Viewing Category: ThinkingTools
Last week I needed to do some proactive project estimating for a prospect, and so I busted out my old gantt chart spreadsheet. This is a nice quick-and-dirty visualization tool that doesn't require quite as much mucking around with resources as Microsoft Project, but one drawback of my spreadsheet was that I have to redo the dates at the top every time. This has always sucked, but I have new Excel tricks from the 2009 Compact Calendar tucked beneath my sleeve. Now, I can just enter the starting date and the weekend shading will be drawn automatically. It even marks the beginning of the month now in tiny letters, which isn't ideal but it looks unexpectedly cool.
Now I can print out blank versions of this spreadsheet to create gantt paper, which is helpful for visualizing how threads of work intertwine. The document is set up by default to print gridlines on 1 landscape page, so if you don't like this make sure to change it. Also new are some instructions in the worksheet itself, with hints on modifying it for your use.
You can download the new version at the newly-updated Manual Gantt Charting in Excel post. Note that it still doesn't do automatic calculation of resource usage or anything remotely useful like that, but it's useful for a quick ballpark visualization of a project that the Compact Calendar can't handle.
Enjoy!
A few days ago I posted the latest progress on the Day Grid Balancer forms, a line of inquiry that has attracted very high-quality commentary from you all. Special kudos go to John Ballantrae for using Tarot cards as a tool for design reflection. Instead of using the cards to "read me", he used them to reflect on the direction that the Day Grid Balancer might go. Despite what you might believe or not believe about the "psychic power" of Tarot Cards, the symbolism nevertheless does span a variety of human desires and anxieties; just by considering the interpretations of each drawn card, one can gain some insight by seeing how the symbolism might fit with the situation on your mind.
John posted his video tarot card reading for everyone to see, and in his 12-minute video he came up with several interesting insights. One that resonated was the sense of anxiety and frustration that is driving the development of the Day Balance Grid; he suggested that perhaps focusing on that would provide some new direction. It is very true that I have been feeling that I've not been keeping balanced, and that I was potentially forgetting important things. I had started to write up everything that was on my mind, which works fine when I'm doing it for other people. This time, though, I was stuck. The thought of seeing all those unfinished tasks and unfulfilled dreams was incredibly demotivating. Nevertheless, it had to be done.
When I went to re-watch John's video, the first three minutes suddenly stood out to me. He's doing nothing but shuffling his cards as he's explaining his approach to the reading. It's rather mesmerizing to see someone who is adept with cards shuffle and spread a deck, and several thoughts came to mind regarding the appeal of a card-based form factor:
- There is something cool about manipulating a deck of cards so much that they become familiar friends. John's Tarot deck is obviously well-used, and he's quite familiar with how it handles.
- Tarot cards use strong symbolic language that carry the power of self-reflection in them. The Rider-Waite Deck, with its illustrations of the various meanings of each card, is particularly fascinating to look at.
- Physically, cards are very easy to group, sort, and flip through. This is a huge boon to organization, and you don't have to rewrite anything.
I also just happen to like cards. A few years ago I had made something called the Task Order Up! that included index card versions of task cards, though the system was originally conceived in the spirit of order checks and check rails used at fast food restaurants. This system assigned a card to each task, which you could then array in front of your desk so your coworkers could see what you had going on. You could also prioritize task cards by putting them all the way on the side. But really, the driving force behind the Task Order Up! was that I thought check rails are cool, and I built the process around that.
card stacks versus to-do lists
What I have so far is a deck of personalized task cards for everything I had going on. Instead of standardizing the look-and-feel of each card (as they are in the Task Order Up!), I am allowing them to have individuality. My thinking is that the cards will take on greater representative power the more I scribble and draw on them.
One issue I had come across in the use of my Emergent Task Planner was that I had so many outstanding tasks that it was getting hard to review them all. I am going to make this easier in the next design by reverting to the "right hand side for notes" layout; this will allow me to fold the "to-do" list backwards so I can transcribe it more easily into the next day's task list. However, even in this case I'm forced to retranscribe data, which is a design no-no in my productivity form philosophy. With index cards, I can keep a master list in the form of a hand-held card deck.
Previously, I have maintained a master list electronically. For example, I recently used Google Tasks with Google Calendar. Results were mixed; Google Tasks is a little simplistic at the moment. An even older system I have used was a text editor to-do list, but since this is a local file I can't share with other computers. However, web-based to-do lists have the requirement that I am connected to the Internet, which limits the places where I can access them.
The advantage of electronic media over paper, of course, is the ease of reordering data. However, electronic media suffers when it comes to direct manipulation of overlapping data; there is a lot of clicking and dragging of the mouse, which is slow and makes comparison of data sets cumbersome. Cards do not have this disadvantage, and their tactile qualities make manipulating them a pleasure. They naturally lend themselves to manipulation; when you're dealt a hand of cards, the first thing you do is order them according to your strategic intent. Cards can be grouped, stacked, stuck together, taped, glued, and shuffled. Cards are also more pictorial, more solid, and make soothing noises as you shuffle them. Cards also afford a far richer repertoire of physical manipulation than the mouse, which I think is more helpful when thinking (I don't have any kind of citation for that, unfortunately).
design and process
I sat down with a blank pack of index cards and wrote out everything that I could think of that I needed to do.
I am starting to develop a visual vocabulary for the different kinds of tasks. Some cards are reminder cards that I will come across when I want to keep something on my mind. The "WAAH I'M FAT" card, for example, reminds me that I want to do something about that. There are some cards that I've marked with a symbol that means this moves you toward completing a strategic goal, and there's another symbol that means this supports other things you are doing. Some cards just have the names of people and projects on them. Some of them are process cards that describe how to do the laundry, and assign point values to the card.
There are lots of ordering and prioritization possibilties with a deck of cards. I can extract cards to prioritize tasks, putting them on the top of the deck. I can also group cards with small clamps or paper clips, which gives me a sense of the magnitude of a multi-step project. I can sequence cards in the order they need to be done. I just started this on Sunday, but already I find it comforting to know that everything that's on my mind is in this deck; I've found myself just shuffling through it seeing what was in there. It is like a portable version of my pickle jar. And I haven't even scratched the surface of the gaming possibilities around a custom-designed deck of cards. Collectible Color Card Task Management Gaming, anyone? Balance your Day by trying to get a Three-Of-A-Kind or Straight Flush? Unique Cards, with Webkinz-style Card Tracking and Social Media Integration via 43Things? Oh, my goodness.
