Viewing Category: Shiny Things
I've been writing way too much heavy stuff about focus lately, so it's time for a quick gear break!
I ordered an Inka Pen from ThinkGeek a few weeks ago, hoping to use it as a replacement for the flat pens I've been using. While I like the flat pens, they are not quite as durable in the pocket, and despite their relative thinness they tend to bulge out of my reporter-style Moleskine notebooks. Wear and tear is also increased because I carry the notebook in my back pocket, which makes the flat pen tend to chew its way out of the pocket. Not good.
Construction
The Inka pens are pretty cool, having been designed for extreme conditions by its inventor, Greg Adelman. From the website:
Lightweight, watertight and built to withstand harsh environments. The pressurized ink cartridge ensures the pen will write wet or dry at any angle, any temperature, and any altitude.
I was a little skeptical about the robustness of the pen, because I could imagine the steel barrel warping or other some similar disaster occurring. This post on Kickstart News, however, offers some heartening detail about the pen's machined outer barrel and carbon-fiber inner body construction.
I've been carrying the Inka around on my keychain for about a week, and I haven't yet noticed any warping or even scratching. We shall see how it holds up over the long term, but two small details give me hope: the end of the steel outer body, which you can see above, is utterly round and smoothly polished, unlike just about every mass-market pen I've ever seen. The pen also screws together without any scratchiness or scraping sensation, again unlike just about any other pen I've owned. This is a precision-made object.
The pen itself is comprised of several unscrewable components. You can use the pen in two ways:
- Pull the pen straight out of the outer body tube. It's held in place with friction from a blue o-ring. The pen is short, but usable.
- Assemble a full-size pen. Unscrew the pen from the key ring cap, then screw the mini pen to the end of the outer barrel. The result is a full-sized pen that feels pretty good in the hand.
The one down side I've found about the Inka pen is that it got me held up at the TSA security line. It didn't help that I was also carrying a stubby plastic pen shaped like a small cigarette and mechanical lead engineering pencil with a very cool double-clutch lead gripping mechanism on top of the usual laptop gear. My laptop bag must have looked like a bomb maker's tool kit. :-)
We born-again productivistas are packin' paper heat in our leather-backed Moleskines and slingin' Hipsters in our back pockets like they grow on trees instead of bein' made from 'em. Back at the ranch we've got Noguchi and tickler files backing us up, keeping our thoughts sizzling and ready-to-go. I once seen a guy, a specialist by the looks of him, use simple index cards kill a task dead at 15 paces without having to click a single mouse button. Welcome to the Wild Wild West of Paper Productivity. It's a gritty, physical world we live in, and we likes our tools to be tangible, portable, and crushproof. Booyah!
As tough as I reckoned I was with all my paper-based weaponry---you should see the paper task shuriken I've been working on---my delusions of badassedness came to an abrupt end when I came across Magnatag products half a year ago. I had stumbled onto a trove of custom magnetic whiteboards and task tracking support tools, built large from steel and plastic. They're working tools for daily use in the field, for information-critical activities like truck dispatching, construction projects and even church management. From shipping containers to saving souls, Magnatag seems to have an informational whiteboard product for every industry that needs to get things done. Suddenly, my pretty inkjet-printed forms didn't seem so substantial, especially when the most pressing item listed is don't forget to buy more cat food and toilet paper.
That said, I try to learn from my mistakes, especially when it means there's an opportunity to upgrade my arsenal. If you are shopping for a productivity freak itching to lay the hurt on a pile of projects, you might give Magnatag a look-see. Here are some new products I've taken a fancy to since my last post:
[NOTE: I've just read in the comments that the Magnatag website is only viewable in North America. Apologies for the inconvenience.]
The Magnatag Grand Planner shows up to two years of a project, in familiar Gantt chart style. That's a big board, for big jobs.
For those seeking something a little more intimate, this Personal Time-Task Organizer might do the trick. I like the idea of it, though I don't have space to put one.
I love the idea of the Tack-Free Quick Change Bulletin Board, as one might guess from my dalliance with check rails and task tracking.
These TCards fit into a special board, and are loaded with information. I don't know what I'd personally do with it, but dang...I want one anyway.
I like the name of the Do-Done StepTracker, and I love the idea of "flip the magnetic button over to switch from to-do to done" functionality. Elegant and effective!
Ok, I listed this one before, but now there's a video showing just how the RotoGraph® Long Range Daily Line Item Planner actually works. It's one continuous scrolling surface that you can write your schedule on, kind of like a real-world version of Excel with locked sheet cells.
This is a great idea: a whiteboard with faint gray lines that show up only when you're up close. A whiteboard to put an end to migraine-inducing crooked writing!
There's all kinds of other stuff, like the crazy awesome specialty boards, including a transparent whiteboard for use with neon markers...great for that "war room" look, I'm thinking. Check the older Magnatag post for more interesting items.
