Let Us Present is an introduction to a number of content creators worth getting to know. Streamified’s Zane Claes and Mark Shore invite a variety of bloggers, musicians, podcasters, etc. from across the web to join them for a conversation. By using @Streamified, they’ve discovered a wealth of fresh content to share with their listeners.

We talk about the origins of the Amateur Traveler podcast, podcasting, travel and other topics.

Eventually they start piling up and taking up closet space. My wife gave me a gift for Christmas, or perhaps she gave herself the gift of closet space as she had 30 of my t-shirts mad into a new quilt. I got to keep my memories and she got 30 hangers back.

The project is not cheap.She outsourced the work to CampusQuilt.com. which can make items as small as a pillow from a single t-shirt to a double bed quilt like this one. Of course, I have already started accumulating more t-shirts so in another decade or two I may have to get another quilt.

One thing that science fiction has taught us is that robots are cool… at least until they take over the world. But some robots are cooler than others.

I had the opportunity recently to visit Intuitive Surgical with my alumni group from RPI. Intuitive Surgical is located here in Silicon Valley. They make surgical robots. These are not self-guided robots but instead a 4 armed robot that let’s a trained surgeon do the kind of surgery that used to be done with laparoscopic instruments. Laparoscopic surgery is very useful but is a difficult skill to learn. As you move your hand to the right, the instrument moves to the left. Combine the non-intuitive movement with small spaces and small video cameras and you can see why it might take some practice before you would be ready for surgery.

What the robots that Intuitive Surgical creates do is make the whole experience much more intuitive. How intuitive. I was amazed. They gave us basically no training and then let us sit down at very expensive robots and do remote surgery. OK, we weren’t able to get real volunteers for surgery so we were doing tasks like unwrapping a hershey’s kiss or a starburst candy. And we could! The surgical instruments seemed like a natural extension of our normal limbs and their motions an natural extension of our normal motions.

What kind of things can someone who is trained in the system accomplish. I loved this video on folding origami with the robot. Skip to the end to see the size of the crane that is being folded.

With a growing number of surgeons trained on the machines they are finding more and more uses including operations not previously possibly. Robots are cool.

My friend Margit is a teacher. Her Facebook wall had the following update recently:

Note to student: “Thank you for submitting your paper. Unfortunately, I am unable to access your work. It appears there has been an error in the file upload. Please submit a new copy of your paper before [deadline]. I look forward to reading your work.”

Note from student: “My paper is password protected. The password is [password].”

Note to student: “Please submit a new copy of your work. The software that is used to grade papers does not permit me to enter a password and when I attempt to download the original file, I receive information that the file is corrupted and unreadable.”

Note from student: “My paper is password protected. The password is [password]. I do not know how to turn it off and do not want to contact technical support.”

Note to student: “Congratulations. You have protected your paper so thoroughly that it is the online equivalent of hermitically sealed. It is the black hole of papers. No information can escape its gravitational pull, and all attempts to approach it have resulted in catastrophic systems failure. The good news is that I have provided you with a grade. The bad news is that it’s password protected and will resemble a zero in every way until a new document has been uploaded to the landing site.”

I had some empathy for Margit but also for the future boss of this student.

I was reminded of the first person that I had to fire as a manager. This young man had a complicated life and that particular week his job was inconvenient. If he had picked up a phone and called me instead of disappearing for a week he would have kept his job. He was only one phone call away from success.

I felt for this student. He did the assignment. He turned it in. He was one password away from a grade. But he quit one step too soon.

Sometimes a our jobs, our relationships, our responsibilities are inconvenient. The universe is not always convenient. Hopefully we will learn that sooner rather than later… perhaps from a teacher… hopefully not from a boss.

alien todo mug / t-shirt

I was just asked to moderate a panel at an upcoming conference on Time Management. I also get asked all the time how I get so much stuff done. Let’s look at just one aspect of getting things done and that is capturing your ideas.

I am a big fan of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. One of his big ideas is that if your mind is constantly thinking of the 100 things you have to do that you will get less done. He is a big proponent of capturing all the things that you want to do someplace safe, someplace  where you won’t forget them. This can be as simple as always having a notebook with you and writing down when you have ideas or when you think of things to do, but my own system has a bit more complexity.

