Viewing Category: Personal
I'm finding I have to hunker down and seriously reduce the number of activities I'm engaging in to push past an important milestone, so my posting frequency will be (if you haven't already noticed) drastically reduced. I was feeling very guilty about this, until I thought to myself that there was no reason to. My life is my own, right?
Well, not really. My life is now intertwined with dozens of other lives, and participating in the blogosphere has been very positive. I'm loathe to let go of it even for a short spell to again don the black clothes of the itinerant freelance codeslinger, but it's what I need to do. I call it "hermit mode", and last year I recognized that it was a kind of luxury to be able to shut out the world and focus exclusively on just a few things. As more of my friends start families, I see how their priorities change and how their schedules shift with the need to juggle many more balls.
I've never been particularly good at juggling, or perhaps more accurately I've never liked feeling the stress and fear of dropping the ball. My coping mechanism has been to run silent and deep, like a nuclear submarine on patrol hundreds of feet below the surface of the ocean, alone with my work and shut out from the world. It's during these times that I lose contact with the natural day, staying up later and later until I'm going to sleep at the crack dawn and waking up at noon. There's just a couple of balls to juggle then, and there's few distractions. It's actually not so bad a life, if you have a few 24-hour supermarkets near you, and with the Internet you're never completely isolated. Now that I think about it, since adopting the early waking schedule about a year ago (yes, I'm still doing it) I've lost touch with quite a few people that I used to talk to regularly in the wee hours of the morning, fellow hermits tapping greetings across the slumbering Internet.
I'm faced with a decision: I could manage my time better by applying any number of techniques I've used in the past, though frankly I don't really want to do it. I'm tired. Or I could shut out the world and pour all my attention into the tasks that I want to get done.
The advantage of managing my time is that it's more sustainable---if I accept that what I get done every day is going to be incremental and feel very small. I personally have little patience for incremental change, which is why I probably suck at it. The one exception to this is when I am actually observing incremental change in PEOPLE...that fascinates me, because each small change in a person's behavior can indicate something much larger. I guess I am naturally curious about what makes people tick, not the number of ticks I can count.
The advantage of shutting out the world is that it is a more exciting commitment to action; kind of an adventure, really. I like getting ready for adventures, strategically planning my moves, getting everything ready for the big push. The problem is that it is an expensive contextual switch, on the order of planning a vacation without the relaxation, and it always burns me out at the end. This may, however, be the natural way I work by myself. It is a recurring pattern.
My gut reaction is that I should avoid going into hermit mode, but instead triage what I am focusing on. Blogging is going to have to go on the sideline for a bit, because there is a lot of other stuff that I need to get done for both the business and for my projects.
I'm also considering my energy levels. Last week I tracked my hours using my excel timesheet and added two additional fields: energy level and what I ate. I had the feeling that I wasn't doing the right work at peak times, so I wanted to see if there were any patterns at all to my day. I discovered that in the morning, after going to the gym, I was at peak alertness. I checked my email afterwards and followed up with people, and found that after a couple of hours of this my energy levels were again drained. Surprisingly, activities like washing the dishes seemed to recover some of that energy. What I ate didn't seem to make as much of a difference as I thought, though the quantity might still have something to do with it (overly full = sleepy).
My tentative conclusions:
I am getting eyestrain from looking at the screen, and this is making me dizzy. I can go maybe a couple of hours before the slight headache starts distracting me. I just ordered a larger monitor to alleviate this, hopefully it will get here tomorrow.
I need to pace my eating so it's smaller amounts, more frequently. I hear this advice a lot from people who are optimizing their metabolism, and it's high time I did the same. This is a whole new kind of process I will need to learn. Also, I should be drinking a lot more water. Remembering to do this in the winter time is more difficult, for some reason.
