The Evolving Worker

iMindMap for iPhone is available (and free)

2010-02-18T10:28:00Z

If you’re a subscriber, you know I use mind-mapping on a regular basis.

That’s why I’m quite happy to see iMindMap coming to the iPhone.

Unlike its desktop counterpart, the iPhone version is free, yet it feels quite easy to use (once you understand the basics).

I can’t help to wonder about what it will be like on an iPad, with a larger tactile surface.

An Alternate Definition of Wealth

2010-02-03T18:48:00Z

Wealth = how long you could sustain your current lifestyle (same expenses) if your income stopped, today.

I hope you’ll do the actual math yourself. Is it days ? Weeks ? Years ?

This definition is more or less extracted from Olivier Seban’s book called Tout le monde mérite d’être riche (in english, roughly: “everyone deserves to be rich”). I have no idea who first came up with this idea.

Some consequences of this definition

I did some calculation to illustrate the point – but please, try to think about the definition itself instead, see how changing either your expenses, your income, or the place you live affect your current and future wealth immediately. That’s my real point here (and my calculation may be wrong).

Under that definition of wealth, someone who earns 2000€ and saves 50€ per month is just as rich as someone who earns 4000€ and saves 100€ per month (assuming they have no previous savings). If my calculation is right (sorry if it’s not), both will have 1.5 months of wealth after 5 years.

But what if the person who earns 2000€ and saves 50€ manages to earn 2200€ instead and to save 450€ ?

That’s definitely an important change in lifestyle: expenses reduction + more income usually mean uncomfortable changes (ie: learning to cook vs. going to the restaurant, negociate your salary, etc). But overall it’s only 200€ less expenses (again if my calculation is still right!).

Compared to the previously owned 1.5 months of wealth after 5 years, this person will own 1.3 year of wealth after the same 5 years.

Please note that I don’t intend to be simplistic here. This isn’t easy, this isn’t what I mean.

Once you’re there, there is another consequence: if you have 1.3 year of wealth somewhere, and move to a cheaper place – your wealth multiplies, just by moving (you still have to get income, but your need for money changes as well).

Another consequence: as your wealth (per this definition) increases, it becomes easier to choose a job you really appreciate, to leave a job that is either not fulfilling or not matching your income expectation. It gives you that kind of freedom.

Again, I really don’t want to be simplistic here – I really hope this will be helpful or thought-provoking, as much as it has helped me (which means: a lot).

If you wish to comment, please do it on Hacker News

I wanted to write this a long time ago – thanks to this thread on Hacker News for pushing me to actually publish this.

A productivity tip to avoid forgetting to answer or read an email (gmail and iphone)

2009-02-12T09:56:00Z

Since I’ve been checking my GMail email from my iPhone, I met the two following situations:

I read a mail from the iPhone then forget to reply as I intended to do,
I have a quick look at an interesting email but have no time to read it in detail – and forget to come back to it later.

While I ensure I don’t get tons of emails, I don’t like to forget about something when I think it deserves an answer (which is why I’m quite fond of Nozbe and a good part of what’s behind Getting Things Done).

I realized I needed an easy way to label things from the iPhone or the GMail web box, and I needed to be able to have these messages emphasized when I reach the web box, too. I’ve been quickly trying out various ideas to avoid that. Here’s what I’m using today, in case that or an adaptation is useful to you.

Step #1 – use a label that will stay on top of the list

I noticed that I could start the label with minus and that it would stay on top if I did so.

So I picked these two labels: I WANT TO REPLY and READ NEEDED, surrounded by minus characters.

On the iPhone, it translates into a two “clicks” operation to label (because the label is on top of the list) – screenshots below (from a public conversation):

Step #2 – use the GMail multiple inboxes features

Later on in my GMail box, I use the Multiple inboxes labs feature to show two panes with messages with these labels applied (no screenshot, sorry).

When reading or replying to a mail, I can then remove the label in one click:

Voilà – nothing fancy really, but I really made my life easier, and I hope it will do so for you!

Using Screencasts to Share Knowledge Inside a Company

2008-10-13T13:25:00Z

In Implementing Lean Software Development, Mary and Tom Poppendieck wrote:

Because tacit knowledge is so difficult to communicate, handoffs always result in lost knowledge; the real question is how to minimize that waste.

How to ensure we minimize that waste when we share knowledge inside a company ? One widely-used possibility is to take notes and transcript them into a wiki. Mind-mapping also works pretty well for that purpose.

There is another option though.

