Archive for April, 2005
Just working around the clock….
On the plus side, I think I finally found my Holy Grail of personal content management, the new version of DEVONthink (Mac OS X only, I’m afraid). It hasn’t impressed me as an ideal solution in the past, but the last few iterations are amazing. It’s been quite an enabling little beast for my job at hand, allowing me to sift through thousands of pages of text (plain, RTF, HTML and PDF), find related entries, track my sources, manage all related media, and write various documents without bother or fuss. Its capabilities are constantly surprising me. Stay tuned for a write-up….
April 29th, 2005
Like most other gadget freaks, I always want the latest and greatest. I can’t go near a Future Shop without venturing inside with a drool cup duct-taped to my chin. I dream of all the things I could get –one day– when I have far too much money and have those business needs which somehow validate purchasing plasma screens wider than my apartment’s living room, wireless speaker systems capable of generating more noise than the eruption of Krakatoa, pens that do everything but write, and strange hunks of plastic that serve as an all-in-one cell phone, barometer, airplane landing signal, holographic chess projector, egg timer, and remote control for next-generation iPods yet-undreamt-of. Like other forms of lust, this too can lead to blindness.
Lately, my dear old faithful Linux SGI box is staggering on its last legs, and so my thoughts turn to how I might replace it. Since portability is key to a lifestyle like mine, a laptop makes perfect sense. But ah, which one?
In my last place of employment, I requisitioned a shiny new Sony Vaio laptop with a Pentium 4 2.66GHz processor. Part of the day was spent in Windows XP Pro, part of it in Debian Linux. Let’s say that the machine was not without its problems. At times, especially in Windows, doing more than one thing at a time seemed to make it incredibly sluggish. (When burning a CD or DVD, you had to be careful not to run another program in the background or touch any keys –even the screen brightness– lest you make a coaster.) Because of the “shared memory” video card, it wasn’t even possible to play a 3D game like Neverwinter Nights while on the road: the OpenGL was software-only. And then there was the failing power brick. When I called Sony tech support, I was pushed to a flustered Indian woman who knew no other English than what was in a flow chart: after nearly an hour’s wait on the line, a 10-minute conversation (me: “Look, I’m a techie… I know that this power supply has a loose connection inside, and I can’t open it!”; her: “Please check that the plug is in the wall socket, and you have pressed the laptop ‘on’ button”), and her request to “Please hold while I look into escalating your issue”… I was promptly dropped. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but this happened a second, third and fourth time as well, albeit with different call centre personnel who had even less of a mastery of English.
Confession: I used to be an Mac bigot. Occasionally working with designers who felt confident and smug about how their pricey machines were far superior to my beloved PCs, I learned to make fun of these hippie freaks who barely knew anything about their machines, who clinged to overly-simple interfaces, and who resisted the urge to join the rest of humanity. I stayed as far away from Macs as possible, which was actually quite easy in this redneck Windows area of the world.
Five years ago, I joined a school in Nova Scotia that would only provide me with a Mac laptop, specifically a Powerbook 2000 Pismo. This oddly-shaped little black laptop came with Mac OS 9.1, and O! did I hate it. I could barely change anything, the interface was far too simple for my liking, there was no right-click button, and there was very little complexity under the hood (I had grown quite used to Linux). When the UNIX-based OS X was released, however, it was an entirely different story: it was powerful enough that I could start to enjoy it. How could you not like something that lets you use Photoshop one minute, and then jump into a terminal to edit bash scripts with vi and tweak its Apache the next?
Five years later, I still have the Pismo.