A Place for Every Idea

Things

I use the application Things on my Mac as the center for prioritizing the set of tasks that I want to get done over the course of a week. When I think of something new to do I will often add it straight into my list of priorities. Sometimes I will add it into my “someday maybe” list meaning that I am not sure when I will get around to it, but at least I have captured the idea.

This new task joins my existing list of tasks. Some of these tasks are periodic tasks or projects putting out a weekly podcast. For the Amateur Traveler, for instance, each Sunday a new project is added to my list of things to do which includes the dozen or so tasks that are needed to get out this weeks show:

• interview a guest
• edit the audio of the interview
• illustrate the episode with pictures
• add in the intro and 3 news stories
• add in the closing and news of the community
• publish the show
• promote the show to the tourism board for the destination we talked about
• notify the guest the show has gone out
• publicize the show (with its own separate checklist)
• update the google map for Amateur Traveler with this show
• update the featured podcasts on AmateurTraveler.com
• write a weekly newsletter

Reddit 

I also use a few other bookmarking sites. For the This Week in Travel podcast that I do with Gary Arndt and Jen Leo we have created an area on Reddit (called a sub-Reddit) where we can add stories to talk about. So if I spot what might be an interesting travel related story during the week I quickly hit a different bookmarklet on my browser to add the story to the This Week in Travel area on Redit. When we have a guest on the show, we just send them a URL to that area to see all the stories that caught our eye this week. After a show I usually delete all the old bookmarks. We can also use this to allow listeners of the show to submit stories that they see.

Delicious.com

I am a heavy user of the website delicious.com to keep track of web pages that I want to find again. When I see an article about a new wordpress plugin, a certain destination that I may want to go to, a recipe, etc I quickly bookmark the page at delicious with a set of appropriate tags. If it is an article about a Wordpress calendar plugin it might get tagged with “wordpress” “calendar” and “plugin”. I use whatever words I think will help me find the information again.

Google Voice

The number one what I use Google Voice is to call my own Google Voice number. I am driving in the car and think of something I want to do. I have Google Voice on speed dial. I call and leave myself a message. Google then emails me a transcript with something vaguely like what I said. If that is not enough to remind me why I called I can click on a link and listen to the message.

Evernote

Evernote is increasingly becoming the place I store my notes. I don’t use Evernote for my task list but if I figure out a procedure for work, or want a place to start to put down my thoughts for a talk, or want to scan the instructions for that new clock that I know I will lose then I type it or scan it into Evernote.

Example

Let’s put it all together. Let’s say I have an idea for a book that I might write. I would add that task to Things as a project with a series of steps. My notes would probably start in Evernote. When I get a flash of insight while I am driving I would call myself in Google Voice. If I see an article that I want to read that is relavent I would add it to Instapaper and check it out ater. If I see web pages that I want to reference again later then I would probably keep track of them in delicious.com or reddit.com.

I have an office with my name on the door just like my father used to have. My office is 2,700 miles from my house or the length of the longest non-stop flight in the continental United States. With that kind of commute, you might understand why I am only work from that office one week out of the month. Here are some suggestions based on my experience on how to manage a team when you can’t just walk into their cubicle.

1. Hire The Right People

If you have people who you wouldn’t trust to stay focused on work in a normal work environment then one or both of you working out of the office won’t make that situation better. A great knowledge worker can often be more productive working at home, but one who needs to be micromanaged should not be hired in any situation. In general, more experienced people will work better in a virtual environment.

2. Make The Goals Clear

Let’s assume you won’t be micromanaging people. That means that they need to be able to make decisions, at least some decisions without you. That means that they should know their current priorities, but it will also be helpful if they understand the business reasons of why those are currently the top priorities. If a new task comes their way and they can’t get a hold of you, will they know how to prioritize it?

3. Time is a Bigger Barrier Than Distance

Time-shifted work is a bigger barrier to a team dynamic than the distances involved. Where possible see if people are willing to time shift to maximize the common hours. If people on the West coast are willing to get up a bit earlier (I got up at 5am this morning and was online by 5:30am) and/or people on the East Coast or Europe are willing to work a bit later (I have a business development co-worker in London who tends to get online in the evening local time) this will aid communication.

4. Face Time is Important

I schedule a Skype video conference once a week with each of my direct reports. Sometimes we do a call instead, but there is value to seeing each other face to face on a regular basis. I also travel to Boston once a month.

