DFW

Please see my new blog

2015-04-11T20:37:00.002-04:00

I'm integrating all my blogs into one giant one.

See http://filsalustri.blogspot.ca/ and select the PRODUCTIVITY heading. All the posts that are here are now also there.

This blog will remain alive but inactive, at least for a time.

The winds of change are blowing

2015-04-11T19:17:00.000-04:00

I have four blogs; this being one of them. That's a problem, because (a) I can only post to them at 1/4 the speed I post overall, and (b) it's hard keeping track of them sometimes. So I've started integrating them all into one single blog. This will take some time.

I won't delete this blog, but I will post the new URL here when the conversion is done. Thereafter, this blog will remain but be dormant.

Toodledo beats Doit.im for now

2015-02-21T16:05:00.000-05:00

I’ve been using Toodledo for years now as my task management app. Recently, I had a “crisis of faith” that made me go rooting around inside a number of other task management apps ranging from Any.Do to IQTELL. I ended up trying to us Doit.im for a while, but I just couldn’t find a way to make it work for me.

Here’s the short version of the apps I investigated, in no particular order, and why they were ultimately discarded. I mean no disrespect to any of these apps by the brevity of my remarks; I just don’t want this post to become a tome.

Any.Do: Too simple; no start dates.
FacileThings: Only for people who are really into GTD (which isn’t me).
NirvanaHQ: I’m worried by lack of support and development.
TaskClone: One way sync only from Evernote to other services.
GetItDone: No start dates.
SmartTM: Couldn’t get it to work; no response to my queries to the support team.
Pocket Informant: No web/OSX version.
IQTELL: Too complicated; user interaction model too different from what I’m used to.
ZenDone: Weak mobile support; having an identity crisis.
ToDo7: Insufficient integration with email/calendar/evernote; stale Android app.
Doit.im: Too GTDy for me; no hotlist; weak Evernote integration; lacking sort by modification date; confusing organization of tasks; rendering of recurring tasks is highly unintuitive.

The reason there’s more issues listed for Doit.im is just because I spent a lot more time studying it since it seemed to be the pick of the litter for me.

At the same time, though, I also made some discoveries about Toodledo that I’d not realized before. In particular:

A pretty good bookmarklet. While some people eschew bookmarklets, I don’t mind them - if they work properly. And Toodledo’s certainly appears to work well. It’s most useful for creating a task from Gmail. Clicking on the bookmarklet will render a pulldown with a blank task, except that a link to the particular email message being displayed will be pre-loaded in the Notes field of the task. That was I can create a task and then archive to Gmail message to get it out of my Inbox.

I can also use the bookmarklet to connect a Toodledo task to an Evernote, assuming I’m using the browser version of Evernote. I prefer the standalone desktop version of Evernote, but I can still copy & paste an Evernote link into the Notes field of a Toodledo task and have it open that note from within Toodledo. (Actually, to do this well, you need to copy a “Classic Note Link,” but that’s not a big deal for me.)

Since I only use Toodledo for active tasks (everything else is in Evernote), I also discovered that I really didn’t need that much organization in Toodledo. In Evernote, I have all kinds of tags to capture contexts, projects, subjects, people, states, etc. Most of that is unnecessary given how I use Toodledo. Now, I only use contexts in Toodledo; for me it’s the perfect trade-off between organizational overhead, and easy of use. But let me stress, this works just because I have so much stuff in Evernote.

The last, and least important, thing that irked me about Toodledo was it’s look and feel, which is… kind of clumsy. I discovered a Chrome plugin called Stylish that lets me rework the CSS for a site, which has let me clean up the UI’s appearance and give it a cleaner, easier to read look - for me at least. (So, if you go down this road, you'll need to know CSS.)

It was a month in hell, quite frankly, studying all those alternatives. And the irony of ending up sticking with Toodledo is not lost on me. But there you have it. There are lots of apps that seem poised to overtake Toodledo, but none of them have managed it yet, so I’m sticking with what works best for me.

How I’m using priorities in my Toodledo hotlist

2015-02-07T22:15:00.000-05:00

Toodledo’s flexibility lets me use priorities in a pretty interesting way. Here's how I use them.

One of the nicest features of Toodledo is its flexibility; you can implement all kinds of different systems with it from a full blown GTD system down to something as simple as Autofocus. And you don’t need a degree in computer science to use it.

Priorities can be a real problem, though. There are some very good arguments against using them at all because priorities aren’t static - they change as your situation changes. Perhaps the most trivial yet telling example is the high priority task that you can only do at home; when you’re at work, that task has pretty much as low a priority you can give it. Still, if used judiciously - or, in my case, somewhat strangely - I think they can be quite helpful.

I’ve written before about how I think priorities should work: they’re the combination of effort to complete a task and the impact that completing the task will have. But I’ve yet to find an app that supports this. What I’m writing about here is something quite different.

First, a review of how I (currently) do things in Toodledo.

Toodledo lets you sort tasks in up to three sequential ways. It also has a really cool measure called Importance, which is a combination of a task’s priority, how many days you have left till the task’s deadline, and a couple of other things. (You can read the details of Importance here.

I keep both dated and undated tasks in Toodledo. I don’t break tasks down much in Toodledo, because I’m just not the type of person who needs to do that. And if I do (for particularly complex projects), I tend to combine subtasks with notes and I keep that stuff in Evernote; so only the project name remains in Toodledo. What’s more, most of my tasks don’t have deadlines; that’s just the nature of my work. That means that most of my tasks can’t be completed in one sitting. It’s not a question of getting them done; it’s a question of regularly taking a swipe at them so that I will finish them in a timely manner.

I sort my Hotlist first by Importance (which incorporates priority), then by reverse modification date, then by priority. This organizes my hotlist into between three and five chunks, one for each level of importance, with the most important tasks at the top. But what’s really interesting is what happens within each chunk.

Tasks that are due today always end up at the top of the Hotlist. They have to be dealt with, albeit not necessarily first thing. For instance, I have to take the garbage out on Tuesdays, but after dinner and not before lunch. Still, because they’re right there at the top, I can’t possibly miss them. I should note that I use due dates very strictly only for tasks that actually are due; these are hard deadlines and not just preferences.

Tasks in the other chunks are arranged by reverse modification date. That means that the tasks nearest the top are the ones I’ve neglected the most. Since I update the notes on each task when I work on it, those tasks will automatically cycle down to the bottom of the list. So when I’m looking for a task to do, I can scan the hotlist from top to bottom, knowing that the first task I find that makes sense to do at that moment, is the most important task I can do, and that needs attention because I haven’t worked on in a while. For further details on this technique, see this post.

Here, finally, is where priorities come in. Toodledo has five priority levels, but I only need three. I’ve set my Toodledo defaults such that new tasks are created with Medium priority. I have a lot of Medium priority tasks. Because they’re sorted by reverse modification time, it can take quite a while to cycle through them all.

But some tasks just need more attention than that: I can’t just work on them once every 20 or 30 days. So I bump those tasks up to High priority. This moves them to a different chunk, one with usually between six and 10 tasks. They’re still sorted within that chunk by reverse modification time, so I still know which tasks I’ve neglected, but since there’s fewer of them, I can cycle through them much faster - once a week at most. In other words, the tasks that matter most are getting more attention, which is as it should be.

Finally, sometimes, there are tasks that are so important, I have to keep an eye on every day. Typically there are only two or three of them, but I don’t want to risk "losing sight” of them among even my High priority tasks. These are the tasks that I bump up to Top priority. This puts those tasks into their own chunk, above all the others (except those that are due today).

