Do Fast and Well

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.

Moleskine "hacks" highlight a shortcoming of bound notebooks

2012-04-16T23:31:00.000-04:00

While I may be a techno-geek, and proud of it, there's still something both seductive and beneficial about writing the old-fashioned way, with pen on paper. And as far as that goes, the gold standard in notebooks is the venerable Moleskine. Even more impressive, I think, than the notebooks themselves is the gargantuan community of Moleskine hackers; people who tweak, twist, cut, add to, remove from, and reinvent their notebooks for their own purposes. But I think many Moleskine hacks actually underscore an intrinsic shortcoming of the bound notebook.

(Full disclosure: while I have used my fair share of Moleskine notebooks, and have several new ones waiting in the wings, I find myself these days being more drawn to Leuchtturm1917 notebooks. This notwithstanding, this post applies equally well to all notebooks.)

A whole gaggle of Moleskine hacks can be found on Flickr and via Google. If you take the time to look through them and sort through the duplicates and variations-on-a-theme, you'll start to see some trends.

Paginating these notebooks appears quite de rigeur. (I note one reason I currently prefer Leuchtturm1917 is that they're pre-paginated and even have an index page at the front that you can use to create a table of contents.)
Forward and backward referencing is very common. Since you can't rearrange pages in a bound book, many people need a way to relate pages that may be, in the book, quite far from one another topologically, maybe even in different books. This is often done by numbering both the book and the page and then using double-number scheme like 3.45 to indicate page 45 in book 3.
Sectioning. Many Moleskine hacks involve adding tabs, post-its, or some other, usually coloured, marker to indicate the start of a section of a notebook. This is particularly popular among those who use their notebooks to implement GTD or a related method. This can cause people some grief as the notebooks, not having been designed for tabs, end up looking a bit messy; the tabs stick out past the cover and can become worn and frayed. Some clever people have found ways of actually cutting the pages themselves - laborious as that is to do well - to create sections without having bits and pieces sticking out beyond the notebook's cover. I note that Moleskine does produce one book that has cut-in tabs, the Info Book, but it only comes with lined pages. And for those of us who prefer quad or blank pages, the lines are a royal pain.
Post-its for temporary notes. I love post-its; they're infinitely flexible. And there's something so significant and weighty about Moleskine notebooks that one is often loathe to just use them as scratch pads. So many users add post-its to their Moleskine, for the sake of being able to quickly scribble things down, knowing that the post-its can be removed and recycled once that info has outlived its usefulness. This leaves the notebook's pages clean for more "important" things.
The Moleskine as wallet. While Moleskines and other high-end notebooks invariably come with a pocket inside the back cover for storing receipts, cards, etc., many users augment their notebooks with a variety of extra pockets - some literally turn their pocket-sized notebooks into full-blown wallets.
Pen loops. Many notebook users want to be sure that they always have a good pen near their notebook. The easiest way to do this is to have a loop on the notebook for holding one. However, Moleskines don't have pen loops. I personally buy adhesive pen loops from Leuchtturm1917; they'll work on anything. Others use duct tape, elastic cloth, rubber bands, and fabrics to create pen loops.

There's plenty of other popular hacks for bound notebooks, but these are the ones I've noticed most often.

Here's my observation: most if not all of these hacks are already handled by another type of notebook - a ringed binder - and it can be done quicker and with less effort than any of these hacks.

Pagination can be done in a binder just as easily as in a bound notebook, but it's not really necessary. The principal reason for paginating things is to be able to refer to information items that's cognitively close but topologically far. With a binder, you can rearrange the pages so that topological distance is not an issue - thus, no need for pagination.

A similar argument can be made for forward and backward referencing.

Sectioning is rarely an issue with a binder because the binders are usually large enough to accommodate tabbed dividers. And since you can add paper to any section in a binder, you no longer have the problem of filling one section of a bound book but leaving other sections only partly filled - and therefore partly wasted.

Post-its work just as well in a binder as in a bound notebook, but aren't as necessary. Again, since a binder can be refilled at whim, it's not such a problem to use it for scratch notes. Indeed, I have two kinds of paper in my binder: some good paper for important notes, and some cheap paper for scratch notes. When I'm done with the scratch paper, I just tear it out of the binder and toss it into the blue bin.

Binders often come with an assortment of pockets in them. My "senior" size Succes binder is a little larger and thicker than a pocket Moleskine, but has six pockets for business and credit cards, and two larger pockets for money or receipts. And you can by extra card pockets too. So binders are much closer to being usable wallets than are bound notebooks.

Finally, most ring binders come with pen loops.

So, to sum up: the most popular Moleskine hacks appear to address shortcomings that they do not share with ringed binders. It would seem that users of bound notebooks are just trying to reinvent the binder, just without the rings.

The only serious and quantifiable measure in which bound notebooks like Moleskines beat binders is in robustness. A Moleskine can stand far more abuse than a binder.