Recording handoffs sessions with screencasts

Because they could not be at the office at the same moment, two friends of mine (Damien and Ludovic) decided to use Camtasia Studio and a microphone to record a training on Friday so that the other could watch it on Monday and know what had to be done and how to do it.

What should have been a one-time adventure turned out to work so well that they decided to generalize this practice to their whole company.

Each time two developers are on one machine for a handoff session, they now take benefits of the situation to record the session and save the screencast into a shared folder so that everyone can access it if required.

Low-cost, high-value information sharing

Knowledge is the most valuable asset of a company, hence treating it like gold really is deserved. Here are some reasons why screencasts worked so well for Damien and Ludovic:

once the required software is installed, the effort required by turning it on is low (a few clicks)
the output of the recording is quite close from a regular handoff, hence diminishing the waste described by the Poppendieck’s
the output tend to be dense yet easy to grab at the same time
the technology is mature and easy to use

I find screencasting an appealing way of learning – no questions why PeepCode is so successful.

NovaMind Connect - Discover How Others Use Mind-Mapping Software

2008-09-22T07:46:00Z

When people discover mind-mapping, they often want to know how to use it better, what can be done. They wonder if there a “right” way to achieve a specific task with it.

I don’t believe there is a “right” way, but I do believe looking at how other people use it is a fairly good practice to enhance the way we use it (that’s why I shared the situations where I use mind-mapping a while back).

Mind-mapping software goes social

A couple of weeks ago, Mind-mapping software editor NovaMind released NovaMind Connect, a place where you can freely find interesting maps and share yours.

It really is a specialized social network, dedicated to mind-mapping. You can share things, get connected with people with the same interests as yours, rate maps, and learn a couple of tricks.

I’m quite happy to see this happening as I believe mind-mapping is an interesting skill to learn – seeing it shared with more people is definitely encouraging.

Easy Graphic User Interface Design with Axure RP

2008-09-19T19:27:00Z

Getting Real is a great book, advocating simplicity and pragmatism in web application development. In fact, the advices in this book also apply to most kinds of projects (a recommended reading).

After re-reading it, I wanted to find some tool to achieve rapid prototyping and user interface design in a more efficient way (for those times where pen and paper do not feel good enough).

User interface design with no code

My brother advised me to have a look at Axure RP. I started trialing it a couple of days ago and must say if you care about designing features of a web products without getting into the code too quickly, it’s a tool really worth trying out.

Beside the usual widgets placement features, it supports conditional interactions, notes-taking, versioning with Subversion. Once a page is designed, it’s possible to export it either to HTML (with javascript interaction included) or to a Word document (to play the role of functional specifications).

Definitely worth trying. If you do so, be sure to check out the two following resources:

the product tour gives a good overview of what’s possible with Axure RP
the how to use guide is a pleasant 2-hours tutorial, designed to give you a pretty good insight

Other prototyping tools

I also discovered (but did not try so far):

Balsamiq Mockups – full fledged prototyping tool
the Pencil Project – free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping
Protonotes – a way to add notes on the real prototype to exchange with your team

Plan Your Day Ahead

2008-09-03T18:56:00Z

You may have already heard the maxim fail to plan, plan to fail. I believe this sentence is especially true when applied to our day at work, weither we’re self-employed or work for a company.

Losing control of the day

You’re hard at work, it’s 3pm and suddenly you hear yourself saying:

I’ve done nothing worthy today
I’ve done plenty of things but these things are not the things I wanted to achieve
how did I end up doing this specific thing?

When I’m in that situation, even though I’ve been working all day long, I don’t feel happy. I don’t feel confident.

A tip to get back in control of your tasks

The tip: spend the first 30 minutes of your day writing down the tasks you’d like to achieve and prioritizing them. Be rude: eliminate the extra stuff, things that are “nice to have”. Only keep the 20% that bring 80% of the value.

And when I mean the first 30 minutes, it’s really the first 30 minutes: do that before checking your emails or you’ll most likely get out of control. An even better alternative is to do that at the end of the previous day instead.

My own experience is that Mind-mapping works great to carry out this prioritization of work.

Each and every time I do this (and it’s almost everyday now), the day is a lot more rich in accomplishments.

And it feels a lot better to accomplish things than to “just work”, isn’t it ?

A Simple Tip to Keep a Positive Mindset

2008-08-31T21:14:00Z

Every now and then, I feel doubt. For instance today, I’ve been pondering a lot about a website I’m working on – it’s called lectures.fr (it’s a simple books-related site, I’ll tell you more when it is in a more advanced state).

I’d really like to create something truely useful. But will it be ? How to keep a positive mindset when the doubt arise ?