The result is a task list arranged so that looking from top to bottom, I know I’m seeing the most pressing, most neglected tasks I have.

It’s not really what priorities were meant for, but it works really well for me.

And you’re welcome.

A scree (or manifesto) about Google integration

2015-02-01T20:13:00.000-05:00

Hey, Google! Why haven’t you integrated your basic user tools yet?

Seriously, considering how helpful this would be, and considering Google already has all the necessary pieces and an abundance of resources, why hasn’t it been done?

I’m not going to answer that here - though I can dream that Google will, in a comment to this post. I am, however, going to explain why I think the question needs to be asked.

In my never-ending and possibly obsessive-compulsive search for the ideal personal task management system, I recently went a little crazy assessing a number of online systems. This time (yes, there have been other forays into the land of Felix Unger), I was looking for apps that could integrate rich notes (e.g., Evernote), calendaring, task management, and email.

What I discovered is that the app I want is really the app Google won’t seem to make - although I cannot imagine it would be very hard for them to.

First, a little background.

I’m old enough to have used ~~punched cards~~ green ASCII terminals, so I’m not a big fan of the bells and the whistles. I want task management that clean, simple, and minimal. Also, I don’t like heavy systems like full blown GTD; I’m more of an autofocus man. Finally, if it’s going to be computer-based, then it’s got to work everywhere, mobile and otherwise. (For me, that’s “limited” to Chrome, Macs, and Android. No Windoze for me, thanks.)

Currently, the heart of my system is Google Calendar, Google Mail, Drive (for handling Big Important Things), Toodledo for tasks, and Evernote for pretty much everything else (including drafting this blog). Google Keep is also always close by as Plan B because it’s fast and easy and dependable, but no where near as powerful as Evernote.

(Then there’s Zotero, Pocket, Diigo, and I can’t even remember what else; but they’re more for sharing stuff with my colleagues and students and less about getting shit done. So let’s put those aside for now.)

We can put Drive and text preparation aside for now, as I’m convinced the functions it serves is significantly different than the others.

Insofar as task management goes, I have relatively few requirements, but it’s surprising how many apps can’t satisfy them: start dates, due dates, contexts & folders (or, alternatively, a robust tagging system - like Evernote's), intelligent and rich repeat options for recurring tasks, rich sorting (or, alternatively, intelligent searching - again, like Evernote’s), and some kind of user-configurable “hotlist.” While that might sound very close to GTD, it really isn’t because GTD seems to boss me around too much; I want more flexibility than full-blown GTD offers. If that were all I’d need, I’d be happy to commit for life to Toodledo (more on that below).

(Notice also that this regretably punts the otherwise very usable but equally neglected Google Tasks right out of the running.)

But I’ve recently noticed that the bottlenecks I face are almost invariably in between the tools rather than inside them. That is, I tend to slow down when I’m trying to create tasks because of an email I’ve just received, or coordinating events (on Google Calendar) with tasks (in Toodledo), or deciding whether a task should be a checkbox item in Evernote, or an item in Toodledo….

If that’s where the bottleneck is, then what I’m looking for is an app that manages how those tools interact rather than how they work individually.

So, into Google Search I went. Here’s a very fast summary of the apps that I've looked at (so far).

Toodledo. King of the hill, IMHO, except it doesn’t really integrate with much. On the other hand, it has the best tradeoff between usability and functionality. You can customize it, too, and make it nearly as simple as Autofocus or as complex as full blown GTD. The interface is intuitive enough that you can quickly get on your feet and be productive. Even better, you can use it (even its free version) as a “service” to sync a variety of other apps. And it’s full of all kinds of incredibly useful features. (My favourites are to set a conditional due date and “importance.” A conditional due date means that if it’s not done on time, the task’s due date rolls over to the next day and keeps doing that till you get it done. This option is great for tasks you’d like to get done by a certain date, but can let run over a bit without all the fuss of seeing it glare OVERDUE at you. Importance is a calculated measure that includes task priority, due date, and whether the task has a star. It would be nice if users could program their own calculation for importance, but it’s still pretty good as is.)

IQTELL. This system has huge aspirations and has achieved a lot. It integrates calendaring, Evernote, email of all kinds - even Google Tasks - with its own task management system. It can look like GTD, but you can customize it - a lot. It’s a Howitzer: powerful and clumsy. It has some problems. For instance, it can parse and use your Evernote tags, but not your Gmail labels (even though they’re basically the same thing); and it can’t display email messages as threads. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how many videos I watched and forum posts I made, I just couldn’t figure out how it all fit together. I’m pretty sure there’s a kitchen sink in there, but I couldn’t find it. If you’re looking for brute power, you must consider IQTELL; but be prepared for many a long, sleepless night trying to decipher it.

Zendone also connects to calendars, email, and Evernote; in fact, it rather depends on Evernote quite heavily, which is great if you like Evernote (as I do). It’s also very beautiful. However, it doesn’t have start dates, and it’s having a bit of an identity crisis these days; that is, its developers say they’re going back to the drawing board - which is admirable, but doesn’t really help me at this point.

SmartTM is very interesting. It depends heavily on Evernote (you need an Evernote account to get it going). It appears to integrate everything I need into its own task manager, but I couldn’t get in. I’ve reported the error a few days ago but have yet to hear back. Also, it doesn’t seem to have an OS X app. It does have a browser app, which would be fine with me, but it’s in beta and I can’t access it either. I’ve also read that it’s quite clumsy to use. It’s a new product, so I would expect some growing pains, but again it doesn’t help me.

FacileThings is also a new-comer. It has a web and mobile apps. It pretty much forces you to use all 5 steps of GTD. I’ve read that the mobile app sucks, but it doesn’t. I have it running on my Nexus 5 and it’s fast and clean, albeit it uses a truly weird font. It also supports integration with email, calendars and Evernote. From my point of view, it has a few serious issues. First, one has to manually change from one GTD stage to another; I would have had them all visible on the screen (at least on the desktop/browser version) and let users simply mouse into whichever stage best suited their needs at that moment. Second, it has no hotlist (or equivalent); it only has the standard GTD Next Actions thing. Third, it relies strictly on tags to simulate contexts, projects, folders, etc.; this means users have the cognitive burden of remembering their own tagging system. And before you ask: no, it doesn’t really have a good way of seeing/searching all your tags from any action.
See also http://purplezengoat.com/2013/06/19/facile-things-teaches-you-gtd/ for more about it.

TaskClone takes a really interesting approach: it only provides a service to sync from Evernote to any one of a number of other task management apps and calendars. The idea here is that you can use whatever apps you’re most comfortable with, and still get your sync on to keep things tidy - assuming you work mostly in Evernote, of course. It gets clumsy if you want to change an Evernote that TaskClone has already synced, and it doesn’t sync back from itself to Evernote. That wouldn’t work for me, because I tend to diddle my Evernotes a lot.

Doit.im is an actively maintained and developed system that does provide at least some integration with calendars, email, and Evernote, and runs on pretty much anything. It assumes a GTD-esque stance, but there is reasonable flexibility built into it. It does a lot of “magic” behind the scenes, populating various lists (especially the Today list) with tasks from other lists as certain conditions arise. It supports start dates, which is great for me, but I find its UI a little clumsier than I’d like.