The other way in which bound notebooks beat binders is only qualitative, but still matters: prestige. There's something special about a good bound notebook, like a Moleskine or a Leuchtturm1917, that many people just don't "feel" about binders. In many ways, that's just as important - if you really want to use something, you'll use it better and more often than if you have to force yourself.

In the end, of course, all these books are just tools. They're means to an end. Whichever one gets you there best is the one you should use.

But still, if you're a big Moleskine hacker, you might want to ask yourself: are you a closet binder-user?

"Clear" is great, as far as it goes

2012-02-21T18:33:00.001-05:00

A new "todo app" called Clear, by RealMacSoftware, has hit the App Store, to much more fanfare than usual. Given it's novelty, and it's price - $0.99 CAD for a limited time - I couldn't help but try it out. While it's UI is bloody brilliant, it's no where near enough for a "power user." Great UI, but while it's long on style, it's short on functionality.

You can see all kinds of images and videos of Clear in action at its website. This one doesn't really do it justice, but still it's better than nothing.

Clear's magic is in its UI, which is a brilliant mix of subtle animation and the simplest gestures you can possibly imagine. Swipe right to complete a task; swipe left to delete it.

Right there, I see a problem. What are the odds that someone will accidentally swipe left instead of right? The odds increase dramatically because there is no confirmation for deletion (and Murphy's Law now kick in).

Pinching the list collapses it - and brings you "up" a level to the dashboard (of sorts): your list of todo lists. Pinch again and Clear pops you up to the main menu.

Pulling down a list creates a new item. Same with spreading (opposite of pinching) two items in a list. Touch-hold an item and you can move it around in the list. The colours auto-adjust, on the premise that items further up the list are of a higher priority.

There's a few other features of the UI, but you get the picture. It's very clever, and I found it insanely easy to use. Fonts are large enough to read easily, and no tappable item is too small for one's fingers.

But.

All this app does is manage simple lists. It does not handle due dates, repeating tasks, priorities, contexts, locations, tags, or any other advanced feature. And it doesn't sync with anything.

Granted these are early days - Clear is only at version 1.0.1 - but there's just so much functionality that's missing, that Clear is clearly not a power user's choice.

I have also added Clear to my giant chart of iPhone task managers.

De-cluttering is de-lightful

2012-01-18T20:42:00.000-05:00

I read this post at lifehacker, and it seemed to fit so closely with my way of doing it, I thought it was worth sharing. The question is keeping one's home free of clutter. It can be hard to do, but that's mostly because we keep putting it off.

The lifehacker post suggests a list of typical things one might want to get rid of in order to de-clutter, but the list is rather generic (and thus applies to only few people). Also, the article doesn't talk much about how to go about it. These are two things I'd like to cover here.

First: the list of things to toss.

I find that my own personal list doesn't line up well with the list in the lifehacker article. But that's cuz I'm weird. Things I toss include: old paperwork; old textbooks; old tests, exams, and other student work; old CDs with old software on them; stuff in my "someday" pile that I know is now "never."

You may find the list of things you tend to de-clutter is also different from both mine and the one in the article. So how exactly do you make your list? Here's a simple meta-list that you can use to review and identify things - and because it's meta, it should work for nearly everyone. You should get rid of:

anything you haven't used in a year;
anything that's broken;
any document older than 10 years; and
extras anything that you have more than one of.

Of course, you may find there's some things really want to keep in spite of these rules - memorabilia, for instance; even if you don't use it, and if it's broken, and you have another one that works, I doubt you'd want to throw out your grandfather's gold pocket-watch.

These things, that violate the rules, need to be dealt with somehow. If you leave them scattered about, you'll likely never deal with them. Gather them all up and put them in boxes. Label the boxes with something obvious, and don't put them in storage. Leave them somewhere not really underfoot, but also not somewhere you'll forget about. Keep them under your nose; make them an annoyance. As more and more boxes accumulate, you'll get so frustrated that you'll set aside a Sunday afternoon and sort it all out.

Second: how to do it.

Here's what I do: once a week, I spend 15 minutes wandering around the house looking for stuff to toss. It might just be a magazine. Or it might be a chest of drawers. If I can't deal with it then and there (like the chest of drawers), I add it to a list of stuff to do the next free weekend I have. I actually book it into my agenda because, for me, that lends a certain pressure to completing the task. It also prevents me from overbooking my Sunday afternoons.

Sometimes, I do my 15 minute check just before bed; other times, while I'm having my morning coffee. Sometimes, but rarely, I'll do it during a few successive commercial breaks during some TV program I'm watching. The important thing is to book the 15 minutes to do this, and treat it like the important task it is. Get it done the day you that you've booked it for. This will help you form the good habit of not putting things off.

