Life with Tim

  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 ...

 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 tri...