The Story of Magnatag
As I oooohed and aaaahed over the products in the Magnatag online catalog, I couldn't help but wonder who or what was behind it all. Usually, I think of office supply provisioners as being rather lame, pumping out mediocre product with little effort going toward innovation. About six months ago, though, Magnatag's PR company came across my blog and asked if I had any questions about the company. I got to email some questions to the founder, Wally A. Krapf, who generously forwarded me several fascinating anecdotes about sales, personal initiative, and risk from his days as a young salesman-turned-entrepreneur in post-WWII Rochester, NY. Here's an excerpt about how he got the idea for Magnatag.
NOTE: I've removed names for purposes of privacy, edited some sentences out for flow, and bolded a few phrases for my own emphasis, but otherwise this is what Wally related to me via email:
Dave, you ask for a comparison story about our very first original product that I saw could be made as a new company. Actually it did not come about that way. Each day brought a new challenge, adventure and learning as I evolved and applied my “systems” marketing concept to my sales job. It all kind of evolved over time like I was being drawn toward a distant goal in mind that each day’s activity brought a little closer and clearer and sharper until the time just arrived to make the move to “go on my own”. On the personal front, I was married and had three young kids to support as a commission salesman, so income generation was a very big incentive, but not the really driving one.
The concept of making my own products, and marketing them by direct mail came about piece by piece after I had left the stationery company and set up my own business as Krapf Business Systems, Inc. on January 30, 1967. It is hard to isolate a significant event to say that it was the bright light that flashed on and became the company we have today. Each step evolved and was driven usually by reaction to some negative event with a lesson learned and applied.
[...] Anyway, after I conceived the idea of “systems packaging” of selling products as a solution to a problem by bundling all the components into a single entity, I discovered that many of my customers had the same problems and that one packaged solution could be sold to many others with similar problems, only tailoring it to each potential customer’s specific needs and pointing out clearly to him that he had a problem, which they often did not realize. (Listerine told you that you had Halitosis, Nexium told you that you had acid reflux disease, for example).
[...] Our stationery company [where Krapf worked before founding his own company--Dave] was housed in an old loft 4 story building near the headquarters of Kodak in downtown Rochester. It was the old Shinola Shoe Polish factory from the early days of Rochester when it was a center of the men’s fashion clothing industry with hundreds of companies housed in as many loft buildings in the old city, each contributing a piece of the fashion pie. In fact my dad earned his living as a freelance commercial artist doing many of the fashion paintings for industry advertising. When depression hit before I was born, most of his business folded and we lived through some pretty hard times through the 1930s and through the war.
The stationery company had a “systems division” that basically sold the Acme Visible Record line of information storage and retrieval systems equipment. I was getting bored with the furniture and supplies and wanted to get into this department. It really seemed challenging and fun. It was run by an old WWII vet named D- ( a D-Day Silver-Star Purple-Heart veteran, 13 years older than me. He is now 88 my good friend and we lunch every month with the other old vets I told you about). D- had just fired a salesman who had sold a large system to a bank and lost money on it. I pestered D- to give me his job, but he kept turning me down saying there was not enough business for the both of us. I kept after him for about a month and every day he kept painting a more dismal picture of my earning potential as his assistant. To get rid of me he made me a ridiculously meager offer of a sales draw that was about a quarter of what I was making in the furniture. To his shock, I took it. Everybody in the place thought I was nuts making a move like that. I started on a Friday morning. D- took me to what was supposed to be a sales call at Xerox, but he was actually just picking up an order he had sold earlier. Then he took me to an early lunch and when we returned to the office he told me he was taking 2 weeks vacation and that it was all mine. He walked out. As soon as he left, I backed my station wagon up to the door and loaded it up with all his customer files and catalogs and took them home. I studied them all weekend. The line was very complex. On Monday, when repeat customers called, I told them I was new and asked them to help me work through the product line with them. When D- returned I had it down cold. 2 months later he left the department and took my old position selling furniture. He kept dropping in to the systems office every day and we became really good friends. D- kept saying “You know, we really don’t need the stationery company to do this, we could keep all the profits ourselves if we went out on our own” At first I thought he was kidding, but after a few months it started to come about. In the meantime I had applied my “systems packaging concept” to several complex but very interesting applications (designing unique voter registration systems, jury selecting systems, and others, selling them to several counties in western NY state. (another interesting story).
