Seventh Heaven? Not quite.

At the start of the week every member of the team receives a "Pending Things Report" which shows the top ten pending Things. The problem is all the Things are set to care factor: 7. The care factor is not discriminating between what's not so important and what's really important. But the real problem is no one cares about the care factor - what is care factor 7 anyway?

So I'm looking at a different way of ordering Things without the need for maintaining a care factor.

Email is Br0keN

I started using email in 1990 and over the last 16 years I've progressively received more and more emails while sending less and less. In the last six months though, I've felt a change. The Russian "spam bots" are winning - exponentially so.

I now receive way more spam than real emails and I feel we're heading towards a tipping point - spamassassin does a valiant job of applying a Holtzam-esque shield but the slow, and crafty spam still gets through! I think we're converging on the "Spam Singularity".

The demise of email may not be such a bad thing --- I think there's more that can be done with a controlled hypertext system. A worthwhile message, for example, should always have a "what's next". I wonder what's next for email?

Drilling Down

I was talking to my dentist, of all people, about the CareOMeter. It turns out my dentist is full of ideas about workflow processes. His big idea for improving work processes is to capture the "what's next". He suggested that everything has a "what's next" even if it means "place this in the archive". He punctuates his points by spinning the dental drill so I wasn't in a position to argue - but I like the idea!

I didn't expect to feel this sort of pain whilst in the dentist chair.