I need to shift the priority from communication to project, which is a reversal of my current values. I like to read email and respond to it, and I like chatting with people to see what they're up to. For the past half year I've been pretty bad at replying to email in a timely manner because I've been busy with more projects, and I've felt guilty and inadequate. I will have to face up to the fact that I don't have the bandwidth to spend 4 hours a day just writing back to people and exploring interesting opportunities. The "golden time" right after my workout should be devoted to project work, no exceptions. Email will have to wait to the end of the day, along with blogging. When I was responding to email, it was right after my workout. I'm still going to get eyestrain and dizziness after a few hours of staring at the computer screen (assuming the new larger one doesn't alleviate this), but knowing this I can at least make sure my best hours are devoted to project work.
I don't know how this will work out, and I've already frittered away some prime "work time" by writing this post instead of doing project work, but at least I am laying the groundwork for future productivity this week.
In other news, the initial wave of people who have pre-ordered Emergent Task Planner Pads has dwindled, and the remaining people who haven't yet ordered either have decided not to or have non-functioning email addresses. I am now going to start the process of collecting the names of people who have expressed interest in leftovers. I also need to figure out a better way of doing order fulfillment, as PayPal's initially-promising merchant tools are cumbersome and painful to use. The biggest obstacle to just opening up a store is the ability to track inventory levels; PayPal does not offer this, and I do not want to accept money when I do not have product in stock. Someone must make a combined ordering, payment receiving, inventory-counting e-commerce front end with integrated postage and packing slip management. Eventually I will probably go with Amazon Fulfillment, but for now I want to continue to ship myself as I work out the best way to package these boxes. Until that time, there are so many shopping cart options out there that it's going to take days to research them all. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears.
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed how it's changed its focus from the personal to the productive. In the beginning, when I first started blogging out of a kind of quiet desperation to once and for all figure myself out, the entries were short clippings of my thoughts on whatever happened to catch my eye and interest. As time went on, and I discovered that long-lost friends were starting to stumble upon the webby shores of my site, I grew a little bolder and started writing in more depth about topics that were interesting to me. Blogging for that small audience was the outlet I needed.
At the beginning of 2005, I was starting to just come out of a two-year period of negativity, and was comfortable enough about writing online to make a few rambling journeys into personal introspection. These felt quite daring because they were so out of character with the other posts, which tended to be more detailed, hard-edged and technical. I remember posting about feeling negative, and a couple of my friends actually emailed me to make sure I wasn't about to lose it. While I find those posts to be somewhat embarrassing in retrospect, they are also as honest as I could make them, so I leave them up as signposts of my online journey. And it was through this journey that I really started getting to the bottom of what was important to me so I could create solutions to my problems. This is what lead to the original Printable CEO article, with its bizarre merging of psychology via video game design philosophy. I think one reason people like it, other than its sheer geekiness, is that it was designed to help you care about yourself. Fundamentally, I think of it as a design that is all about caring, inspiring, and empowering individuals.
Lately I've been avoiding writing the long introspective posts, because I've been aware of the growing contingent of productivity enthusiasts who have come here through sites like LifeHacker and Web Worker Daily. These are very popular, tip-focused sites that link to the various forms I've created to address the different inefficiencies I've faced in my freelancing career. Every time one of these sites links to an article here, I see a bump in RSS subscriptions. A few days later, I see a corresponding dip as people realize that I tend to write about other stuff like sandwiches and they unsubscribe. This used to bum me out, but I would tell myself that my writing is not for everyone. It's hard to describe exactly what keeps people here, actually, but I figure the people who stay are the ones I want to talk to in the first place. It's been tougher recently to stick to that line because I'm starting to realize that there is a lot I could do to drive traffic and build a real "web property". I'm starting my 4th year of blogging, and over those years I've learned quite a bit about how to write content and how to maintain a website. I've seen other websites that have started at around the same time I have flourish and explode into full-fledged enterprises, far beyond what I've done here. It was for this reason that I switched from WordPress to Expression Engine, because Expression Engine offers me the ability to start expanding my site facilities without a whole of painful integration work. It will allow me to start compartmentalizing my writing into focused, ad-friendly packets of content. It's a good media strategy.