One day the field rep for Acme Visible showed up unannounced and introduced me to the manufacturer’s vice president and told me that I had built up their business in Rochester to such an extent that they were putting in their own factory direct sales office and gave me 30 days to close up. Acme accounted for about 90 percent of my business. The owner told me I could come back to selling the furniture (about 2 years had elapsed). I told him forget it and to “just leave me alone, I’ll be just fine”. Although Acme had a very broad line and there was no other manufacturer who had one even near it, each product segment of their line had competitors. I immediately got on the phone and started calling up the competitor manufacturer sales managers and made appointments to visit their factories. I got in my car and started driving. At the end of about 2 weeks I had visited each plant, and secured a dealership on each competitive line. In the end the product mix I put together was much larger than the Acme line. Unfortunately,. I had made the mistake earlier of having Acme drop ship all my sales, so they knew exactly who all my customers were and gave that list to their new salesman, so I had to start from scratch again, except that I had created a lot of personal relationships with the customers most of who switched over to my new lines. ( I noticed that mostly the newer customers switched, which told me that the loyalty gradually moves from the salesman to the product once they become accustomed to it)
[...] I was [now] selling a broad line of business filing systems, visible record retrieval systems equipment, complex business forms and a lot of unique products including a new line of magnetic scheduling boards. The scheduling board people would send me sales leads from their space advertising, but I soon found them to be pretty poor quality and mostly a waste of time. Their catalog just showed photographs of existing boards in their customer’s offices, and a list of components you could select and build your own system. One day I was selling a filing system to a high school and saw they had a cork board on the wall with paper stickers on it showing teacher-class schedule against the daily periods. I suggested that we could do it better with color-coded magnets, and designed a system right on the spot which they ordered. I cold called a couple more high schools and made an easy sale at each. I then started calling on them all over the area and sold several. When the manufacturer asked me about them and I told them what I was doing, they offered me $500 if I would write up how I did it, for their sales manager. I ignored the request, but got to thinking, they should be the ones telling me how to sell their product not the other way around. In the mean time I also created a computer scheduling board system. In those days if you got a computer, you build a big glass walled room to house it, positioned it on a special built up floor with air conditioning to keep it cool, and invited all the neighbors to come in to see how modern you were. Of course, any department that wanted to use it had to reserve time on it, and I found that that called for a magnetic scheduling board with the 24 hour time scale reservation time spaces and color-coded application magnets. I also had designed system kits for school bus route scheduling and hospital staffing schedules. (another story).
One day I was selling a computer schedule to the Friden company factory when they asked me if I had a thin magnet that they could write on and erase to use to label their parts bins that were constantly changing contents. The magnets I was selling with the boards were about a third of an inch thick with stiff plastic plates adhered to them. You needed a saw or guillitine type blade to cut them. I asked the factory to make them thinner but they refused to consider it. The problem intrigued me, so I looked up the manufacturer of the raw magnet material (Goodrich) and got some samples of the extrusions (the only ones made in those days). I sliced them thin and then went to a local plastic supplier and went through hundreds of plastic samples until I found just the right one that would take writing, not smear and erase with a damp tissue. Next I had to find an adhesive that would cement the plastic to the thin magnet, be flexible because the magnet material bent easily, and wouldn’t come off after being bent or twisted. I also wanted a product that you could easily cut with a scissors. I was having no success with the adhesive, so I went to the adhesive wholesaler and asked for their help. They were not very interested but told me they had a loft with all the special adhesive tape samples the manufacturers were sending them over the years and I was welcome to poke around there and see if I could find what I needed. I spend 2 very hot sweaty summer days in that loft but finally found one that worked after hundreds of tests. That was 38 years ago. They put me in touch with the rather obscure adhesive manufacturer, I had them make me some and voila, I had my first invention, the Magnatag. The very first successful magnatag I made in my basement at home and when I came up and showed it to my wife, she said “When are you coming up for dinner?”
A year later the adhesive started to liquify and the plastics started to come off in the field. My next door neighbor was a chemist at Kodak so he took a sample to work, analyzed it and told me to tell the adhesive manufacturer to change one of the chemical components which they did. I still use that adhesive today.
At first I called them Magnamatic labels, until one Saturday morning I started rhyming mag with words to get a better name: Magnatag. I started showing them on my customer calls and they got a really good reception. By the way 6 months had gone by since the guy at Friden had asked for the special magnets, but by then he had left and the new guy was not interested. I also soon found that my new magnets were much better on the scheduling boards that the klunky ones that came with them, so I decided to drop the other supplier and make my own boards and magnets, (I didn’t tell them right away because I knew they would immediately send another salesman to compete with me, which the sales manager, E-, who left them a few months later told me on a visit to my office.) I bought green steel chalkboards and taped lines on them, later silkscreen printing them (another skill I had to learn). Whiteboards had not been invented yet.
I then took a nice color photo with a model of my board for school classroom scheduling, had it printed on a color post card, went to the library and got a directory of schools, copied out about 500 addresses and mailed them by hand. I was swamped with orders. I was making them at home in my basement. When a truck arrived one day with more steel chalkboards (while I was out selling) and made my wife unload the truck in the driveway, with our three little kids in tow, I came home to find them all over the driveway. Of course, she kicked me out of the basement and I had to get my first production facility which was a little store front on South Ave. in a poor neighborhood. I was there for one year, 1969. I worked alone there 12 to 14 hours a day but was happy a lark with my inventions and business. When a truck would show up in the street with my delivery of steel chalkboards, I would go to the local bar and hire one of the guys on the bar stools for five dollars to help me unload the truck, then would talk the city trashman into taking the crating materials which was against the rules (not an easy sell, but a few free magnets would do the trick). The next year I moved to a 2nd floor loft in an old macaroni factory, kind of an incubator for dozens of would-be entrepreneurs with dreams and schemes. It was a zoo, and I could do a whole book that would keep you laughing for hours about my year and a half in that place. I knew absolutely nothing about manufacturing but just asked questions wherever I thought I could get answers. I bought an old Davidson offset printing press, and read the manual to learn how to print my first brochures. I bought an antique Verirtyper for fifteen dollars to set my first type. Even did all my own mailing (some really funny stories there too).