You might not notice a big change at first, but if you keep this up - a wee bit at a time - you'll start to notice a real difference in the amount of flotsam and jetsam you've got lying around. And what's more, you'll be teaching yourself a habit that will prevent the junk from ever accumulating again.

Weave is threadbare

2012-01-17T06:05:00.000-05:00

Weave, by Intuit.com, is an interesting task manager app. It's visual design is nearly perfect, which is a great hook to make you want to try it. It's free, so it won't hurt. But there's some things about it that just don't work for me.

The app will not function without you registering at the Weave web service. While I have no reason to think anything nefarious is going on there, Weave is the only task app I know of that requires you to register. What are it's developers doing with that information? I don't know.

Once you've registered, you're confronted with some tutorials on Weave's use. You can't skip the tutorials. This is, to me, the developers saying "You're an idiot and you can't be trusted to use this app without proper training."

Finally, once you've set everything up, the app seems to sync every time you start it. It syncs in the foreground, thereby locking the app for a good five seconds or more. Every time you start it. This can really slow a user down if all they want is to fire off a quick little reminder.

As I mentioned, there's some great aspects to Weave - you can see them all by going to my comparison of iPhone task managers. But there's enough hangups with Weave that I really cannot recommend it.

Tagging links: a hint

2011-12-27T20:46:00.001-05:00

One of the more popular classes of productivity app is the social bookmarking app. The principle behind sites like delicious, diigo, Google bookmarks, etc. is that a group of people will tend to reuse the same (or similar) bookmarks for similar items thus leadings, eventually, to a self-organizing collection of links.

Whether the hypothesis is a good one is, for my purposes here, irrelevant. (Personally, I think it is false because too many people seem unable to identify key and rather obvious tags associated with relatively obvious web resources. But that's another story.) These sites are also very useful for individuals simply trying to keep track of web resources for themselves. I used to have a home-made system that treated keywords and tags as the same, which seemed to lower the number of tags one actually needed. (I've not kept that system up just because I haven't time to nurse the code.) Still, I find that existent systems are good enough - you probably will too.

But the question remains, how does one use tags in a sensible way? This is a broad question that I don't really want to get into because it requires one to eventually call forth the cumulative knowledge of the library sciences with respect to categorizing resources. And I know just enough to know that I don't know enough about that to comment intelligently.

There is one small "trick," though, that I've developed over the years, and that seems to work quite well for me. It is this trick I'd like to share.

The trick involves trading off two goals: minimizing the number of tags one must remember and apply to a given resource; and capturing sufficient meta-data to be able to efficiently search for resources later. I'll show the trick with and example.

Let's say you want to tag a resource as relating to decision making. Depending on which site you use the syntax will vary, but most of the good sites allow multi-tag words or some approximation thereof. I'll use double-quote to denote a multi-word tag, and I'll italicize tags to set them off from surrounding text.

There's three general techniques by which you can tag that resource.

decisionmaking - jam multi-word tags into a single word, which has the merit of reducing the extra characters (underscores, spaces, quotes, etc.), but hurts readability. And what about makingdecisions? Does that count?
decision-making or decision_making or "decision making" - You can separate words with special characters. Some systems let you use hyphens; others support the use of double quotes to group multi-word tags. I like hyphens because I don't have to hit the shift key to get one. Other systems only allow underscores to join multi-word tags. I find that annoying, but the underscore is a time-honoured mechanism for forming multi-word variable names in many computer languages - and since many of these systems started as some programmer's pet project…. Well, you know.
Finally, some systems, like diigo, separate all tags with commas and allow spaces in tags. This is perhaps the best, most natural, and efficient way of specifying multi-word tags. That's one of the reasons why I have for a long time now used diigo.
decision and making - The last technique is perhaps a little counter-intuitive, but this is in fact my trick: treat each word in a multi-word tag as a separate tag.

Why on earth would you treat a multi-word tag as a whole bunch of tags? Doesn't that break the semantics of the single, multi-word tag?

Well, yes it does, on the surface. But I think that's a result of limiting your thinking to just what tags are most appropriate in some objective way. Rather, I think we need to think of how you (and possibly others) might search for resources based on those tags.

So, what simpler way is there to search for something than just typing all the tags as separate words? And what is most likely to catch related resources that might also interest you? I think it's the single-word tag approach. It's also pretty efficient in the long run.

For example, if you search for decision in a collection tagged as I suggest, you'll find all the resources tagged with that term, including those tagged with decision and making. On the other hand, if you had treated decision making as a single tag, your search for decision wouldn't find them. If you don't know that decision making is a single tag, then you might not find anything useful.

Many systems will show you a list of tags that occur with the tag for which you're searching. So a search for decision will show, among other related tags, making. Those systems will also show you other related tags, some of which may trigger new ideas.

This means that what you're really doing is constructing an implicit taxonomy of terms, where, in this case, decision is the most general term, and decision making is an item under the taxonomic tree for decision. And it all happens naturally without any effort on your part.

