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  • Information Capture and Geek Dinners

    December 14, 2007

    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.

    1. If you are just doing without thinking, you’ll make progress, but maybe not the right progress.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.

    <

    p>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:

    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:

    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.
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    DSri Seah

  • Ground Hog Day Resolution Review Day 10: Wrapping Up the Year

    December 11, 2007

    Today is 12/12, the very last day of my Groundhog Day Resolutions, an experiment to replace ineffective “New Year’s Resolutions” with a system worked with my actual lifestyle. You can read about it in more depth here, but the gist is to wait until you’re settled in for the year and make your resolutions on February 2nd aka Groundhog Day. To make sure I followed through with my resolutions, I picked 3/3, 4/4, 5/5, and so on to be Groundhog Day Resolution Review Days (GHDRRDs), to see how things were going.

    The full year has wrapped up for me, so I will review my resolutions and evaluate the performance of the GHDRR system. Overall I think it’s worked pretty well for what it is: I was able to remind myself of my bigger goals more than once a year. There are refinements that could be made, of course, which I’ll touch upon later. First, let me see how I did overall for the year for my personal goals.

    Three Goals Reviewed

    I had three main goals, all them related to making adjustments to my hybrid life/career. My understanding of these goals has changed over time and, I think, has deepened:

    (1) Commit to Deriving Income from Writing and Making Stuff — I originally picked this goal to test a hypothesis: if I like blogging and creating forms so dang much, would I be happier and more successful if I could pursue this full time? Underlying this goal is a question about identity: Am I a writer? Am I comfortable presenting that role to the world? Am I a maker? Am I ready to present myself as such? This is a significant departure from the service-based New Media Designer / Developer niche that I’ve been in for the bulk of 2006.

    {2} Build Sustainable Social Networks — In 2004, I was quite isolated from the rest of the world, wondering what I should do. Thankfully, I met some wonderful people that got me interested in the world again. I discovered that I could create my own groups, and that it really took very little to sustain them: have some experiences and things to share, be genuinely interested in sharing them, and meet regularly no matter what. Through the blog, I met some very cool people and ended up going to SXSW for the first time, which hammered home the point that meeting like-minded people face to face is one of the most energizing things a body can do. However, all that socializing takes a lot of time and energy, so my challenge for 2007 was to figure out how to make it work without bleeding me dry.

    (3) Sell a Product This Year — This goal is related to (1) but tests different hypotheses:: Will people buy something I’ve made? and Will I like making and selling stuff more than I like writing and design? In retrospect, I can see now that goals (1) and (3) are really about choosing a career path. I could be a writer / craftsman of some kind working on the behalf of other people, or I could become more own enterprise and apply my skills on my own behalf. Which will it be?

    Three Goals Evaluated

    So how did I do?

    1. In terms of committing to being a writer / maker, I haven’t been successful in the commercial sense. I haven’t published an article, written a book, or made money through pure design. I have, however, continued to work on and improve my website, writing articles and making things that have continued to amuse myself and a few others on the Internet. And because I’ve done this, it’s been easier for the right people to stumble upon my website. I am starting to get more work from website-based referrals, and I could see this could go somewhere. The main hurdles are managing my business development activities and finding good people to share the workload.Regarding biz dev, I’ve emailed a lot of people this year, and I’ve not followed up on several promising leads because they got buried by other projects. From a relationship management perspective, I would score a big fat C minus. It’s a huge challenge for me to just keep track of everyone and still actually have time to do paying work. Each personal interaction I take uses up at least 15 minutes, though the average is probably something like 30 minutes. Regarding finding good people to work with, I had some success in meeting some good people this year through the World of Warcraft Guild Experiment, and I made a referral that happily worked out for both parties. There is much additional work that can be done in this area, for example the Freelance Network that is still on the launchpad, ready to attract a few good collaborators and co-schemers. How about the question of identity? I’ve only lately realized that I would like to be meeting interesting people and documenting their stories, sort of like a tinker, plying my design work from city to city while collecting stories and songs. In a way the blog allows me to do that, but I’d like to see where it can go.
    2. The problems I face in (1) are part of the rationale for forming a sustainable social network. Here, “sustainable” means “self-maintaining”. The ideal network exists to empower and energize all who meaningfully participate in its activities. Most social networking groups I’ve been a part of have either been (1) pretty flat or (2) a job in itself with its own agenda. Since I am finding I have less and less time, I want to make something that rewards me in exactly the way I need for every hour I put into it, guaranteed. The WoW Guild was a flawed experiment in that it required a lot of energy to maintain. While the guild still exists, we haven’t gotten together for some time. Despite the lack of a clear win in creating a sustainable network, the socializing itself has been successful. I’ve met a lot of people, and I’m involved in more groups both online and offline. It has led to a feeling of contentment that I haven’t had in quite some time, and I am truly blessed to have met so many interesting people. It has transformed my sense of purpose, because I recognized that I felt much happier when I applied my skills to express what I personally value. And what I value are moments of inspiration and epiphany, when someone realizes that an entire world of possibility has suddenly opened to them. I’d like to continue doing that.
    3. And this brings me to my last goal, selling a product as a way of applying my skills to create packaged ideas that can be physically shipped to people. I love packaging almost as much as I like making sense of things, the yin of the experience intertwined with the yang of an executable idea. I was also enamored of the idea of creating a self-running design-make-sell-ship-profit business after reading Tim Ferriss’ book The Four Hour Work Week. This is a good example, incidentally, how doing something new can yield surprisingly benefits. I had reviewed the book because it was the first “advance copy” anyone had ever offered to send me. It turned out to be quite an interesting and inspiring read, and it’s changed my outlook on what I could be doing with my life. As a direct result, one of my major goals for 2010 is to be completely mobile, so I can afford to work anywhere in the world at the drop of a whim. Ferriss’ blog is awesome, BTW. He’s not a spectator in life; he’s a rare combination of teacher AND doer. Incidentally, for all of you waiting for the Pre-Printed Emergent Task Planner Pads to go out, we are finally ready to start shipping them throughout the domestic United States. When I get back from San Jose, we’ll send an email blast out. One lucky person actually asked about them before I left, and I sent them to the secret preorder testing page, so hopefully they have received their pad order by now. Therefore, I can actually check off this goal from the list. Woo hoo! After we fulfill the pre-orders, the store will open up to the general public.

