The Trick

So what is it? What is the miracle of productivity tips that has naught been divined hence?

Simple: when you sit down to work, set a timer. Work your butt off until that timer buzzes, then take a break. Lather, rinse, repeat until it’s time to go home. Let me explain.

I find I can concentrate steadily for about 2 hours at a time. So I set the timer for 2 hours. Once the 2 hours is up, I take a 15 minute break (using the timer), during which time I’m checking blogs, twitter, Facebook, or most importantly – playing with the dog. Lunch time is a little different – I typically take 45 minutes to an hour. I get in four quality 2-hour work sessions every day with little to no distraction. This, in my opinion, is awesome.

How it Works

Why does this work so well? For me, it’s the assurance of knowing I’ll be able to goof off soon enough. That way, I feel compelled to concentrate for 2 hours because I know I’ll be immediately rewarded at the end of it. But during the breaks, anything goes, and since I’ve just worked for 2 hours, I don’t feel guilty goofing off a bit.

Timers to Try

If you want to give this a try, I can recommend a few timers. If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod touch, just use the Timer app that comes with it (make sure you turn the volume up so you can hear the timer go off). If you run OS X, give a timer dashboard widget a try. There are two that I like: Stop It! (my fav) and Tea Timer. If you run Windows, uhhhh…do you own an egg timer?

Bonus

Bonus tip: write your todo’s for the day down. Tackle the tough creative ones in the morning (especially the ones you’re dreading). You’ll feel a since of accomplishment and be motivated to do the boring stuff. Do the administrative stuff and email after lunch.

Bonus bonus tip: don’t do personal email at work!

What do you think? Do you have any easy productivity tips of your own you’d like to share? Comment below!

I’m currently working on a new product and a lot of the material was relevant to me. I’ve read a few books on marketing, but nothing specifically on branding. This book has whet my appetite for more.

Here are my notes:

• Generate publicity, not advertising. Best way to get publicity? Announce a new category, not a new product.
• Claim your product is a "leader", not "better". All products claim they are better, but you can’t argue with leader.
• Own a word. Like "luxury".
• Perception of quality is built by a narrowly focused brand, a high price, and a better name.
• Promote the category, not the brand, and be first in the category so that your brand is associated with the category.
• Expand a brand, reduce its power. Contract a brand, increase its power.
• Welcome other brands in order to build the category.
• Generic brand name = bad
• Select a brand color opposite of that of your main competitor’s.
• Consistency is key. Never change your brand, ever.
• What’s a brand? A proper noun that can be used in place of a word.

1. First download and install STS. STS comes bundled with a full Eclipse installation, so you don’t need to download Eclipse first.
2. Now for the Groovy plugin (required for Grails). Open STS, and go to Help -> Install New Software. Add the Groovy Codehaus site: http://dist.codehaus.org/groovy/distributions/greclipse/snapshot/e3.5/. Now install the Groovy plugin from the site you just added. I installed 2 plugins actually, the Groovy Compilers and Groovy-Eclipse plugin options. Restart STS when the install is complete.
3. Now you can install the Grails plugin. In STS, go to Help -> Install New Software again. This time choose the Spring Source Update Site for Eclipse 3.5. Under Extensions / STS, choose the SpringSource Tool Suite Grails Support. Install and restart STS.
4. Create a new Grails project by going to the new project wizard and selecting Grails Project under the Groovy folder.
5. The project creation screen will say that you don’t have a Grails installation configured. Just click the Configure Grails Installations… link, then Add, then Browse, and navigate to <YOUR_STS_INSTALL_DIR>/grails-<version> and choose that directory. Then give it a name and click OK.
6. Give the project a name and click OK to create a new Grails project. Give Eclipse a few seconds to finish creating your Grails project and you should be ready to go.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten so far. If you’ve got any tips or advice, please feel free to leave a comment. Here’s to hoping that the Groovy and Grails plugins are high quality!

mvn grails:create-app appName

I can’t say I don’t have anything against Maven, because I don’t like it. Personally I’ve had much better luck with Ant, but then I’ve never worked in a highly distributed team environment with lots of dependencies and builds that couldn’t be managed with a simple Ant script.

Let the holy wars continue…

This is your friendly reminder that the Triangle microISV Group is having its 5th meeting tonight (Tuesday, May 19th, 7pm, Southpoint Panera).

This will be our 5th meetup – the first 4 have been great – I think the people who have come have really enjoyed themselves and found it worthwhile.

Here’s the agenda:

The fifth Triangle microISV Group meetup will be on Tuesday, May 19th at 7PM in the Panera at Southpoint Mall.

General discussion topic still TBD.

The informal format continues to serve us well at our meetings. I’m not coming with any specific topics prepared, but feel free to bring up any questions or insights you’ve recently had. Have an idea and you’re wondering if it’s any good? Make sure to speak up!

Expect lots of chatting with other microISVers (or those wanting to take the leap) – you’ll meet lots of friendly and like minded people.

One last note – Meetup.com charges about $70 every six months for the ability to schedule these meetings here – our meetup will never require donations, but small donations are welcomed.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again (and new faces too) – see you all Tuesday, May 19th!

If you plan on coming, or are even thinking about it, please RSVP so I can get a rough head count. See you tonight!

This is your friendly reminder that the Triangle microISV Group is having its March Madness meeting tomorrow (Wednesday, March 25th, 7pm, Southpoint Panera). For you NCAA fans, make note that there are no games tomorrow night, so you should be free to come to the meetup!

This will be our 3rd meetup – the first 2 have been great – I think the people who have come have really enjoyed themselves and found it worthwhile.

Here’s the agenda:

The third Triangle microISV Group meetup will be on Wednesday, March 25th at 7PM in the Panera at Southpoint Mall.

Basketball lovers rest easy – there is no men’s tournament play scheduled for the 25th. Use your one free night of the week for something constructive.

The informal format has served us well the past two meetings. I’m not coming with any specific topics prepared, but feel free to bring up any questions or insights you’ve recently had. Have an idea and you’re wondering if it’s any good? Make sure to speak up!

Expect lots of chatting with other microISVers (or those wanting to take the leap) – you’ll meet lots of friendly and like minded people.

If you plan on coming, or are even thinking about it, please RSVP so I can get a rough head count. See you Wednesday!

Just a quick note to let y’all know that we’ll be having the 2nd meeting of the Triangle microISV Group this Tuesday, February 24th at 7pm at Southpoint Panera.If you’re curious, here’s the agenda:

The second Triangle microISV Group meetup will be on Tuesday, February 24th at 7PM in the Panera at Southpoint Mall.This will be another shoot-the-bull type meeting with a loose agenda. I will do a brief overview covering the basics of credit card processing as there was some interest in that last month. You are more than welcome to come with topics of your own if you feel you have something interesting to share. And I’ll be hitting people up to see if they are interested in doing a low-key 5 minute presentation at one of our future meetups.I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again (and new faces too) – see you all Tuesday!

If you plan on coming, or are even thinking about it, please RSVP so I can get a rough head count. See you Tuesday!

Here’s some HTML that will not work correctly in most browsers:

<p><embed src="/controller/gen/streampdf.html" width="800" height="400"></embed></p>

(Note that in my case I have a server side script that is dynamically generating and streaming the PDF to the browser.)

Here’s the HTML that will work:

<p><embed src="/controller/gen/streampdf.pdf" width="800" height="400"></embed></p>

If you look closely, I changed the extension on the URL to “pdf”. I’m still streaming the exact same bytes with the same response headers, however, having a “.pdf” at the end of the URL apparently makes the browsers happy.

That would have been nice to have known this morning!