In this edition, I report on my productivity and activities of the past week,  extol the time-saving virtues of iGoogle and conclude with a new WHV feature: The Head Voices Review!  Unfortunately, due to a chronic lack of sleep, there will be no backyard philosophical contribution.  We hope to be back on track for the next edition.

During week 9 of 2010, the temporal context of the sixteenth edition of the Weekly Head Voices, I spent 2 hours preparing for lectures, 3 hours lecturing and 12 hours in scheduled meetings.  I spent a significant amount of time assisting five of our MedVis Ninjas shepherding papers out the door, so now you have to cross your fingers that we get 100% accept rate, else the Ninjas get really angry.  Counting up to the weekend, and without any cheating, I completed 22 GTD tasks, again one task more than last week.  If this continues, I will eventually attain infinite productivity, so you better watch out, ok?

Noteworthy happenings include two Skype Video meetings, which worked really well and saved me a significant amout of travel time. These meetings would be even better if my correspondents would invest in webcams, allowing me to look at more than just my own face during the discussion. In other news, I’ve been spending even more time futzing around with processing, resulting in a first blog post detailing the installation of said library with video capture and augmented reality support on 64 bit Linux machines.

The main topic of this post is gadgets. I’ll be talking about two kinds of gadgets, so first I’d like to start with a screenshot of my iGoogle:

iGoogle your twitter.

I’ve been aware of iGoogle, and used it as a poor man’s aggregator before getting addicted to Google Reader, but never really appreciated the possibilities.  In short, you can add all kinds of web applications, called gadgets, to any number of tabs (each tab is a page), thus mixing and matching for example the social networking websites you use on one single web page.  Because I’d recently been wasting far too much time switching between twitter, facebook (everytime someone mentions facebook, I somehow reflexively and compulsively open the site, hence wasting more precious minutes of my life, which at my advanced age is no small matter), gmail and compulsive news checking, I decided to compress my time wasting into a single page visit. So far, it seems to be saving me a number of minutes every day, minutes that I’m saving for later…

Finally, it pleases me greatly to be able to introduce a new feature on the WHV: The Head Voices Review! [As soon as my TPN completely masters Ableton, I'm hoping he'll make me a nice theme song that I can insert here.] Some of you might know that this blog has a rich history in reviewing gadgets. See for example this post where, after weeks of investigation, I posted an in-depth review of not one, but TWO cheap-skate headphones.  To summarise:

• Sennheiser PX20: SUCKS.
• Philips HP-200: AWESOME.

To kick off this first edition, I’m going to discuss three more computer audio gadgets.  First off, the Logitech S3-30 2.1 (that means stereo speakers with sub-woofer to my non-audiophile readers) computer speaker set with built-in amplifier.  I’ve used these extensively for five years now (purely for the purposes of reviewing them of course) and have set out my conclusions in the table below:

• Logitech S3-30: SUCKS BADLY.

I base my conclusion on the sub-par design of these speakers, especially in terms of the cabling.  Below is an artist’s rendition of the cable design for these speakers:

Artist's rendition of Logitech S3-30 speaker set cable design. Note the bird's nests.

As you can see, it’s as if the engineers had been challenged to see how much cable they could waste in producing these speakers, and as a side-challenge, how they could ensure that any desk carrying these speakers would instantly turn into an unmanageable mess of cables in various states of entanglement.  Why why why didn’t they read this really important paper?

I have recently ordered the JBL Duet 200 to replace the S3-30.  After at least five more years of extensive testing, I will document its performance in a future Head Voices Review.

On the topic of Logitech, a number of my screencasts up to now have been performed using a Logitech Analog Desktop Microphone with 3.5mm jack plug, purchased especially for that purpose.  Now that I’ve also purchased the quite affordable (6 bucks for the whole headset, that means headphone AND microphone!) yet very stylish Sweex HM400 headset, also for recording screencasts, I can present the following comparative review:

• Logitech Analog Desktop Microphone with 3.mm jack plug: SUCKS.
• Sweex HM400 headset: AWESOME.  Wait till you hear my deep baritone narrating the next screencast.  I expect that it should sound almost exactly like this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Err, that’s it for the first edition of the Head Voices Review! I don’t think that you have to worry too much about the next edition arriving anytime soon.  Here at HVR headquarters we take our sweet time, as we pride ourselves in jumping to all of the wrong conclusions, all of the time.