5. Have a Sense of “In the Office”

When I start work in the morning I connect to two IRC (Internet Relay Chat) chat rooms. One room has my team members and one has my team plus members of the product team. I start each day by greeting the team as a way of letting them know I am now available. Similarly when I leave work at night I say goodbye. If I leave the keyboard for more than 2 minutes I usually change my availability setting (I use the Mac program Adium) to say I am not available. If my availability light is green I want you to have a good sense that I am “at” work and that I will respond promptly.

6. Know When to Call

In my last job my entire engineering team was semi-virtual. Many lived within commuting distance of our small office but would only come in about once a week for meetings. One continued problem I had was trying to convince people that chat and email are great ways of communicating but there comes a time when you need to pick up the phone and have a conversation. My rule of thumb is when I see the second or third email come by and we seem no closer to an answer then it is time to call someone.

7. Have a Issue Tracking System

Don’t try and manage all the issues of who should be doing what in email. Have a system where you can clearly see who owns which issues and what the history is of a particular issue. This is particularly useful in my business which is software development but I would recommend it for all knowledge workers.

8. Have a Shared Email Protocol

When I read an email from you I should be able to tell:

• who has action items as a result of this email
• what the action items are (numbered lists are a good thing)
• when these action items are do

Try and address an email to the owner and copy those who you want to keep in the loop. An email going to more than one person may muddle who is expected to take action.

9. Use The Appropriate Communication Tool

Even if I am in the same room with you, if I have a complicated URL to send to you I will cut and paste it into an Email or a chat window. Speaking a URL and trying to carefully get all the letters, numbers and punctuation right is a waste of time. If you are trying to describe something graphical like the layout of a document or web page then use a screen sharing app like Skype and point. Email is a great tool for communicating things that someone needs to know in the next hour or so, but don’t assume that everyone will see the email in the next 5 minutes. If you have information that has long term value like things you need to do each time you hire a new team member, then think about creating a wiki for keeping shared knowledge. How to restart a server or who to contact when the building alarm goes off should not only be stored in Bob’s email box.

More and more businesses are finding that virtual teams are advantageous, useful or at least unavoidable. Allowing a team to be virtual, at least some percentage of the time, can even increase productivity if the team is managed appropriately.

Accomplishment

I remember how proud we were the day we moved into our new offices. I walked around with Peter the CEO of Talk City and there was a sense of accomplishment. The tallest building in the Pruneyard is visible for miles and was, we were told, the tallest building between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Ours building had only 6 stories but 3 of those were now ours. For the first year of the company we had had no offices at all. I had been employee number 4 and all the technical staff reported to me. We had raised millions of dollars in financing (60 million by the time we had our IPO) and had investors including NBC, Cox Interactive, Hearst Publishing and customers including all of those companies and WebTV, Microsoft, ABC, CBS Sportsline and Disney. There was a sense of great accomplishment as we looked around at the customizations we had made to the new building that made it feel like ours.

Disaster

It was not that many years later when we were desperate to get rid of that building. Talk City was a dot com company. We made our money from internet advertising and the bottom had dropped out of the market. Our larger customers were closing their internet divisions and our smaller ones were folding. A market that was already soft had gone into a tail spin when two planes hit the twin towers. We had a layoff, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another, and another as we tried to cut staff to the point where we could afford payroll. Seven layoffs for seven quarters in a row. The building we were once so proud of was now the anchor that was dragging us down. We were paying for empty office space at rates far below what the now depressed market would charge for the same space.

Rebuilding

Somehow Peter was able to get out of our lease, if he hadn’t the company would have died then and there. Instead we returned to our virtual roots. We got a small office space with one big room, a conference room and a machine closet and started to rebuild. By my count we had dropped from a high of 256 employees (although no two people seems to agree on what the actual number was) to 15 people. We took our computers and some of the office furniture home and went back to a mostly virtual company.

Realization

As we saved and started to rebuild the company I noticed something odd. I didn’t miss the big building. It was not just that I liked working at home but I found certain things were more efficient. When you have a large team (I think my team topped out at 56 employees) and you want to find someone I was surprised the number of times I would wander up and down 3 floors looking for and inevitably just missing them. When we switched back to virtual everyone was required to be on AIM (AOL Instant Messenger). When I wanted someone I could send them a text message and often get a response back in seconds.