Now, five years for a laptop is a looooooong time. Usually, an older machine has been dropped, has begun to experience major hardware malfunctions, and is so woefully underpowered that it is practically useless with modern applications. In contrast, this Pismo is still running exceedingly well, to my complete surprise, and each new generation of OS X seems to make it faster. Its specifications: 256 MB RAM (eek!), G3 400MHz processor, 8 MB ATI 3D video card, DVD drive, Firewire, 10 GB hard drive, AirPort wireless, Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Strangely enough, it’s quite zippy and responsive. I can have several large applications going at once (including Adobe programs, Firefox and a word processor), and it seems to be able to handle the load very well. In fact, I’d even venture to claim that it’s almost as fast as the P4 2.66 Vaio for regular day-to-day work. True, the poor thing is starting to show its age: the fan comes on and sounds a little whiney, DivX movie files stutter ever now and then, the DVD drive occasionally has to work a little harder to read some CD-ROMs, and the power brick (er… “yo-yo”) is held together with electrical tape and tender care, but all this just gives the little beast more personality. I can see why people adore their Pismos: there are plenty of user comments on sites like LowEndMac that sound off about their wonderful little “workhorses” in such endearing tones that they often verge on love letters. The resale value is also extremely high for such an old machine.
While I will –no doubt– eventually succumb to the technophilia evoked by the beautiful new Powerbooks, I’ve decided that I’m sticking with the Pismo for now. I’ll pump up the RAM, slot in a new hard drive, refresh the electrical tape, and maybe even get a G4 upgrade. The new Powerbook can wait: I already have a good machine, one that feels a little more like a companion than a cold hunk of silicon, metal and plastic.
April 22nd, 2005
I was doing some work in the local library (a fairly small one), when I decided to take a little break and peruse the shelves. The productivity section was small indeed, but it yielded a little unexpected treasure: Getting Things Done by Edwin C. Bliss, subtitled “The ABCs of Time Management”. Now, I’ve heard this book mentioned a couple of times, mainly in the context of David Allen’s more famous book of the same name, but I had little idea as to its content. A glance at the sign-out stamps indicated that has been borrowed roughly once every three years. Obviously not a very in-demand book in this neck of the woods. Without further ado, I slapped down my library card and took it home.
First, let me say that I’ve heard a little bit of condescention and smugness used when mentioning Bliss’ book, mainly from hard-core GTD fans who have never read it and somehow seem to resent the back that an earlier productivity book could somehow use the sacred nomenclature. Folks, the term “getting things done” is a pretty run-of-the-mill –even bland– title that… uhm… seems to offter advice on getting things done. While I hesitate to congratulate either Bliss or Allen (or their publishers) on their creativity when naming books, I certainly don’t hold a lack of originality against them either. “It is what it is.”
On to the book. I was very pleasantly surprised. In a way, this is more in line with what Allen hopes to achieve in Ready for Anything, a collection of productivity ideas and wisdom. Bliss, also a consultant of many years’ experience with megacorporations and a lecturer on organisational and time management issues, has put together a book that is deceiving in its randomness. Rather than start at a particular point and build up to a complete, self-contained system (as Allen, Covey and others do), he instead organises the sections alphabetically. He moves from “After-Action Reports” to “Alcohol”, and finishes with “Xenelasia” and “Yesterday Trap”. (There is no “Z”, but I’m not going to hold this against Bliss; I would have liked his take on Zen, though.) In other words, you can open the book, start anywhere, and absorb of few pieces of advice before you rush off to actually get things done.
While Allen and Covey back up their ideas mainly with anecdotes, Bliss is more logical about presenting evidence to back up his thoughts. While he does share the occasional personal story, his approach is far more scientific. He quotes surveys, statistics and studies, and gives well-researched examples for certain topics. These little “mini-essays” –each averaging a page or so– are filled with practical advice, insights into the leaders of large companies, figures from little-known but meaningful reports, and plenty of great little (dare I say it) “life hacks” that cause your neurotransmitters to suddenly figure in the right sequence.
