Gurkan Nisanci’s Weblog

I read about this swiss knife for some time ago. Last week, after reading about it again, I wanted to give it a chance and it became one of my favorite tools in my laptop. TiddlyWiki is a single file, personal wiki application. No setup is required, you just download the single empty html file and you start using it. Very cool to edit and use.

Before TiddlyWiki, my desktop was full of with files named like links.txt, blog.txt, todo.txt, bla ba.txt. I was taking notes related to work and things I didn’t want to forget in such files. Now TiddlyWiki is acting as my personal agenda for collecting such data into a unique place. There is no more redundant memo files on my desktop. It has a simple&powerful search facility which helps you easily access the thing you are looking for. Also since it works on browser, I add html links to the documents on my laptop, or webpages when I want to access them directly. For instance I have some ebooks in pdf, chm or html  format. Before Tiddlywiki I was navigating to the directories holding them and then open. But since they were distributed over different directories I had to first remember where they were located before navigation. Now I add links to the frequently used documents or web sites on TiddlyWiki and have just a single entry point to access them.

There may be mornings when you have no idea what to do next in the project during that day. On such mornings, I got help from a SCRUM practice. One of the practices of SCRUM is daily standup meetings. 3 questions are answered by the team members during these short meetings and at the end everyone has some info about the activities of other members. Those 3 questions are:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• What’s in your way?

I used this practice also in my projects. When there is no specific plan or task to do, I answer these questions in order to self-plan my day. If a daily record of your progress are not kept in the project, self-motivation by answering these questions will help you not to waste time and more easily plan your daily activities.