Over the past few days I've held off on emptying my deleted items folder in Outlook to get a better sense of the number of messages I "process" per day.  The average over the past three days with very little varyance per day was 800 per day.  Granted this does include RSS feed posts I go through but it is still several hundred without them.

This doesn't include IM, voice mail, meeting requests, personal email or text messages.

The bad news is that I am not getting to zero in my inbox each day either so there is some "carry" from one day to the next.

I've got to come up with a better way to handle this.  I've read various GTD-esque things but at some point, the incoming flow and accumulation of tasks and meetings just doesn't average out to zero per day.

Stay tuned...

• Prefab green building
• The rise in the "undeclared / independent" policial party
• The mobile phone as THE device (phone, email/text, video camera, music/video player, still camera, wallet, display/projector, gps, computer)
• IP everything
• Boxed wine
• More content in smaller chunks
• China

Those two people who follow my blog have probably given up on following it since I haven't posted in ages.  The caltrain love poem didn't happen and instead I've been having a very time consuming relationship with my work now that I am responsible for the applications, user experience and server components (metadata mostly) for Microsoft's IPTV and cable products.  The good news is that I really enjoy my work, the people I work with and many of those extra things that don't fall cleanly into either of those.  The bad news is that the long hours have come at the expense of many other non-work things in my life. 

In catching up with my blog feeds today I came across a FT article about "tribal workers."  I think this article describes many things I identify with (beyond just my age).  While I don't believe that the number of hours worked alone is a sign of "success" I do feel the challenge of having too many options and the focus on my career.  I've got the Georgetown undergraduate degree (double major in Econ and English with honors) and the UC Berkeley MBA not to mention some good career experience.  I've worked in DC and Silicon Valley, live in San Francisco and have had some great travel through my job at Microsoft.

I have to think some more about whether or not I fall in this new "class."  I probably do -- I had a pretty good streak of 80-90 hour work weeks in the past few months and I just got off the phone (via my parents' VOIP service) with my relatives in Italy who were watching the World Cup game at the same time I was.

Italy won and I think I probably felt like more of an Italy fan than a US fan as far as the world cup goes.  Don't tell that to the Germans I work with on IPTV. :)

I know, this sounds weird, but I forgot how much fun it was to hammer nails until yesterday.  A group of managers from my team did a full day volunteer project at Habitat for Humanity in Daly City.  This was my first H4H experience and I found it to be physically and mentally rewarding, not to mention the good that will come of bringing homeownership to a low-income family in the expensive Bay Area housing market.

At any rate, just remember, the key to successful hammering is to make the hammer work for you and get leverage by holding it closer to the bottom!

I have had three people ask me to explain what it is that I do at Microsoft as a Lead Program Manager.  I'll eventually get around to expanding this post more, but until then, here are some good links:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/techtalk/archive/2005/08/08/449231.aspx
• The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun

Most San Franciscans know that there are about five drop everything and have fun outside days per year.  Without fail, I'm out of town for most of them.  I think I'm going to start sharing my travel plans with weather forecasters.

In related news, it was a cold and dreary in Philadelphia and the red-eye flight out, all day meeting and late flight back were productive.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_06/b3919124_mz063.htm

BillG Q&A: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_06/b3919127_mz063.htm 

Yup, that's the group I work in.

• http://www.wematter.com/comcast-dvr.htm
• http://blogs.msdn.com/johnmont/archive/2004/11/25/270425.aspx
• http://www.jeffsandquist.com/PermaLink,guid,8651f710-98c2-4b1d-83eb-a1db2188e01e.aspx
• http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/11/16.html
• http://www.majornelson.com/blog/2004/11/thanks-for-memories-tivo.html
• http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000097020901/

http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/

After running the Google toolbar for a long time, I switched to the new MSN toolbar with desktop search on my work machine.  After using it for several weeks, I can attest that this is a great package of software and it's still only beta!  I'm now installing it on my home machines -- that says a lot as I prefer to run very clean and tuned systems at home.

Here's why I chose it over Google:

• Hotmail, Messenger and MSN spaces integration
• My MSN integration
• Form Fill -- finally, the web toolbar people are following Mac IE 5 innovations introduced in 2000!
• MSN search beta integration - this is on its way to becoming a serious Google competitor.  It's not there yet, but it's good enough for me to use it over Google now.
• Page viewer and highlighter for search terms
• Desktop search works as well or better than Google desktop search.  The Outlook integration is killer.

Bill Gates came to Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus on October 1 to give a quick talk on stuff going on in the company, our strategy, etc.  One neat thing about Microsoft is that BillG and SteveB come talk to employees and there is no holds barred Q&A.

I asked Gates a question about the increase in content protection and what that means for media sharing within the house, across devices and for Microsoft in general.  I think that many CEOs would probably rattle off some high level comments about this but Gates is able to dive deep on a wide range of topics and he proceeded to do so.  Without going into the specifics here, in sum Gates took a very reasonable stance saying that the PC needs to be a more trusted device within the home so that it doesn't get shut out by such developments as the broadcast flag, 5C/DTCP, CCI, OpenCable, etc.  At the same time, the marketplace for content needs to consider content providers and content providers need to consider whether or not they will alienate their consumers.  Microsoft needs to balance the interests of consumers and content providers by providing a rich set of tools in the platform to address these issues.  With our platform, content providers can be as tight or as loose as they please with their content.  Ultimately, it's their decision and Microsoft merely provides a platform that lets them be as smart or as dumb as they wish to be.

Consumers have rejected DIVX (the DVDs that died, not the MPEG-4ish codec), copy protected CDs that provide no means to rip and SCMS crippled DAT decks.  Consumers know when their options for media usage are being taken away and they desire the freedom to share media in a fair and responsible way.