I noticed that it’s easier for doubt to come in when I’m tired. I also noticed that when I feel this way, it’s really easy to forget about all the good things that happened the very same day.

Because of this, when I feel doubtful at the end of the day, I use a very simple tip that could be called “Positive Visualization” – sorry if it sounds a bit mystic.

Simply close your eyes (in your bed or in any place where you won’t be disturbed), then:

take 2 minutes to enumerate each good thing that happened to you today (even very simple things),
take another 2 minutes to do the same thing at the week or the month level.

Things take a bit of time to remember at first.

Then after a while, if you’re like me, you will feel re-energized and confident.

OmniGraffle - Quick and Pretty Diagrams on Mac OS X

2008-08-27T16:35:00Z

I’m always looking for tools that make things easier in my day at work, like password managers, tools to find free space on your disk or such things.

It’s almost obsessional, but I believe it’s a good thing. OmniGraffle is one of these tools – it’s a pretty neat charting tool, designed for Mac OS X only.

An example of diagram created with OmniGraffle

This diagram describing user states in a web application took a few minutes to complete.

I have to create such diagrams quite often as part of my job as freelance developer. Therefore I appreciate how easy it is to copy styles, to create gradients and to handle color and styling in general. As well, I like the smart magnetic guides that help you to place things around without taking too much time.

The feeling of use is quite similar to the one you can get by using mind-mapping software. In fact, I tend to use OmniGraffle and Mind-Mapping in a complementary fashion now (see what can you do with mind-mapping for some real use cases).

Things I tend to use OmniGraffle for in real-life

I’ve been using OmniGraffle Pro in the following situations in the last few weeks:

brainstorming and illustrating state-machines
designing workflows (what happens when the user clicks here ? under which conditions ?)
quick prototyping of web pages (using the yahoo design stencils extension for instance)
nice-looking diagrams in general
quick buttons for web development (like the buy now button on this page)

If you’re using Mac OS X at work and have to create diagrams, I recommend giving it a try.

More about OmniGraffle features – and how to test-drive it

You can find a detailed list of features on the OmniGraffle website as well as a trial working a few days (long enough to get the general feeling).

Empowering The Team: Partial Budget Delegation

2008-07-19T17:31:00Z

Here’s a common story: Joe works as part of a team and trials what seems to be a useful tool (some mind-mapping software for instance).

During the trial, Joe shares the discovery with the rest of the team – as he falls in love with the benefits provided by the tool.

Pretty soon, a good part of the team, including the team-leader, find that it would be a useful addition to their tool set.

So far so good.

The Purchase Wall

The next step is often “nothing happens”. In many organizations, the team (including the team-lead) has no way to carry out a purchase by itself. To buy an interesting product, the team often has to:

go through a complicated and somewhat discouraging buying process involving a 5 steps workflow
alternatively, bug the person (usually the boss) who has a company credit card – who is busy as hell working on totally different topics

Pros: the budget is under strict control! Cons: the team may stop asking for purchases because the process is too painful or slow. Or the guy with the credit card may end up doing more administrative work than his own work. Either way, not very interesting.

Breaking The Wall: Controlled Delegation

Here’s a solution that is often suggested in time-management trainings or in books like the 4-hour work-week.

The idea is to achieve controlled delegation: make a deal between the team and the boss to define a specific amount (or monthly amount) under which the expense should be carried out by the team without even asking the boss.

(note that it doesn’t mean that the boss cannot ask for a budgetary situation).

The benefits are:

the team can more easily adopt new tools that foster innovation, overall productivity or well-being
the payer frees some time and can focus on what he would like to focus on, as he doesn’t have to handle the purchase process for “small” purchases
the payer stays in control of the budget

The reasoning behind this tip is simple: put the people in position to make decisions by themselves, as they have the knowledge of their needs.

How To Wake Up Easily

2008-05-05T18:25:00Z

Do you have a hard time waking up? After reading a couple of painful comments on a post entitled “how do you make sure you wake up?”, I realized that dawn simulators are not as widespread as I thought they were.

Here is a presentation, in hope my readers will benefit from a useful discovery.

Introducing the dawn simulator

The dawn simulator is a pleasant replacement to the usual alarm clock, providing a simulation of fade-in and fade-out of light.

The Lumi 200 (for French market – I believe an American equivalent is the BioBrite Digital Sunrise) I was offered two years ago looks like a rather elegant globe of light.

I find this device makes it a lot easier to wake up. The overall feeling we get is that we’re awake “naturally” and before the included alarm finally rings.

