Local Insanity

There are two graduations I can participate in:

• College of Letters and Sciences (Friday, June 17, 17.00)
• Math Department (Sunday, June 19, 09.00-10.30)

I can bring about 10-15 people to each. I’d like to know both which one you would prefer and whether you cannot attend one. I’ll go to both only if there is a roughly even number who cannot attend each. Send me an email to let me know. The difference is that one is on a Friday, one on a Sunday. They will probably be about the same length. The math one will call everyone’s names. I’d prefer to go to the math one. Graduating is fun.

I knew that 43folders advocated Getting Things Done, the book I’ve been reading, and I figured that 43 was just some random number and folders was… well folders are clearly organizational tools. It didn’t hit me until I got near the end of GTD that 43 is the number of folders required to set up a tickler file system. You can read more about it by clicking the above link.

I’ve been putting some pressure on Sarah to maintain her own HPDA, and so far she’s done it (day 2). It takes some getting used to, since most TODO lists are just lists of objects related to things that need to happen, but not the things that need to happen themselves. An example from GTD:

For example, a client will have something like “tires” on a list. I then ask, “What’s that about?” He responds, “Well, I need new tires on my car.” “So what’s the next action?” At that point the client usually wrinkles up his forehead, ponders for a few moments, and expresses his conclusion: “Well, I need to call a tire store and get some prices.”

That’s the sort of thing I had on my lists at first. Sarah did too. The next problem that I encountered was appropriately grouping my next actions lists. At first I grouped them by relatedness. If an action was to advance a school project, it went on the school list. If it was to advance a personal project, it went on the personal list. This makes sense, but is completely non-functional. It makes more sense, as GTD advocates, to group things by context. Where can I do this action? At the computer? At home? At school? In the car? Anywhere? With my cell phone? Once this became the setup of my lists, it became much easier to get through them because I didn’t have the subconscious barrier to processing my lists caused by an inappropriate organizational system.

This last point brings me to the single greatest thing this book has identified for me: the reason I could never effectively get organized in the past is not me, but the system I used. If an organizational system is less than completely usable in some way, there will be a subconscious barrier to using it that will eventually overcome your desire to be organized. The same is true of exercising regularly and eating healthy. Make the system easy and fun, and you will use it.

Today Sarah and I went shopping for calendars. I tried to keep in mind ease of use and effectiveness when choosing. I eventually settled on one that is quite small (easily fits in my pocket, reducing the barrier to carry it around with me), has perforated corners (easy access to “this week”, reducing the barrier to open it and flip to the current events), and has mini calendars for this and next month on every other page (reducing the time it takes to figure out when something occurs relative to the date I’m looking at and on what day). I plan to keep it with my HPDA and to use the calendar only for date-and-time-specific items and my HPDA for everything else. This will work better than using an index card for a given day because it will reduce the barrier to adding a date-and-time-specific item to my collection system.

I’m endeavoring to put everything down on paper, but it isn’t easy. But it is fun, so I think I’ll stick with it. Here’s to mapping the storm.

Work has a way of coming all at once. There are some days that seem to serve as convergence points for everything. Today (yesterday technically - it’s past midnight) was one of those days. Things that had to be done today:

1. Math 110a Final
2. Life Science 1 Final
3. Computer Science 161 Project

Of all these the CS one caused the most stress. The project description was so disorganized and had terrible grammar! Oddly enough the project was related to text language understanding. Now I’ve only got one final left, and it’s on Thursday. I’m not too worried about it, and I plan to get stuff done in the meantime - stuff not related to school. Then I get to spend time with Sarah and the family! That’ll be nice.

I’ve started reading GTD by David Allen and I must say I’m fairly impressed, but in a ‘why didn’t I think of that?’ way. In my push to get things done more effectively this quarter, I lost steam about halfway through. There were a number of reasons for this, but I think the biggest one is that I had no system in place to keep myself organized.

Personal Digital Assistant

In the past I had a Palm Pilot - one of the originals - that I used to keep contact information. I tried using its Todo list feature and calendaring system, but I found that I never looked at the stuff again until the relevant tasks/events were long gone. Such a system actually hurts you, because you’re spending time inputting the data but getting nothing out of it. A few years after giving that up, in the midst of my pro-Microsoft phase, I bought a PocketPC under the assumption that it was the Palm Pilot that wasn’t being effective, and that a newer, higher tech PDA would be. I just assumed that it was better than a paper solution because the paper solution couldn’t sync with my computer. It turns out that the MS software was so ineffective that syncing probably took longer doing it “automatically” than by hand. I couldn’t shake - or even see - the assumption that digital was better than paper, so I stopped using the PocketPC and replaced it with… nothing.

Enter Apple

About the same time I realized that Microsoft wasn’t all that great I started noticing the Mac. It was sleek and slender (the PowerBooks), sexy (the Dock, Aqua in general), powerful (Terminal.app and everything underpinning it), and altogether elegant. But it’s a Mac. It’s not Windows. Could I really switch to something that wasn’t Windows? I was so invested, I thought, that I probably couldn’t. Most of the programming I knew how to do was for Windows, all my software was for Windows, all my friends used Windows… But the curiosity remained. After talking to a professor or two with a PowerBook and reading about it, I decided to take the plunge. At first it was confusing. It was new, which was exciting, but sometimes frustrating. I couldn’t perform the simplest of tasks without expending significant mental energy. I wish I could say that now that I’m used to it that everything is problem-free, but that’s not true. I have had problems and things do not operate exactly as I’d like. But the difference between things not behaving as they should on the Mac vs. on Windows is in the community. The Mac community listens, responds, and engages you. Many of the apps I use were written by groups of 1-4, and are very approachable (online, of course).