NirvanaHQ is another elegant system that runs on multiple platforms. It has relatively weak integration with Evernote and can only sync calendars via iCal. The other problem I have with NirvanaHQ is that there has been virtually no activity by the developers in quite some time. They seem to not respond to posts on their own forums, and the android app is quite stale. More than the lack of advances in light of OS evolution, I’m troubled by the lack of feedback to users’ comments.

Pocket Informant is currently based on mobile devices only, but claims to be developing a Mac app. It would be a contender for me if/when that happens, because it does everything else I need it to do. I used it for a time when I used iPhones, but its UI became clumsy. Apparently, the new version is much better in that regard. Indeed, it syncs with Toodledo, so I wouldn’t even have to migrate my tasks. It has pretty good Evernote integration: notes are synced in their entirety, and Evernote Reminders become reminders in PI. I wait with a worm on my tongue (“baited” breath) for the desktop version. Till then, it’s not going to help me.

Todo7 is another very elegant system. I used it for years back in my iOS days, but it doesn’t integrate with calendars or Evernote, and its Android app is quite stale, so it’s pretty much off the table.

Then there's systems like Bitrix24. If IQTELL is a Howitzer, then Bitrix24 and its ilk are the nuclear option. Not interested.

So where am I going with all this? The real take-away here is that there’s a market - a market that’s growing - for integrated apps. Now, I know Google has tried its hand at all-in integration before (cough Wave cough), but the current field of apps out there seems to be suggesting a definite trend. It's tasks, calendars, email, and notes; people want integrated tasks, calendars, email, and notes.

Now, given its size and breadth, it’s seem ridiculously obvious to me that Google needs to get back into this game. Google knows about integration - witness Drive. Google also knows all about calendars and emails.

Where they’re a bit weak, methinks, is on the tasks and notes front. Google Tasks just isn’t enough, and it irks me mightily that they’ve yet to address the thousands of requests posted over the years since Tasks was released to add some meat to it. Tasks are not events; it’s just silly to think that Google Calendar will do for task management. It’s great for event management, but it quite frankly sucks for task management. Tasks needs real but optional due dates and start dates, tags (see below), options for recurring tasks, some kind of prioritization like Toodledo’s “importance,” and a really good search system. Contexts, folders, projects, etc. can all be simulated perfectly well with tags.

Google Keep is pretty good for notes, but it needs a bit more functionality to make it anything more than a scratchpad. It doesn’t - indeed shouldn’t - become a competitor for Google Docs; Docs-style functionality would be too much of a computational burden. But it’s clear that Evernote has listened carefully to its users in this regard: a few, modest formatting options, tagging, and a truly brilliant search facility.

Google knows all about search. Google also knows about tagging; the label system in Gmail is really a tagging system (and they’re hierarchical, just like Evernote); Google Bookmarks supports labels too. They also have tags in Google+. As far as I know, even folders in Drive are really just lobotomized labels.

What’s needed is a universal tagging system so that a user can use the same tags regardless of the Google app that they’re using.

The next step is to put key apps in a single window: calendar, tasks, email, and notes. They can start it out as four separate panes - that’d be fine with me. The magic, though, would happen behind the ~~scene~~ screen. While each app can be its own thing, the integrated four-pane app has to add a layer of interoperability. It should be possible to, for instance:

create a rich note in Gmail that automagically links back to the email message/conversation;
create a task or event directly from an email, and have the email intelligently parsed for information to populate the task or event;
turn a task into an event and vice versa;
intelligently search all the apps for tags/labels as well as text, dates, contacts, etc. and present them in an integrated view;
allow searches to be saved and reused with a single click;
embed a task or event within a note, and have it appear in your task list or calendar; and
everything must stay synced with everything else, all the time.

And, of course, it would have to work on mobile devices as well as desktops.

In the long run, I’d like to see something more like a “stream” - a single interface combining email, tasks, events, and notes into a single, consistent view. But that will take a lot of thinking and study of usage patterns.

I’m drooling just thinking of something like this.

Come on, Google, you can do this!

My new sabbatical task schedule

2015-01-13T14:08:00.001-05:00

In my last post, I explained why I feel I'm not getting enough out of my sabbatical, productivity-wise. As it happens, I had the time today to sort out a new schedule, which I summarize here.

The general requirements I set out for my new schedule are:

Lay out general themes for each weekday to give me flexibility to respond to unforeseen events, problems, and opportunities.
Block off my day to help ensure I get to each theme.
Spend at least two hours a day on that day's theme.
Leverage existing typical weekly tasks to decide what theme goes on which day.

I started with 11 themes originally, and that was too much - especially as I couldn't easily predict what I'd be doing next because of the offset in rotating through 11 themes over only 7 days a week.

As far as blocking off time each day, I wanted something minimal and flexible. Great hay has been made of Benjamin Franklin's schedule, and I can see why: it gives a sense of direction without micro-managing oneself or one's time.

So here's what I've got so far as my daily themes:

SUNDAY: R&R, Catching up, Miscellaneity.

We tend to do bugger all on Sundays anyways, just out of habit. So I made Sunday my built-in slack day to make sure I have some time to catch up on stuff that really needed to be done the previous week but failed to. Also, The Walking Dead is on Sundays. Can't miss The Walking Dead.

MONDAY: Teaching stuff.

I don't teach while on sabbatical, but there's a lot of preparation, course(ware) development, and teaching-related research that I normally can't do when I actually am teaching. My sabbatical is a chance to seriously refresh a bunch of stuff I use in my teaching.

TUESDAY: Research.

My sabbatical is ostensibly at the University of Toronto, and Tuesdays are typically when I go there. This is the ideal time to do research. I have a quiet, secluded office with a good Internet connection; there's no phone in that office (which is perfect); and virtually no one can find me. Given that my research is theoretical rather than experimental, this is virtually an ideal opportunity.

WEDNESDAY: Admin and miscellaneous work-related tasks, Students.

Even though I am on sabbatical, I tend to go in to my "real" office at Ryerson once a week to sort through old paperwork, check my mail, deal with administrivia, gloat about how little I have to do with colleagues, catch up on office gossip, and see my one remaining graduate student. Oh, and have a burrito at z-teca. BEST. BURRITOS. EVAR!!! I do this mid-week because that's the time I'm most likely to find anyone else I need to talk to on campus.

THURSDAY: House stuff and cleaning.

Fridays the grocery stores are depleted. Weekends are a nightmare. Thursdays, in our neighborhood at least, seems like a good day to shop: still a good selection, but no big crowds. And since shopping gets done on Thursdays, then may as well do all the cleaning too. Also, Thursdays are for home projects, like organizing photos, hanging pictures, gardening, etc.

FRIDAY: Reading and writing.

I've got a list of papers and textbooks to be read that has thousands of entries. I'll never get to them if I don't put aside some time expressly and only for that. And it ain't light reading either; these are really dense (and often poorly written) research papers and monographs. I take notes on them too and often embed choice ideas either in my courseware or in my Evernote notebooks on research. Given that reading often spurs my best research ideas, I also set aside time on Fridays to actually do some writing. I'd be satisfied with a couple of publishable research articles per year, so (I think and hope) one day a week for writing should be enough.

SATURDAY: Blogging and online stuff.

Blogging is, for me, different than my "professional writing." It comes from a different place, a different part of my mind. So I want to set those two types of writing apart from each other. My blog posts often arise in response to other stuff I've found online, so bundling blogging with generally organizing the kazillion links and web resources I have squirrelled away in Pocket makes sense.