Right now, the process I'm using is very simple: I'm just writing down stuff on index cards as they come to mind. The designs are sparse, but are already functionally evolving into distinct uses. When a task is completed, I'll pull the card from the deck and retire it. There are all sorts of neat index card hacks out there that could help as well. There's a nifty index card board on Unclutterer, for example, and Levenger makes those sweet index card holders and docks. However, what I'm more interested in doing is making a deck of beautiful, personalized cards that can be manipulated in my hands. We'll see where this goes.
I've been redesigning the prototype Day Grid Balancer based on the excellent feedback on draft 1. The overall consensus was that while the color and grid were very playful and attractive, their use as a day-to-day tool was limited. And confusing, because my categories don't line up with other people's categories. What seemed to work, though, was the idea of weekly balance. I guess the name of the form will have to change eventually, but the implication for right now is that this creates a LOT OF ROOM to play with on the left-hand side.
I was thinking of biorhythms, DNA spirals, and other patterns, so I drafted a version of the balance grid that, well, is kind of a mess but might give y'all some ideas in brainstorming an approach to make the thing work. I think there needs to be some kind of auxiliary marking within the grid itself, and some obvious place to leave notes, but I haven't gotten that far ahead. I'm planning on printing this out and just scribbling it on it sometime to see if anything pops up.
Thoughts? Here's a editable PDF file to play with, saved with Adobe Illustrator CS3. Creative Commons license applies, as before.
It's been a week since I first started trying the new day grid balancer form, and in practice I found that it didn't quite mesh well with my expectations. Partly this may be due to the long weekend and the surprise visit of one of my best friends, which meant that I didn't adhere to the daily schedule I'm striving to put into place. Even when factoring that in, I think I can still say with confidence that there are several aspects I didn't like about the form:
- Filling out the little day balance grid was confusing because my categories didn't quite fit what I was really doing. They are not named quite right, even for me.
- I wasn't quite clear on what kind of things I should list. In hindsight I see I was mixing up several categories of task: things I want to "make time" to do, scheduled meetings, and ongoing projects. The sheet is also a little cramped for writing any more than a few words per item, though perhaps this is a good thing.
- I had a tendency to just want to use the day balance grid to just check things off to try to complete the figure, instead of noting time.
In short, I wasn't very clear myself on how I wanted to use the form, and this might also be due to imprecise expectations. On the other hand, I also knew that the first week run was unlikely to be quite right, which is why I'm doing this review. There were some useful insights:
- There's something kind of fun about the day balance grid that I like. People have commented it reminds them of Tetris® in its shapes, and perhaps that gives rise to the expectation of fun.
- Merely checking off a box does make me aware of the other areas I could be balancing, which I think is a good thing. The current design of the sheet, however, doesn't leverage this very powerfully. Perhaps a single larger diagram is the way to go.
- Having notes on what I did every day to achieve balance is very helpful in remembering what I did.
- My mindset was that of achieving balance through completion, not through doing. This may be because I feel I am bootstrapping a lot of projects to get new work lined up, and I perceive a long sequence of intermediate steps that will take time to complete. In other words, I'm "finish fixated".
That last point regarding completing versus doing is somewhat subtle; I'm thinking that some actions are inherently good because it is about the time spent in the process itself, and other actions are good because they "finish" something that needed finishing. For example, I'm told that fishing is quite relaxing, and that it is not about actually catching a fish and (as I used to presume) getting to eat it. If one is results-focused, then spending lots of time fishing and not catching any fish would be a big waste of time. However, for someone who enjoys the experience of fishing itself, the entire point is to be immersed in the pleasure of the activity itself.
So there are at least two elements of balance that I should be considering:
- Maintaining a healthy variety of achievements, which lead to balance of multiple prerequisites for security and happiness. This the working assumption behind the design of the current form.
- Remembering to engage in both immersive and results-oriented experiences. This is a distinction that is probably important to note.
So what should this form even do?
And even more important is to decide exactly what this form delivers. I'm not really sure yet. If I look inward to see what it is that's really on my mind, it's that I transform myself into a higher-performing version of myself so I can get my languishing projects done. Just about all these projects are related to either creating new business machinery or creating new ways of interacting with people en masse, which is also beneficial to me. The net result I expect from completion of these projects is more opportunity, both financially and socially.
So why even worry about balance when there's so much to do? The assumption I am testing is whether balance leads to consistent productivity. My gut says that this is part of it, and I keep coming across mentions on other blogs and books that seem to confirm this. Consistent productivity in my case is a matter of maintaining consistent momentum and motivation. I know certain activities inspire and energize me, and I know others drain me. When I am not getting things done AND not constantly exposed people energy pre-mixed with optimism, my motivation wanes.
If I leave this balance issue up to chance, then it's pretty likely that I'll have inconsistent days of productivity. This may actually be an acceptable choice, but I am also feeling that time is short and I need to get my ass in gear. Hence, the creation of a new form to help me track what I'm doing and improve my mindfulness. Improving mindfulness is, perhaps, the main point behind this form.
I'll probably take a second pass at this in the coming week. I'm also very curious about other people's experiences using the form. Feel free to leave a comment, and I'll try to address the feedback as much as possible in the second draft.
Official Compact Calendar Page: http://davidseah.com/page/compact-calendar
About the Compact Calendar
Updated 2009 Calendar (USA and other contributors) Now Available!
I find myself doing more project planning these days, so I dusted off my old compact calendar from several years ago. It's just a simple printable calendar created using Excel's date functions and presented like a candy bar o' time, but the design justification runs more deeply than you might think.
» Impatient people: skip to 2009 COMPACT CALENDAR DOWNLOAD
The Candy Bar Theory of Calendar Design
I evolved this technique while still working at ActiveEdge, when I was doing a lot of on-the-fly estimating for proposals and production. The problem with traditional calendar design is that they chunk time in months, not continuous days. I generally am thinking of things like:
- How many days are available, including weekends?
- When are critical deliverables?
- How much calendar time is needed to finish a task?
- What are the specific days we have to work around?
One way to do this is to use a long timeline, like a Gantt chart. All the days line up one after the other in a long horizontal format, which makes it easy to see how long something takes; distance is directly equatable to duration. The drawback of the Gantt chart is its lack of compactness.
How To Use the Compact Calendar
Download the Microsoft Excel templates (they are .XLT files) and double-click them to open. If you're using a Mac, you may have to open them manually from Excel. Select the "Calendar" worksheet and print it out. If you don't need the entire date range, you may also select just a few rows; just make sure you choose "print selection" from Excel's print dialog box.