So, as far as I can tell, treating multi-word tags as lists of single word tags is one of the easiest ways to enter tags, one of the most natural ways to search tags, and self-constructs a taxonomy of meta-data along the way.

Win-win-win, right?

Updated iPhone Task Manager Chart

2011-07-03T06:36:00.000-04:00

I maintain a comparison chart of iPhone task management apps. It's not very big yet, but I'm working on it.

I've updated the ratings of all apps currently in the chart.

I've also changed the presentation. I've also colour-coded the values in the chart, so its easier to get an overall sense how the apps compare. Red is "bad," yellow is "medium," and green is "good." This is, of course, all based on my analysis. Your milage may vary.

I note with interest that Taska seems to be the best, except for the bugs that seem to keep messing it up. Too bad there hasn't been any activity on that app since Sep 2010.

Zotero: maintaining online bibliographies

2011-06-13T13:15:00.000-04:00

Zotero is a bibliographic application developed at George Mason University, and it lets you manage, share, and export bibliographic information on the internet and locally on all your computers. It's not the only package of its kind, but I think it's the best of the lot.

Zotero started life, and still works as, a browser plugin for Firefox. It's very clever because it recognizes (most) web pages that contain citable documents, and lets you add that resource to your zotero library with one click. You can of course add items manually if you want, and if you have a PDF or other file that contains a citable work, you can load it into the zotero plugin with drag-and-drop, and then have zotero scan it and search the internet for the bibliographic information to match it. You can also tag any resource however you like, to make searching easier and faster.

You can create collections of resources and share them with other people. This is great for students who are working on team projects, and also for researchers and academics who want to share resources with their students and colleagues.

And of course, you can export selected items in formats consistent with a variety of document processing packages, so you can largely automate the construction of the bibliographies in your own publications.

The one big problem with zotero used to be that it only worked with Firefox. Many people had complained about this but its developers were adamant in not wanting to support different versions for different browsers. As a Google Chrome user, I really found it annoying to have to keep Firefox open just for the sake of zotero.

But then they came up with a novel solution: create a standalone version that doesn't require a browser, and just write tiny, little plugins for the browsers that talk to the standalone version. Granted, the standalone version is still in beta, but I've been using it regularly for quite some time and it seems to work just fine, almost all the time. Occasionally, it has difficulty accessing the zotero servers - but that is quite rare.

There's a lot of useful information about zotero on their website, and I would encourage you to consider it if you're looking for a web-enabled way to manage your bibliographic information.

A great list of lessons

2011-05-27T22:41:00.000-04:00

I know I took a shot at Leo Babauta last time, but it's important to remember that everyone makes mistakes. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe he is. Whatever. I can say that there's some things that he and I do agree on.

Leo compiled a great list of "life lessons" that I would encourage everyone to read and adopt as rules to live by. They distill in words far clearer than anything I've come up with, some ideas that I've had myself but couldn't quite verbalize.

I'd suggest only one modification, to Leo's first lesson about always being willing to apologize. I don't believe in apologies. An apology accepted is just permission to make the same mistake again. And an apology denied is, well, useless. Don't apologize. Instead, explain that you understand what you did wrong, and that you'll do your best to learn from the mistake.

I would note also that Leo's lessons seem to be good principles to achieve what I call balance. Balance is about finding that sweet-spot in life where you've got what you need, just enough to be good and happy, doing things that matter, with a minimum of stress.

I know what I'm going to do: build Leo's lessons into my own rulebook.

The myth of the myth of discipline

2011-05-23T20:49:00.000-04:00

Normally, I have high praise for Leo Babauta's blog Zen Habits. However, I came across his page on the myth of discipline. I don't get this page, because while arguing against "discipline," Babauta keeps talking about how to make habits.

And if you look up the word "discipline" and "self-discipline," you'll find that the ability to form habits is pretty much what discipline is. It's a bit confusing. Babauta is usually quite insightful. That he didn't bother to study the dictionary definitions of discipline is atypical.

In point of fact, and using words as they are generally defined in English, discipline is just self-control based on a consistent system of rules. So the best way to get discipline is to build habits. And that's just how it is.

Of course, anyone can make mistakes, and this doesn't diminish the general validity of Zen Habits. I guess the real lesson here is to remember to be flexible and adaptable, because one can never tell where a problem will come from, but come they will.

Chrome extension for Google Tasks

2011-05-13T20:53:00.001-04:00

Google recently released a long-awaited API for Tasks. They also immediately made available, code and all, an extension for Chrome that lets you access Tasks via a toolbar button. This is great news for people who use Tasks. (Previously, you'd have to have Tasks open in a window or tab, or access it via Gmail.)

A particularly cool feature of the extension is that you can add a task in two interesting ways:

you can just type t your new task in the Omnibar, no matter what web page you're on, and the task will be created; or
you can highlight text on any web page, right-click, and add that text to a new task.

