Stephen Few, who has written excellent books on visualizing numerical data, focuses on data sensemaking in this book. The author argues: mastering modern analysis tools is not enough to understand the data; we still need to train the thinking skills. Most important of these are critical and scientific thinking skills …

In this book, Cal Newport shows that cognitively demanding intellectual work, that is deep work, is extremely valuable and rare at the same time. This includes rapid acquiring of new skills and gaining complex knowledge, as well as producing at a high quality level. If we prioritize this kind of …

Cal Newport has made a strong case in his book for why deep work is valuable but rare. I was especially impressed by the arguments for why this type of activity is meaningful. For my part, I can say that when I manage to carve out several long blocks (at …

Smartsheet is a powerful, spreadsheet-like tool. It helps to automate processes in your team. In my current company, we've been using it for years to support project management. Plans, issue logs, risk registers, project dashboards, task trackers - just to name a few examples of what we use Smartsheet for. However …

Using Gantt charts as a form of project schedule for fixed-price IT projects, I’ve encountered the following problems: To build a schedule, you have to put all the tasks in a specific order. It’s typically a finish-to-start dependency. However, this is not what happens sometimes. More often than …

If you needed the median function in Smartsheet, but couldn't find it, don't get upset. That function, indeed, is not present among supported functions; however, there is the percentile function available in Smartsheet. And the good news is that the median is just another name for the 50th percentile. To …

As IT professionals, we deal with quantitative information quite a lot — on a daily basis, literally. Many of us present numeric data to colleagues: be it a report, forecast, or information dashboard. However, only a few possess the basic skills to present numbers well. Most of us have never been …

To better understand my expense habits and overall spending, I used to track my financial transactions in a mobile application. I would manually put data after each payment. I was doing it for a couple of years until I realized that it didn’t quite help me. First, since most …

In Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport argues that, through sophisticated algorithms exploiting our psychological features, social media and Internet services have successfully grabbed our attention and made us dependent on them, forcing us to spend a huge amount of time there. The situation has been especially exacerbated with the advent of …

When you manage several projects simultaneously, you have to switch context quite a lot. It's important to have a tool that helps update awareness of the current situation on a particular project. You need a dashboard. Information dashboard, when well designed, is a good means to update situational awareness at …