For example, he mentions the “Stand-up Desk”. Now, I’ve never really considered this idea. Apparently, not only great writers like Hemingway, Woolf, Carroll, Nabokov and Winston Churchill used standing desks, but many leaders of large organisations do. This caused me to reflect on something that I’ve noticed about my own thinking habits: all my heavy duty thinking, I tend to do while pacing or standing at whiteboards. Bliss quotes a USC study that indicates an acceleration of 5-20% in the brain’s information-processing speed while standing instead of sitting, as well as a marked improvement in reaction time for anyone working on difficult tasks. He also mentions the fact that a desk should be about elbow height, and that there should be a bar to raise one foot occasionally to prevent back problems. This entry alone has kick-started the creaking gears in my mind: the next time I change around my office, I will certainly try a standing desk for a while. I might have to play around with the ergonomics, especially with regard to using a laptop, but it sounds like a worthwhile experiment.
Bliss covers many other topics in the same way, including the need for sleep, how to overcome mental blocks, the use of exercise in increasing productivity, procrastination, a step-by-step guide to handling correspondence quickly, and so on. There’s plenty of solid, practical advice that one can put into play almost immediately, and enough scientific research to feel informed about your choices.
I am not sure if this book is still in print or not (my edition was updated in 1991), but Amazon.com carries some copies that are quite inexpensive. Highly recommended, especially considering the price.
April 11th, 2005
There’s quite a favourable review of D*I*Y Planner 2 online over at the UK-based Home Computer Magazine. I must say, I was a little amused to find a “screenshot” of the planner. 
(Thanks for the tip-off, Dave!)
April 10th, 2005
How do you make a “trusted system”, the term David Allen uses to denote a planning and organisational system which can be relied upon to contain your events, tasks, projects and thoughts? It’s easy to get carried away in tweaking productivity methodologies, but mind like water is only achieved when such a system is fully implemented and consulted on a day-to-day basis. One of the biggest obstacles for many people, myself included, is how to create a system that is always there, at the ready, and worthy of your trust.
When I was in high school and university, I used to keep journals. Not only did I write rather copiously about all my daily happenings, my far-fetched ideas and my roller-coaster relationships, but I’d also sketch, write lists, insert my favourite new photographs, tape in interesting clippings from newspapers, practise other languages, and so on. For years, I was never without my journal.
After university, I joined the regular work force and started lugging around a day planner instead of a journal. I had every intention of doing everything “by the book” and figuring out how to use all the fancy forms to organise my life and job. I started by entering all my personal and work information into the planner, buying special inserts and folders, and stuffing it with every conceivable type of professional form.
Gradually, though, my enthusiasm began to slip away into apathy. Soon, I rarely carried around the planner. I wrote people’s addresses on stickies and stuck them to the monitor, with the intention of later entering them into my contact sheets. Things to be done, I tried to memorise, believing I could remember them when the time came. Project details degenerated into loose notes jotted on the back of meeting agendas. And my calendar was scattered thoughout my planner, digital PIMs, various stickies, a “motivational” wall calendar, and random scraps of paper (usually crumpled in pockets or lost in manuals).
Obviously, it didn’t take long before I recognised a problem. As Mr. Allen points out, I had no system I could trust. And I had no system I could trust, because I didn’t have a convenient system at hand that felt like an extension of myself and my work habits.
The past dozen years have been a learning experience, trying dozens of different systems in an effort to find one suitable for me. Being a web professional, most of the systems have been web-based or at least digital in some way. But none of them were particularly streamlined for my usage habits, nor were they where I needed, when I needed them. Even lightning-fast Graffiti skills on the Palm tended to seriously cramp my hands after a half-page.
Lately, I’ve finally decided to settle upon a paper-based system, which is what we techies refer to as analog. (This is obviously no surprise to anyone who has poked around this site, as this was the main motivator behind the whole D*I*Y Planner.) Between the Getting Things Done methodology, the forms I designed and the processes I tweaked, my productivity and project planning skills have never been better.
But there was still one missing piece to the puzzle. What would make me carry around the planner, and use it as my “trusted system”? Mind you, once a planner hits critical mass and contains all your pertinent information, you tend to carry it anyway because it becomes essential to your life. The problem is, how can you keep it handy and employ it as a trusted system long enough to get to this stage?