This is good news for minimalists like me. I'm going to have to seriously reconsider Tasks for my own task management system.

Google Tasks finally gets an API

2011-05-12T07:44:00.000-04:00

Google finally announced on 11 May that they've published an API - an application programming interface - for its Google Tasks app. Gtasks, as it's sometimes known, is a minimalist take on task management that I've written about before. If you don't need projects, and contexts, and priorities, and stars and fancy stuff like that, you should look at Gtasks. There are gtask apps for every kind of mobile device I can think of, and it links to Gmail and to Gcal.

An API is a standard way for programs to access other programs. So for all of those people who write, say, iPhone apps that interact with web services, APIs are absolutely essential.

Gtasks has been around for a while now, and by far the most requested feature for the app was an API. Since it was a long time coming, several programmers managed to figure out how to get their apps to talk to gtasks on their own - thankless task at the best of times.

Those days are, thankfully, over.

I predict there'll be a flurry of activity, especially in the mobile app world, as extant and new task management apps are written to take advantage of the new gtasks API, followed by a flurry of new products and apps to help us get things done fast and well.

I will keep an eye out for developments and post them here as quickly as I can.

Orgmode: productivity geek heaven

2011-04-11T19:53:00.000-04:00

Orgmode, or just org, is an add-on for the venerable emacs editor that manages your tasks, builds your daily agenda, builds websites, outlines notes, help one keep a journal, tracks how long you spend on a task, and probably walks your dog and makes great julienned fries. Unfortunately, you have to be a bit of a geek to really appreciate it.

Don't get me wrong: I've got nothing against geeks, being one myself. Indeed, I think geeks rule - literally. I think we wouldn't be anywhere near as advanced as we are if it weren't for geeks, and I'm very satisfied to self-identify with the geekery. We might not be pretty or politically correct, but we do get shit done.

Still, geeks are not in large supply, so this productivity tool may not be to everyone's liking. But given that org is free and open sourced, and that it does damned near everything, it is very worthy of mention here.

For those who don't know emacs: it's the mother of all text editors. Much older than the Web, emacs is really a double-precision floating point dialect of the Lisp programming langauge, with a plain text interface, that happens to manipulate strings of text really well. Some people have even compared it favorably with operating systems like Windoze and Linux. (Well, anything compares favourably to Windoze....) It seems nearly infinitely flexible because it is its own programming language; an emacs program can load chunks of itself while it's running, thus changing its behaviour on the fly; it can even output its own source code. Emacs works in modes, each of which is targeted at a specific type of task. While emacs is best known as a programmer's tool, it can be taught to do nearly anything by just loading up the right mode.

Org-mode, as the name implies, is "just" one more of emacs's modes - about 85,000 lines of it. Originally designed written by Carsten Dominik, org recognizes certain special but not cryptic combinations of characters as specific types of information, and let's you do a number of interesting things with them. You can see a number of screenshots of what org looks like here.

Typically, org is enabled on any file that ends with ".org" so you can create as many "org files" as you like, and the emacs editor will keep track of them, enabling org any time you open one of them.

One of the basic structures in org is the headline, a line of text that starts with some asterisks followed by a space. Text after a headline is treated as belonging to the headline. It's as if the headline were a section heading and the text below were the body of that section. Org understands subsectioning based on the number of asterisks that start a headline; the more asterisks, the deeper the level of the section. Text that goes with a headline is automatically visually indented to line up with the headline itself. I say "visually" because, like real word processors, org recognizes that format is not content and rearranges text to fit nicely on the screen without altering the file itself. (Of course, you can get org to embed the formatting directly into the file, but if you tend to transfer content from org into other applications, like blogs, then you don't want your content to carry all of org's formatting with you when you move it out of org.)

Org lets you hide the chunks themselves leaving only the headlines visible. This means you can use it as an outliner or what is sometimes called a folding editor. You can lay out a long document by starting only with headings, then go back and work on the document one heading at a time, hiding all the others and focusing only on the one on which you want to work. Indeed, in this regard, org has been compared favourably to apps like WriteRoom, especially because org and emacs are both free.

If the first word after the asterisks in a headline is TODO, org recognizes the headline as a task. When you complete a task, you change its state to DONE, after which the task will no longer appear in your agenda (described below). You can assign start dates, due dates, and priorities to these tasks. Since a task is a headline, you can write as much as you want after the headline to describe the nature of the task, and then fold it away so it doesn't clutter up the screen. Also, a subtask is simply defined as a sub-headline starting with one of the magic task keywords.

Org can then generate an agenda for you: a list of tasks according to deadline, priority, etc. and lay it all out for you in a easy to read, if somewhat unaesthetic, form. Working on the agenda automatically works on whatever files were used to build the agenda, so you don't have to worry about not syncing the agenda with the other org files. Of course, not all your org files need contribute to your agenda. You can tell emacs which of your org files are those you want it to manage within the org agenda.