You might be surprised to know that I don't spend every day reading RSS feeds to suck down the latest productivity and design news. I know that stuff is out there, but I get most of what I know through other people mentioning what's hot in passing. The sites that I do visit are ones that share the stories of someone's life. If there are any tips, they're offered in context to what someone has done and how it affected them. This is what I am drawn to, and recognizing that changes the way I deploy my shiny technical skills. I design because I like stories. And the kind of stories I like best are ones where someone has a dream, meets an obstacle that seems unsurmountable, then finds that greatness in themselves somehow to get past it.
I recently reread Po Bronson's What Should I Do With My Life?, which is his book about ordinary people who have asked this question and what they did about it. I originally read the book sometime in 2003, before I knew what a blog was and before I knew what was important to me. All I knew was that I wasn't particularly happy or inspired or motivated, though I wanted to feel that way. I wanted a calling, and the book reassured me that I wasn't alone or crazy in desiring this. Then I forgot about the book and went on with my life. 2004 kind of sucked, but 2005 offered possibility. 2006 was pretty good, and 2007 was better still because I've met people who have made a difference in my life, and have given me fresh perspective. What I lacked, though, was a sense of being part of a greater movement. What Should I Do With My Life? (a book about individual calling), along with Why Do I Love These People (a related book about family bonds) has reconnected me with the notion that it's really the people making their lives work that inspire me every day. And so, if what I can do with my life can help them make their stories better and make a good life...that's precisely what I want to do. I just need to make it pay.
I'm not exactly sure why I wrote this, though I suspect it's partly a reaction to my NOT having written a rambling personal post in quite some time, and it's probably also part of my processing of my Po Bronson weekend. I think maybe this is an affirmation of faith, and maybe it's also a beacon. As an experiment I've tried linking this post to the forum that I just installed this weekend for the C# Study Group. If there's anything I've learned, it's the small offerings to connect that lead to surprising opportunities. You just need to keep making the offer, and not have expectations on what comes back. It's both scary and exciting. It doesn't always work out or last, but heck let's see if anything happens. You can register here.
My sister says this picture reminds her of some kind of European rock album cover.
I was pleasantly surprised to receive my XO Laptop, formally known as the $100 Laptop for the One Laptop Per Child non-profit, and I just spent a couple hours playing with it. It is the cutest, coolest piece of gear I have in the house. I would venture to say that it's WAY cooler than my MacBook Pro 17" which is, basically, a production workstation. Sure, the XO is not very fast, is made of the type of plastic that's used for toddler toys, and the "keyboard" is a chicklet-style membrane that is not designed for touch-typing. There isn't a hard drive, and it doesn't run Windows or a window system for that matter. So what good is it you ask? It's good for getting education and computing into the great outdoors, that's what. It is the most exciting thing I've seen in quite some time. Yes, I even think it's cooler than the iPhone.
Admittedly, it is designed for smaller hands than mine, and in terms of speed you can practically feel the tiny processor grunting to itself like a jogger huffing I CAN!!! toward the top of a mountain as tourists stare curiously at him from their air-conditioned rental cars. Fast, it isn't. It reminds me a lot of one of the microcomputers I wanted when I was 12, the Sinclair ZX80. Like the Sinclair, the XO makes thrifty use of its limited memory. And like microcomputers of the early 80s, the XO is open. Open Source, in fact. The guts of the software are accessible, so this is a machine that people just getting introduced to computers will be able to learn on. What's really exciting, though, is the quality of the I/O. There's a camera, microphone, speakers, a high-res sunlight-readable display, and self-organizing mesh networking all built in. For expansion, there are USB ports and a memory card slot. You can take this computer on outdoor adventures with you, take pictures and notes, and share your findings with your peers around you. I find this incredibly exciting.
I haven't really played with the software at all yet, but I'm looking forward to trying to use this machine quite a bit as my primary "on the go" laptop to see what it's like. When I'm traveling around I usually just take notes anyway in my reporter-style Moleskine. The wireless networking capabilities of the XO should make this a good coffeehouse companion, though the keyboard is not suitable for touch typing at all.
