Life with Tim

It happened again. I missed something critical on Slack—a message buried beneath the flood of notifications that should have been front and center. This was the wake-up call I needed. Despite all the efforts to stay organized, Slack’s constant stream of notifications, unread messages, and channels I don’t even remember joining were drowning out the important stuff. Sound familiar? That’s when I turned to an old, yet effective, decision-making tool: Eisenhower’s Matrix . You may know it as the framework that helps prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance, separating what's truly critical from what can wait—or what shouldn’t even be on your plate at all. But how does this tool apply to Slack? Let me explain. Understanding Eisenhower’s Matrix If you’re not familiar, the Eisenhower Matrix categorizes tasks into four quadrants: Urgent and Important : Do it now. Important but Not Urgent : Schedule it for later. Urgent but Not Important : Delegate it. Neither Urgent nor Important

Together with the coffee-at-tea expert, ChatGPT, as the expert witness to the effects, both positive and warnings, minus the funny bits, like figuring out how to do the 💩emoji 🤣. 1 & 7. Yerba Mate Loosely translated by some Argentinians as "The Herb". This savory tea beverage is not for those who need that sugar rush in the morning, but enjoy the smoky flavor of a dark tea. Yerba has about the same level of caffeine as your standard cup of joe, but without the shakiness that comes with your double-pump latte from the Bux. Yerba water is set to the same as the green tea setting on the #3 temperature-controlled water heater, also known as 175F. That water heater is amazing, it even has a button that says "hold temp", which when pressed, keeps the temp steady for up to 30 minutes. Brilliant. You then take the hot water and pour it slowly over the herb that is in the mate cup pointed to in 7.1. If you are on the go you can pour it into the thermos with the Grafana

  I love a good todo list, and I’ve tried a lot of apps, and none of them stuck, until I found Google Tasks. I think it stuck, unlike the others, because Grafana uses Google Business Suite. Google Tasks is an application that is fully embedded with all other Google work suite products (docs, gmail, sheets, slides, etc…) and it’s very powerful! I wanted to write a small post about it to share what I’ve found useful. Tasks is available in the right sidebar of most Google Applications: When you click that icon then a new sidebar appears, you can quickly add tasks manually, like every other todo list. The little arrow circle is a way you can set tasks as recurring. Need a way to remember to fill out your TPS report every Friday, here ya go. You can also make multiple lists, if you want to do that. I’ve found it’s useful to just have 1 for work and 1 for personal stuff but everyone is different here. Google Docs Integration In google docs, Tasks is also embedded.  By clicking that icon in t

 In the more global world that we live in, people are not only working remotely, but people are working across the globe and critically across many time zones. Due to our global reach even within a team, we have less daylight that we share with our coworkers. In the past, I’ve been part of very successful remote standups, but I noticed they only really work well if you are in close time zones. If you only have 1 hour of overlap with your coworker, do you really want to be going over high-level status with your broader team? I’ve asked my teams about this, and I got a very loud “NO!” We all use Slack as a communication tool, so I started an experiment with a team where a bot posts in the channel at the beginning of the earliest person on the team’s day. It asks a few simple questions: @team-name welcome to today and good morning! What did you work on yesterday? What are you intending to work on today? What blockers do you have on your priorities? What help do you need? As people trickle

When you approach a bridge that overlooks a river do you tend to look upriver at the past, or downriver to see the future? I am naturally drawn to looking downriver because I like to plan for the future. For the role of manager, you have three major areas of responsibility, the people, the projects, and gluing those together. That last part is where the magic happens. If you get great alignment with your people and what they work on, that is where you have the best outcomes. People Helping people thrive is the cornerstone of any people manager. How we align people and set them up so that they can be at their best self is critical to our success, and the success of the company. It's a win-win-win situation. It all starts with hiring and onboarding. For me, there are three critical areas that I focus on during the interview process. Do they have a growth mindset, do they include others during their decision-making process, and overall is the candidate a kind human being? Beyond the

Happy new year everyone! For this year I’m going to try and take some advice and create a life of consistency health, enjoy, and continuously learning. Using my 3 pillars of my values as a guide, here are my goals for 2023. Consistency is Key I want to scale back up to my level of fitness in 2020. I ran 2 1/2 marathons that year, so that seems like a good target for running. I’d also love to average 3 WODs per week. Even during work trips or illnesses. I’ll just lighten the intensity of those workouts during those times. As part of being consistent I need to focus on eating well. As they say, garbage in, garbage out. It starts with a good diet. Sustain a Sustainable Schedule This goal focuses around sticking to committing appropriate levels of time to my main areas I spend time; work, family time, friends time, personal recharge time, and of course sleep. It’s all about finding a proper balance that when goes unchecked I typically 1) work too much, 2) don’t check in with my friends, a