Scoville Units Unite

Last night’s talk by Scott Hanselman was really good. The most amusing paraphrase was something along the lines of Reading Twitter is like swimming in a sea of shit

It seemed a mixture of:
Information overload (video)

Social Networking for Developers (video)

Outlook Rules (blogpost)

Essentially it boils down to: if you can’t hyperlink to it it’s a waste of time. Email sucks up way too much time. If you have to write anything more than 5 sentences write a blog post and email the link so you can refer to it again. Set aside time for email every day (he suggests after noon) as if it’s important someone will contact you in a synchronous fashion about it. Don’t subscribe to lots of news/blog feeds – find someone else who does and who links to the best of it all. Set up rules in outlook so you can filter and prioritise the email that does come in and train people to expect you to not reply outside working hours.

I would recommend viewing them all – I am gonna listen to the videos today to see if there’s anything he cut when he compressed the talks.

I emailed this around work breaking the 5+ line rule and didn’t write an internal blogpost about this as I don’t really share my personal blog around work. We are right now trialing Sharepoint with personal/team/department blogs etc so if this was already in use I would have written this there (and may copy there when my beta testing starts).