When I'm doing impromptu planning, I just circle dates and underline ranges, writing notes in the empty space on the right. It is basically a form of doodling your schedule. I find it's a great planning tool in meetings too; just whip out a few of these sheets out at a client meeting to do a quick thumbnail schedule on-the-spot.
The advantages of the Compact Calendar:
The days are all packed together visually, so "distance" corresponds directly to time. This makes visually estimating how much time you need much easier, an visual advantage shared with the Gantt chart.
The calendar for an entire year can fit on a single piece of paper, with plenty of room for notes. You can also just print out a section of it, for short projects, by using the "print selection" feature of Excel and it should retain the headers.
It still largely retains the monthly calendar format, with days of the week in columns, so it's a bit easier to use than a Gantt chart.
Saturdays and Sundays are shaded differently, so we are not as tempted to plan our work schedule on them.
It's easy to count weeks too. "Unit weeks" tend to be the building blocks of longer-term projects.
You're forced to break up project tasks to fit into each 5-day work period. Gantt charts, by comparison, tend to draw long lines through the weekend because that's what lines want to do. Even if you don't work on the weekend, from a visual perspective it seems to imply that you should be working. This has always bugged me, from the perspective of visual gestalt and information design.
Because we retain the days of the week in the same column, it's easy to mark recurring events that are tied to them. "Oh, every Friday we have a company meeting." Easy to see where they'll be; not so on the Gantt chart.
The main drawback of the Compact Calendar is that you can't easily show dependencies or overlapping tasks. It's also not so good for detailed planning. For those cases, I would use my Excel spreadsheet version of the Gantt chart, which is much prettier than the ones that come out of Microsoft Project.
Another drawback of this approach is that it's hard to shift tasks around, but you know what? Project is terrible at that too; it's a glorified outliner with pretensions toward being a resource allocation tool, and it isn't very competent in either role. To be fair, I haven't looked at the more recent versions of Project. I have a license of it that I should install to see how it's evolved...but I digress.
Printing the Compact Calendar
It's an Excel spreadsheet template. Unzip CompactCalendar.zip and double-click the resulting CompactCalendar.xlt file to open a new copy of it.
Then print it out as-is. I keep a few printouts handy in case I need to do some on-the-fly planning. I will then go back and make an "official" version for distribution.
Anyway, there's three worksheets in the Excel file: Instructions, Calendar, and Tables. Usage notes are written in the Instructions sheet for your reference. Calendar is the actual sheet itself, and Tables contains the Holiday Lookup Table that highlights the right days in the Calendar sheet.
If you'd like to modify the calendar, download the latest year (2009). It's much easier than before:
If you need to change the year, just modify the year at the upper right of the blue calendar header. In other words, change 2009 to 2010 or whatever year. Thanks to the help of several readers, the calendar will automagically reformat.
You can add holidays to the HolidayTable on the Tables worksheet. This table is an Excel Named Range, so make sure that if you expand the table, you redefine the range. If you change the year, you'll have to change the holidays in this table too.
There are two conditional formats in use: one that makes the background of the day blue for the first day of the month, and another that makes the day number itself bold and blue for holidays in the Holiday Table.
If you don't need the entire year, you can select the range of rows you want, then when you print check "Selection" in the "Print What" part of the Print dialog box. The headers will print automatically at the top of the sheet, and it will also print a little larger. Useful for shorter projects.
Compact Calendar Workflow
Here's an example of the calendar in use...click the photo to zoom in!
In general, I use printouts as a thinking calendar, doodling in estimated times and circling dates, dependencies, and deliverables. You can see how I use lines to connect with the notes on the right side of the paper.
At client meetings I can use the calendar to note other dependencies, deliverables, and ask about company meetings and other potential conflicts like vacations. It's a lot easier to pass the sheet around than a laptop; people can contemplate paper more easily.
After I get things worked out, I will sometimes make a "clean" version of the schedule using a new sheet and give it to the client to photocopy.
When I'm managing other people in person, sometimes I'll use the Compact Calendar to quickly note their deliverables and the dates on this sheet. I'll also sometimes point out dependencies, and then they have this sheet they can just stick up on the wall and follow. I find that people just need to know when something is due so they can tackle the work; if they have to read a detailed spec or the proposal to find this critical information just slows things down. Specifics of course matter, but that's a post for another day.
Download the Calendar Template
INSTRUCTIONS
Download using the link below, unzip the archive. In the Excel folder, you'll see files named something like CompactCalendar.xlt. This is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet template.
Double-click the file (Windows) and a new spreadsheet will be created based on the template.
Print it out, or annotate the calendar within Excel. Again, I just print them out; you could make a fancier "production calendar" too and print that instead, if you're that type of person.
Optionally you can copy the .xlt file into your Microsoft Excel templates folder. This gives you the ability to create new calendars using Excel's New Document command.
US Version
Download USA 2008 by Dave Seah
Includes Sun-Sat and Mon-Sun (w/ ISO8601 week numbers) versions in ZIP archive. You can also download the PDF Sun-Sat and PDF Mon-Sun versions too!
Download USA 2009 by Dave Seah
Includes Sun-Sat and Mon-Sun (w/ ISO8601 week numbers) versions in ZIP archive. You can also download the PDF Sun-Sat and PDF Mon-Sun versions too!
2009 International Calendars
If you've made a version of the Compact Calendar for your locale and would like to share, put it on a page on your own website and I'll link it here! I no longer host other people's files, because it puts the support burden on me to maintain them.
Argentina 2009 via Jeroen Sangers
Austria 2009 by Ronald
Australia 2009 by Working Solo
Australia/NSW 2009 by Diane (direct file download)
Canada 2009 by andryou
Chile 2009 via Jeroen Sangers
Chile 2009 by Gabriel
China (PRC) 2009 by iWorm
Colombia 2009 via Jeroen Sangers
Colombia 2009 by Javier Ferrand
Denmark 2009 by henrik
Ecuador 2009 via Jeroen Sangers
Estonia 2009 by Eero
France 2009 by Tisseurdetoile
Germany 2009 by Lennart Groetzbach
Guatemala 2009 via Jeroen Sangers
Greece 2009 by Gerasimos Tsiamalos
Hong Kong 2009 by Catus Lee
Indonesia 2009 by Eka
Italy 2009 by Luca Magnani
Italy 2009 by Strategie Vincenti
Japan 2009 by Yoshiomi KURISU
Libya 2009 by Dino
Malaysia 2009 by Fred
Mexico 2009 via Jeroen Sangers
Netherlands 2009 by Pieter
New Zealand 2009 by Jon Pawley
Peru 2009 via Jeroen Sangers
Phillipines 2009 by Arvin Pedregosa
Poland 2009 by Mizo
Poland 2009 by Jaason
Portugal 2009 by Miguel Alho
Romania 2009 by Andrei Neculau
Russia 2009 by Ivan Bulychev
Serbia 2009 by Goran Anicic
Singapore 2009 by John Spencer Tan
Slovakia 2009 by Uzivatel
South Africa 2009 by Jason Bagley
South Africa 2009 by Peter
Spain 2009 by Jeroen Sangers
Sweden 2009 by David Fredin
Taiwan 2009 by yuanlin
United Kingdom 2009 by gregnbaker.com (box-net download, unchecked)
Uruguay 2009 via Jeroen Sangers
Venezula 2009 via Jeroen Sangers
OTHER VERSIONS
OTHER TOOLS
You can find more printable productivity tools on The Printable CEO™ Series page.