You may be wondering what this has to do with productivity. For a time my PowerBook was my PDA. Though not well suited to the purpose, it performed better than either of my previous machines. I noticed a few trends emerging:

1. I actually like using it, and I gather my information and use the PowerBook to process it
2. I began to really customize and tweak my setup because I wasn’t living under the constant looming shadow of the monthly reformat my Windows machine required - this broke down much of the subconscious barrier to use it
3. While I could use it effectively to perform certain tasks, it sucked if I had to draw something or take a quick note - such things just got discarded

43folders.com and the Hipster PDA

The site that introduced me to GTD, 43folders.com, is one man’s response to the Windows-centric view of that book (and the productivity world, more generally). I’m not sure who first coined the term Hipster PDA, but it is just a bunch of 3×5 index cards held together by a binder clip. This is my new PDA, and so far it works nicely. I can carry it with me easily, I can use my own pencil as a stylus, I don’t have to worry about dropping it or spilling water on it, it syncs with my computer just about as fast as my old PocketPC, and it never runs out of batteries. I’m still in the honeymoon phase of using it, so we’ll see what happens a few months down the road. In general I’m pleased.

Procrastination

This being finals week, my brain is particularly sensitive to anything that might offer a distraction… like… um… this post. But I’ve allotted time for it! The bane of my existence right now is StarCraft. For Pete’s sake Blizzard! Why’d you have to produce such a good game?! I’m going to eject it from my PowerBook, and go put it in a safe place… there we go. I’ve now raised the barrier to playing it to a level that hopefully will keep me from doing so. While it is my choice to play it, it is hard not to. This is not an excuse, it’s a reason. Now all I have to do is lower the barrier to getting work done to a sufficiently low level so I’ll actually do it. Here’s to getting over my fear of management and “stuff”.

What a scam.

There’s an open source project that I’ve loosely followed called PearPC that has a pretty cool idea: create an emulator for the PPC (Mac, IBM) architecture that runs on the x86 (Intel, AMD) architecture, allowing you to run Mac OS X or any of the PPC Linux OS’s from within Windows. Neat.

Now there’s this other software called CherryOS that supposedly lets you do the same thing. It was announced long before the release, so many people considered it to be vaporware. It was finally released, and people have found some pretty damning evidence that it has completely ripped off the PearPC project.

This is what I hate about people - they will do anything to get a short-term gain. This is a violation of the GPL, but the makers of this “product” don’t seem to care. I hope they get their asses handed to them on a platter by the FSF.

I’ve been contacted by a number of people who’ve asked to test my Adium plugin for Quicksilver, and they’re all cool people (guys, invariably) who are into computers and Macs etc. One works with one of the Wordpress contributors, another is a hockey player. Almost all have their own websites.

The plugin should be ready by the time the next Quicksilver beta comes out (which may or may not be called B37), and it’ll probably only work with the upcoming Adium 0.8, leaving the old plugin available for earlier versions of Adium in case someone is silly enough to want to use it.

I got Getting Things Done sometime over the weekend from Amazon. I’ve started reading it, and it’s interesting that it sort of uses the idea of wu wei (vaguely “non-action” or “action without effort”), which I’ve known about for years and studied in my reading of Taoism and Buddhism. Why didn’t I think of applying it to my personal and professional life as a means of organization? Guess I’m not smart enough, or maybe it was just too obvious.

I started fairly well this quarter, but have slacked off, as usual. Next quarter will only be different if I make it different, and it’ll be my last chance to break the pattern. We’ll see what I do.

I’m sitting in my LS1 class right now and am thankful for the fact that I’m taking this class P/NP. There are two things I should be doing that I’m not:

• Do the EAP picture DVD. It’s not done yet, and it’s making me apprehensive. I’ve decided to get it out by the end of spring break.
• Go to work. I’ve been in once or twice in the last month.

Where’s that reset button?

My usual practice in the past regarding shareware was to find an activation key online, usually at AstalaVista. The reason for this is that I had no job, and had no money beyond my ‘allowance’. I didn’t pay for it simply out of habit, and I regarded shareware as somehow inferior to freeware.

I’m not reversing my position, but the fact that I’ve bought TextMate, Transmit, and NewsFire in the last 30 days tells me I’ve undergone some sort of paradigm shift. I think this came about when I started thinking about my own soon-to-be-looking-for-a-job self. I think it’d be cool to be able to sustain myself on the applications I’ve written as part of a small company. I’ve never really much liked working for others, so the self-employment route looks appealing to me. Sometime over the last few months I’ve realized, though perhaps not fully consciously, that all these apps I’ve been pirating are made by guys (yeah, not many women in this field) who feel the same way, and by not paying for the apps I use, I’m preventing them from achieving that goal. I certainly wouldn’t want this to happen to me, so I’ve begun to acknowledge the right of these people to be paid for their work.

Open Source is another model I find intriguing. It involves a few people to a few thousand people who collaboratively work on the project. The code is out in the open. It’s free, and because of this it lacks the normal pay-to-use mechanism of proprietary software. It requires another motivator. Some people are paid to work on open source projects by the companies they work for (IBM, RedHat). Some open source projects make money through services and support. Many die because they lack a persistent motivator, and this is too bad.

I’ll sidestep the issue of which model is better and claim that they are good for different things. The nature of the project should determine what model is used. An extension to the HTTP protocol to handle flash crowds? Open source. A standards-compliant web browser? Open source. A marketing tool masquerading as a web browser? Proprietary. A specialized text editor for developers. Either way. When something can be built on top of and is meant to be built on top of, open source is probably best. If not, proprietary is fine. As for me, I hope to do some of both in the future.