WOW. I certainly hope Mr. Krapf writes his book, because it's the most inspiring bit of business storytelling I've ever read. It reminds me of Richard Feynman's autobiography, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, one of my favorite books for its humor, personality, and insight.
For those of you checking your credit card limits, a caveat: I haven't yet ordered anything from Magnatag, as I don't have the space for a whiteboard, so I can't say I've hefted their boards or written on their magnets. They sell direct from their factory, and don't seem to use retailers like Staples. I imagine that they're used everywhere, taken for granted as reliable pieces of functional architecture in businesses and organizations across America. If someone in the Boston area spots one, let me know! I want to check out the construction and finish, and through that, get some closure on this story :-)
Last week I wrote about these flat bookmark pens I got at Barnes & Noble. I finally got a chance to use them "in the field" during Barcamp Manchester, tucking one into a thin moleskine cahier journal. It was quite convenient, and I discovered that the flexing of the pen body was actually an advantage: it doesn't break when you sit on it! At least, so far it hasn't.
The one complaint I had was not due to the pen; the cahier is a very flimsy notebook to write on while standing up. So today I stuck a flat pen in the regular moleskine pocket notebook---the one that fits in your back pocket---to see just how much of a problem it would be.
As it turns out, it's not so bad if you put the pen in the middle, clipped to one of the manilla folder inserts (it's a thin cardboard as opposed to regular paper). The bottom of the pen tends to move around though; I might use a small loop of paper or sponge to help keep the pen in place. The cover does bend alarmingly, comforming itself around the pen, but I think the moleskine can probably hold up to it. Time will tell.
The picture above shows the cahier notebook on top, and the pocket notebook on the bottom.
Just about a year ago, I was obsessed with making a flat pen that would fit into a book or journal. A flat pen, I reasoned, would allow the pages of a book to "flow" better.
I finally stumbled upon some readily available ones right at Barnes & Noble, which commenter Claire had first brought to my attention the last time I was penhunting in Boston. Thanks for the tip, Claire!
The flattened pen is about 4.5 inches long, 7/16th of an inch wide, and a mere 1/8th inch thick. The clip adds another 1/16ths of an inch to the thickness, but still lies flat. While the build quality is a little on the light side, it's a pretty stable writing instrument for short sessions. There's some flex in the pen body if you exert some force on it, but it's one step above the usual cheap-o novelty pen. They are also prettier than the folding wallet pen I saw on LifeHacker.
Each pen was stamped "patented" with the mark "Slip Grippa", which lead to the manufacturer's website. If you're looking for tsotchkes to give away at a tradeshow, you can order them in a variety of colors from Grippa, singly or in packs. You can order them customized with your own logo and any one of 29 colors (PMS color matching is available too). Perusing the website, I saw that they also have a metal version that might have a more substantial feel. I'll have to get a hold of one and try it out.
If you're near a Barnes & Noble, the flat pens are packaged as bookmark pens and cost $4.95 for a CD-style case of 8. I've heard a rumor that they're also available at some drugstores.
UPDATE: So you want to see what they look like inside a moleskine?
When I was in Harvard Square for a meeting last week, I happened to notice The Swiss Watchmaker on Church Street. I popped into the store and looked around, and was struck by the matter-of-fact quality of the place. What was especially cool was that there was some kind of lesson going on behind the counter between a master watchmaker and two students. There was old-school craftsmanship was going on. Not having thousands of dollars to spend, I ducked out but noted this store's existence for future reference.
This weekend I was in the Square again, this time to hang out with my sister and her boyfriend. I had gotten in a little early, so I had some time to wander by the Swiss Watchmaker. I noticed a sun-faded sign in the window advertising something called The Invisible Clock II, which featured all kinds of alarm and timing modes. Always on the look for interesting time-keeping gadgets, I decided to drop in and ask to see the unit.
The Invisible Clock II
Being a Saturday, the store was a little more relaxed feeling. I spoke to one fellow named "Moose", who was happy to tell me all about The Invisible Clock II. It's a light but fairly-rugged feeling unit, powered by one AAA battery. It's about the size of a small pager, and comes with a belt clip. It's primary raison d'etre is to keep track of time intervals. Here's what it does:
It keeps track of up to 12 distinct daily alarms, which can vibrate or beep in different settable patterns.