James Bicker just shot me an email telling me about his Majency Oracle Cards:
The Majency Oracle is a 169-card deck of original prompts or "matches" to spark the imagination of writers, poets, or any creative individual that needs inspiration.
As James mentions, it's similar in spirit to Brian Eno's famed Oblique Strategies. This one, though, is a free download...why are you still here? :-)
A long time ago, I offhandedly wrote that I used to make Gantt Charts in Excel to help visualize project flow. I've never uploaded these files because I didn't think they were that exciting. I'm basically just using Excel like graph paper, and there is absolutely no automatic calculation at all. On the other hand, it's probably a lot EASIER to keep up to date, through copying/pasting and inline annotation, than actual software like Microsoft Project.
Enough people have asked, however, that I'm finally releasing a couple of examples of how I put these Excel-based Gantt charts together.
Version 2 (2009)
This is a version that will calculate the shading for you automatically and mark the months based on the input of a starting date. This version is also set up to print gridlines, which makes it useful for printing out "gantt paper" to sketch on.
Download the dseah-gantt-excel2.zip archive to your computer and uncompress it. The resulting folder will contain two files:
- The
.xlsx file, for Microsoft Office 2007, with nice shading.
- The
.xls file, for older versions of Excel
There are instructions on its use on the first worksheet. Note that there is an example worksheet included; check the document tabs at the bottom.
Version 1 (2007)
This is the older version, which does not automatically shade the weekends or recalculate based on the input date.
When you download and uncompress the dseah-gantt-excel.zip archive, you'll see two files:
- The
.xlsx file, for Microsoft Office 2007, with fancy shading.
- The regular old
.xls file, for older versions of Excel.
The color schemes are slightly different in each file, but you should get the idea. Again, you will not find anything earth-shattering in here, but you might have fun playing around with the formatting.
If you are doing rough scheduling at a meeting, you can use the Compact Calendar, which is helpful for visualizing future time as one resource block. Unlike a Gantt chart, however, it does not show dependencies between multiple project sub-tasks.
Enjoy!
As technology gets newer and I get older, learning new things becomes frustrating. For example, I want to learn how to work with MySQL for web development, program 3D games, and play the guitar, but my lack of ability in these areas prevents me from achieving my overall life goals. There's also day-to-day stuff that, as a 40-year old American male, I feel I should know: balance my household finances, invest in the markets, ride horses, and flirt with women without throwing up. These are tasks that are, from my perspective, hard to learn for several reasons: a lack of good mentors, reference materials, and classes. And that's even without mentioning the magnetic properties of my ass with respect to my couch.
When I overcome these obstacles, I still hit the proverbial brick wall; for whatever reason, my brain can't quite deal with the important task of learning before getting bored or sleepy, and I end up going to get a sandwich instead or watching Age of Love on TV.
It's easy to presume, as I join the ranks of the Newly Old, that my mind is becoming less flexible. This is the common wisdom; for example, people say that it's tough to learn languages when you're older, and that we should have done it when our minds were most facile: around the age of 6, I think. Although I don't have any studies to back me up, I'm pretty sure that other factors are greater contributors:
We're self-conscious about not being competent in front of other adults, so we iterate less and thus learn more slowly.
We're not particularly motivated, given that mass media tells us it's supposed to be easy. When it's not, we give up.
Since we're all grown up and have our own money, we expect to be able to buy knowledge and expertise readily. It's really amazing just what you can buy, and we've grown to expect the easy access or we get real mad. It doesn't help that our advertising, at least here in the USA, tends to emphasize the quick and easy fix. We expect instant gratification, and thus we've forgotten how hard it was to learn our first lessons, and we've also perhaps forgotten how to learn for ourselves. I wonder if kids these days even know what it's like to have to wait for anything.
A LESSON FROM THE PAST
Yesterday morning I was doing my morning coffee thing, glumly looking at all the things I wanted to do that I was unable to follow through with due to a lack of understanding. One of the main ones has been transitioning my blog to Expression Engine, which I think will allow me to more easily expand the content offerings on my website while improving overall service. I had met up with Mark J. Reeves recently for lunch recently to catch up, and asked him about the possibility of writing a web service that would save data from my Flash Apps and integrate with the Expression Engine user management system. Mark, who's a competent execution-oriented web developer, told me exactly what I needed to do: write some SQL queries to access the pertinent database tables, maybe even repurpose the underlying blog engine to store data for me in custom fields. The problem: I don't know SQL, or what tools to use, or even how to talk to the database. I am paralyzed by not knowing what the best practices are, haunted by issues of scalability and security, and most importantly of all: I was not looking forward to learning all that stuff. I could not readily apprehend the structure of the material, and therefore I could not approach it logically.
Reflecting on this experience, I found myself reminiscing about my youth, when I first started learning about computers. Today, computers don't scare me at all, and it's because I have experienced them nearly to the transistor level of operation. As a result, I can look at a computer system and "read its aura" to figure out what's really going on. That is now, but when I was in the 7th grade, computers were as mysterious to me as, um, MySQL is to me right now. I vowed that I would master the computer and learn all its secrets. Somehow.
And so I started my notebook:
Some historical notes first: this actually isn't the original notebook: it's a manually-transcribed copy. The original copy went to a kid named Derek Bumpas, which I handed to him just before I graduated; he had a good attitude and was eager to learn even though he was in the 8th or 9th grade. He recently contacted me, some 20 years later, to say that getting that notebook had meant a great deal to him, and had helped put him on his path in computer science. That was really nice to hear.