    So out of those three goals, I have technically met just the last one. The reason that I met the last goal was that it was actually concrete: you either have shipped a product, or you haven’t. That really made all the difference. I should have known better, I suppose, since I am a fan of concrete goals, but on the other hand my other “goals” turned out to be a series of questions:

    Q. Am I comfortable calling myself a writer/maker? A: Yes. Finally. Q. Can I make a living from it? A: I don’t know. Selling my design work as product, writing books, and continuing to blog as inclusively as possible seem to be the direction that’s working, so I’ll stick with it. Expanding into products, decoupling myself from the supply chain, and being able to live anywhere will help make it possible. Q. Is a network of awesome people part of the plan? A. Yes. That’s the whole point, to meet, scheme with, and be around awesome people to do great things.

    Review Days Reviewed

    The Groundhog Day Resolution system itself has, more or less, worked out. It helped that I entered the dates into Google Calendar ahead of time so I would get a reminder, and I never forgot which day I was supposed to reflect. That might be the best part of the system.

    The main problems I had with the system, as currently implemented, have to do with frequency, concreteness, and maintaining clarity.

    • Once a month is frequent enough to be aware of your goals, but it isn’t frequent enough to make them part of your daily continuity. If you’re a dilligent practitioner of Getting Things Done, you know the importance of the weekly review in making sure your projects are moving forward. With a whole 4 weeks between Groundhog Day Review Days, you are just not going to maintain the same pacing. This was sort of by design; as I didn’t want my goals to be more work for me that I would have to track on top of my every-day work. In other words, they were “bonus” goals.
    • Some of the most personally satisfyiing things I did this year, like Getting Up at a Regular Time (still doing it) and Decoding the Mysteries of the Gym (still doing that too, having achieved the level of “cardiovascular fatness” without losing weight) were not even on my list. I think there should be some way of tracking these bonus accomplishments within the system, but there is no formalized record keeping methodology. Corrie Haffly’s Monthly Goal Tracker Forms are the closest thing there is to an “officially-approved” form, and who can say no to a cheering cartoon groundhog? Only heartless bastards, that’s who! :-)
    • About halfway through the year I hit the goal doldrums, and had to remind myself why I even had these goals in the first place. So midway through the year, it probably is not a bad idea to have a goal re-assessment day around 7/7 to infuse new energy into the system. I’m not sure what it was; perhaps the onset of summer had me distracted.

    So sometime between now and February 2nd, I’ll hopefully be working on a version 2.0 of Groundhog Day Resolutions, complete with new forms and writeups. You can probably guess that this might be a second product to put together. I’ll probably adapt the old Concrete Goals Tracker for New Year’s Resolutions methodology, combined perhaps with some interesting props.

    So that’s it for the year. Practitioners of Groundhog Day Resolutions have the rest of the year off for their resolution keeping, because we’re busy with the holidays and the aftermath of closing out the year. I hope everyone had a good year.

    Happy 2008!

    Past Posts on Groundhog Resolutions Day

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    DSri Seah

  • Visiting San Jose

    December 5, 2007

    December 9 through December 14 I’ll be in San Jose, California for an extended on-site, getting serious about coding for the Big Project. Although I don’t yet know our schedule (it is going to be pretty intense), I thought I’d see if there was any interest in having a productivity geek dinner at some easy-to-access place that’s quiet enough to hear each other talk.

    When I used to run user group meetings here in New Hampshire, I would encourage people to bring some objects (not on a computer, though, unless the computer itself is cool) for a kind of informal show and tell. The criteria? If you think it’s interesting, then likely other people will too. When you bring some object to serve as a conversational prop, our geekly excitement tends to override any hesitation. It works great, and it makes it much easier to remember people.