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #14: My Week Was A Wormhole.
2. Weekly Head Voices #11: iCalmDown.
3. Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply

As mentioned around these parts, I’m currently playing with Processing, a beautiful programming stack for making interactive visual, err, thingies. To be more specific, I’d like to use processing together with something like ARToolkit to do real-time 3D tracking of markers in live video, for augmented reality fun.  To see what this could look like, see this YouTube video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Today’s challenge is getting whole stack, including processing, the GSVideo video capture library for processing and the NyARToolkit augmented reality for processing going on Linux x86_64 (64bit).  On Linux x86 (32bit) this is much more straight-forward, but I wouldn’t write a blog post about straight-forward, now would I?

Here is the recipe:

1. Make sure you have the native 64bit Sun JDK installed for your system.  On this Ubuntu 9.10 machine it’s sun-java6-jdk 6-15-1.
2. Also install the jogl libraries, on this machine called libjogl-java.
3. Make sure you have the whole of gstreamer installed. On ubuntu, all packages containing “gstreamer”.
4. Get and unpack the processing for Linux tarball (1.0.9 at the time of this writing) from the processing download site.
5. In the unpacked processing directory, remove the whole java subdirectory. Now make a symlink pointing to your system java directory (the one containing bin, ext, jre, lib, etc.).  On my system, that was:

   cd processing
   rm -rf java
   ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.15 java
   

6. In processing/libraries/opengl/library remove the 3 libjogl*.so files and libgluegen-rt.so. Symlink their replacements from /usr/lib/jni with for example:

   cd processing/libraries/opengl/library
   rm lib*.so
   ln -s /usr/lib/jni/libgluegen-rt.so
   ln -s /usr/lib/jni/libjogl_awt.so
   ln - s /usr/lib/jni/libjogl.so
   

7. Download and unpack gsvideo into processing/libraries.  You should be able to run the examples in processing/libraries/gsvideo/examples/Capture with the PDE (Processing Development Environment).
8. Download and unpack the NyARToolkit for Processing library into processing/libraries.

You should now be able to run the NyARToolkit examples by changing the Capture class (twice) to GSCapture and perhaps also the capture resolution, depending on your camera. The major trick in all of this is converting your Processing installation to use your system 64bit JDK instead of its own built-in 32bit JDK.

Let me know in the comments if this worked (or didn’t) for you!

Related posts:

1. Thunderbird on Linux and URLs
2. Recording screencasts on Windows with free software
3. The Visualisation and Image Processing Platform Formerly Known as DSCAS3

Before continuing, you might like to watch this clip explaining why you shall build a turtle fence (I’ll get back to the clip after my dropbox story):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last week I completed, you guessed it, 21 GTD tasks spread over 10 projects. Once again, one more task than last week. The question is thus not if, but when I’m going to have to disappoint you.  Worth mentioning on the miscellany front is that I’ve started playing around with processing, a fantastic little system for programming visual effects and interaction, in preparation for a new first year course. My goal is to get the students irrevocably addicted to the coolness that is media processing! I’ll keep you up to date…

In a previous post, I was quite enthusiastic about Dropbox and its possibilities for collaboration. As some of you might now, I really like this whole living-in-the-cloud idea: I use GMail, Google Calendar and Google Documents quite extensively and I’m even paying for extra storage with the big G.  So, during the past week, I decided to bite the bullet some more and to move 12G more of my data right into the cloud, courtesy of a 50G Dropbox Pro account.  Up to now, I had a ridiculously complex synchronisation system keeping various subsets of my data up to date between a netbook, a laptop and three different servers. At the core of this system was unison, a brilliant multi-way open source synchronisation tool. In spite of this system mostly working, its complexity and the starkly contrasting It-Just-Works nature of Dropbox convinced me to give the simple solution a shot.