So that's my week, in a nutshell. I've added a weekly repeating task to my Toodledo account for each theme, just so that I get a daily poke about what theme I should be working on.

As for my daily schedule, it comes in two flavours: weekdays and weekends.

Weekdays work generally like this:

7:00-9:00: Get up, get organized, get caffeinated, get fed, get through overnight email and Google+ notifications, get kids to school.

9:00-12:00: Handle the theme of the day.

12:00-13:00: Lunch and general pondering of the universe.

13:00-14:30: General tidying up, odd jobs, possibly more themed work; at least 30 minutes exercise.

14:30-15:30: Get kids from school, post school problem-solving, etc.

15:30-17:30: Enter a persistent vegetative state while watching bad TV; possibly nap.

17:30-19:00: Pre-dinner, dinner, post-dinner stuff.

19:00-21:00: Help kids with homework, possibly more themed work if my brain isn't already fried.

21:00-...: re-enter persistent vegetative state, tablet in hand, reading online stuff while watching not-so-bad TV.

Weekends are different:

... - 10:00: Drink lattes in bed while reading news on my tablet and showing silly internet memes to my wife.

10:00-12:00: Odd jobs, slowly try to find the energy to accomplish anything at all. More lattes.

12:00-13:00: Lunch.

13:00-16:00: Themed work + random other stuff as required.

16:00-17:30: Exercise + R&R.

17:30-19:00: Pre-dinner, dinner, post-dinner stuff.

19:00-20:00: Get ready for the coming week.

20:00-...: TV (The Walking Dead!!!!!), maybe some themed work, stuff I forgot to do otherwise.

I've got a little chart on my desk that lays out my daily schedule for weekdays and weekends, just to remind me. I don't care if I'm a little short on one time block or a little over on another. I don't care if some Unexpected New Thing sucks up a couple of hours here and there. The daily schedule is a template - a suggestion more than a directive.

I like it. Fingers crossed, it'll help me get more done and let me get more enjoyment out of it all.

Reacting to tasks just isn't working for me

2015-01-13T09:29:00.000-05:00

I'd set up this interesting (I thought) way of partitioning my time during my sabbatical. But it slipped away from me and I've gone into a purely reacting mode of response to tasks. And that's not working for me either. Lesson: no matter what I originally thought, my process design was no good.

Here's the tl;dr version of my approach to getting things done during my sabbatical: I came up with a list of 11 different major themes for my tasks; I would cycle through the entire list, one theme per day, spending at least 1 hour on that theme. The idea was that I'd eventually get a substantive amount done on all of the themes.

It didn't turn out that way. Stuff kept getting in the way - email, house chores, various other activities, figurative fires that needed to be put out, new tasks with short deadlines, and - perhaps worst of all - some things I just didn't feel like doing.

So I drifted back to The Old Ways, of letting my time be driven by whatever seemed most crucial to get done at any given time. But that doesn't work for me either, because it turns into a litany of things I have to do, at the expense of things I want to do - until the things I want to do become things I have to do because I've let them drift for too long.

But the point was to balance the have-to-do's with the want-to-do's, because while the former are necessary (but not necessarily pleasant), the latter are pleasant (but not necessarily necessary). It's really all about balance.

Also, I was irritated that The Old Ways prevented me from being able to predict what I might be doing in the future (even in the near future, like, tomorrow). Sometimes, we decide what we should do now based, in part, on what we expect to have to do tomorrow. And I couldn't do that.

And my sabbatical is half-over and I've not done anywhere near as much as I would have thought.

So, time for a reset.

Since I still use my rolling tasks trick to suggest tasks (no matter what else, that continues to work well for me), I have a dynamic and self-organizing prioritized list of possible tasks to make sure I'm getting something done. The question is to make sure that I'm setting aside enough time on a regular basis to get things done that really matter.

I still like the idea of have task themes: they give me some structure without requiring me to go through a list of hyper-specified tasks, structure with a bit of give to it.

So here's what I'm going to try.

There's 7 days in a week. I'm going to develop only 7 themes and assign one to each day. This will let me more easily predict my expected future tasks, yet maintain flexibility of choice. I'm going to make one theme a generic "Catch-up / relax" day to make sure there's enough slack for me to enjoy my sabbatical while still making sure there's enough time to get the absolute necessities done. The other 6 days and themes will be an amalgam of the 11 I had in the last version.

The amalgamation of the 11 themes is the tricky bit, because some themes (e.g., students, research) are just plain more important than others (e.g., blogging), and some themes (e.g., research) require far more attention and effort than others (e.g., home).

I'll post an update once I've got it sorted.

Notebooks of famous people

2014-08-10T15:40:00.003-04:00

Well, actually, famous men. Sorry, but the site where I found this is about "manliness." [Insert rolling eyes here]

I think that most of what's on that site is just macho bullshit, but there's no escaping the interest in learning a bit about some famous men lived, by means of their notebooks.

See The Pocket Notebooks of 20 Famous Men.

I note with a teeny bit of satisfaction that I tend to do as Darwin did, and write from the spine out - at right angles to convention - because it's both easier and gets the rings of my binders out of the way.

Sabbatical planning II

2014-05-19T21:04:00.001-04:00

Today I test-drove the system I've developed to help manage my work for my sabbatical (see here for an overview). I quickly discovered that I need to tweak how I list tasks by context to make the system workable. Fortunately, Toodledo can handle it.

There's two basic steps in the workflow that I use, including the system I've developed for my sabbatical:

Go through my hotlist, and make sure I've taken care of everything that must be done today. Usually, this doesn't take more than a few hours.
Once the hotlist is settled, select the next category of other tasks (see here for details) and choose a task from that context to work on. Repeat step 2 until I'm done for the day.

When I tried doing step 2 today, just to see what would happen, I noticed a problem: the default listing of tasks in a given context in Toodledo includes all tasks in that context. In particular, it includes tasks the start date of which has not yet arrived. This clogged up the list with all kinds of tasks that I'd already decided I didn't need to worry about yet.

Fortunately, Toodledo can filter each list it displays differently. I was able to fix the problem completely by deactivating a single option that displays "future tasks." This hides tasks the start date of which is in the future, which was exactly what I needed. (The hotlist hides future tasks too, unless it's also got a star, but does it differently because the hotlist is a special list in Toodledo.)

I must admit I had a tiny spasm at first, because I thought all those extra future tasks that were showing up originally would just confuse the hell out of me, and that it would take a lot longer to find a good task to do for the day because of it. Fortunately, one little modification corrected everything.

(Special takeaway: Remember to keep your system fluid and adaptable. It's unlikely you'll find a good system right on the first try. Be willing to change the system to meet your objectives. Make the system work for you, and not the other way round.)

Planning my sabbatical schedule

2014-05-18T23:24:00.000-04:00

I've got a year-long sabbatical coming up, and I needed some flexible yet systematic way to make sure that I'll spread my time reasonably among many different projects. Here's what I came up with.

During my sabbatical, I'll have lots to do, and time to do it, and no particular deadlines at all. I won't be teaching or doing administrivia. It's not a question of scheduling specific times of day and of the week for specific tasks; it's more a question of just making sure I make headway.

Usually, I'm either tending to teaching, or sitting in meetings, or pushing paper around. That consumes most of my time, so I just plug those few holes in my schedule with other things (usually research oriented things) that I really want to do. But now that I'm "off" for a year, I've got 'way more time for all kinds of things that I couldn't even allow myself to think about before.