Orgmode agendas are dynamically constructed summaries of appointments, tasks, and all kinds of other things. You can even create your own combined agendas. Indeed, you can even define your own set of task status labels. The default list includes only TODO and DONE; I have TODO, WAIT, ACTIVE, DONE, and CANCELLED. You can even define alternative sequences of task keywords, each representing a different possible workflow. Besides the sequence I noted above, I have a separate sequence for "bugs" (OPEN, WIP, PAUSE, and CLOSED), and for projects (PROJECT and COMPLETED). You can associate a shortcut key with each keyword, so changing the status of a task can be as short as one keystroke and never more than three.

This just scratches the surface of what org can do. It can export its contents in all kinds of formats, including HTML, which means that you can publish your org pages to a website. Not that you'd want your agenda published for the world to see, but since org includes outlining capabilities, you can literally create websites using it. You can attach files, create links between different parts of different files, and link to images (such that when published to the web, the resulting web pages will have the images embedded in them). Of course, all kinds of web linking is also possible; for instance, just pasting a URL into an org file automatically turns the text of the URL into a link to the corresponding web resource.

I've been using it for only a few months but I'm still exploring its functionality. A(nother) nice thing about org is that you don't need to know all of it to use just part of it. The functionality is very nicely compartmentalized, so you only need to learn as much of it as you need to use. But be forewarned - once you get into it, you may want to learn more of it than you first thought. Also, you may set up your org files in a way that makes functionality you haven't yet discovered harder to use because it doesn't "fit" with the way you work.

Of course, nothing is perfect, and there are some irritants in org (largely arising from emacs itself).

Emacs was born in a time before computer mice, even before the numeric keypads and function keys on your keyboard. All that its original developers had at their disposal was the conventional keyboard. So most commands involve holding the control key, or the escape, or meta, or opt, or whatever other special keys that don't print characters might be. This means that some commands in org are composed of keystrokes that might seem bizarre to those unacquainted with emacs. For instance, the three keystroke sequence control-c control-x control-e is how you get org to update the "effort" (i.e. number of hours needed) to complete a task that is currently being clocked. Even though I've been using emacs for more than 20 years myself, there are days when I swear my hands cramp up from typing all those wonky keystrokes.

Another problem is that the documentation is not geared to the org beginner. And if you're new to emacs generally, then heaven help you. What's needed to make org really popular is a manual that anyone can use successfully.

One last major complaint I have about org is that the iPhone app for it, MobileOrg, requires you to sync by performing four separate manual operations. Assuming you've set up org on a real computer to do remote syncing with MobileOrg, and configured the app properly (neither of which is a trivial task), you then have to manually push the content of your real org installation, then manually pull it into your iPhone. Then, when you want to sync everything back to your main computer, you have to manually push from the iPhone and manually pull it all into your real computer.

Now, the iPhone app is quite new, but - really! - this is not how it should work. For example: I sync my org files over all my computers using Dropbox. Allowing the occasional and brief delay for Dropbox to work its magic, my org files are automatically synced everywhere. And I know there are many iPhone apps that automatically sync to Dropbox.

Why can't they do the same thing with MobileOrg?

In any case, here's the bottom line. Org for emacs is a fantastic productivity app that will only get better with time - if you can understand it.

Keyboard shortcuts in Chrome

2011-03-11T17:52:00.000-05:00

Keyboard shortcuts can really speed you up, and help stop you from being distracted by having to reach for the mouse and then back to the keyboard. Here's some extensions for Google Chrome that give you configurable shortcuts.

I find that moving my hand off my computer's keyboard to use the mouse is a supreme distraction. Maybe it's just that I got used to computers before mice were ubiquitous - i.e. maybe I'm just old - but I find that having to move my hand back from the mouse to the keyboard breaks my concentration just enough to be supremely irritating - like a small round stone in one's shoe: it's not painful, but it is distracting.

So I love keyboard shortcuts, keystrokes that equate to mouse actions, menu selections, etc. With a good set of shortcuts - and a little time to get used to them - one's hands can fly across the keyboard. And more importantly, I find my concentration is unbroken because I'm not having to move my hand to the mouse and then back to the keyboard.

I pretty much use only Google Chrome these days, and I was getting more and more frustrated with the typical mouse-oriented interactions, so I set about looking for a Chrome extension that would give me some control over the keyboard.

It took longer than I thought to find something reasonable, so I thought I'd share the fruits of my labour.

My first discovery was the aptly named Shortcut Manager. It offers a nice interface in which you can enter any keystroke and bind it to one of many, many actions. However, it doesn't work very well. For one thing, it misunderstood some keystrokes (e.g. the Apple Command key - I use only Macs - was interpreted as three Escape characters). Even worse, though, is that it messed up the javascript in the browser so that I couldn't use buttons in the WYSIWYG editor at wordpress. That's a showstopper.