It has a countdown timer that can be see to go off once or repeat, vibrating or beeping at any interval you want. It goes as low as 3 seconds, or as high as 999 hours. I was thinking it might be good for 15-minute interval timing.
It has a special Custom Timer mode that allows you to set a master interval, with up to 6 unique alarms within that interval. It will count up or count down, and it can be set to repeat auotmatically.
It's got a Meeting Timer, which you set for an interval for the length of the meeting. It will go off 50% of the way through the meeting, with 5 minutes to go, and then when time's up. Each alert has a distinct pattern of vibration or beeping.
It also works as a regular clock with date and as a stopwatch.
It has a cool electroluminescent backlit display. Yum!
It has a lanyard loop, so you could attach it to yourself in some fashion in addition to using the belt clip holster.
On the down side, it only has 4 input buttons, so programming this thing is like solving a puzzle in a puzzle-adventure game like Myst. Moose spent some time showing me how the programming worked, following the instruction in the 4-page instructional pamphlet. I asked him what people tended to use it for, and he said people who needed to take medicine at certain times, professionals who needed to time sessions, people who ran meetings, and so on. I myself just wanted it to remind me to keep track of what I was doing with [The Emergent Task Timer][ett] when I was away from my desk, plus I was attracted to the re-invention of the timer into a small device. At $45.00 it wasn't cheap, but the day I was in the store happened to coincide with a Sales Tax Holiday in Massachussetts. Swiss Watchmaker has a 10-day return policy, so I figured I could at least try it out and return it if I really didn't find it that useful. You can get the device for slightly cheaper at Time Now's website. They also sell on eBay.
I'm a little concerned about the quality of the side switch, which is used to set BEEP, VIBRATE or OFF mode, which you can see here is a pretty ordinary looking. I guess I am spoiled by the sealed slider-type switches you see on mobile phones. Other than that, the unit seems pretty solidly built. I'm going to try it for a week and see if it really helps.
Swiss Watchmakers
As I got ready to leave, I chatted with Moose a bit to learn a bit more about the store, and he was very passionate about what they did. The Swiss Watchmaker in Harvard Square is, from what I gather, one of a few very specialized establishments in the world that is capable of servicing the world's high-end watches.
- They can cut parts from scratch if they have to; unlike a lot of places, they have the guys right there in the store.
- The energy in the place is so rare to find these days: actual artisans and craftspeople who have studied for years to master their craft.
- Moose told me some cool stories about the decline of watchmaking even in the large established companies; one gold-plated brandname he described as now having "more lawyers than watchmakers" now. He informed me how a good mechanical watch kept better time than your average "quartz" watch, which can lose up to 15 seconds per month and still be regarded as "accurate". He described the process of adjusting a quality mechanical watch; each one has its own kind of characteristics based on its internal friction, and you adjust it based on that. Once you've found it, it keeps great time, but you need to let it sit for a while and watch it for a week.
- He also told me his opinion on the excellence of one particular watch he was excited about that was a tremendous value compared to more pricy watches, waterproof down to something insane like a kilometer (I may have misheard that). He explained why the winding knob was on the other side of the face: it's because when you bend your wrist, you don't want it to poke into your hand and break. Apparently, some people think it's because you wear it on your other arm, and Moose made a slight exasperated noise to indicate what he thought of that idea.
Clearly, Moose was a man who was passionate about watches. The next time I buy anything even remotely related to watches, I'm going to check out this place first. They had some specialized stopwatches that might also be suitable for task timing, but I didn't have time to look at them. Moose invited me to come down and talk watches anytime; he said something like, "think of this store as a working museum", which was an excellent way of describing the shop. I just love places like this.
While looking for a nice 4x6 card file, I re-discovered Magnatag, which makes custom magnetic whiteboard solutions. It's not the sort of thing that you see in your everyday office, as their products are geared toward specialized applications: engineering projects, print run management, inventory, and so on.
They have some interesting stuff...here's a small sampler:
Check out this modular infinite calendar system...sweet! Goes month-to-month!
Or just have a WHOLE YEAR mounted in convenient swinging-door fashion, right on your wall, with their SwingView system!
Yum...index card storage! Unfortunately, this CardView solution appears to use proprietary 3x4" cards. But it's a great idea!
The FileView Wall Filing System. OMG THIS IS THE FILE FOLDER STORAGE SYSTEM I WANT!!! Vertical, mounted on the wall, compact, with everything in view. YUM.
The Grip-A-Sheet is a lot like the check rail I got, except this one uses a transparent gripping mechanism (patented, even). You can see everything on the page. On my check rail, the top 3/4" is obscured. I even like the name :-) It comes in a variety of lengths, and seems pretty reasonably priced compared to regular check rails.
The RotoGraph is a SCROLLING infinite project planning GANTT-style chart for engineering project management! SUH-WEET!
When one magnetic whiteboard isn't enough, build an entire room from them.
Apparently Magnatag has been a family-owned business for 40 years...I'd like to find out more about the founder. You can't buy their products in stores, so you have to order online or by phone. I already have my catalog on the way :-) As a bonus, the company is located in upstate NY, an area of the country I am rather fond of.