Still, it doesn't make sense to schedule, say, research only on Wednesdays, because I don't know what else might come up. And even with all the time I ought to have at my disposal, I'll probably not get everything done that I'd like to. After all, it's been 7 years since my last sabbatical.

I should also mention that I use Toodledo to manage my tasks, and I have this neat "rolling tasks" trick that I use to make sure I eventually spend some time on all the various projects that I have on the go. The trick lets my cycle through a list of undated tasks, so that I know that eventually I'll spend some time on them. I want to leverage that into my sabbatical planning.

I don't want the system to be complex or nuanced because I really don't like those kinds of systems. I'm more an autofocus guy than a GTD guy.

So here's what I've come up with.

First, I reconstructed all the contexts that I use in Toodledo. I used to have very few contexts: Home, Work, Errands, and Online. Now I have 11 contexts, but they correspond to the general classes of tasks that I want to spend time on during the sabbatical. They are:

Home (house related jobs, of which there is a neverending supply)
Teaching (there's a whole bunch of modifications I want to make to my courseware, to various assignments, etc. that I can't do while my courses are "live.")
Research (well, yeah, right?)
Writing (writing research articles is not at all the same as actually doing research)
Blogging (usually unrelated to my research)
Reading (I'm usually far too tired to read much research material during work time)
Catch-up (I've got thousands of links stored in Pocket that I've never had a chance to deal with, as well as all kinds of old notes that need cleaning up and putting somewhere sensible)
Online admin (tending to my computers, my android devices, etc)
Students (my grad students continue to be my responsibility even when I'm on sabbatical)
Work admin (the odd bit of work related junk that I have to keep track of and can't escape except in death)
Other (anything else that needs to get done but doesn't really fit in any other category)

The biggest pain was going through all my Toodledo tasks and reclassifying them into the new category system. Still that only took a couple of hours.

Next, I create a table of all these categories. I did this on dot-grid paper, in my A5 journal binder, because I can't do it in Toodledo. The table is shown in the image to the left.

There's not much to it yet because I'm going to start this schedule in a few weeks (there's still a pile of lingering administrivia hanging over my head).

The categories are listed across the top of the page, in no particular order. Order doesn't matter because they're all equally important categories and so long as I keep cycling through them, I'll get to them all.

I'll start with the first category, House. I'll then go to Toodledo, pull up all the tasks I have filed under House, pick one, and do it. It may take 10 minutes; it may take all day. It may even need several days - in which case, I'll only work for it a while - this is what I call a task requiring multiple sittings.

Once I've done a House task, I'll put an X in one of the dot-grid boxes below "House."

Then I'll move on to the second category, Teaching, pick a Toodledo task, and do it; finally, I'll put an X under Teaching.

Once I get to the last category, Work Adm, I loop back to House and begin again.

Since there are no deadlines or other forces pressing me to work on a particular schedule, I'll be free to take breaks as and when needed, either just to rest, or to go for a swim, or watch some TV or whatever.

The only daily goal I've set for myself is to spend at least five hours a day working on tasks that are covered by this chart. That's a low-ball estimate of how much I want to work, but it also makes things flexible, to accommodate whatever else may come up. This is because, again, I have no fixed schedule and I don't really know how long any given task will take. Setting a minimum number of hours work is better, in this case, than setting a minimum number of tasks.

I've never tried this technique, so I don't know how it'll go, but I think it should help make sure I remain productive without overworking myself and without stressing out over how much (or how little) I get done in a day. I'll update things here, as my sabbatical proceeds.

Wish me luck!

The Joy of Post-Its

2014-04-18T21:05:00.000-04:00

Arthur Fry and Spencer Silver have saved the world. No, really. They invented post-it notes - they deserve a Nobel Prize... each. Post-its are, in my humble opinion, the greatest invention since duct tape and certainly the greatest invention ever for productivity wonks like me.

If you use a paper agenda, planner, or organizer - be it ring-bound, hardbound, or spiral - if you don't use post-its, you're doing it wrong.

Post-its let you write down notes such that you can rearrange them, organize them, and pass them on to others, all without ever having to copy the note. Copying information takes time, and introduces the possibility of transcription errors. And Murphy's Law says that these problems will only happen when they'll cause you the greatest possible grief.

Another fantastic characteristic of post-its is that their uses are legion. Try googling "uses of post its" and you'll see what I mean. Of course, this can also be a problem for people: it's easy to get buried in their possible uses to the point that you're not getting anything important done. Which would defeat the purpose of it all.

While I tend to use digital systems for my task management, I never go anywhere without a pen and a notebook, and that notebook always has some post-its tucked in there, just in case, usually tacked on the inside back cover. Indeed, I usually have two or three different size post-its available.

I use small ones (0.5 x 2 inch) to write down tasks. Indeed, these small ones will play a significant role in my own productivity system, which I'm still developing. The 1x2 inch post-its are great for asking short questions and making removable annotations on documents. The 2x2 and 2x3 inch posts are good for longer notes; for instance, when I circulate a document among colleagues such that each recipient has to do something specific to the document.

My best advice: get yourself a "variety pack" of different sized post-its and experiment. But do it slowly. When you have an idea of what you could do with them, try just that one idea for a while and see how it works for you. If you get another idea for how to use them - write it down on a post-it (!) and set it aside till you've got time to pay attention to trying it and evaluating it properly.

I'll try to keep a list of interesting web resources on using post-its on the On Paper page of this blog.

This is too much for me...

2014-04-17T20:36:00.001-04:00

...but it might be just right for you.

I recently came across a very detailed post by Amanda, at Paper Pens Ink, that carefully describes her planning system.

I can appreciate it, but I wouldn't use it. I wouldn't use it because I couldn't possibly keep such a complex system working for long. That doesn't make it a bad system; that just makes it the wrong system for me.

Of course, I recognize that (to the substantial relief of most people) not everyone is like me. So, I'm mentioning it here, because it might be good for you. If you're looking for a far-reaching, meticulously crafted planning system that stretches from dreams and goals all the way down to "next actions," then you should seriously consider Amanda's system.

A distinctive type of paper notebook

2014-02-11T20:11:00.001-05:00

So many manufacturers of paper notebooks just really make books. The paper will vary, the type of lines will vary, the covers will vary - some give you perks like pre-numbered pages.... But they're still just books. Books are all or nothing. You write in them till they're finished and there's absolutely no chance of "rearranging" pages. You could use a ring binder (like a Filofax) but you don't like rings. What do you do?

Well, perhaps you should consider an elastic-bound notebook.

I recently came across not one but three different manufacturers of an interesting style of notebook that may just be right for you if you want more flexibility than, say, a Moleskine, but you don't want to be encumbered by metal ring mechanisms.

As shown in the image above (of an X17 notebook), this type of notebook lets one bundle together a number of thinner books, each for whatever purpose you wish. Since, for instance, your journal booklet is not the same as your agenda booklet, it's easy to swap out a full journal for a new blank one and yet keep your agenda as is.

