Corny as it is to say so, if we can put a man on the moon we can create an environment in which an apple is a better and more accessible choice than a Pop-Tart.

More can be said about the sea change my diet has undergone in the last year, but suffice it to say that eating better is patriotic, progressive, conservative, and apolitical—oh, and tasty—so if you’re not doing it already, get on it.

I covered them briefly on RTM’s blog but they’ve changed a bit since then, and I’d like to flesh them out a bit more.¹

Obviously my work has meant that I come in contact with a lot of users’ methods that they share on the forums, and I’ve borrowed a few.

The first method I ever implemented was Doug Ireton’s “classic” post on the RTM blog on implementing GTD.

My setup deviates from that though. The basics are there—I try to minimize use of due dates, I organize my tasks by physical context (home, phone, computer, work, etc.) and I try to make my list capture everything.

However, I try to keep my setup as minimal as possible, a lot more minimal than a full-on GTD setup. The biggest thing is that I don’t really organize my tasks in projects; that’s just not how my work or life revolve.

To show you what my organization looks like, here are my lists on the website:

As you can see, I only have two proper lists²: Mine and Shared. The only reason I have two is to separate tasks that are shared with Deanna. (I’ve shared that list with her.)

The rest of my organization is tag-based, and I’ve created a number of Smart Lists (shown in blue) to organize them in ways that I regularly use.

I use my Inbox as a place where my quickly added tasks end up—something I’ll email in, a handful of tasks I think of and want to get in quickly without setting any properties, etc.—but I empty it regularly.

Most of my Smart Lists are pretty obvious (and correspond to a particular tag or two), but a few of them are worth mentioning:

• zzz: This is a Smart List that puts tasks to sleep until a certain time before they’re due. (When I’m looking at my list of tasks to do at home, I don’t care about the bills I have to pay until it’s time to pay them.)
• !Next: (((priority:1 OR priority:2) AND NOT list:zzz) OR (NOT tagContains:@ OR list:Inbox status:incomplete)) AND NOT (list:Target OR list:Grocery)
  This is a list of all “next actions”, things I can do presently. Naturally, this will exclude anything I’ve “put to sleep” as mentioned above, and also things that I’ve designated as something that I’ll get to later. It also catches anything I haven’t filed correctly (anything not tagged correctly or in my Inbox) and it will exclude anything in my special Target and grocery lists.
• !Today: ((dueBefore:today OR due:today OR priority:1) AND list:!Next OR (NOT tagContains:@ OR list:Inbox status:incomplete))
  This is a Smart List that shows me the things I really have to do today—or should at least try to. On a really good day, I’ll clear this list. It’s everything from the !Next list that’s overdue, due today, or high priority.
  Perhaps its obvious, but this is where I spend the bulk of my time, with the occasional jaunt over to my !Next list.

Lastly, my Tag Cloud shows how my tags/lists are being used. It should be no surprise that a lot of my tasks are things for me to do on the internet.

My goal with my organization is to make it quick and easy to use. I can quickly add a task that will show up where I’ll see it (!Next and !Today) and organize all sorts of tasks that won’t show up there.

Let me know if you’d like any more pointers or tips on how I do things.

1. Firstly, you should read my notes on GTD; if you don’t understand that, my methodology will make less sense. I’m not going to reexplain it here.
2. Inbox and Sent are lists RTM creates

Remember the Milk is one of my favorite websites.¹ Keeping a list of tasks, keeping it simple, and keeping it current are ways I manage my life. It’s nothing super profound or super important for me, but a list of tasks keeps me from becoming overwhelmed.

Principles

My basis for task management is GTD. Merlin Mann summarized it quite well, and I still think of his four-year-old article when discussing GTD:

Basically, you make your stuff into real, actionable items or things you can just get rid of. Everything you keep has a clear reason for being in your life at any given moment—both now and well into the future. This gives you an amazing kind of confidence that a) nothing gets lost and b) you always understand what’s on or off your plate.

Obviously it’s great for professionals where you’re more or less paid for being productive, but I’ve found the principles to be very useful for my own personal life as well. (I’ve found that it goes very well with Inbox Zero—incidentally also by Merlin Mann—which basically prescribes that it’s not worth your time to waste it on email, and that your goal should be speedy mail management and an empty inbox.)