So far I can only report that I remain impressed: At one stage I manually copied a complete dropbox (12Gigs) from one already synced machine to a fresh target machine and started the Dropbox software on the target. It politely asked:

There is already a folder in your home folder called Dropbox. Do you want to merge all the existing files in that folder into your dropbox?

After clicking on the “HELL YEAH!” button (that’s how it felt, ok), the software went on indexing for a minute or two and then correctly claimed that everything was nicely synced up. Very much understated robustness, kudos to the developers. I’m going to test-drive this whole business for one month, and then let you know whether it’s going to be  a permanent fixture in my cloud-home.

Still wondering why you should build a turtle fence? Well, you can blame the Auto-Tune internet meme. Very shortly, auto-tune is an audio effect that corrects one voice to be perfectly in tune with backing music. In other words, a vocalist who can’t sing is in fact no problem at all, computer will fix! Initially it was used quite sparingly and its application was even sometimes kept a secret, until artists such as Cher and especially T-Pain turned it into an art form, in fact exaggerating the effect until it gave a decidedly unsubtle robotic voice effect. The effect has become so famous that it now gets to call itself an internet meme and is often parodied.  The turtle clip above is just one of a whole series (auto-tune the news, see them all!). In the clip below, internet scientists *ahem*, including the well-known Professor Weird Al Yankovic, take an in-depth look at this phenomenon:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Finally, back to the purpose of this weblog… Good blogs all seem to have some central theme, such as photography, environmental issues, science or pokemon. I seem to recall that I’d also seen this in more than one “how to become an A-list blogger” guides.  I don’t find it hard to believe that this is very important.  However, this blog has never had a central theme, it’s always been me blabbing about the various things that I find blab-worthy.  I’ve never been able to come up with something better, and it was definitely not for lack of trying.  The Weekly Head Voices, by focusing my blabbing into slightly more coherent episodes, have finally helped me to come to a conclusion.  Besides acting as a creative outlet, sitting down every week and carefully externalising a specific subset of my experiences with the express purpose of having it read by a small number of people, is an important ritual during which I am forced to distance myself from the events of the week, and to self-reflect.  By formally concluding the previous period in this way, one has the mental room to manoeuvre in preparation for the next. If you by any chance find any of it entertaining, or at least you just can’t look away, it’s a win-win situation!

In other words: Theme-schmeme! The voices in my head will continue to be the many and various topics of this weblog, thank you very much.

Have a great week kids!

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #12: Ceci n’est pas une bibliothèque.
2. Weekly Head Voices #7: The Answer, a STAR is born, post-human YouTube
3. Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply

Screenshot of the FoBVis system. This is just one of our many attempts to take over the world, subtly.

Just before bedtime on Monday, I had still managed to make a note in my special top-secret Weekly Head Voices journal.  I usually do this every day to make sure I don’t forget anything by the weekend, when I usually have some time to write these posts.  Thursday night’s entry simply says “WTF, where did my week go?!” — There had been no other entries since Monday. I’m still not quite sure why it felt that way, as my breakdown of activities is similar to that of the previous week: 2 hours of lecture preparation, 3 hours of lecturing, 15 hours of scheduled meetings and 20 tasks completed (one more than last week!!) across 10 projects. Perhaps those four extra hours of meetings don’t scale linearly in the amount of business they cause, due to the number of extra context switches that they bring. I have to add that a number of truly exciting projects are brewing, but I can’t say more about them until I can say more about them, if you know what I mean.

We (The Group, of course) recently released two new open source software projects:

• FoBVis is a tool for the real-time acquisition and visualisation of human motion: Currently it supports the Flock-of-Birds electromagnetic acquisition system, we are currently working to integrate Optotrak optical tracking system. We should also shortly have a version of the DRE that can run the FoBVis on YOUR computer as well.
• HistoVis is a client-server system for the visualisation of large collections of (registered) histological sections.