Here are the features I actually use:

programmable (15/30/45 minutes) light fade-out when you want to sleep
programmable wake-up time and fade-in duration (15/30/45 minutes of progressive light increase before waking-up), with an alarm when reaching full brightness
special light-bulb simulating a warm daylight (I didn’t have to change it so far)

A while back I may have considered this kind of product to be amusing. After two years of use I would not travel without it and I don’t miss the classical alarm clock trauma. On a more long term view, if you’re affected by the lack of light during winter, this product definitely helps.

About kids: we have a baby. Having a bit of progressive fade-in light makes things easier when he wakes up earlier than we’d like him to. We also use the fade-out feature for his room.

About Light Therapy

Dawn simulators are only an example of products issued from the light therapy research. Light Therapy basically consists of exposure to specific rays aiming at reducing seasonal affective disorder and non-seasonal depression (very short version!). This research has also developed lighting products for the desktop and other devices.

Does it work? From what I can tell – yes, absolutely. This has a great impact on how you feel during the day. This tool and a couple of light-bulbs spread throughout our flat have definitely changed the way we wake up and live. The light reduction during winter is not a big deal anymore now.

Where to buy these products?

You can either pick a specialized local store like I did or find an online shop: the Lumi 200 is available on amazon.fr.

For my american readers, I believe the Lumi brand is not available over there, but the BioBrite Digital Sunrise dawn simulator seems very close in terms of features (I assume it may be the same thing rebranded).

There are a lot of other products in this market including the ones from Verilux.

If you are in Europe, be sure to check out La Journée Parfaite, a great online shop with plenty of references of dawn simulators, both in French and English (mention “the evolving worker” in your order comments to support my writings).

[BioBrite digital sunrise dawn simulator]

Some Hopefully Useful Reading for my Readers

2008-04-12T13:25:00Z

First I want to say thank you to you my readers, both for reading these articles and for sending me feedback through the website. This blog is 4 months old (I started it 5 days before my first son birth!) and I’ve been very happy to share ideas I find worth spreading. I learned a lot throughout this process as well. Thanks!

Alltop.com or how to find more interesting “lifehacks” blogs to read

If you read The Evolving Worker, chances are that you’re interested in either self-improvement, productivity, organization or related topics.

I’m happy to announce that this blog is now featured on the lifehacks section of Alltop, a website that gathers a variety of RSS powered sites, organized by topics (like education, music or programming)

Although technically there is nothing new here, I find this site useful:

if you are RSS-savvy like I am, you may find it’s a convenient way to find new interesting feeds to subscribe to
if you don’t know what RSS is or if you are willing to change the way you read, you can bookmark the few sections in which you’re interested in and follow them like regular pages.

Either way – I’d be happy to hear from you, to know what is your use of RSS!

Like Brian Clark, I believe from what I see around me that RSS may not become mainstream. It is mainstream for techies – but most of my non-techies friends or colleagues don’t use it.

I’m pretty sure you will find interesting reads on the lifehacks section!

How to find interesting books to read ?

I believe there is a lot to learn through a good mix of experience and reading books. Since I started reading about personal development, project management, finances, organisation and communication, the way I live and work has significantly evolved.

If you’ve subscribed via RSS or email you may have not noticed that I added a BookStore on the top of this blog.

This BookStore references a few books I read and appreciate and wanted to share (I trust you not to buy them blindly though – be sure to check out the customer reviews first to make your own decision).

In case you buy one of these through The Evolving Worker BookStore, I’ll earn a few dollars – I’ll definitely consider this your contribution to my writings! Thanks.

Comment trouver des livres ou des blogs sur le développement personnel, la communication ou l’organisation en français ?

In case you happen to read french (I’m french, currently living in Paris), you’ll find more recommended books on the little site I set up to share my readings with my friends and relationships.

I also recommend my wife’s blog on organization and simplicity blog as well as this directory of personal development websites in french.

I wish you an instructive reading!

In Favor of Password Managers

2008-04-04T21:17:00Z

This post will tell you why I now use password managers and which tools I’ve settled with.

I’m a strong believer in simplicity. Despite this, it took me quite a bunch of time before starting to use password managers. That was procrastination, definitely.

After starting to handle my own servers (to host the Evolving Worker, my blog for software developers or one of my pets projects like The Lighting Shop), I decided it was over.

Why did I start to use password managers ?

Here are the reasons why I now use password managers:

only one, very strong password to keep in mind,
convenience: a lot of typing saved everyday thanks to the auto-fill feature. That mean less frustation and more productivity,
safety: when you think about it, it’s a lot more safe to have your passwords encrypted in one place (with proper backup) than non-encrypted and spread all over the place (emails, post-its, whatever other “safe place”),
safety again: password managers usually have this feature to generate strong passwords when you sign up to a new web site (those strong passwords are actually a lot stronger than the ones we tend to choose by default),
the tools I found are cheap and worth it in my opinion.