I haven't actually seen or used any of their products, so this is just a heads up to anyone out there who is on the prowl for cool office gear :-)
UPDATE NOVEMBER 27, 2006: Magnatag's PR company arranged for an email interview with the founder, excerpted in this post. It's at the end of the post.
I finally mounted my check rail, but before undertaking this momental task I went to Home Depot to buy some kind of leveling device. I was originally thinking of getting some kind of fancy auto-balancing laser level, but they're expensive...$39 and up! The one I really wanted was about $80, but the packaging was done is such a way that I couldn't quite tell if it did what I really wanted. So, I thought I'd check out what I thought would be the boring old-style levels and save myself some money.
What I didn't expect was this sweet piece of machined aircraft aluminum:
The World of Levels
Levels deliver precision measurement in demanding construction environments, have to be shock-proof, lightweight, and easy to read. And of course it helps if they look cool. The one above is from the Empire Level Manufacturing Corporation website, which made the slickest ones I saw. Their claim to fame is some kind of innovation in the level bubble capsule itself, but I thought they just looked neat. Look!
COOL!
COOL!
Prices were about $16 for a 24-inch aluminum level.
Another neat purveyor of fine levels were the wooden ones from Johnson Level & Tool. They were made of laminated strips of wood, with brass edging and shock mounts on either side...really neat looking. These were a bit more expensive, at $25 for a 24-inch wooden level. I couldn't find a decent picture on their website, but there was a fancy web page for their new product line. It's called, er, "The Big Johnson":
I spent about an hour looking at every different level there, admiring the design and construction of each manufacturer's offering. It's interesting to note that both Empire and Johnson are located in Wisconsin, the land of cheese and hearty wursts. Is toolmaking a tradition out there? The president of Empire Level is apparently fifth-generation member of the family that founded the business in 1919. There's a cute picture of her holding the "the super-accurate True Blue® vial which is at the heart of Empire's premium level's and squares." Adorable.
Money is Still Money
Despite all this looking and shopping, I just decided to get this $3.99 Stanley plastic level:
Cheap, cheerful, doesn't take up a lot of space, and it gets the job done. Still looks cool, albeit in a more toylike way. And what really matters is that I got the check rail mounted:
Woo hoo!
I was at The Museum of Useful Things last week...what a great store! The website doesn't do the place justice; they carry much more than is shown online! I was excited to see they carried the Ex-cell Noteminder Check Rail, which is used by restaurants to hold orders in the queue.
I've wanted one of these things for years, thinking it would be useful for prioritizing my own tasks. I got the idea by watching a worker at McDonald's manage a priority queue during a busy lunch period. She put the priority items (for cars) on the left, scanning the tickets constantly to stay on top of what food needed to go in which bag . I was impressed; apparently I am not alone in this observation.
Now that I have my check rail, I need something to put in it! This type of task management has been on my mind a lot since I re-evaluated The Printable CEO™ series and noted that there were two major missing elements:
- Something useful for focusing on a single task
- Something useful for very high level strategic planning
Today I'm addressing the first one. Introducing the Task Order Up!
UPDATE: I changed the name from "Task Order Slip" to "Task Order Up" after reading Damien Tanner's trackback...much cooler sounding! :-)
The Big Idea
The main idea of the Task Order Up is maintaining context and continuity for a single task. With previous incarnations of The Printable CEO&trade, the various forms addressed groups of tasks, and are therefore more usfeul as "big picture" tools. The closest tool is probably The Task Progress Tracker, which was designed for managing tasks like a To Do list with finer-grained progress measurement. The Task Order Up ticket is similar in that it is also a form of To-Do list, but it ideally focuses only on one thing at time. One task, one ticket.
One of the original inspirations is my belief that, in a trusting work environment, all an employee needs to know are the following two things:
- What I am supposed to do?
- When is it due?
The manager / producer needs to know:
- What the employee is doing?
- How long did it take to finish?
- Is the employee being effectively utilized?
From the employee's perspective, the tangible work ticket allows them to manage their own tasks. It ameliorates the distractions that occur in a busy workplace too, since the work ticket becomes a visual anchor. Where was I? Oh, the ticket is right here in front of me. Once the task is complete, the ticket is also useful to review what happened that day, which makes filling out the weekly timesheet a little less onerous.
From the manager's perspective, being able to see what's on an employee's plate at any time without having to explicitly ask helps you from becoming needlessly annoying. The work ticket is a minature contract between you and the employee, outlining the essentials of what needs to be done by when. By observing the state of the check rail, one can get a quick picture of how loaded someone is at any given time.
While comparing our hip New Media lifestyle to short-order cooking may seem unglamourous...have you seen how productive those places can be? It's amazing. The really good places don't even need a check rail, but in fast food environments these things help maintain context and continuity. That helps with focus. I'm also thinking that having these slips of paper may help disambiguate the process of communicating what tasks are actually "on-deck" at any given time; that's always a challenge in a small business environment.