It’s all very exciting that more products of our research are entering the big bad outside world!  The FoBVis is already being actively used by the LUMC Laboratory for Motion Analysis (we hope that more labs will start using this soon), and HistoVis will soon go live from the visible-orbit.nl server. Of course these have both been released under the new BSD license, as the GPL sucks.

Screencasts: Video Performance Art of the Nerdily Inclined. That’s where one makes a recording of one’s computer screen whilst demonstrating some or other procedure, optionally narrated by oneself, and then proceeds to upload said recording (called a screencast) to YouTube or similar. See a previous post of mine for one possible (and free) way of doing this on Windows. This weekend I produced and uploaded two such pieces, both demonstrating aspects of the DeVIDE Runtime Environment, or DRE, that paradoxically do NOT involve DeVIDE itself. Especially the second is really soothing, one could even say mildly sleep-inducing.  I just say: (1) Try (2) it.

To conclude, I give you a track from the new Massive Attack album Heligoland, called Paradise Circus. It should make your brain sit and scratch its chin stubble, not unlike the usual dose of backyard philosophy:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #12: Ceci n’est pas une bibliothèque.
2. Weekly Head Voices for Week 36
3. Weekly Head Voices #3: Powerless meat Zen, Xi leaves, NFBI, Motek

All hail the beautiful EuroVis 2010 logo!

To kick start this blog post, allow me to get this off my chest: BOTH Stef Busking’s paper on the <CENSORED> and Peter Krekel’s paper on the <CENSORED> were conditionally accepted for EuroVis 2010! There’s some hard work ahead to get the papers ready for the final round, but this conditional acceptance (70% of submitted papers were rejected) is a great achievement. You may send them your webcammed applause and adoration.

During the past week, the 6th of 2010, I did 2 hours of lecture preparation, 3 hours of straight lecturing, 4 hours of demonstrations and 11 hours of scheduled meetings, most of them quite energising. According to my GTD system, I also completed 19 tasks spread over 11 projects. I’m mentioning this here, as I want to increase my weekly task completion count, and posting this on my blog turns it into a weird kind of game. Once again, you are allowed, no you’re encouraged, to boo and hiss at the appropriate moments.

I also finally got around to updating our research group’s publications listing scripts to generate per-paper pages, so that we’ll henceforth have a (hopefully) attractive webpage to go with each published paper. See this for an example of the per-year listing, and this for an example of such a paper page.

Screenshot of example per-paper page, click to go there!

On Wednesday, three of us got together at my house to convert a complete PhD thesis (a good one, if I might add, and I’m allowed to, since it’s not my own) from Word to LaTeX, to get it ready for print production. Besides having lots of fun (besides bubbling personalities, beer was also involved), we got to stress-test DropBox by concurrently working on a shared folder filled with .tex files, and often doing full LaTeX builds involving latex, dvips, ps2pdf and bunches of image conversions. In spite of this dangerous concoction of a PhD thesis, concurrent editing, beer, laughter and the cloud, Murphy never arrived at the party and we ended up with 170 pages quite handsomely typeset in LaTeX. Kudos to Dropbox! (and us of course. duh.)

On a slightly less excited note, I’ve just been threatened with a lawsuit for the second time due to activities on my blog. This time, it’s a very angry and foul-mouthed homeopath. If you’re interested, search the latest few comments on my Werner post for the ones made by a certain DJ. Currently I’m hoping he’ll take the reasonable (for both of us) option and stay away. (DJ, if you’re reading this, no this is not THAT promised post. I’m keeping to my end of the deal: You stay away, your identity is safe.)

Continuing a short but promising tradition in backyard philosophy, I’d like to conclude with something I seem to remember a Very Flat Cat telling me years ago, and something that recently came up again in yet another interesting discussion with the same extremely interesting guy from last week’s visualisation science discussion:

Under-promise, then over-deliver.

I’ve seen some pretty good mottos, but this one’s an absolute keeper. Thank you very much Very Flat Cat, also for this.

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #14: My Week Was A Wormhole.
2. Weekly Head Voices #11: iCalmDown.
3. Weekly Head Voices #16: Go Go Gadget!