1Password (for Mac OS)

If you own a Mac, I believe 1Password really is a “Priceless Utility for only $34.95”, as they advertise it. I first tried their free version – the decision to buy it was pretty quick afterwards.

The video on their homepage gives a good idea of how well it is integrated with the browsers (Firefox, Safari, Camino and more…). Their auto-fill feature works pretty well – I only had issues with a few Ajaxy websites.

In short: I’m perfectly happy with it. It’s a lovely utility and it eases my everyday life.

RoboForm (for Windows)

The benefits of 1Password were quickly clear enough for my wife Cécile (her simplicity and organisation blog in french) so that she wanted to find an equivalent on Windows for her use at work.

After much trials (including KeePass which you may want to test), she finally settled on RoboForm. She thinks it’s not as slick as 1Password but believes it may be related to the french translation of their toolbar.

Once she got used to it, RoboForm is the most convenient password manager she could find on PC so far.

Prevent And Cure The Out Of Hard Disk Space Syndrome

2008-03-03T08:00:00Z

Running out of hard-disk space can cause troubles ranging from minor slow down to irreversible data loss when an application hangs.

In this article I present a couple of tools to cope with this situation and try to prevent it.

First two tips worth sharing:

don’t delete files (or buy financial products) unless you really understand their use
keep roughly 10% to 20% of free space to save time on the long run and avoid frustrating situations (like computer crash just before a presentation, ha!)

Using data vizualisation to find who is eating your space

See those colorful squares ? Their area is proportional to the underlying files size. Clicking on an area gives informations about the underlying file and allows to delete it, if relevant.

I believe this representation (called treemap) was invented by Ben Shneiderman in response to the common problem of a filled hard disk, for those interested in the story.

A few tools use these treemaps to help you track hard disk space eaters. Here are the ones I use, depending on the kind of machine I’m on:

WinDirStat for Windows
GrandPerspective when on my Mac
KDirStat for Unix/Linux

They are all free and open-source.

The very neat thing with the treemap representation is its usefulness to help you apply the Pareto principle when chasing space: just focus on a couple of big blocks, be sure to understand if the underlying files are actually useful or not, then delete those files.

I usually timebox myself to no more than 5 minutes to retrieve the space I need with this kind of tool. Thanks to the visual representation, most of the time it’s enough to get back to work (or anything you were doing, that is).

Prevention is better than cure

To be warned before you actually get out of space, check out DiskSpaceMonitor.

For sysadmins (or advanced users) who don’t want to spend their whole day recovering lost files from crashes on their users machines, it can be useful to monitor the machines through the network.

If you want to monitor several machines on a given network to ensure enough free space is available on their hard disks, I recommend checking out SpiceWorks and its SpiceWorks inventory feature to monitor the current level of free space.

I’ve also heard good things about LanSweeper, although I didn’t try it myself.

Hopefully you’ll never get out of space again!

Using Mind Mapping Data To Drive Your Software Application

2008-02-28T10:31:00Z

I wrote a while back about common use cases for mind-mapping.

In this article I present a less common use: mind-maps can be used to create data used by database driven web applications or any other software.

Two years ago, one of my customers wanted to build an intranet to support therapists helping people to quit smoking through phone calls.

We decided to create mind maps with MindManager to describe the questions and answers, then to programmatically extract the data from those mind-maps to drive the intranet application using the Ruby programming language.

A visual example of interview scripting with mind-mapping

Here is a sample of this work (click on the image to get a bigger version):

As you may notice, we adopted specific conventions to make it easier to programmatically extract the data:

a special icon would mark a question allowing multiple answers
another icon would mark answers requiring free-text input
relationships (arrows) would be used to translate the conditional flow
comments bubble would inform the therapist of specific details

What were the benefits ?

By using a mind-mapping software to do the job, we avoided the costs of developing our own graphical user interface, which would have been significantly higher than the cost of the mind-mapping software.

Instead I wrote a surprisingly simple Ruby library to parse the MindManager maps (which are XML based) in only a few hours and used it to import the interviews data in the intranet application.

The stop-smoking specialists were able to use the mind-mapping software themselves to describe what was relevant, without much need to be trained nor without any technical person behind (as long as the adopted conventions were followed).

If you care about the technical details

If you want to know more, contact me through the website and I’ll see if I can wrap up an article on my blog for software developers.