The Setup
Here's a more illustrative view of the check rail w/ three task slips. The idea is that you mount the rail near your primary work area and keep a bunch of these "current task" slips on them. Maybe at your workplace you use it to jot down quick tasks and hand them off to other people; I'm still working out the logistics.
The photo here is a temporary setup rigged for the purposes of this blog post, but I am planning on building some kind of holder out of 2x4s over my monitor.
Features
The form is split into 4 visible sections. Note the header at the top is designed to disappear under the check rail's gripping mechanism.
Task Description -- What you are planning to do in terms of producing a tangible result. Tasks that don't produce tangible results are not really to-do items.
Date / Due By -- The optional due-date of the task. There is also a visible weekly calendar so you can make a mark when it's due. The theory behind the calendar is that this allows you to visually sort dates instead of doing comparisons in your head. You can mark something due as either in the AM or the PM by filling in the box or putting an X in it.
Procedure List -- Write down the things you need to do to complete the task. Use the bubbles on the side to track the amount of time you spend on the various subtasks if you like; they are supposed to be 15-minute bubbles. I find that visually this isn't quite working well, so this part of the form is still not quite ready. The original idea was that I'd write the procedure down like a receipe so I wouldn't have to think so much as I work, but that's a topic for another post.
There are small tick marks to align subtasks on the left. The tick marks on the right are for putting Concrete Goal Tracker points; for example, if one of your subtasks produces a result that is CGT-worthy, you might write "+2" in that column.
Hours & Points -- After the task is complete, finalize the task by filling in the amount of time you took. Also, sum up any Concrete Goals Tracker points that were earned; you can use the ticket to later fill in your weekly timesheet or whatever. Finally, there's space for a job code, if you're in an environment that uses them. Otherwise, you can just write down the name of the project or other note in the space.
Concluding Thoughts
I'm still working on this form, as there are two significant drawbacks:
It's hard to sum-up the hours from the bubbles in the left column -- They are supposed to be 15-minute intervals, but I think they tend to read as hours. If you don't fill them continuously, then you can't just count big groups for hours.
The "best" way to fill-in the To Do list portion is not clear -- If you use the bubbles as an estimate of time per item, then you have to skip lines or draw arrows to connect a set of bubbles to a particular line item. That would be similar to using the form as an emergent time tracker, but the results are visually cluttered.
The horizontal format of the Emergent Task Timer and Task Progress Tracker is more suitable for this, so I have some ideas on how to bring that back in while maintaining the vertical format. In the meantime, you might just treat this as a fancy todo list and see what uses emerge over the next few days.
This is potentially a very wasteful paper process. I personally like making forms so it's fun, but ultimately this should be a software-based system. I have most of the essential design concepts finalized now through previous iterations of The Printable CEO™; it's time to put some of my Actionscript experience to work.
BTW, if you're grouchy about not having a check rail, just use a big clip like this!
Download The 2010 Printable Task Order Up Forms
This year's updates make some cosmetic changes to the typography, including darkening some of the background tints which were printing too lightly.
Standard Format
3x5 Index Card Format
4x6 Recipe Card Format
» More on The Printable CEO Series
I finally replaced my Epson Stylus Color 900 with a new Canon Pixma IP-5200R network printer. Booyah!
Ah, my Epson. It was a 4-color business printer with exceptional color output for its time, with pretty decent speed and reliability; it's lasted me for 8 years, surviving five different moves without a hiccup. Sadly, its printing quality has degraded to the point where it smears everything, and no amount of cleaning would bring it back.
While Epson had been the print quality leader for much of the 90s, the gap has been eliminated in the past few years by HP and Canon's latest models. Epson's current offerings have left me feeling crawly with their guzzly ink usage and cheap build quality. I also was not looking for a "photo printer", but a fast general-purpose 4-color model for daily use. HP printers I avoid on general principle (I hate their driver software), which left Canon. I had been reading good things about Canon printers for years, but they fell just short in image quality versus Epson. Until recently, that is; the recent batch of printers seems to get good buzz. The features that appeal to me:
- Network ready! Includes both ethernet and wireless (802.11G) connectivity!
- Both Mac and PC drivers!
- Individual ink tanks!
- Two-sided printing!
- Two paper paths, a bottom cassette and top-feed!
- Fast, quality black & white / color printing!
- PictBridge (direct from supported digital camera) printing!
The North American version, unfortunately, doesn't include the direct-to-CD printing feature that the European and Japanese version of this printer. Apparently you can hack the printer to re-enable this feature on the U.S. versions if you're willing to crack some plastic and twiddle the registry.
I first set the printer up on the Wireless Network, and it was pretty awesome. However, when I power-cycled the printer it stopped working; I suspect it has something to do with the drivers expecting the printer to be on a particular IP address; however, the printer is using DHCP and is grabbing a dynamic address every time. I'll have to fix that. I've put the printer on the regular ethernet for now, and it's working just fine. The printer also includes a regular USB 2.0 connection.