    Any takers? Leave a comment if you’re interested, and a suggestion for a venue. I guess we could make a page on the Public Wiki for coordination. You’ll have to register first. I guess it is also time to bring a forum online as well. If there’s any interest, I’ll set it up.

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    DSri Seah

  • Desktop Grilling

    December 4, 2007

    Desktop Grilling Last Christmas, a good friend of mine surprised me an indoor electric grill. I was surprised in that Why, I never considered getting one of these way, where you’re actually not sure what you’re going to do with the gift. I like grilling outside and burning stuff, and the idea of doing this in my house didn’t seem like quite a good idea because of two problems:
    1. My kitchen doesn’t have a good exhaust for high-heat cooking, not that my crap stove can generate the tens of thousands of BTUs I’d need to make a decent stir fry. The exhaust issue is related to the second problem:

    2. My overly-sensitive smoke detectors, which readily go off if I even boil a lot of water. On second thought, the smoke detectors are probably just right, but it’s still pretty annoying.

    <

    p>Because of this, I couldn’t even conceive of grilling in the house. This course of action had, in the past, produced too much smoke and anxiety to be fun. So the gift, after an initial period of admiration, was left in the box unused and forgotten.

    Fast forward a year, and I stumbled upon the grill again while cleaning my office. With the wisdom that advancing age must have bestowed upon me, I could immediately see a new application for the grill, and this was entirely due to the grill being in my office. You see, my office is vented to the outside. It’s in the basement next to the storage room, which is also host to the litterbox for my cats. One of the first things I did after I started working down here with the cats was to figure out how to exhaust the fumes from their sandy deposits. Step 1 was to get a Littermaid Automatic Scooping Litterbox. Step 2, after the Littermaid failed to completely contain the smell, was to visit Home Depot to by an electric ventillation fan and an outside vent pipe that would fit in the tiny basement window. With one portable Ground Fault Interruptor outlet for the fan (just in case) and some duct tape to seal the vent pipe to the window, I now constantly vent the nastiness into the Great Outdoors where it belongs. There have been some additional side benefits too: visiting smokers can actually smoke in my office when it’s cold out, and the smoke gets sucked outside pretty quickly.

    Anyway, I reasoned, what works for cigarette smoke and litterbox odor probably would work for the gently smoking meats and sizzling steaks. So I cleared off the top of my drafting table and set up the grill:

    Desktop Grilling Setup The grill itself, a nice West Bend electric, is about the size of a large scanner, fitting approximately 4 burger patties at once with a flat area off to the side suitable for toasting buns. Unlike my mom’s ancient electric skillet from the 70s, the electric grill unit is immersible in water (simplifying cleaning considerably) and has a separate drip pan that fits underneath it. The manual instructs you to fill the drip pan with water, which is a good trick to make cleanup easier (the grease doesn’t harden and char). I have tried this in conventional ovens but it tends to create steam at the same time, creating a mushy gray yuckiness on the bottom of the meat. I was pleased to see that this grill didn’t seem have that problem when I tested it just now with lightly-salted cross-cut beef short ribs marinated with a touch of low-sodium soy sauce. Overall cooking time was around 15 minutes per batch. While the smoky charcoal taste was lacking, the convenience of working and grilling in the same space was, dare I say, exhilarating. I can see a bit of grease that has escaped, so this isn’t the sort of thing I would do every day, but it’s just a bit crazy, which is what I needed today :-)
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    DSri Seah

  • Second Take: Public Wiki @ David Seah

    December 3, 2007

    A while ago I had installed a Wiki so people could post their various modifications to the Printable CEO series of tools, thus removing myself as the bottleneck for disseminating these evolved ideas to the public. Having moved to Expression Engine, I now can deployed a much more integrated Wiki that supports my favored syntax for formatting articles, John Gruber’s Markdown.

    The new wiki is accessible via the navigation link at the top as Public Wiki. This place is a free-for-all for people to play in. The policy is simple: Be nice, help each other out, and don’t be a jerk. I also will remove content that I consider blatantly commercial, not in the spirit of community, a violation of copyright, or is an executable program of some kind. Otherwise, share whatever you want!

    You will need to register as a member of the site again to be able to upload files and edit Wiki pages. On the plus side, registered member’s comments should be automatically approved, and future services (Discussion forums and updated versions of the online versions of the Emergent Task Timer, for example) will all use the same credentials; this capability is the major reason why I switched to Expression Engine.

    One note on uploading: I encourage people to post any files or materials on their own website with a related blog entry or descriptive page. You may then add a link to an appropriate page (make one up if you don’t see anything, I’ll organize it later). The upload facility I am providing for the handful of people who do not have their own web host. I appreciate the files people have sent me, but it takes quite a bit of time for me to download a file, decompress, and then upload the file with descriptive notes. The end result is that I usually don’t end up posting them. I wish it were different, but that’s just the way things are for me right now, as I have quite a bit of other work to do at the moment. I hope this is a reasonable compromise.

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    DSri Seah