WE INTERRUPT THIS PROGRAMME FOR THE FOLLOWING IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT:

I’m officially not supposed to talk about this until the next edition of the Weekly Head Voices, but it’s too big and too cool to keep quiet about until then.  Google has just released Buzz, their location-based status / media updating system, and it’s fantastically cool.  I’ve just posted my first Buzz via Google Maps 4.0 on my E71 (I think I’m the third buzz in Delft EVAR).  Don’t know what Buzz is? Check this YouTube clip:

Click here to view the embedded video.

YOU WILL NOW BE RETURNED TO YOUR NORMAL PROGRAMMING.

The reason for the title of this post is my Saturday visit to DOK, Delft’s unique library concept. It’s not really a library, but more of a fantastic place of gathering that coincidentally contains thousands of books, CDs, DVDs and, err, a coffee shop! They even have a number of sonic chairs that one can make use of to listen to music via the mounted Macs. This Saturday, live music by one of the artists who exhibited at the DOK.  I made you a short snippet:

Click here to view the embedded video.

As even this short edition should end on a philosophical note, I’d like to conclude with an interesting discussion I had on whether the type of research we do in (medical) visualisation can be considered to be science. Very strictly speaking, the scientific method consists of observation, hypothesis forming and finally experimentation to prove or disprove the hypothesis. A large body of visualisation work is concerned with making stuff that solves hard problems, i.e. formulative research as opposed to the more traditional evaluative research. Although the question of whether making stuff that solves hard problems constitutes science is a complex discussion that deserves a whole year of blog posts, I am going to conclude with one possible and simple take on situation:

By taking this constructive approach we are, besides actually solving problems (a neat by-product, no?), discovering how to create effective visual representations of complex phenomena hidden in even more complex data. By doing this, we are in fact observing the supremely complex system consisting of the whole pipeline from data acquisition to insight, all the while experimenting with parameters (in the widest possible sense of the world) and thus confirming or disproving hypotheses concerning the nature of the pipeline and its various components. Together, these hypotheses make up the model that governs the effective extraction of insight from data via the human visual system.

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #14: My Week Was A Wormhole.
2. Soulwax
3. Eurovis 2009

SuSE engineers consider this dog to be "quite pretty" and also "so cute and cuddly".

First I have to get some negative emotions off my chest: I’m currently test-driving the TU Delft’s new standard SuSE Enterprise Linux Edition (SLED) 11 image at work. After two days of using the system and documenting my experiences, I had to switch back to my usual Ubuntu desktop, as my eyes had started bleeding profusely. The SLED desktop takes the concept of “ugly” to places even it feels very dirty having ever visited. Okay, so I might be ever so slightly exaggerating, but there really is almost no comparison with a modern Ubuntu system!

During this past week my productivity has again made the transition from reactive to proactive. This is a usual phenomenon after any long vacation, but it sure is a nice feeling being able to start on things long before they become urgent. It gives me some room to strategise and think about the Big Picture. In the same vein, I (once again) realised that I should spend mornings on the creative and heavier-weight items on my todo list, and reserve the afternoons for meetings (which definitely require creativity, but of a different kind) and more routine tasks. For the past months I have followed the policy of scheduling meetings in the afternoons as far as possible, so my mornings are reserved for tasks that require a few hours contiguously. Luxury!

At the start of an evening with two friends (in line with my anonymisation policy, let’s call them Science Entrepreneur Friend, or SEF, and Extremely Clever Yet Very Social Scientist Friend, or ECYVSSF) that ended with me having so much fun that I managed to get caught on the infamous Dutch nachtnet (trains that take party-goers home at ungodly hours), SEF pointed out that my “to learn and to create” snippet of the previous post reminded him of something of Wilhelm von Humboldt. After some searching I found the relevant quote:

To inquire and to create;—these are the grand centres around which all human pursuits revolve, or at least to these objects do they all more or less directly refer. Before inquiry can fathom the very essence of things, or penetrate to the limits of reason, it presupposes, in addition to profundity, a rich diversity and genial warmth of soul—the harmonious exertion of all the human faculties combined.