A couple of notes about the installation:
The manual is relatively straightforward but somewhat poorly organized. The diagram labeling is incomplete, never identifying the "inner door" that you're supposed to manipulate when installing the print head for the first time. I eventually figured out that the inner door instructions were edited out because it's related to the "Direct-to-CD" printing feature that IS NOT shipped with US models.
I was shocked to see that the printer driver by itself required a whopping 100MB of disk space. That is without the optional utilities that I didn't install. This is a huge printer driver; I thought HP was bad. The Mac OS X drivers, by comparison, are a little smaller at 40MB. I haven't gone and looked yet to see what's taking up all that room.
Installing the wireless network requires that you hook the printer up to a computer through the included USB cable. The setup software communicates with the wireless network through the printer, so you don't actually need to be using a computer with a wireless connection.
The print quality is quite a bit better than my 8-year-old Epson, which I suppose is to be expected given that my old 900 is 3 or 4 generations older.
The Epson output, scanned at 1200DPI. You can see the huge dots, and that the grayscale is composed of random colors. Click the image to see it bigger.
The Canon output, scanned at 1200DPI. Noticeably smoother! Grays are also printing much lighter, and there's a hue shift.
The Epson color output, scanned at 1200DPI. You can see how the printer is smearing a lot, and that the text isn't very sharp. The green color also shows a lot of dithering.
The Canon, by comparison, is much smoother and even. As it should be...it's brand new!
That was all with plain paper, so it's low resolution. Both printers were set to their best plain paper quality setting. The Epson takes several minutes to print a sheet at that setting, while the Canon takes something like 10 seconds. A vast improvement.
Normally, this printer is about $229, but Amazon was running a special for $199 plus free shipping, so I jumped on it. The IP5200R is the network-ready version. if you don't need it, then go with the IP5200 (no 'R' designation). It retails for $179 or so without the networking.
I can now print from every computer in the house, which kicks ass. Now that I have a working printer again, I'm more inclined to do some more paper-based work...hooray!
It has been 14 years since I've wanted an Apple for its sexy hardware. I'm not talking, mind you, about Apple's industrial design (when Jobs is in charge). Nor am I talking about Mac OS X, which continues to delight me. I'm talking about the guts: the processor, memory bus, video card, and integration with the operating system.
Finally, the first Mac I could buy without feeling ripped-off on performance is here: The MacBook Pro, with Intel Inside. Glee!
Now, I am not saying that Intel Rules over PPC... the Intel architecture is rather kludgy compared to, say, the much-loved Motorola 68000 series of the original Macs. However, the Mac has been trailing PC hardware (not the OS, the hardware) for over a decade. In 1992, when the first 486-DX2 PCs because available at 2x the performance for 1/2 the price, the Macintosh has been outclassed in terms of raw speed. I should know...I was facing that decision in 1992, and reluctantly went with the PC. Full disclosure: The LucasArts game X-Wing was only available on PC at the time...that may have had something to do with my decision as well :-)
Anyway, speed still didn't matter as much because all the good graphics software was still Mac, but around 1995 things started to turn the other way when Adobe made a usable version of Photoshop (version 4) available. The rise of 3D gaming and the Internet further pushed the Mac into a game of catch-up. Great software design and a loyal user base is what kept the ball alive, not speedy hardware.
Despite all that, I've always wanted a G5 box. They just look so cool, and OS X is so sexy. But as soon as I touched the mouse and felt the lag, I just walked away and kept my money. I did succumb once and bought the cheapest PowerBook I could (a 12" 1GHz G4), and it's easily my favorite machine in terms of personality. But fast it ain't. My 1GHz Compaq Presario notebook is noticeably faster.
No more! The MacBook has a dual-core Intel processor in it (2 processors in one = faster data processing), a faster frontside bus (better cpu-to-memory speed = faster data handling) , and PCI express (quicker graphics transfer = faster screen refreshes). I imagine that some of those sluggish 3D acceleration issues will go away too, because now 3rd party vendors can incorporate portions of Intel-native hand-optimized driver code. It's all good...hooray! Mac OS X and speed. Together at last. At a competitive price. Someone pinch me.
I see that there's a new iMac too too, that's supposed to be 2x faster. The cynic in me was analyzing the ad copy on the iMac page: it sounds like with the dual-core CPU, it's of course 2x faster than the single-processor version. But there are so many fundamental improvements under the hood, I'm wondering if it's actually capable of more speed than they're willing to admit to, say, people who just bought a PowerBook or G5; sorry if that's you...it's one of the hazards of being an Apple person! And think of this: the 2x speed may be referring to emulated PPC code, not Intel-native versions of your favorite apps. I eagerly await benchmark results of a totally-native software suite. There will be dozens of announcements over the next few weeks.
Now it feels like 2006! There are new Macs! Will 2006 will be the year to switch?
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