Then I started to notice other benefits. It used to be that if we were in a meeting and we needed the answer to a question from someone who had not been invited to the meeting that we would either send someone in search of that person or we would have to schedule another meeting. But now I found that being able to get an answer to a question via AIM might take a minute while the meeting continued. Before we left the meeting, we had our answer and could make the correct decision.

Although I have left that company (now called LiveWorld), the company is still semi-virtual. We grew back to as large as 80 people but only 4 people had offices. The rest of us on days we were in the office would take over communal spaces or conference rooms. My office was now my backpack and with it I had everything I needed to be productive whether at home, at the office, on the road or at a nearby StarBucks. Once my idea of what “going to the office” meant was not much different from that of my father. Now I again have an office with my name of the door, but it is 2700 miles from my home. I have to wonder how my understand of “the office” will continue to change.

I get asked all the time how I can get so many things done. One of my favorite tools to help get things done is a text macro program on the Mac called TypeIt4Me.

Everyone who sits in front of a computer for extended periods of time or who answers a number of emails should have a text macro program. The idea behind a program like TypeIt4Me is that you type a short macro and it expands into a entire paragraph, letter, article template, etc.

So for example. For the Amateur Traveler I exchange email all the time with people about coming on the podcast. “What kind of questions do you ask?” is the most common query. My answer to that question is always basically the same. So in my email I type “atp-questions” and that expands to:

I do interviews by either phone or Skype (you need a computer and a headset). Generally an interview is about 30 minutes.

The kind of questions I usually ask
Why should someone go to XXX?
What were the highlights of your trip?
What should you see?
What do the guidebooks recommend that you think are a waste of time?
What do the guidebooks / tourists miss?
Where should you stay?
What should you eat?
How do you get around?
What side trips would you recommend?
What was the biggest surprise?

What I am looking for is travel information, but also personal travel stories that lend color commentary, that give us a flavor of a place.

If I want to mention press citations I type “atp-press” and it expands to:

—
•    1.5+ million travel podcast downloads in 2010
•    The Chicago Sun Times included the show in their list of 10 “Best travel sites”.
•    Oxford University uses the Amateur Traveler to teach English as a second language.
•    Men’s Journal says: “One of the 4 best adventure travel podcasts”
•    Best Life Magazine named the Amateur Traveler one of the 10 best podcasts on the internet.
•    Nominated for a People’s Choice Podcast Award in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011
•    Popular Vote Winner for a Lonely Planet Blog Award 2009 in the Podcasting category
•    Named by tripbase.com as one of the 10 best looking/most accessible travel blogs on the internet
•    Named in a study as one of the “50 Most Influential Independent Travel Blogs”

I don’t have to type this yet again and as a bad typist and lousy speller I only have to proof-read my template once… or maybe twice.

I have macros for my site name, site url, email address, mailing address, a short bio, an Amateur Traveler episode post. The second time I need to type the same paragraph of information I make it into a macro instead.

There are other programs like Text Expander which have pretty much the similar functionality as TypeIt4Me. Both get good reviews, I use TypeIt4Me because it is the older program and I have used it for years.

I run this websites and a few others, including my more popular Amateur Traveler website on a bluehost.com account. I started to run into problems with performance as my site started to push past 2000 page views a day, especially when I would get bursts of traffic from sites like StumbleUpon. I started to get issues where the CPU on my website was “throttled” as much as half of the day. I investigated more expensive hosting options but eventually found I could get better performance from my WordPress hosted site for free using a few small changes to two files: .htaccess and robots.txt.

Before you implement these changes I would also recommend using a caching plugin like WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache.

.htaccess

Most hosting websites use a free webserver program called Apache to run their websites. With Apache you can change the local configuration for a site using a file called .htaccess which lives in the top directory of your WordPress site. It should be in the same directory as wp-config.php.

Caching

The first set of changes to add to this file are a series of commands that make certain static files like images save for longer in the user’s browser. Setting these commands will allow fewer and fewer downloads of files from your server as a user returns to your site. There is a risk here that as you need to change an image, for instance, you will need to rename the image file so that a user’s browsers will download it promptly. So you might not want to increase the caching time on your css and javascript files if you plan on changing them constantly.