Thank you SEF !

This same evening was characterised by, besides too many Pelgrim Trippels (a strong beer brewed in Rotterdam), much heated discussion on the interaction between science, that is how we attain and disseminate new knowledge about the reality around us, and academia, that is the interesting ecosphere where science mostly takes place, where scientists work in strange and strict hierarchical castes, and the focus on science can easily be lost due to the practicalities and politics of academia.

For all its faults, it is exactly this strange system that makes it possible for me to work closely together with a number of exceptionally bright people, an energising activity that is arguably very much in the spirit of inquiry and of creativity.

On that positive note, have a brilliant week everyone!

Related posts:

1. Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply
2. Weekly Head Voices #13: So you want to sue me?!
3. Amazingly crap print support in Ubuntu 6.06

You might have thought that my Weekly Head Voices were a thing of the past, but I unfortunately have to disappoint you yet again. The weekly head voices will continue in 2010, in spite of slip-ups like this one, where I’m going to have to stuff three weeks of inconsequentialities into the room usually reserved for a single week of inconsequentialities. Whatever the case may be, welcome to this edition, covering weeks 1, 2 and 3 of 2010!

A fine day in beautiful Bergen, on our way to have lunch.

In week 1, I had the privilege of visiting the University of Bergen in Norway, where I opposed the defence of Jean-Paul Balabanian, now the proud owner of a successfully defended PhD thesis on integrated view visualisation. Dr. Balabanian proposed, based on a number of solid publications, that integrated views, i.e. the idea of creating a single visualisation combining a number of different conceptual views instead of making use of separate coupled views, is in many cases more effective. Making the acquaintance of Prof. Christof Rezk-Salama, my co-opponent, was an added bonus on top of catching up with the Bergen crew.

On the Big Brother front, I have started using the Dutch OV chipkaart also for travelling by train. The OV chipkaart is a single smart card with which one will eventually be able to pay for all shapes and forms of public transport in the Netherlands. The cool thing is that one can in theory travel more efficiently as no tickets have to be bought. As one is diving through the closing doors of the train, one waves the card past a conveniently placed reader and the system records the station whilst also deducting a deposit. As one leaves the train at one’s destination, in a slightly more relaxed fashion, one elegantly waves the card past yet another conveniently placed reader, thus checking out and having the unused part of the deposit transferred back to the card.

This usually, surprisingly, works. The other day however, my diving through the closing train doors resulted in the waving not being properly registered, resulting in my NOT checking IN and hence mistakenly checking IN at my destination, instead of OUT (it’s the same card reader). Checking out immediately in order to undo the whole operation was problematic, as the system kept claiming that I was already checked in. Whoops. Much later, i.e. after I had lost my deposit, it turned out that one has to wait for 2 minutes before being able to check out again. Remember that kids, remember that. You can buy me a deposit’s worth of beers when we see each other again.

My SO now owns a brand-new iPhone 3GS. It is indeed a beautiful thing, but the beauty unfortunately does not make up for the on-screen keyboard, or rather the lack of hardware qwerty keyboard. This has made me rethink my plans to get the similarly keyboardless Google Nexus One when it’s officially released over here. I’ll wait for the first Nexus One-class phone with a good keyboard. Reviews have unfortunately not been kind with regard to the Motorola / Droid keyboard, so I’m going to skip that one.  (There is that other nagging little issue that it looks like a brick. A brick with a slide-out sub-standard keyboard. It is indeed a very smooth brick. If one were to build a house with it, it would indeed be a very special house, if a tad expensive.)

On the work front, I have two bits of incredibly good news:

• After spending significant time on finishing my teaching portfolio (just call it a mini-thesis) last year, I am now the proud owner of a TU Delft BKO, which means that I’m qualified to teach at University level, using all kinds of new-fangled learning methods. Note that I said “learning” and not “teaching”. This means I’m hip. If you see me lying outside under a tree with one of my classes, you know we’re Learning, with a capital L.
• Our STW NIG proposal “Novel pre-operative planning and intra-operative guidance system for shoulder replacement surgery” has been approved! We now have enough money to pay two people for 4 years to work on our Top Secret NEW Idea for surgical guidance. This proposal was written together with colleagues from the LUMC Department of Orthopaedics.

