I’ve been putting off writing anything for the past week for a few reasons: nothing much is going on with me in the admin world, so I’m not thinking of anything to write. Also, I want to give myself parameters on what I can and can’t write. I don’t simply want to be a re-hashing of things that the Department already does, but I am willing to do a consolodation of stuff that’s found in five different places or is so unclear a plain-English explaination is due. I’m also interested in workflow and process, especially within our IT world. There are some good blogs that deal with Getting Things Done (GTD)/Lifehacking. I see no problem with incorporating some of that into this blog so long as it is done in a way that is useful in an IT-lockdown environment where archiving is often required by regulation.

So, as this all gets more complicated, I decided that some posts might have a prerequisite. If the tip is kind of complicated, I’ll put another link at the top so that they can build on each other. And since I’m fond of stretching analogies, I offer up the following “summer reading list.”

  1. A primer on Getting Things Done
  2. Inbox Zero - process your email and get rid of it all by assigning actions to each one. If you have 20 minutes, I recommend watching the presentation part of the video. It will save you much more than 20 minutes over the course of the first month alone. I’ll talk later about how I implement this on OpenNet computers.
  3. The Overseas Briefing Center’s excellent, if hard to find on the internet website, “What do I do now?” publication has many of the forms, steps, and checklists you’ll need to head to an overseas assignment.
  4. If you’re on an OpenNet computer, click the AskAdmin link on your left. A lot of good, if incomplete, stuff there.
  5. Make friends with a good GSO. Seriously, I learned a lot from just being around some of our excellent GSOs in Colombia who either knew a reg on the tops of their heads or knew how to get an answer quickly.

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