Fortunately for me, the XO recognized my treasured IBM Model M 84-Key Space Saver Keyboard, which I plugged through a PS2-to-USB adapter. Seemed to work fine with the machine. When you put the XO into tablet mode, you end up with a very compact word processing station that is high-resolution and usable in direct sunlight. While the XO is supposed to run for quite a while on batteries (especially with the backlight off), the additional current drain of the Model M keyboard might reduce battery life further...I have no idea.
Anyway, it's here in time for Christmas, so I'm looking forward to spending a bit of time looking at the development environment. It might be neat to develop some portable tracking tools for the machine, if only for my own amusement.
Friday is my last day in San Jose, which was pleasantly sunny but chilly--chillier than I expected, actually. I shouldn't complain since I have been hearing that New England is getting hammered with snow. Here's hoping that I don't end up camping out in the Chicago Midway airport Food Court tomorrow. On the plus side, Midway has a pretty decent food court, as airports go. But I digress! Here's what's going on:
Geek Dinner
We had a small gathering of five productivity nerds on Thursday night, meeting at an open air mall called The Pruneyard in Campbell, California. My fellow productivity enthusiasts informed me that The Pruneyard is a popular meeting place for events in Silicon Valley, particularly because there are several good restaurants right there. After convening at The Coffee Society, we moved on to a diner-like place called Hobee's, where I had a club sandwich served with TORTILLA CHIPS on the side instead of fries. It's these regional differences (or perhaps it is just a Hobee's thing) that I find fascinating about new places.
The conversation opened up with an inquiry into The Great Big Mess that all the information capturing we do seems to create. After a great deal of inquiry about job text, performance metrics, and the tossing around of the word "orthogonal" more than a few times, we came to a tentative conclusion that the ideal system would have the following characteristics:
- minimal overhead in note taking and information capture
- not necessary to do a structuring pass to make the notes useful
- available everywhere and anywhere
This is the DREAM SYSTEM, and on first glance it seems untenable. Note taking is essentially the entire scope of information capture; anything we think we should be able to recall later is fair game. This includes conversations in the hallway, planning meetings, things on the Internet, email email email, and pieces of documents scattered across dozens of computer systems. A great deal of our time is spent processing all this raw input into useful resources (or it should be); the seminal information system designer Douglas Engelbart had observed that much of our time is spent just doing clerical work. TThe percentage of time spent being CREATIVE (like, actually making something) is pretty small. Once you have your nuggets all in a row, you naturally want to have them accessible. This is a form of magic. I think the reason devices like smart phones, PDAs, and even Moleskines and Hipsters are so popular is because they are arcane artifacts in a mundane world filled with ordinary information. At least they would be, if they actually worked. Right now, these systems function because we spend a lot of energy maintaining them with methodologies like Getting Things Done and 7 Habits. That isn't quite magic, though...what we want is something we DON'T have to work at constantly, because we're lazy and believe we have better things to do. Even if we force ourselves to do them, we don't enjoy it.
I've written about productivity systems in the past in terms of the importance of context, but lately my emphasis has shifted to continuity as being even more fundamental when it comes to doing stuff.
- If you are just doing without thinking, you'll make progress, but maybe not the right progress.
- If you are doing within an understood context, you have an idea of how your work will be applied; therefore your work is theoretically better.
- If you are maintaining continuity in doing, you have a form of momentum that tells you what to do next, because it follows from what you just did.
The better user interfaces I've seen have addressed context through intelligent screen layout and functional grouping, but I haven't seen anything that really pays attention to continuity. My paper-based tools tend to enforce continuity probably because I need it; I don't have a manager who's job would be to direct my energies along fruitful paths. The modern knowledge worker has so many things going on that it's impossible to maintain continuity of everything, so you're forced to do it very badly or learn to shut things out. For people who want to do more, they turn to a methodology that ensures that they ARE maintaining continuity; this is one of the strengths of GTD, though it doesn't help you with WHAT you should be doing to achieve your desires. That's a different system.