On the same front, I made the depressing mistake of calculating my h-index the other day.  Publish or Perish, great little tool that it is, has difficulty with my very common surname, plus that it misses some of my oldest publications that have the highest number of citations, and Scopus is just too durn stingy, so I rolled my own quick and dirty hack that parses Google Scholar with BeautifulSoup, based on a RIS-format list of my publications. Whatever the case may be, the outcome was mildly discouraging. I believe the “h” in h-index stands for “HARSH”. Harsh man!

In the meantime, I’ve mostly recovered by remembering (or rather being reminded by the observant folk around me) that I started doing what I do not to work on my probably doomed h-index, but to learn and to create. This indeed still makes me happy.

That being said, YOU CAN START CITING OUR ARTICLES NOW, PEOPLE!!

Related posts:

1. First thoughts on the Tungsten E
2. Weekly Head Voices #16: Go Go Gadget!
3. Weekly Head Voices #13: So you want to sue me?!

Holiday feeling.

Yes, that up there is my foot. Next to my beer. On my balcony. Overlooking my ocean and my clouds…

It was a ridiculously lovely holiday, with the only drawback that I wasn’t able to take more people along on it. Fear not, soon my Master Plan will come to fruition, in which my significant other will become famously rich and I’ll be able to charter a Family and Friends Boeing (or an Airbus, depending on the rules that govern such things at that time), and you’ll all be able to tag along on my Ridiculously Lovely holiday. Fear not, for I will not forget you.

2010 is now upon us. This year, I plan to create value, in as many ways as I can. I have resolved to meditate more often. I have also resolved to spend more time on meaningful communication with friends and other appreciated humans. May you have exactly the year that you desire, or the one that you need.

Related posts:

1. Back from ZA 2003
2. Three rules of stress-free email productivity
3. Oh brother!

Image copyright Grant Neufeld.

I get to process quite an amount of email every day, and the amount seems to be increasing year after year.  Experience has taught me one or two hard lessons with regard to the efficient handling of said email.  Because I like you, I now give you my not-so-secret-anymore rules for stress-free email productivity!

1. Only check email when you actually have the time to take action.

This is the most important rule, and also the one I forget the most often.  The bottom-line is that you should only check your email if you have the time and inclination at that moment to take action on all of your inbox.  Taking action includes the GTD-style delete, delegate, defer and do possibilities, so for example chopping an email up into its constituent actions and sticking those in your todo-system (deferring) counts as taking action.  Under any other circumstances, don’t even check, as this will only serve to stress you out.  Conversely, following this rule will lead to having longer blocks of contiguous time to spend on tasks that you select, and not the crazy reactive work processing style endemic in the modern work place.

This rule is in practice nicely satisfied by the advice to make time for two or three distinct email processing moments per day.

2. Don’t use email as your main todo system.

Conversely put, have a good todo system that’s separate from your email.  This forces you to analyse emails during email processing moments and to break them up into the atomic GTD-style tasks that they represent.  You can always link the original email to the task, but the task description should be your main unit of work.  Seeing the same emails over and over increases stress and leads to unnecessary effort as you analyse them again and again every time that you see them.  Tasks, in general being more concisely described, are easier to start with and also increase the resolution of your accountable productivity.

3. Have separate work and non-work accounts.

Accidentally seeing one work email during your well-deserved holiday can spoil your mood. Maintain a separate email account for non-work (social) matters and make sure correspondents are aware of the difference.  This way, you can continue using email during rest periods without the risk of that one misplaced email putting you back in work-mode for the rest of the day.  This measure helps to maximise the value of your relaxation time.

Following the three rules above will also help a great deal in attaining and maintaining the nirvana that is inbox-zero.

Related posts:

1. My PalmOS-based GTD setup
2. My GMAIL experiment comes to an end
3. Weekly Head Voices #8: Uninterruptible Fun Supply