X17 is a German company. It's offers a number of cover styles and types for inner booklets supporting various styles of agendas, organizers, and notebooks. Each booklet is simply slid under one of several elastics that wrap around the spine. The elastics hold the booklets in place. Notches at the top and bottom of the spine keep the elastics properly aligned. Another elastic, tied at the spine, wraps around the cover to hold it closed. There may be a risk that the elastics on the outside of the spine might catch on other objects.
X47 is the luxury model of the X17. These have a system of metal hooks to hold the booklets in place and seem to be made of high quality leather. They're quite pricey.
Whitebook is a Swiss company selling handmade leather-covered elastic bound agendas, organizers, and notebooks. They use elastics, like the X17s, but the elastics are attached inside the leather cover; not being exposed, they shouldn't catch on anything. Whitebooks can also house various types of tablet computers. These too are quite pricey.

They all come in a variety of sizes.

I haven't tried any of them, but I'm thinking of trying a small X17.

If anyone has tried these notebooks, or have any thoughts on them, feel free to leave a comment.

Paper beats laptop for learning

2014-02-02T16:11:00.001-05:00

Here's an interesting bit of research: psychologists have found evidence that taking notes on paper improves learning and retention compared to taking notes on laptops.

The results of the experiments that led the researchers to this conclusion are soon to be published, but the tl;dr version is this: regardless of whether it's short term learning or long term retention (for, say, final exams), and even regardless of whether the students were told about the effect and how to counteract it, students who took notes by computer generally performed worse than those who took notes on paper.

According to the research, the difference between paper and laptop is that note-taking on paper requires a greater degree of cognitive engagement. You have to make an effort to take notes on paper, think through what you want to write, how to write it, and how to annotate it for later study - an effort that is not required when using a computer.

While I would expect this research needs to be validated by other, future experiments, I see this as supporting something most teachers already know from experience: you can't learn if you don't really invest in the whole process - there are no shortcuts.

Toodledo trick: rolling tasks

2014-01-30T10:20:00.000-05:00

Toodledo can sort your tasks in multiple, customizable ways. I've found a neat "trick" that let's me generate a rolling list of tasks based on sorting tasks by their modification date.

I have a bunch of tasks that:

are undated, and
are not especially urgent, but should be done sooner than later, and
may not be possibly completed in one sitting.

These are tasks that I want to poke at fairly regularly, but that are less important than other (say, dated) tasks. The problem is finding a way to automagically rearrange them (so I have less meta-level task management to do) and still help ensure I don't neglect any of them for too long.

Toodledo can sort a task list in multiple ways. One way is by modification date; if any field in a task is changed, the modification date is updated. Whenever I work on one of those "better sooner than later" tasks, I update the Note field with a short status update. This resets the modification date of the task (and also leaves me a hint of how far I'd gotten for the next time I work on the task).

Then I sort those tasks by reverse modification date. This puts the task I most recently worked on at the end of the list. More importantly, the tasks at the top of the list are the ones I haven't worked on for the longest time - which are the tasks I really should work on again as soon as I can.

So now, once I've gotten everything else out of the way (e.g. tasks due today, urgent/unavoidable things, etc), I work on one of the first tasks in that "better sooner than later" list. If I complete it, I check it off and it's gone forever. If I don't finish it, I update the Note field to remind myself for next time how far I'd gotten and refresh the list. That item will move to the end of the list.

If you're a fan of autofocus-style productivity systems, this trick pretty much lets you implement autofocus in Toodledo. If you're like me, and want more structure in your system without going full-GTD, then you can add whatever structural elements you like from Toodledo and still have that rolling list available.

Personally, I sort my Toodledo Hotlist using all three sorting parameters (Toodledo lets you choose up to three nested types of sorting). My first sort is by Toodledo's "Importance" measure, which is a neat single metric that includes due date, priority, etc. The second level sorts tasks that all have the same Importance as calculated by Toodledo; that's where I reverse-sort by modification date. The third sort will sort tasks that have both the same Importance and the same modification date. My third sort is by priority.

Do you sort your Toodledo tasks differently? If you do, leave a comment and share your insights.

I'm calling bullshit on this technique to "beat procrastination"

2013-12-29T16:55:00.000-05:00

Lifehack.org is a productivity website. It's supposed to help people get their lives in order and live more happily. Unfortunately, it - and virtually every other productivity website I know of - has pretty low "quality assurance." That is, some material available at Lifehack is good, some of it is rather terrible, and there's precious little way to tell the difference.

Case in point: It's no good getting furious if you get stuck, by Ally Leung. It's hook is entirely unrelated to the meat of the piece, and the meat itself is pretty rancid.

The piece starts with a quote by Stephen Hawking about knowing when to pause a task on which you're not making progress. Leung then magically equates the word "stuck" in the Hawking quote with procrastination, the bubonic plague of productivity wonks - or, as Laura Leigh Clarke calls it, "the silent killer of dreams."

1. The word "stuck" can be associated with procrastination, but needn't be always. If you ponder Hawking's quote for more than a few seconds, you'll realize he's not at all talking about procrastination.

Who is Laura Leigh Clarke, you ask? That's the author of the piece that contains the (alleged) answer to the question of procrastination posed by Leung, a piece linked at the bottom of Leung's own piece.

2. Lifehack gets you to visit two of their pages for the price of one promise of useful information. This is a pretty blatant attempt to superficially "drive web traffic" without offering anything substantive in return.

Clarke's piece is summarized by this one paragraph: "The point is, there are some things we each love to do, that are within our natural flow, and there are things that make us feel stuck. The key to getting back into flow and overcoming the stuck-ness is simply a case of spending a greater proportion of your day on tasks that are within your flow. The degree to which you can do this, is the degree to which you will THRIVE."

Another way of saying this is: do what you want, not what you have to do.

And that is just plain wrong. We don't live in a Star Trek universe where everyone can do whatever they want. To get to do what you want, you will have to do things that you don't want to do. Want to play guitar well? Well, you'll have to practice, and practice, and practice till your fingers bleed. Wanna be a heart surgeon? You'll have to do go through years and years of training doing things that you'll think are stupid and absurd.

And even if you can get to do what you really want to do, there will be collateral indignities waiting for you at every turn. I love to teach, but the administrivia surrounding it very nearly suck the fun and value out of it entirely. I love being able to read the paper in bed with my wife, but to do that means working hard on things I don't really believe in - not because I've chosen to do those ugly things, but because they are quite literally inevitable.

See, that's not what the Hawking quote was on about at all.

Hawking encapsulated two important ideas in that quote.

First, actively trying to solve a problem isn't the only way to do it. There is significant scientific literature indicating that once a problem is firmly nested in your wetware, it will keep running even if you're not consciously thinking about it. Keith Sawyer, for instance, has demonstrated quite clearly (in my opinion, at least) that those magical, so-called "moments of inspiration" that we all have from time to time are really just the unconscious part of your mind sending a solution to the conscious part of your mind. You think it's a revelatory moment only because you weren't conscious of all the work your brain was doing.

It is important, however, to study the problem very intensely before setting it aside from your consciousness. In all documented cases of this sort of revelatory cognition having happened, it was preceded by intense study.

Second, Hawking recognizes that nothing is so important that it is worth one's active attention, to the exclusion of all else, for a protracted length of time. Just because he set aside the question of information loss and black holes for 29 years does not mean he just sat around with his thumb up his ass. He got all kinds of other incredible work done.

3. This relates in no way whatsoever to procrastination.

The question isn't even really about procrastination, it's about getting everything done and not just the stuff you want to do.

I've got my own way of doing that, but I haven't the time right now to write it up. Once I do, I'll post it here.

Journaling is good for you

2013-08-18T14:05:00.001-04:00

Here's a post at BBC (16 August 2013) advising us that journaling is good for our health, but warns against "online" journaling.

