Daily Organization

The nature of the work I do frequently involves custom hardware and a lot of expensive diagnostic instruments. That typically precludes working from home. (Besides, when you're as lucky as I have been to work with such great people, why would you want to?) In Red, Yellow, Green Blue I described my dirt simple way of keeping stuff organized in the briefcase I schlepp around to customer sites. Now I'll describe how I keep organized while I'm working at the customer site.

I spent years in academia, more years at a national laboratory rooted in academia, and years again at Bell Labs and two of its spin-offs with a long tradition in research and development. The lab notebook was a fixture at all of these places. Yet its utility wasn't apparent to me until I began freelancing. Go figure. Now I wonder how I ever lived without it. It's a tool for organization, an indispensable part of my billing process, a cache memory, and an archival storage mechanism, all rolled into a handy item that fits in a briefcase or a file cabinet.

The lab notebook is traditionally a hardbound notebook with blank ruled pages, and there are still plenty of folks that use those, especially if the company is paying for them. But it can also be nothing more than the spiral bound notebook like you may have used in college. I use something in between. John Dickinson is a British company that makes a series of spiral-bound Black n' Red notebooks with plastic covers. I use them exclusively as my lab notebooks. They are sturdy and handle the occasional beverage spill. The fact that they are in my two favorite colors is just icing on the cake. Each client has their own notebook, and I label the front with the client's name and a sequential number. I typically go through a notebook every two months, more or less, on a project. Although they come in ISO standard sizes (i.e. not 8.5" x 11") they still fit in a standard file cabinet. The elastic strap riveted to the back cover keeps all my ancillary crap from falling out.

I'm always collecting odd scraps of paper, notes, and odds and ends that fit nicely in the pocket at the front of the notebook. I use TUL-brand gel pens almost exclusively, which I buy in boxes of a dozen at OfficeMax. Their ink can't be easily erased, they are reliable, and (most importantly) they fit inside the spiral binding of the notebook.

I make a note of the date at the start of every working day, and make a note of at least my start and stop times. I can usually reconstruct what I worked on that day, and approximately for how long, just by perusing my notes. (You may notice that the dates on these pages are over four months apart. Some projects work that way.) Symbols in the margins give me further guidance: stars are actions items and must be checked off; asterisks mark information that I am likely to need later; question marks are things I need to find out; arrows point me forwards or backwards to related information.

Note that my lab notebooks are the intellectual property of my company, Digital Aggregates, not of the customer. I have never had a customer question this, but sometimes it pays to be clear. If a customer calls or e-mails me with a question, the notebook comes out of my briefcase or file cabinet. Given the occasional senior moment, I've been known to refer to my archived notebooks to remember how to do things like a Linux kernel build.

I keep my own weekly time cards that I use for invoicing. Data from this paper form gets entered into a QuickBooks time card, which I use to generate monthly invoices. This paper time card also gets covered with notes like customer project numbers and billing codes. I keep a PDF version of the time card form on the web so I can always print a blank one at a customer site. I've never had a client that required me to get a signature on my time cards, but several of them do require me to use their own web-based time card system, which is very reasonable. I make sure that the customer time card and my time card agree. Accountants Payable departments don't like surprises, even if it means being invoiced for less than amount indicated in their own system. (I learned this the hard way. Never round down. In fact, never round at all. A fifteen minute discrepancy in the client's favor nearly meant a month delay in getting paid.)

In A Future Without Keyboards I mentioned that I also use a Palm T|X PDA to help stay organized. It keeps my calendar, my contact database, and a lot of notes, and I keep it synced to my ThinkPad X61 laptop. When I travel light, I carry a Nokia N810 internet tablet to keep up with email and web cruising.

But I have also learned not to depend too much on anything that requires electricity. (For example, I wear a self-winding mechanical wristwatch.) Hence, the lab notebook and the paper time card, both of which have served me well.