When I first started taking these notes---recall that there was no Internet, hard disks, or multi-window multi-tasking operating systems---paper was the only way to simultaneously take notes and learn. Every nugget of wisdom gleaned from hours of tinkering was transcribed, as cleanly as I could, into this notebook so I could share information with friends at school. There were all kinds of things in the book, all of them interesting to me. It was, in essence, my spellbook. Here's some of the entries:
INCANTATION
An Applesoft BASIC routine to reformat a long string so it would display nicely on a 40-character wide text display; in today's desktop publishing terms, it does "ragged-right justification" for a monospaced font. This was a common task that I had to solve in my various text-based programs, as I was pretty obsessed back then with things looking right. I finally wrote it down...my first incantation.
TRANSMUTATION
As a high school kid without any money, we often "had" to copy software. The difference was that software back then came on 5.25" floppy disks that were copy-protected using peculiar algorithms; it was a fun challenge to try to figure out exactly how to elegantly disable them by rewriting the program code. This was my real education in computer software debugging. The code listing shown here is written in 6502 assembly language, revealing the method behind the protection. By understanding the principle behind the interaction with the disk hardware's imperfections and the software code that exploited them, a copy-protected disk could be transmuted into one that was easily-copied with everyday copy utilities.
SORCERY
As I started to understand assembly language, I learned how mapping the interface between code and hardware (the "input/output", or I/O routines) allowed one to zero-in on the game logic itself. For example, say I wanted to be able to change a shooting game so I had "unlimited bullets". By looking for the specific code that read the joystick button state (e.g.: is it pressed?) I could easily find the code that was responsible for checking how much ammunition was left. And once you decode one piece of code, you can infer the purpose of surrounding code. I was able to modify the game Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (the original Apple II one from 1984) to give me a 30-round submachine gun with burst capability, and rewrote the opening story to explain why you had one in the first place. This changed the nature of the game quite dramatically. By documenting the logic behind the software and noting the location of critical routines, the granting of unnatural abilities within the game world became possible.
ENCHANTING
I attended an American high school in Taiwan, and software was difficult to find for teaching purposes. Taiwan being a rather gray area in terms of copyright, my science professors would sometimes enlist my help to help them make backups of the US-sourced software; the humidity and mold in Taiwan tended to eat disks very quickly in the sub-tropical environment. Most of the time, educational software was protected with fairly straight-forward techniques using off-the-shelf protection systems. Because they were rather generic, the same general process could be used to remove the locks with just a few steps. In this photo, I wrote down the process of disenchanting this particularly piece of software, which required the use of a specialized instrument called "Advanced DeMuffin".
THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE
And then there were the great unsolved challenges against which I beat my head. Electronic Arts had a very advanced protection routine that was designed specifically to defeat the casual copy breaker; you needed special hardware installed in your computer to even get at the code, and then you needed to understand it. I spend many hours trying to understand just how Electronic Arts' incredibly fast boot system worked, and once I understood that I tried to trace how they were doing the copy protection. Smarter crackers in the U.S. had already done it, but it was beyond my abilities and knowledge to follow. Here's a fragment of my research on the area...to me, to be able to understand this code would be like transmuting lead into gold. I should search online to see if any back issues of Computist describe this. I still kind of want to know how it worked.
THE MODERN SPELL BOOK
It's been years since I've kept any kind of notebook like this, with the exception of my patentable ideas journal. There's so much material out there now that the task of learning is equated with finding resources: the right teacher, book, or online tutorial is perceived as the "magic bullet" that will get things done. However, what I have forgotten is that the process of distilling these ideas into a form that I can invoke at will is necessary as well. It's my missing link.
I went out and bought some of the larger Quadrille-ruled Moleskine Cahiers ($14.95 for 3), and pasted a paper label on the front of it (the picture is at the top of this post). The idea is to start recording the same kind of notes that I used to do in the 7th through 12th grade; looking back, it was a highly productive period of time for me, though I didn't recognize it then. I'm thinking of just writing down really basic things that are currently mystifying, by hand, for reference in this book. I know there are plenty of reference books and online sources that purport to do this already, but do you think any aspiring wizard would buy their spellbook off-the-shelf? NO WAY! They would be told by their cantankerous mentors to go find a sturdy book and pen, and transcribe their spells themselves by hand. Because that's the way you learn, and that's the way you bind the magic to yourself.
WHAT WAS OLD IS NEW AGAIN
Ok, you may have figured out that this whole "spellbook" thing is just an amusing way for me to start learning again. The main takeaway is this: by assembling my own book of "recipes" that actually make something, I'm much more likely to maintain some kind of focus on learning. In the past, what I've done is just read everything and picked out the main principles as they've revealed themselves. What I have forgotten is that transcribing the nuggets is just as useful. I think I probably forgot this because it's so easy to just let the actual implementation replace documentation: Photoshop files, HTML, javascript libraries, etc. I don't think this is a good foundation, because you can cut 'n paste your way very quickly into the structural equivalent to spaghetti code.
Packaging the information into nuggets as I learn, which I used to do when I was younger, may be the way for me to approach the new technologies that are making my head hurt now. As an adult I had expected things to get easier, but really they are just as hard. Fortunately, I now remember how I worked through the challenge.
We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, I'm just pleased with the way my new SQL notebook looks :-)
As I was working on my text-file based tracking workspace, I remembered a kind of calendar I used to make back in the old days.
I think I first made this calendar sometime in the mid 90s when I was working for Qualia, Inc., a startup game company that I was part of as a game designer and project manager. I was so green, I didn't know what project management actually meant, and I still placed more value on what I could make with my hands rather than how I could lead a team. But we were young and our bellies were filled with fire; the team members have since gone on to have rich and rewarding careers.
Anyway, at the time I needed some way of showing elapsed calendar time on a monospaced display, as our project intraweb used PRE tags to avoid doing a lot of HTML markup while updating our project files. I haven't thought of this calendar style in quite some time, but it's great for text files if you need to provide monthly context.
Fitting Days to 80 Columns
My goal was to fit as many days as possible onto a typical 80- to 132-column text display. 80 columns is the magic number that's burned into my head from the 80s, and most printers of the time assumed this when printing (all printers had the ability to print text straight as a teletype back then...I'm not sure if this capability has gone away). These days you can print graphically at very high resolutions or make your web page really wide, but back then a typical monitor was probably 640x480 to 800x600, with 1024x768 starting to really push the limits of what CRTs were capable of displaying with reasonable quality. Anyway, an 800x600 screen gives you about 100-132 characters to work with, assuming a character matrix of about 6x8 pixels and margins for the various application windows. My point is that resolution was precious.
If you want to make a compact horizontal strip calendar in text, the first instinct is to do this:
APRIL 2007
.. Mo Tu We Th Fr .. .. Mo Tu We Th Fr .. .. Mo Tu We Th Fr .. ..
