HighEdWeb 2014 at Portland is now a week gone. As is the case with most HighEdWeb it did a good job of balancing professional development, meeting new people, and getting to know the locale.
Charles Fulton and I gave a talk on improving your website without nuking it from orbit. The presentation focused on using tools such as Siteimprove, Splunk, Nagios, and OSSEC to identify and fix problems with your website, and while it didn’t win us any red staplers, I think it went well.
Portland itself didn’t disappoint. This was my fourth trip to the town, and the first one where I saw blue sky … and Mount Hood. It was a little disconcerting to see the sun shining down during my time there — I enjoy Portland’s signature rain and clouds — but the city obliged by deluging me the night before I left.
The high point of the conference was the best-in-track and best-in-conference session “Human at Work or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Get Better at My Job”. It had nothing to do with web development; instead it discussed how to better manage your time and expectations at work. It’s a topic I’ve been thinking quite a lot about, and presenter David Cameron of Ithaca College did an excellent job of turning what could have been a series of life hacks into a cohesive presentation. It also led me to read the book “Managing Your Day To Day”, which is a series of essays on how to stay creative and productive when you’re super busy.
As a result of the conference I’ve tweaked my schedule, moving my project time to the mornings, and shifting my “getting things done” time (email, project management tasks, etc.) to the late afternoon. I still check my email in the morning to make sure there aren’t any major problems that need to be dealt with, but I defer as much as possible to the 4 o’clock hour.
So far it’s been working well. I spent a lot more time working on projects last week than I had in quite a while, and my inbox has stopped ruling my mornings. The challenge now will be to sustain that pattern … and to make sure that the myriad of deferred tasks still gets done.