# Expire images header
ExpiresActive on
ExpiresDefault "access plus 7 day"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 3 months"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 3 months"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 3 months"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 3 months"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 7 days"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 day"
ExpiresByType text/plain "access plus 1 day"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 3 months"


Spiders

The way that search engines work is that they send a program (called a “bot” or a “spider”) to grab the contents of your website periodically. You can make these bots more efficient by using a plugin like Google XML Sitemaps (or WPMU Google Sitemap on a multi-site configuration) to create a file with a map of all of the pages of your site. Normally you can communicate with these programs via a file called robots.txt which we will deal with in a minute.

I did find that one spider from the Chinese site Baidu was ignoring the content of my robots.txt file so I am blocking that spider via the following lines of code in the .htaccess file. The reason that I am blocking Baidu is that I found that the spider was hitting my site a thousand times a day but only sending me maybe 6 page views a day of user traffic. Note that access from spiders will not show up in Google Analytics so you will have to look at your webserver logs to see what kind of traffic you are receiving.


RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Baiduspider [NC]
RewriteRule ^.* - [F,L]


Robots.txt

The file robots.txt should also be in the top level directory of your website. It tells the robots/bots/spiders how they should deal with your website. It tells them what content they should and what content they should not spider. The less content they spider then the less load on your system. So what you want to do is tell the spiders not to look at content that you do not want to show up on Google.

When you install a sitemap creating plugin mentioned above then you can tell the various bots about where they can find your sitemap in your robots.txt file. You can also tell Google via the Google Webmasters tool.

Sitemap: http://chris2x.com/sitemap.xml.gz


These commands block the comments form, directories that should be hidden, trackback’s and other dynamic pages.


User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: /category/*/*
Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */feed
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Allow: /wp-content/uploads

Another bot that I found that was spidering my sites a lot, but not sending any appreciable traffic was the Majestic12 bot which is part of an open source search project. These lines block that bot. You could put other bots here but if, for instance, you block the Google bot then you are saying you don’t want traffic from Google.

User-agent: www.majestic12.co.uk
Disallow:

You can also slow down how often various bots will crawl your site. These two lines tell Google and MSN not to crawl my pages more than once every 1 minute and every 5 minutes respectively.

User-agent: msnbot
Crawl-delay: 300
User-agent: Googlebot
Crawl-delay: 60

With just these changes I found that I could get more performance from my website for what it was intended, serving pages to real users.

I had a number of things that I needed to get done today. I had 2-3 podcasts to produce and a few blog posts I wanted to write. It was not my intention that this be a lazy Saturday. But while I still lay in bed I had the overwhelming desire to re-organize the apps on my iPhone. They have become disorganized over time and I had an idea for how to better organize them.

I like being organized, but sometimes the act of organization becomes a nice distraction from actually getting things done.

A Sloppy Desk

The Engineering VP at my first startup was a gentleman by the name of Shiraz Shivji. Shiraz had already had some great success in computers before I worked for him having already worked on early computers like the Atari ST and the Commodore 64. Shiraz had an interesting filing system that I have been known to mock. He threw things on his desk. When the piles got large enough that things fell on the floor he threw them away. How could someone be so productive and yet so disorganized I wondered. What I learned is that if he had something he really wanted to save he gave it to someone else to keep.

I started to understand the value of his filing system as things got very very busy at that company. It got to the point that I went from my organized filing system to opening up the bottom drawer in my filing cabinet and just throwing things in. The surprising thing to me is that I seldom opened the drawer back up to try and find a specific document and when I did it was often one of the last 3-4 I had chucked in there. My last in first out filing system was sufficient for the task.

Minimize

Over time my email filing system and electronic document systems have also simplified some. With the advent of better search on my computer it is often more convenient to search for information than filing it in some elaborate system. Similarly sometimes it is easier to search for specific information on the web rather than having a complicated bookmark system. I find with email that I can delete many emails that I receive immediately and trust that my trash on my email system does not get emptied for a month.
What is the minimum amount of organization that you and I need?

I find that I do need to have a calendar with appointments and reminders because I get to easily involved in my current task to remember when a meeting will start. I find it useful to have a to do list if for no other reason than crossing off things feels good. I find I need to put my car keys in one spot. I do not find that having my apps well organized is as life changing as I might have thought.