01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
Unfortunately, each day takes up three horizontal characters. If you compress the numbers vertically, you can get one day per column:
APRIL 2007
.mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwrf..mtwr
0000000001111111111222222222230000000001111111111222222222233
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901
This actually fits TWO months in less space than the first example. Admittedly it's hard to read, but this is where the application of toning and grouping can make a big difference.
Here's an example:
In order from top to bottom:
Text Editor: I'm using a font I like called Vera Sans Mono, which is open source licensed by Bitstream to The Gnome Foundation. In short, it's a free download, and it's one of the nicest monospaced fonts I've come across. It's much nicer than Courier, which is the default monospaced font for a lot of Windows text editors.
While Vera Sans Mono helps legibility---I should note that the use of periods to replace Saturday and Sunday also helps visually group the week---, there's little control over spacing between characters and between lines. What we want to see is the days reading as single units grouped into a strip that represents the month.
Microsoft Word: While Word gives us the ability to color-code text, that's about it. We can't control the interletter spacing or shrink the linespacing between the two rows of numbers; that would have allowed us to make the numbers read a little better. This example is also using the Courier New font, and you can see while it's legible, it has a kind of looseness compared to Vera Sans Mono that makes the entire strip into a gray blob. Using a lighter gray for the weekend days helps bring back the sense of grouping, but it's not great. The biggest crime is that the vertical space between the rows of numbers is greater than the horizontal space between them, which breaks the grouping that we're trying to establish. Bah.
Adobe Illustrator CS2: When it comes to adjusting type, it comes back to Illustrator. We can not only add more space between all the letters, but we can adjust the line spacing so that implied grouping through adjacency is working. I could have increased the inter-letter spacing more to make it more obvious, of course, but this felt about right. You could import the EPS into a Word document if this is the way you want to go, though it sort of defeats the purpose of having a nice way to insert compact calendars in-line with your text document. On the other hand, Word is a terrible program for maintaining formatting, so using EPS might be the way to go.
Of course, once you're making EPS files, you have the option of varying the size of the text a lot more, or flipping the numbers on their side, multiple fonts, and using background colors to push the legibility of the design even more, so the point of the exercise becomes rather academic.
Takeaways
So what's the point of all this? Sometimes it's handy to be able to quickly make a calendar in your text document for reference. They're easy to make because you can copy/paste the ..mtwrf characters and paste it over and over again. Same with the 1234567890 characters. The tricky part is knowing the starting and ending days of the month, but it's easy once you have any given date. Use the knuckle mneumonic to know how many days there are in a month. You can quickly generate the calendar in whatever application you happen to be using.
If you're interested in the source files, there's a link below. They're nothing fancy, but you can get a feel for how you might create your own text strip calendar in your own documents.
» Download TextCalendar.zip -- contains TXT, Microsoft Word, and EPS versions of this file. The EPS may require you to download the vera sans mono font.
This has been one of those gear grinding weeks in which nothing planned seemed to get done. Seemingly dozens of ideas and opportunities whizzed by me as I cursed and shook my fist like an old man. Toward the middle of the week I decided to stop fighting it and take some time to figure out what was going on.
Stuff On My Mind
It's been a tough week in the blogosphere, with many good people going through some tough times. I started to write something about it, but then came to the conclusion that I was not writing for any reason other than to engage in commentary...so I stopped. I have a weird principle about not doing or saying anything if it doesn't actually help in an immediate and tangible way, and while commentary is very interesting...it just didn't feel right. Maybe in a few weeks.
I've also been feeling a little stuck. I've had a lot of interesting conversations with people over the past few weeks, and I feel like I'm ready to shift into high gear...but I'm dragging something. It feels like the parking brake is stuck on, or that there's a flat tire, or maybe there's water in the gas tank, or maybe I'm trying to tow too much stuff at the same time, or that maybe I should make sure I have someone in the car with me before embarking on a long trip, or...well, you get the idea. I'm ready, but I'm not ready.
TV to the Rescue
A few days ago I saw an episode of The Unit, a TV show about members of an elite special forces unit. It's a strangely compelling mix of downbeat military action and women's drama program; I've found that it provides food for thought. Anyway, one of the characters is helping another through a difficult moral dilemma who doesn't know what to do, and asks for some help. "Here's what the boss tells me," he says. "If you knew the answer, what would it be?" So the other character, after a moment of doubt, writes everything down and is immensely relieved. It's a good trick.
The Master Plan
I actually came across this tip after I had done something similar on Wednesday. Fed up with not knowing what to do, I went to the coffee shop with a pad of 11x17" graph paper and starting drawing my master plan. At the right side I filled in an arbitrary goal ($100,000 a year) and then imagined what I could do to somehow achieve that. I didn't care if it was particularly realistic or not, but I figured that starting anywhere would be a good place to start. I once took a math course called "Numerical Methods" that used a similar approach; when you don't know how to solve certain kinds of functions, you take several guesses and use that data to choose new guesses, until you "converge on the solution". I remember this used to drive me nuts, because at the time it seemed that the whole point of math was to not have to guess at all. Oh, how naive I was. Anyway, I don't remember anything from that course except that the idea of starting anywhere and finding your way is actually not a bad strategy. My first master plan is just that: a guess.
Here it is:
I started from the goal, and started filling things in to the left, ending with the YOU ARE HERE thing in the upper left, which describes what I'm doing right now. I should mention this image has been edited in Photoshop to be a little cleaner than the original drawing; I was going to redraw the whole thing so it looked cooler, but I ended up fixing my computer for two days straight after it started acting up (new motherboard, more RAM, 4x faster, oh yeah :-)
The Master Plan breaks down into four categories of endeavor, which I've arbitrarily decided would each provide 25% of my source income or take 25% of my energy.
1. MAKE BOOKS
I've wanted to make a book for the longest time, since I love the way books feel and smell. One of my Groundhog Day Resolutions has been to create some kind of product, and some kind of book is probably the easiest thing to make from existing content. Companies like Lulu.com and Blurb.com are out there now, making it very easy to handle both printing and fulfillment at a decent level of quality. Of course, writing a good and marketable book is the hurdle.
I wrote down some of the calculations from the SXSW panel on turning your blog into a book, where a "standard advance" of $7500 translates to selling 5000 books. That works out to $1.50 per book. To make $25,000 at this rate, that would mean selling 16,668 books through traditional channels, which might or might not happen. On the other hand, selling an e-book for, say, $9.99 cuts down the number to 2500 units sold, but the value is somewhat questionable. And I have no idea what people are willing to pay $9.99 for.