Well, Duh!

I've long advised my students to get their ideas out of their heads and onto paper. And not just to scratch out a few words intended to jar one's memory later, but really take the time to write out as precisely as possible what the idea is, and to come back often to revisit and revise it.

There's a good reason for this: once a thought has been externalized, it is in a way part of the objective world of reality rather than only part of the subjective world of our minds. Entirely subjective things are notoriously difficult to analyze, learn from, improve, etc. But if you've got it lying there in front of you, detached from whatever happens to be going on in your mind at that moment, then you can bring to bear the full arsenal of your brain's analytic capabilities.

The BBC article basically says that we can do that with our own emotions too. When we journal about what happened to us and how we feel about it, we are preserving (albeit not particularly well, of course) our psychological and emotional state at the time. There are two benefits, one immediate and one long-term.

The immediate benefit is that the act of expressing something seems intimately connected to understanding it. Finding the right words to properly represent our emotions goes a long way to explaining to our own brains what we're actually thinking and feeling. And your brain can use that to better and more fully integrate the described experience into your psyche.

In the longer term, you can learn a lot about yourself by re-reading your journal and reading what you thought about long-ago, barely-remembered experiences. Of course, this benefit requires more discipline than many people have these days - you have to be diligent both about carefully documenting your life and making the time to go back and re-read attentively.

There's one proviso here: there is, as far as I can tell, both no benefit and many dangers to journaling "socially" - via the dreaded Facebook or some such. As the fictional-but-nevertheless-wise Gregory House said: "Everybody lies." And you lie to yourself too. However, it is far more difficult to be honest to others than it is to yourself. You ought to journal for your benefit alone, and not to seek advice or to titillate others, or to gain social standing. You journal to understand yourself; that requires honesty; and honesty comes easiest in privacy.

There is also a danger - one that I think has been blown out of proportion, but that truly exists nonetheless - that if you "share" your journal, you will open yourself up to unnecessary and generally harmful criticism by people who don't really know anything about.

Obviously, this does not mean you can't use journaling software; of course you can. I tend to use Evernote for that (but I also sometimes use pen and paper). It's not about the tools you use, it's about the audience. The proper audience for your personal journal is only you.

So, get in there and write!

Updates on the companion site: tips & tricks

2013-08-15T05:16:00.002-04:00

I have unfortunately neglected the companion website to this blog, for reasons not pertinent here. However, I have started to update that site and wanted to let you know.

There's all kinds of lists out there on the Web on how to be productive, creative, innovative,.... I noticed that many of them have very significant overlap. That, for me, is a design problem: Why are there so many lists? Why hasn't anyone yet thought to integrate all these lists together into a "best hits" list?

I've found that some items on some lists are better than others on other lists, but that the biggest problem is that there no "encyclopaedic" resource trying to stitch them all together into one authoritative reference on tips and tricks.

Well, I don't know why this is, but I'm started to address this perceived shortcoming by starting a list of my own.

Actually, I expect there to be a couple of lists, because I think there's at least a couple of areas covered by the lists I've seen that don't overlap much. Being productive, for instance, isn't the same as being creative.

At the moment, there's just one list, and it integrates only two sources (fully referenced, of course) on innovation/creativity. But that's just because the first two links I yanked from my "list of useful links I haven't got time to deal with yet" were both on innovation.

I must have over 50 such links hiding in "storage," and I keep finding more all the time. So these lists will grow and become more refined with time.

The first list is on Being Innovative, and you can find it at: https://sites.google.com/site/dofastandwell/project-definition/spreading-ideas.

Ring-binding wins my heart

2013-06-29T21:34:00.001-04:00

I think it's official: after years of vacillation and procrastination, I've finally committed to ring-bound notebooks as my preferred way to stay organized.

I have for years now irregularly switched back and forth between ring-bound notebooks (mostly those of Filofax and Succes) and hard-bound notebooks (mostly Circa, Moleskine, and Leuchtturm1917), never quite being able to decide once and for all which best suits my needs.

Most recently, I forced myself to use, for the better part of a year, hard-bound books both for the small, in-my-pocket, just-in-case kind of book as well as the larger, take-to-meeting and think-deep-thoughts kind of book. (In case you want to know, I was using a pocket sized Leuchtturm1917 softcover, and an A5-ish Legami - kind of an Italian Moleskine knock-off). By doing this, I was able to quite crisply decide what the most important and unavoidable requirements are, for me, in a good book.

This is what I've come up with:

I want to be able to reorganize the pages. That is, I like to group pages by topic. Personally, I find it easier to search for information later. This gets rid of the need to "tag" pages, and track continuation pages, etc.
I keep both temporary notes - which will quickly become useless - and long term, journal-like notes. That means that some pages will be full of crap, and others of useful stuff. A hard-bound book mixes those two up. Pages for scratch notes are "wasted" in that I can't use them for more significant stuff. In a ring-bound book, on the other hand, I can just replace spent scratch note pages with fresh new pages as needed.

These are my two single more important requirements. Everything else is just icing on the cake if not total fluff. Once I realized that, I also realized I really had no choice but to use ring-bound books.

And while I regret having to give up the... pleasure of using a hard-bound book (a pleasure, I note, that I cannot explain at all except to say that I get a sense of importance or significance form a hard-bound book that I find lacking in ring-bound books), I have always been compelled by evidence. And the evidence tells me that without question, ring-bound books are right for me.

So now I use a very slender Omega binder (I bought it "vintage" on eBay, and I cannot find others like it). Its rings are small (about 13mm) and its just large enough to accommodate Senior sized Succes sheets. I'll be replacing the larger Legami hard-bound book with an A5-sized binder that I also got from eBay and appears to be from China. I'll blog about that one later.

For now I'll leave you with this boring image of my new Omega binder.

Do you really need that deadline?

2013-01-26T16:30:00.000-05:00

Most task management apps with any meat on them will let you have both dated and undated tasks. In those cases, it can be a temptation to start adding deadlines to every task - even those that don't really have deadlines. I suggest that this is a temptation you ought to resist.

Pocket Informant, Todo, Toodledo, Google Tasks,.... These are just some of the major task management apps that let you have both dated and undated tasks. This makes a lot of sense, because knowing due dates are an important part of deciding what to do next. People will often start with whatever needs to be done that day, and then, time permitting, worry about other tasks.

But there is a temptation - I feel it myself - to assign due dates to tasks that don't really have them. That is, one may decide to assign a due date to a task not because it's actually due on some date, but because one merely wishes to be able to do it by then. In combination with start dates or horizons, the temptation becomes even greater.

For instance, I need to call my aunt in Italy. There's really no hard deadline for that, but I would like to get it done "sometime this week." So I set it as a task with a start date of Monday and a due date of the following Sunday.

While that may seem perfectly reasonable, it can create a trap (which even I have fallen into - more than once). The trap is this: as you assign due dates to more and more tasks that don't really have them, it becomes less and less likely that you will ever get to your undated tasks; and that can easily lead you to adding due dates to more and more of your otherwise undated tasks, just to increase the odds that you'll actually do them. You end up, in the logical extreme, having due dates on all your tasks, and not knowing which due dates are real and which are only your preferences. And that rather defeats the purpose of having due dates at all, doesn't it?

This also highlights the difference between a task's due date and its significance. Some tasks just have to get done, even though they don't have a proper due date - getting one's annual physical examination, for instance. Other tasks may have a hard due date, but the task itself isn't so significant - for instance, buying a new suit while a sale is on at your favorite clothing store.