Method

So I’ve been convinced about these GTD techniques for a few years. Here are a few ways I’ve attempted to implement them:

• Tiddlyspot: A host that offers free Tiddlywikis, Tiddlyspot showcases a few “flavors”, two of which are geared to GTD usage. Quite useful, easy to get used to, but only really usable on the internet and from a computer. And way too fiddly for my taste.
• Remember The Milk: It shouldn’t surprise you at this point that I use Remember The Milk², but I’ve been using them for two years. RTM’s services are its strength; you can access your tasks wherever you are—on your computer, phone, in your Gmail, etc.—and be reminded of what you have to do.

Sorry this post doesn’t have a great finish; like I said, I’m pretty much publishing it as-is, and I don’t have anything profound to say at the end of this. Let me know if you’d like my thoughts on something else.

1. I work there now, but didn’t when I started this post.
2. Uh, hello, I work there, remember?

Deanna’s been working on some wedding pictures. I didn’t realize this; what a nice surprise to find out what she was working on! Quite pleased with the results!

(via deanna was here)

From Sunday, waiting for brunch after Mass.

With Deanna home sick from work, I’m working from the couch in my pajamas.

I’m not sure what I was smiling about, but I assure you it wasn’t because Deanna was taking my picture (since I didn’t know she was).

Happy Halloween everyone!

A recent set of studies suggests that the grammatical genders assigned to objects by a language do indeed influence people’s mental representations of objects (Boroditsky et al., in press). […] Spanish and German speakers also ascribe more feminine or more masculine proper– ties to objects depending on their grammatical gender. For example, […] to describe a ‘bridge’ […] (a word feminine in German and masculine in Spanish), German speakers said ‘beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender’, while Spanish speakers said ‘big, dangerous, long, strong, sturdy, and towering’. These findings once again indicate that people’s thinking about objects is influenced by the grammatical genders their native language assigns to the objects’ names. It appears that even a small fluke of grammar (the seemingly arbitrary assignment of a noun to be masculine or feminine) can have an effect on how people think about things in the world.

Lera Boroditsky, 2003

A set of experiments investigating the effects of facial movements on mood used different vowel sounds as a stealthy way to get people to pull different faces. (The idea was to avoid people realizing they were being made to scowl or smile.) The results showed that if you read aloud a passage full of vowels that make you scowl — the German vowel sound ü, for example — you’re likely to find yourself in a worse mood than if you read a story similar in content but without any instances of ü. Similarly, saying ü over and over again generates more feelings of ill will than repeating a or o.

I’ve long been intrigued by the effect of language on thought processes or worldview. For example, the tendency for verbs to end up at the end of German sentences loads a whole lot of meaning in the last words of a sentence, and I wonder how that affects both conversational interruptions and listening habits. I’ve recently been introduced (thanks, Zach) to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity which is, more or less, a scientific inquiry exploring my selfsame thoughts.

I hadn’t thought about language’s effect on emotions; that is equally interesting, but doesn’t seem to have been tested in the same way.

The experiment quoted above, though, fails; it doesn’t explain why I love German and why saying things like “Öl” and “müde” make me happy.

If Google sells this in the App Store for zero dollars, those millions of bucks Apple makes off of GPS app sales will likely disappear. It’s not for us to worry about until there’s no more GPS competition except Google, and we’re dependent on their pace of progress, but no competition is a bad thing. And it’s a little strange that Google’s search money is going to pay for a free map app that is competitive with stuff that costs $100 a year from full-time GPS makers like TomTom. Unfair is the word that comes to mind. But I can’t say I don’t want this app.

Agreed, on all counts. I wonder if Apple will try to play any differently with this than with other navigation apps since this is Google; does that make it any more “confusingly similar” to the iPhone’s Maps app (driven by Google Maps)? I think not, but I also wouldn’t be confused by a mobile Firefox (Fennec) or Google Voice.

It’s easy to see Google’s (and their users’) advantage in entering a competitive market this way, but yeah, I wouldn’t want to be their competitors either.

It does scare me how much data Google now owns, more in how they ditched their licensors so they could do something like this. But I want this app too.

Not today, which is crummy, but Sunday, which was beautiful!

Andrew Godwin runs a really nice service called LastGraph that creates these graphs based on one’s Last.fm profile data.

Of course, what would this be without a new one? (I had to check it out again, of course.)

Always an interesting view.

2009 UN World Drug report — The Big Picture — Boston.com