Week 2 - Project web page and personal time management

Announce

  1. ASME Design Competition: Probably on a Wednesday evening. Which week?
    • Week of Monday, May 14
    • Week of Monday, May 21
    • Week of Monday, May 28
  2. Beta Project funding for Spring: would you help a freshman, sophomore or junior?
    • How to apply (web page)
    • Information session, Tuesday, 4/17, 11:30 AM - 1:30 PM, EB 84
    • Information session, Wednesday, 4/18, 11:30 AM - 1:30 PM, EB 84
    • Proposals due on Friday, 4/27, at noon, via email to Don Mueller muellerd@pdx.edu

  3. President Shoureshi speaks at ASME-sponsored event

    When: 6:30 - 8:00 PM, Wednesday, April 18, 2018 Where: Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 327. What: Presentation Title: The Future of Wearable Technology

    Please use the Registration Link: https://goo.gl/forms/oz5nuh9M6PVc8Lk02

    More details: https://www.pdx.edu/events/presentation-dr-rahmat-shoureshi-asme-fellow-and-president-psu-future-wearable-technology

Reading

For information on design process relevant to the current stage of your project, refer to Mattson and Sorenson for advice on subsystem design, Section 6.1-6.2.

Other references to personal time management are embedded as links to the notes on the web page you are reading.

Learning Objectives for this Class

After completing the activities in this class, students should be able to

  • Create a web page describing your project and that is compatible with the ME 493 web site.
  • Describe the basic features of a GTD (Getting Things Done) system for managing personal tasks.

the next team assignment. is to create a first draft of a web page for your project.

Review from Prior Class

The last class focused on

  • Identifying work necessary to successfully complete the project
    • Necessary work contributes to achieving project goals
    • First, define what "achieving project goals" mean using specific, measurable objectives.
    • Second, identify engineering tasks (design work) that allows your system (or subsystem) to meet those measurable objectives.
    • Recognize that there is a big gap between looking busy and doing productive work that results in completion of tasks.
  • Crafting tasks in a way that is conducive to efficient and effective work
    • SMART Goals (clear objectives, unambiguous understanding of what "done" means)
    • Make a realistic estimate of the effort required to verify system or subsystem performance.
    • Make a realistic estimate of the effort required to do the engineering design work necessary to achieve the performance target.
    • Get personal commitments to completing the tasks required for engineering design and performance verification. Who is going to do what by when?

Caveats

  1. Not all tasks can be structured with quantitative measurements. Hence, there are more and different kinds of tasks than we focused on during class meeting 1. However, the ideas discussed in class 1 about identifying evidence for meeting customer requirements, and about using reverse planning to achieve your goals, apply to all sorts of productive behavior.
  2. Planning is best done when it is a routine and ongoing part of engineering work. Since planning is imprecise, you will need to revisit and update your plans, both because the context for your work is constantly changing and because your understanding of the goals and the work is constantly evolving.

Personal time and energy management

Managing your time is a life-long skill that will help you be successful in your career while also creating time to enjoy your life outside of work. The following ideas introduce personal time management approaches.

Cal Newport's summary of GTD for students has these five actions.

  1. Collect
  2. Consolidate
  3. Review
  4. Plan
  5. Act

The classic GTD components are

  1. A trusted system for storing your incoming commitments and plans
  2. Work organized into Projects
  3. Regular (weekly) review of Projects – Very Important Step
  4. Each project has a next action item
  5. Tasks are organized by context, e.g. @email, @shopping, @lab, @homeOffice

Additional key ideas

  • Tasks should start with verbs
  • Tasks should have clear "done" state. No "work on" or "plan to" or "continue"
  • When working, manage attention by filing incoming tasks
    • If it is important and takes less than 2 minutes, do it
    • Otherwise, file it in your trusted system
  • Regular (weekly or bi-weekly) review of project status is an important step
    • Sort the incoming information collected while working on tasks.
    • Prioritize tasks so that the next action is clear
    • Regular review allows you to trust your system because important information is not lost
    • Regular review allows you to stay focus on current work because future work is managed by project review

The goal of using GTD, or any other personal time management scheme, is to free up time to do productive work. The goal is not simply to do more work, but to do work with less anxiety and stress.

Although there is much more to life than work, using GTD helps you organize your work so you are more likely to attain Csikszentmihalyi's state of flow while you are working.

Web Pages for Projects

Refer to the Assignment Page, the handout on markdown format and the annotated version of the raw markdown template.


Document updated 2018-04-03.

Go back to the Lectures page.