Time flows like the water through your fingers. Probably, time means to economics more than anything else.

"The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it and no marginal utility curve for it. Moreover, time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever and will never come back. Time is, therefore, always in exceedingly short supply."

Peter F. Druker "Effective executive"

My colleagues presented me with a poster We Can Do It!:

Do you think they are getting at something? :)

There are times when you say to yourself: "I really want to apply myself to this new idea. But I have to turn it down for the lack of time." Sigh... And later you ask yourself "How could this happen that you do not have time for important tasks?" And that is a really good question.

Essentially you can divide the time you spend into two categories: value addition and waste. Value addition activities are everything that advances you towards accomplishment of your mission. Anything else is waste.

It is not that we deliberately choose to do something that we would not like to do. But rather circumstances make us agree to assignments and tasks. When we look back at these agreements we thinks that we should not have accepted those tasks. Sometimes goals that seemed important yesterday become not so important today and suck our capacity to undertake new endeavors.

So when you find yourself in a situation when you can not find time for a new and valuable accomplishment you want get rid of two types of "time eaters":

• Inertia. Things important in the past, which have doubtful value today. Seth's Godin "The Dip" discusses this in detail.
• Monkeys. Something that sits on your back and distracts from important things. On this I'll highly recommend Monkey Management episode of Project Management Podcast.

Start with small. Send your colleagues link to the podcast and the presentation on Monkey Management and begin getting your time back.

On the average I receive from 50 to 200 e-mails in my corporate Inbox which I believe is not high number at all. Still despite of the techniques I use to keep my Inbox clean some e-mails need to be stored for reference for months in archive. As you might expect it is difficult to find required e-mails in archive although I try to keep them in logical structure. Right now I use Windows Desktop Search and this tool is really good in full-text search when you need to find single e-mail. It also has some basic capabilities in handling e-mail threads. But unfortunately nothing more.

A friend of mine told about Xobni. An Outlook plug-in which Bill Gates refers to as "the next generation of social networking". I hope to allocate time and give this tool a try as I see no way how my e-mail counts may drop.

This was a blogless month for me. For a number of reasons and for a none good reason among them. But this, of course, could not stop the world from revolving. So several events which worth attention happened last month:

• Ukraine Joins the W.T.O.
• SoftServe recognized among Top 10 Outsourcing Companies in Eastern Europe
• Ukrainians Took Second Place at World Championship in Biathlon

I have many things to say and I hope to start doing so over the next days.

Did it ever occurred to you that one particular idea or technology which is pretty concrete and utilitarian can suddenly reveal unexpected and beautiful applications? Sometimes one even would not think that any technology should be applied at all. This is what really amazes me about computing and will never our profession completely mechanistic. Through ACM TechNews I've read article Virtual Extras. It subtitle did not promise anything "extra" at all. Just serious advances in development of animated mob scenes:

Giving each member of a digital crowd its own personality could make animated mob scenes more realistic.

But when you read further you come across

... software even manages to capture the way in which two crowds of people, moving through a narrow corridor, naturally form two opposing lanes.

With this things start getting interesting. And finally you get

Beyond movies and games, there's increasing interest in using crowd simulation to help conduct fire and disaster assessments of large public spaces...

Isn't it amazing that purely entertaining-targeted research suddenly finds such non-trivial application. Do you feel the same after reading the article?

Quite a time ago I wrote about "good" outsourcing which is focused on business value delivery rather than on potential cost savings. Even when we speak about outsourcing to offshore locations costs should not be the major factor influencing the decision. What is more important is the ability of the vendor to deliver on promise. Deliver business value on schedule and within budget. If you read Outsourcing Handbook by Construx you will see that cost savings are not listed among 10 common reasons to outsource a project. Although the study did not explicitly focus on offshore outsourcing I believe the results would not much different. Outsourcing is there to help you leverage your own potential by developing your core competencies. Budget savings should be seen as vendor's ability to master his software engineering approaches to achieve higher efficiency than with in-house development team.

This year I haven't had a chance to visit Software Engineering Conference (Russia)although for some period of time I was thinking about writing a paper for this conference. I've attended the first such conference back in 2005 and each year it is very interesting for me to see what they have on agenda.

Looking at this year's conference agenda I'm a bit surprised to see 9 presentations out of 62 delivered by people from one company. It is nearly 15% of all presentations! Looks like organizers had to fill agenda somehow and called out for help. But if we look at 2006 statistics we see that acceptance rate was about 25% I just do not see why they could not select a few eligible papers from other submitters.

Anyway I haven't been to the conference to make far seeing conclusions but this really makes me think twice next year. We'll see.

By a reference from a friend of mine I came to know Shelfari - a service to share and comment on books that you own and love. With this service you can now review My Shelfari bookshelf. Recently I've bought only books I've learned about through references of other people and I hope my references will also help you.

I also hope that I will find some time in nearest future to provide some sort of reviews for books I've read or I'm reading now.

When I came across the Mathematical Fortune-Telling article (article in Russian) the first thing I remembered was psychohistory. When I studied in university theory of games was one of my favorite parts of mathematics and it is amazing to see it in action on such a scale.

When I first got familiar with the psychohistory through one of the books about the Foundations I was really impressed. It took me somewhat around two weeks to read the whole Foundation Series. I think I will take some time to take a deeper look at Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's research. And then probably reread the Foundation Series.