Applying the "if I knew the answer what would it be" approach, I'd pay $9.99 for a book that laid out something clearly and insightfully that would help me get my own stuff done more effectively, paying for itself in a few hours of time saved. I'd want to see great charts and handy reference lists, and be drawn into the story of someone like me who's making things happen. It would be part of a key that opened a broader awareness and community to me, and for the cost of a medium pizza I could have that forever. Wow, that advice from the TV DOES work!
2. MAKE PRODUCTS
Next on the list is the creation of some product, something that's more of an object or tool than a book. Again, the easiest thing to put together is something based on my own work like The Printable CEO. The two immediate things that I could produce are pads of Emergent Task Planner and Emergent Task Timer, write a distilled mini-booklet for them describing how they work, and pushing them out there to see if anyone buys 'em. It's not much of a plan, I know, but I gotta start somewhere. The printing costs are more up-front here, and there's the unknowns of packaging and fulfillment. If these pay for themselves and get the word out there without costing me money, I would consider that a win. I would probably learn something about marketing first-hand.
A next step would be to start creating the "productivity systems" that have been languishing on the back shelf. A simple system would leverage off custom Circa or Rollabind notebook systems, and the goal would be to create a nice system that felt good to the hand. The profit vector is not clear to me, so perhaps this is something more worth prototyping. DIYing it here might be a happy medium: selling kits made of pre-punched PCEO or related custom forms with off-the-shelf notebook systems? The kit approach might be a lot of fun; I liked what the Make people were doing with their kits at the SXSW Tradeshow this year. Kits are awesome!
3. PROJECT WORK
I'm currently doing a lot of HTML and Actionscript development, though I'm starting to shift more into what might be called "strategy". I have never been entirely satisfied by doing straight production and design work, finding it far more interesting to get into the what and why of the project in the greater context. I thought in the past that this was merely a necessary part of the design process, because I can't make a dot unless I have a clear image of the greater purpose of my work; some have found it rather tedious to deal with. On the other hand, I'm starting to embrace the idea that this is useful work, and that it's my favorite part of any project. Secondly, I've come to the conclusion that my work must always deal with individuals as individuals, not as abstractions. Otherwise, I just lose interest. I can wield a pretty broad array of digital media tools, but I don't find joy in them unless they're used to benefit an individual I can communicate with directly. That individual could be an end user or a specific person in the audience that I know. This is pretty important to me.
I've thought of a couple approaches to try defining my approach in a way that goes beyond generic labels like "strategy", "information architecture", and "experience design". These are all fine fields, but they don't quite connect with me because they lack a certain goofy enthusiasm. The two phrases I've thought of are related to the storytelling and game design threads that I keep stumbling upon during my periods of identity crisis. The first is Strategic Storytelling and Design, which has very light traction in the Googleverse and is therefore adoptable, and the second is Video Game Design applied to Organizational Process. I'll write about these later, since creating a web presence that adequately explains and demonstrates the power of these techniques is part of attracting the people who might want to use these services. It's another way of framing the creative process, the culmination of a 5 year effort to define what it is that I do. As it turns out, I always knew, but had never really had the courage to just define it for myself. I suspect that my incessantly-positive and insightful friend Senia might have planted the seeds of this in my head over the years, and I'm pretty sure rereading Jory's Living without a Net series of posts helped realign my thinking after SXSW, which itself was a huge inspiration.
But I digress...the gist behind both of these new labels is that games can create life in the real world. Usually people think it's the other way around, but I really believe that one can apply the same principles that drive great storytelling and game design in real-world scenarios. I try to do this all the time already, trying to create a spark that jumps between environment, artifact, passion, and desire. It's the basis for how I teach and explain things. It's the reason I love being alive in the world, and it's an incredibly large field to play in. I'm a game designer, and I like to tell stories, and I know a thing or two about technology, design, and human desire. Surely there is a need for that somewhere, if I have to create the need myself through my writing and design work.
4. COLLABORATION
Ah, but I can't do it all alone. I've been holding off on seeking true collaborators because, frankly, I've been afraid that it would not work out and I'd be left holding the bag. I've been burned a few times before, and this has made me a little gun-shy when it comes to pulling the trigger. But NO MORE. It's time to create some group energy that benefits everything.
With my newfound focus on design and game-driven process, I may be able to contribute a certain "vision" in certain kinds of development projects. I'm also a good listener, if somewhat scattered. I think there are five hurdles to overcome:
My most immediate need is a way to maintain continuity on a wide variety of disparate projects; this may mean working with interns or figuring out a way of establishing lightweight project management; a dip into some of the agile methodologies could provide some clues. However, this presumes that maintaining continuity is my responsibility.
Now, continuity is very important in getting anything done, but equally important is direction. Continuity management takes up huge parts of my mental energy, because I tend to be obsessively detail-oriented when it comes to this stuff. However, I don't particularly enjoy doing it. An equally valuable contribution might be just one or two hours of my time listening and contributing to the development of various pieces of software and design. I may provide some writing, clarification, and design work as needed, but my responsibility would largely be writing the story we live through the application of real time narrative. If that doesn't make sense, think of it as technical or creative direction.
What about ownership? With multiple people contributing work that's difficult to assess for "equality of effort", how do you avoid arguments?
Frankly, I don't want to worry about it, so I am thinking that everyone who contributes gets nonexclusive rights to the source assets and concepts, with which to do what they please. An example might be if I'm contributing design to a project, then I also get access to source code. The programmer would get access to my source design files. This might be a good way to rapidly build up my development skills by leveraging the work of more experienced developers.
Then there's coordination. I'm thinking that it would be cool to be involved in 3 or 4 projects at once, with many people, so how do you keep track of it all?
This is a tough one. Email sucks. A wiki might work, though I really hate wikis because they're so ugly, and a lot of the open source collaboration tools don't do a good job of showing continuity (there's that word again...I guess I'm still hung up on it). At the very minimum, there needs to be a way for me and others to write the story of what's going on, providing a clear vision of what's happened and what might happen next. Then, there needs to be working areas for sharing files, source control, live documentation, and issue tracking. And for me to want to use it, it has to look nice. Any ideas on what that system might be? I know I'm being super picky, so feel free to tell me to get over it and just use X.
What of accountability and control? This has tended to burn me up in real project work, both for myself as a perfectionist and as a source of worry when responsible for the quality of others.
Maybe the solution is to just let go and be happy if anything happens at all. Instead of a development timetable, we could take a unit approach to measuring contribution. That's just another way of saying "I'm into it" or "I'm not"; make that clear up front that people will commit when they're interested, and that they'll commit to a limited engagement to push to the next step taking no more than X hours, where X is less than 4 hours. Each of these micro contributions will be integrated into the next build or release, and the contributors who took it to that next stage each get all the assets they used to build up to that point.