Then I noticed that the extension hadn't been updated since December 2009. That probably explains the bugs - Chrome continued to change, but the extension didn't. Indeed, I'd wager that Shortcut Manager is dead.

So, back to the drawing board.

Next up is Vimium. This extension creates a set of default shortcuts that are reminiscent of the vim text editor, which has two modes - a command mode (cursor movement, opening lines, deleting words, etc.) and an input mode (where keys insert their characters into the text). Vim is based on vi, one of the original Unix text editors, which existed before computer mice, even before function keys and numeric keypads.

Currently, I use Vimium, and it seems to work fine. '?' brings up a summary of the shortcuts, which is great for users still getting used to it. Scrolling left, down, up, and right are bound to h, j, k, and l. (If you don't get this - put your fingers on those keys; you'll see how useful that is.) Typing '/' will start a text search of the current page (not very useful in Chrome since it's Find command, bound to Command-F on Macs, is bloody brilliant). 'H' and 'L' go back and forward in the History. If you want to turn off the bindings, so that you can for instance type something into a web form, you hit 'i', and to turn the shortcuts back on, you hit ESC. This might not sound sensible, but trust me that it makes eminent sense to anyone who know vim or vi.

You can also rebind commands to different keys, and add your own shortcuts too, so there's plenty of room for you to tweak any of the shortcuts you don't like, and to get creative with shortcuts that are particular to your own browsing habits.

I also found a third extension: Keyboard-Fu. This extension seems much more powerful, giving far more flexibility by letting you associate complex chunks of javascript to a keystroke. Unfortunately, it's still in "alpha," which means it's likely incomplete and quite buggy. It is, however, under vigorous development, so I remain hopeful.

Bottom line: keyboard shortcuts are all that. If you're looking for a good way to use shortcuts in Chrome, then go with Vimium for now. But keep an eye on Keyboard-Fu; it's got great potential.

Best. Wiki. Ever.

2011-03-11T00:29:00.000-05:00

I've got a lot of good to say about foswiki, a recent and thriving wiki engine that evolved from another more established wiki. There's lots of wiki engines out there, and I've tried a bunch. But I keep coming back to foswiki because it strikes the best balance of all of 'em between flexibility, simplicity, and robustness.
Because the post wasn't really about foswiki as a productivity aid, I wrote it at my design blog. If you're interested in wikis, you should check out foswiki. As time goes on, I'll post here about how foswiki can be used as a productivity tool.

Appigo Todo is now in the comparison of task managers

2011-02-13T16:55:00.000-05:00

I've been developing a comparison matrix of iPhone task managers as a Google Spreadsheet. I've just finished adding an entry for Appigo Todo to it. You can see the spreadsheet here.

My first original tool: formatting AutoFocus

2011-01-31T08:39:00.000-05:00

Pulling together bits from a number of sources, I've come up with my first task management tool. It's a slight enhancement to AutoFocus - not in terms of method but rather in format. That is, one thing I've noticed about AF is that little is said about how to arrange things on the page; I've come up with one possibility in that regard.

Here's an image showing a page written up in my format. The goal was to balance the utility gained by adding structure to the page against the extra work needed to add and maintain that structure.

I'm using a simple spiral bound, quad-ruled notebook here. This image only includes sample notes and tasks because the real pages in my notebook all have private information.

I prefer quad-ruled paper because I can use the book in either portrait or landscape and still have a usable space. And the grid of lines helps me when I doodle rather than write linear text. (More on both landscape mode notes and doodling in a future post.)

First thing I do when I start a page is draw in a rather wide left margin. The margin is used to basically "tag" entries with keywords and a few other things. The margin can be thought of as for "meta data" about a task.

Next I put today's date at the top of the body of the page.

Entries come in two basic types: notes and tasks.

Notes are for things like meetings, and generally writing down ideas, rather than actions I need to take. Notes are distinguished by their general topic. I put the topic in the margin, to mark the beginning of a new "chunk," then just write out the notes. Sometimes a note might be just one or two lines long; other times it might be several pages long and have a variety of tasks embedded in it.

This is one particular advantage, I think, of this format: since notes and tasks are kept together, you can put pretty much anything at all into a single notebook. Having everything in one place is a big deal for me; no more multiple booklets and scraps of paper in jacket pockets.

Blank lines are your friend here. A simple spiral bound notebook can cost less than $2, so there's no reason to be stingy with space. Vertical space is important to clearly mark boundaries between items and to make sure you leave space for annotations you may add to items in the future. And if you're worried about the environment, then you shouldn't be using a paper notebook at all. But that's another post too.

Tasks are marked by a small box in the margin. The box is useful because it not only lets you separate tasks from notes very easily, but it's also an anchor for other bits of task meta-data.

Completed tasks get a checkmark in their boxes. Cancelled tasks get an X.