This leads me to my preferred solution: I use due dates only for things that actually have due dates, and I use priorities - or whatever other mechanism afforded by the tool I'm using - to rank significance. It would be nice if I could separately rate the amount of work required to complete a task (something I've written about before), but it seems that that's just not in the cards for now.

Lamy restores my faith in ballpoint ink

2012-07-20T22:17:00.001-04:00

I love fountain pens for writing reflectively. But when I'm working, I often wince at the thought of "wasting" a fountain pen on just scratching out some notes or tasks or phone messages or whatever. On the other hand, I've never found a pen - not even the ubiquitous Pilot G2 - that satisfied my note-taking needs. All that has changed, though, thanks to Rotring and, especially, Lamy.

One of the things that had always annoyed me about my work journal - in which I keep meeting notes, various tasks, my phone log, etc. - was that it was all in one colour. I would often trawl the web looking for interesting hacks for my notebook, and I would regularly see sample pages written on with inks of multiple colours. It annoyed me. I could really use different colours, but there's no way I was going to start carrying a collection of differently inked pens.

Also, I didn't like how faint the colour from most ballpoints was compared to the sharp darkness of roller-balls or fountain pens. But using one of my beloved fountain pens seemed wasteful, as I mentioned. And rollerballs only ever seem to work well for a dozen pages or so before they start to skip. (I think it's that I have oily skin and the oil gets on the paper and the ink doesn't take to it.)

But then, one day, while poking around on eBay, I found this: a discontinued Rotring Visumatic. The interesting part was that the seller wrote that he'd put in four new Lamy cartridges because, he insisted in the product's description, Lamy cartridges were the best.

I've got plenty of Lamy pens - none of them ballpoints; so I didn't really know if he was right.

But here was a sturdy, multicolour pen that might just let me have my cake and eat it too. So I bought it.

That was one of the best purchases I've ever made. The pen is well-weighted and balanced, quite solid, and surprisingly thin. It has this amazing mechanism for selecting a colour. You hold the pen horizontally, and click it. Whatever one of the four colour tabs near the top of the pen is facing up, that's the colour of the cartridge that comes out. Want a different colour? Click the pen closed. Rotate it till the right colour is facing up, and click it again. I tell you it's hours of fun for the whole family!

The best part, though, is the ink itself. I've never used a ballpoint ink that was as good as the Lamy ink. Not too slippery, but not requiring much force to push either. No scratching on the paper. The line of ink is constant and blob-free. Nice high contrast for all four colours.

I swear, I'll never use another ballpoint ink again.

Now, these Rotring pens are rather rare. I've never seen one before - or since - on eBay. But there are many four-colour Rotrings on eBay, and Lamy still makes four-colour pens, so it's quite possible to find one that will work well for you.

But whatever you do, and no matter how many colours you use, use the Lamy ballpoint ink!

(In a future post, I'll write about how I use those colours in my work journal.)

Hipster "notebook" - PocketMod

2012-06-22T21:47:00.000-04:00

PocketMod is a very cool little trick, whereby you can turn a single sheet of paper into a small, multipage notebook with a few careful folds and one cut of your scissors. And the PocketMod, the website, makes it even easier to design your own little notebook.

The site offers a wide variety of page templates which you can drag to any one of the 8 pages of an assembled PocketMod notebook, including calendars, writing guides, organizers, and many others. Design your PocketMod in your browser, choose the paper size (8.5x11 by default) and send it to your printer.

If you're not familiar with how to fold a PocketMod, there's even video instructions available. People have even used PocketMod to create little booklets for specific purposes, like this retro self-help notebook.

Whether you find it useful or not, you have to admit that PocketMod is a very clever design.

Google helps researchers with new tools

2012-06-01T00:24:00.002-04:00

Google has lately added new research functionality to both Google Docs and Google Scholar. YAY Google!

In Google Docs, you there's a new Research Tool. It will appear as a right sidebar, in which you can search - without leaving Google Docs - for web resources, publications (via Scholar), images, videos, etc.

What's really, really cool is that you can then select a search result and, at a click of your mouse, embed the citation into the Google Doc either within the text or as a footnote. And you can choose whether the citation will be in APA, MLA, or Chicago format!

It's not powerful enough (yet) for professional researchers, but it's a godsend for high-school students writing essays, for journalists, and for some university work. It would be nice if it could produce a conventional "References" section at the end of the document - like most scientists and engineers like it - and it would be even better if it talked to zotero, mendeley, and other citation management tools.

But even in its relatively simple form, it's still a fantastic step forward for Google Docs.

In Google Scholar, you can now build a "My Citations" profile page, that will hunt down all your publications, show you how often they've been cited, and calculate various factors that are supposed to indicate how your publications rank compared to the rest of your research community. (Mine is publicly viewable here.) And you can get citations to export from Google Scholar directly to bibtex and a bunch of other citation management systems (but not to zotero or mendelay - sniff, sniff).

It's wonderful to see Google provide better support for researchers.

Putting on your pants two legs at a time

2012-06-01T00:09:00.001-04:00

Sometimes, you don't even notice you had a problem till you see the solution. Thereafter, you can't understand how you could have ever been so blind.

If you wear boxer shorts, you may have had some difficulty in keeping them from bunching up when you pull up your trousers. It wasn't a problem back in the 1940's because trousers were far roomier than they are these days.

And, if you're like me and getting on in years, your flexibility will start to suffer, and getting one's shorts to un-bunch when one is of a certain age can be a bit of a challenge.

Well, here's the solution. It's a brilliant designerly way to look at the problem: stuff the boxers into your trousers first. Without your legs in the way, it's easy to line everything up. Then you just pull them both on at once. Presto! No bunching of the shorts!

Retro self-improvement app may just help form good habits

2012-05-28T23:19:00.003-04:00

A few days ago, DESIGNTAXI published an interesting little post, about a "hipster app" - aka a sheet of paper with writing on it - that purports to help improve yourself in just 30 days.

Now before your Woo-meter goes into the red, please consider this thing just for a few minutes.

It's a small booklet that you can print onto a single page and fold yourself using the pocket mod folding technique. And it's free, here.

What this thing lets you do is try to develop a positive habit. Too many people think that all habits are bad. Well, if you're Charles Manson, or Jason Bourne, they probably are (but for different reasons). For the rest of us, habits can be very useful things. You want to make a habit of brushing your teeth. You want to make a habit of checking your blind spot when you're driving. Why? Because they are (a) good things that (b) you don't really need to think a lot about to do. By forming good habits, you will naturally tend to take care of yourself better, work better, play better - all without the cognitive load of having to consciously manage those tasks.

We tend to form bad habits without really knowing we're doing it. That means we don't really know how to form a habit - it just happens. So, when you want to form a good habit... What do you do?

That's where the "Hipster Habit App" comes in. It's easy to use - ridiculously easy to carry around with you - and it provides a template for you to form pretty much any habit you want.

I haven't tried it myself, but I must admit it looks good. It's not too saccharine, not too geeky, and not too hard. Of course you can't change yourself - you are who you are - but you can adapt. You can tweak yourself - hack yourself, if you prefer - without worrying about changing your base code. You can't change it anyways, so get over it. The Hipster Habit App is an interesting, low-overhead way to do that. It seems based on sound psychology (as far as I can tell), so except for the usual Your Mileage Will Vary disclaimer, I think this could actually work.