After realizing that we were chasing a system spec that was basically asking for the moon, our brainstorming became more animated. Some of the suggestions (that I think I can share):
Maintaining several distinct information data streams, based on "beautiful filters", that create themselves without you having to be involved. Instead, you use days of the week as continuity. When you need information from a particular area, you go and dip back into it.
Creation of a universal work/life filtering language that imposes a standard continuity description language on different information sources.
Capture metadata about the day by recording what you see throughout the day with Tivo-like camera glasses; when something important happens, you press a button to timestamp that moment and say something about what it is. Since a lot of interesting information is recognized only after it has been observed, the digital rewind capability ensures you don't miss anything.
Get email programs to re-implement really excellent conversational threading, and provide a visual overlay tool that you can use to create a continuity of relevance and context. In other words, methods of organizing who conversations, not just tagging individual items. Nerd analogy: Sort of like using Ethereal to isolate HTTP packet traffic, filter out the non-http stuff, and reconstruct the actual back-and-forth between client and server.
Create "Project Manager ELIZA", a chatterbot that can be used as a tool for continuity reflection and conversational memory storage. The theory is that maybe all we need is someone to talk to about what we're doing, constantly, to maintain our own continuity. ELIZA is known for taking the user's text input, extracting nouns and ideas it recognizes through simple pattern matching, and then spitting back a canned reply using those words. The results can sometimes be very insightful, and certainly they are just as good as the average "bad project manager" :-) Combine this with conversation logging, and the ability to just tell the chatterbot to remember things for you, and you might have a pretty decent personal assistant that doesn't cost you anything.
There were various products mentioned throughout the night in this context: OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, Microsoft OneNote, 37Signals Basecamp / HighRise / Backpack, That Mac Program That Keeps Track Of What You Are Looking (name?), Tablet PCs, and Moleskines are what I remember.
RSS Feeds
Some readers have had problems with the RSS feed updating multiple times for the same article. I've started seeing this too in the email subscriptions, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why certain posts kept reappearing. I finally dipped into Expression Engine's RSS template and looked around to see what actually goes in there, and after some reading have tried changing:
<guid>{title_permalink=blog}#When:{gmt_entry_date format="%H:%i:%sZ"}</guid>
to
<guid>{title_permalink=blog}</guid>
From what I can tell about RSS feeds, the "globally unique identifier" (GUID) is supposed to be unique but is otherwise just a string. I don't know if there are strange inconsistencies happening in the way {gmt_entry_date} is producing its output as a HH:MM:SS...maybe my server is wobbling slightly on the way seconds are being reported. And wouldn't the date of the post be a more stable GUID string? Anyway, I just nuked that whole part and I hope the RSS problem fixes itself.
Hot Sauces and Yummy Tacos
Two culinary food finds on this trip. First, this is an excellent spicy hot sauce:
My cousin Ben, who tries every hot sauce he comes across, turned me on to this. He warned me to use only a little bit. I spooned on just a bit more than he suggested, and my mouth was scorched in the most loving yet alarming way. The entire top of my scalp started to sweat profusely and my eyes filled with tears of joy and consternation. At the same time, it was more than just heat...there was flavor and warmth and a feeling of some accomplishment. The heat lingers too, becoming stronger over the next 5-10 minutes, so be careful. Really yummy.
We also had lunch at a place called Plaza Garibaldi in San Jose, which had these tacos:
They were good in a way I didn't expect: as an ensemble cast of ingredients, each offering its own contribution to the overall taste. For me, my reference point for tacos are Taco Bell and the numerous so-so Mexican restaurants scattered around New England. The tacos were not intensely flavored, and because of that there was a much more interesting flavor arc. It was subtle like a quiet passage in a piece of classical music, requiring you to listen carefully so you can catch what is going on. I liked them quite a bit, but in a reflective way.