Delegated tasks are marked with a left-pointing arrow through the box. Optionally, you may want to put a marginal note indicating the reason for delegation. I don't, but it might help you.

Finally, if a task is hung waiting on something, then I put a small circle in the box - small enough to be plainly visible if the box is empty, and yet vanish pretty much completely if I put a check, or an X, or an arrow through the box later.

The very last task on the sample page shows a task marked as important (the exclamation mark at the left side of the margin), and having a due date (the date between the box and the exclamation mark), and a completion date ('way over on the right side of the page). I like the idea of having the dates at either end of the task, representing a span of time as it were. It also makes sure I don't confuse due dates with completion dates.

You can use any variation of AF with this format. That is, the format lets you keep the information you write a little more organized just by the way it's put on a page, while AF in any of its forms helps you sort through the actual tasks and get them done.

I note that if you prefer other forms of paper notery for this format, you do have some choices. Circa makes some very interesting notebooks - which I also use. The beauty of the Circa notebooks is that you can rearrange the pages as in a binder, but also fold the cover back on itself as with a spiral-bound notebook. You can buy pages for Circa that are either plain grid paper or pre-printed to have a large left margin, special locations for dates, and so on. Or you can buy a Circa hole-punch and use whatever kind of paper you like. Circa notebooks work well and look better than the goofy spiral-bound notebooks. I like their touch of class.

There are other manufacturers of disk-bound notebooks like Circa (I mention a number of them here), but I haven't looked into the kinds of pre-printed pages they have and how that might impact the format I propose here.

So there you have it: a simple way to organize content on a page to help you use AutoFocus. It works great for me; your mileage may vary.

If you're interested in how this format came about, here's the short version: I read an article by Mark Forster for lifehacker.com where he mentioned how nice it would be to have both notes and tasks in a single notebook. At the same time I was playing around with orgmode, an editing plugin for the Emacs text editor that does just that: combining journaling and note-taking with appointment and task management. These two things, plus the notebook I keep on my desk at home, just kind of merged one day. And out popped this format. I've been using it ever since. Indeed, I'm even thinking of hacking orgmode to support my page format.

A fabulous fountain pen

2011-01-08T08:52:00.000-05:00

I have a thing for pens. Don't ask how or why, but I love pens. And I especially love fountain pens. Every Christmas, I allow myself a few pens to add to my collection. This year, I added a few Chinese fountain pens to the list. I did this because they look interesting, they're economical, and - in my experience - a good pen doesn't have to be expensive.

Boy, was I right.

A Wenliang 652

I've only tried one of the four pens that I bought: a Wenliang 652 stainless steel pen with a fine nib. It cost $3.90 USD and has free shipping - can't get much more economical than this!

The pen is a little heavier than typical pens (but lighter than, say, Rotrings), and very well balanced. The cap fits snugly on the slightly recessed end (one of my greatest problems with fountain pens is when the caps don't stay on, and end up flying off - especially if I'm writing on the subway or a bus...). It has a removable reservoir so that you can use cartridges if you prefer. The reservoir I got looks different from the one in the images on eBay, but it still works fine.

What really got to me, though, was how smoothly it writes. I can't recall the last time I used a fountain pen that just... floated across the paper like this $4 pen! I charged it from a bottle of Sepia Omas ink I've had for at least a decade - I doubt that the ink made any particular difference. Indeed, I should think ink that old might even do more harm than good. And yet, the pen writes like a dream.

There's nothing like a good pen to help me a deliberate and attentive writer. Seeing a fine, steady line of ink appear on the page, unskipped and unsplotched, somehow makes me think the words I'm writing are that much more important. A good pen helps me write by giving me pleasure in the writing.

If you like fountain pens, you really should give this one a try. (I'll let you know how the other Chinese fountain pens work out, when I get to them.)

In case you want to get a Wenliang 652 yourself, there's still 9 available on ebay as of this writing.

Calvetica is a great calendar app

2010-12-24T15:25:00.000-05:00

I wrote a piece about Calvetica, a great calendar app for the iPhone, at my design blog.

The short version is this: it's a near-perfect calendar app, clean and minimal, with a fantastic user interface. If you're looking for a new calendar app, you really need to consider calvetica.

New comparison of task manager apps

2010-12-20T06:04:00.000-05:00

On the companion Google Site to this blog, I kept a list of short descriptions of various iPhone task manager apps. The list was getting a little long and not, I thought, very useful. In DFW speak, it was neither effective nor efficient.

The idea was to capture all the salient features of a number of iPhone task manager apps in one place such that people could make more informed decisions about which task manager app might be best suited for them. The single long list just didn't seem to make sense anymore.

So I've reconstructed it as a Google spreadsheet, a read-only version of which is now available where the list of apps used to be. I've also significantly updated the list of characteristics that I evaluate for each task manager app.

I will be adding to that chart over the next couple of months, so stay tuned for more.