Finally, there's qualification. Can just anyone jump in as a contributor? Is there a need for screening, or should everyone be able to join? What happens when there's a mismatch of skill levels?
The solution I have in mind is to have a skill show and tell, where everyone who wants to contribute needs to bring a few examples of their work. If you're a coder, you need to provide a snippet of actual source code you're willing to share, WARTS AND ALL, and be ready to talk about it. If you're an application developer (a higher level of coder), then you need to show off your working app, with some snippet of code that you're particularly proud of. If you're a designer, then let's see some design examples of something you really like, and have some source files you're willing to put up.
I think there's a few good things that will come out of this. First, people will have to have real examplesof what they can do, and these become the means through which people can select who they want to team up with. Let the person who sees the potential in someone's work be the one to make the call by seeing and asking questions. Secondly, the samples themselves becomes conversation pieces that help people start to learn about each other and the work they do. Thirdly, since people will be providing samples and chatting about their work, this is a good way for noobs (me included) to see what the bar is and know what I might need to bone up on. Say you're a designer just getting started with Photoshop, and you'd like to get in on this group collaboration thing. So you put together your photoshop sample file of "cool art" you've done, and you upload it. You also get to see how other photoshop artists are doing things, because you'll be able to download their files and read a bit about what they thought was particularly cool about it. You probably will learn something.
In the Meantime, I need to Regroup
So I have a ton of ideas that I want to launch this year. It's almost April 4th too, which is the second Groundhog's Day Resolution Review day of the year. On top of this I have a lot of outstanding projects and project work that I have not been moving quickly enough on. A significant backlog has started to build up, and I haven't come up with a good system of projecting and booking the work so there are no conflicts.
GTD is a system that probably would work well for me, but I am a little stuck on the capture and list-making side of things because I am (against the rules of GTD, I should note) prioritizing tasks and doing things out of order. I'm not sure if it's just me being unfocused (quite possible) or if I actually do have more on my plate that I'm capable of handling. Probably both :-)
There's two positive things though I have today that I didn't have last week: I have some sense of what I want to do with regards to the Master Plan, and I've also resolved, for the moment, the nature of my identity as a creative practitioner. These two things have bothered me for years, and now that they've been newly resolved I feel I can relax a bit more.
I was thinking today about another productivity thing that I've read somewhere about the various altitudes one can use to assess goals. I think this was in GTD, and I'm sure others have written about it as well: there's the "1000 foot" view, the "10,000 foot view", the "20,000 foot view", etc., of your goals and life. The closer you are, the more your experience and focus is dominated by detail that obscures the overall shape of things; have you ever noticed how much bigger a city block is when you have to walk through it? And how much stuff is there? It's really cool...but again I digress. The basic idea is that if you want to see where you're going, you need the "macro view" to help guide your actions in the "micro view". This is a fundamental principle of any kind of analysis or application of effective action. The strategic picture dominates in the big picture view, and tactical execution dominates where the rubber hits the road.
The same principle applies to Longer Term versus Short Term planning, and I decided to create a set of text files that reflected this. Short term planning can be realized in much higher resolution and surety than long term plans. Long term plans help prioritize and guide the selection of tools used in the short term. Here's the list I made in a TextPad workspace:
A TextPad workspace is just a bunch of text files that are loaded all at once. Here's the files I've created, which are numbered to enforce a sort-order from short-term to long-term plans:
00 To Do -- daily task continuity10 Week Queued -- planned task list to be done for the immediate week(s)20 Project Scheduling -- high level project planning25 Side Projects -- high level personal project planning30 Project Inquiries -- project pipeline, to be scheduled in 20 when ready to go40 Project Possibilities -- possible projects, need to be finalized and signed50 Long Term Goals -- my long terms goals, which are another form of project60 Recent Contact -- people I've talked to recently, notes on what we talked about70 Contacts -- people contact information80 Good Ideas -- random ideas and observations, with no direction90 Bad Ideas -- things that I've thought that I probably won't do, but who knows?Scratchpad -- a place for random jottings
The lower-numbered files are more immediate and concrete than the higher numbered files. As I come across tasks and items that I need to remember or do, I enter them in the appropriate text file. The general idea is that I have a continuum of micro- and macro-level tasks that are important to me, and that I can easily scan them. The reason I have contacts and ideas listed is that these are "ticklers"; who knows what the collision of a "bad idea" coupled with a "recent contact" will bring? It could become a good ideaor possible opportunity.
The screenshot also shows a few optimizations I've made to my Windows setup:
The menu in the lower right is my "quick launch" toolbar. It is a simple folder named _jump with some shortcuts on it, located on my Data drive so I don't lose it if I reinstall the operating system. I find this menu is easier for me to use that the bloated Windows Start menu. To add your own, create a folder somewhere with the shortcuts you want, and then right click the Windows toolbar choosing the TOOLBARS -> NEW TOOLBAR from the menu. You'll be prompted to choose a folder. You may also want to unlock the toolbar so you can resize the folder name in case it gets mucked up (if you double click it, it will expand to the width of the toolbar, and it's a pain in the ass).
I'm using a text editor called TextPad, which in addition to providing Workspace Files (shown in my jump menu as ^ProjectToDo.tws, has syntax highlighting. TextPad is a straight text editor, which is nice because it's not bloated and it's fast. I created a new file type, the .dtk file as shown here (it stands for "dave tracking", if you must know). They're just regular text files that I've associated with the TextPad application as a custom type. And because they're custom types, I can define a custom coloring syntax file, dtk.syn, which highlights key words and symbols in the manner I want. Here I've chosen to make the default text color a lighter gray, so that the headers (the ## symbol in column 1, which happens to coincide with the Markdown syntax I use in my blog posts) and keywords like IMPORTANT, TODO and CALL jump out. This is so I can write descriptions in my text files that are just a little easier to scan for the useful bits of information if I'm in a hurry.
So That's What I've Been Doing
I'm going to start looking for collaborators soon, and if there's anyone out there who knows of a place where this is already going on, has suggestions, or is interested in figuring this out, leave a comment and let's start a discussion.
In the meantime, I have a lot of client work to finish, and some new work to book. If you're an HTML jockey, Flash expert, Graphic Designer, business person, project manager, writer, designer, or whatever, shoot me a resume and a sample of your work. I think it would be cool to make a freelance directory that follows some of the principles I'm putting out there, maybe as a simple Wiki or something.
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