For this, I decided to… uh… “borrow a page” from my journal days: when a planner becomes a personal extension of my life, rather than a simple collection of work-related information, I feel better about carrying it with me wherever I go. It literally becomes a piece of me that I feel somewhat empty without.
Getting to this stage is not very difficult, but it means using a planner in ways that often don’t seem obvious to those people using a daily planner for business reasons. Each night, I curl up with my Day Runner and a smooth-writing Pilot G-2 pen and open it up to the Notes (or “Inbox”) section. I use simple plain or unlined paper, because I don’t want a tightly structured form to restrict my free thinking. And I write. I doodle. I make lists of ideas. I play around with concepts. I note interesting news items that might make good stories some day. I make anagrams. I brainstorm design ideas. I note events that, in several years time, will serve up memories of moments potentially forgotten. I write things that are important to me. I write frivolous things. In short, I make the planner personal. I make it mine.
Going to a cafe? Bring it with you and doodle the likeness of the person behind the counter. Going to be caught in traffic? Scribble down a few ideas about what albums you want to get. Grabbing a bite in a restaurant? Jot down the twenty things you want to do before you die. Watching a little TV? During the commercials, write down the list of places you’d like to go for a vacation. Waiting at the doctor’s office? Note ten things you could do on a daily basis to live a healthier life. And so on.
Some of these items will no doubt become projects and objectives someday, but don’t think about that now. Download your brain, express yourself, and worry about structure later. Not only does this jive with GTD, it forges a strong personal connection with your planner. And that’s a vital part of building trust.
For all those people who haven’t yet got into the spirit of toting a planner, I invite you to do one or more of the following:
- Every night, write down a list of ten things. Use the following to get you started:
- 10 things I want people to say about me at my funeral
- 10 books I’ve always wanted to read, but didn’t
- 10 things to do every day to be healthier
- 10 best films I’ve ever seen
- 10 things I can do to help my career
- 10 ideas for a time travel story
- 10 happiest moments of my life
- 10 worst moments of my life
- 10 of my greatest strengths
- 10 of my greatest weaknesses
- 10 things I find exciting/sexy/sensual
- 10 other lists I can write
- Draw one picture a day. (If you’re not an artist, don’t worry: after all, you can only get better.)
- Keep your planner near the bed. Write down any dream you remember as soon as you wake up. (If you are in a rush, put down some keywords and elaborate when you can.) Analyse it, if you can.
- Carry around at least one photograph in your planner that is meaningful to you, and you can show people.
- Carry around at least one photograph in your planner that is meaningful to you, and you cannot show other people. (Nothing too incriminating!)
- Keep a receipt envelope or folder in your planner, and keep clippings of news or magazine articles that speak to you in some way. Each month, read them and transfer to your filing cabinet.
- Keep a tab called Journal in your planner, and keep your personal writings, sketches and ideas there. Clean out every couple of weeks (or 20 pages, whichever comes first) and store the pages in a safe place.
- Make personal writing a daily habit. Put aside fifteen distraction-free minutes a day to write in your planner.
If you’ve never felt a bond with your planner before, I suggest building one. Not only will it become your trusted system, a safekeeper of schedules and tasks, but an omnipresent companion which transcends mere productivity and serves as the caretaker of your thoughts, desires and aspirations. You more effort you put into it, the more important a role it plays in your life.
Keep it handy, keep it personal.
April 9th, 2005
As I’m sure most technogeeks have read in SlashDot, the final version of the new Ubuntu Linux distribution has just been released.
Announcing: Ubuntu 5.04 “The Hoary Hedgehog Release”
The Array (*) is pleased to announce the second release of Ubuntu! If you’ve heard all about Ubuntu and just want to get the Install CD or test the Live CD, you can download it here immediately:
This is one of the first Linux distributions I’ve used (lo, these 11 years and dozen+ distros) that I’m actually completely happy with. It’s just the right mix of usability and power for me, all without getting in the way. It helps to add the new repositories, but after that, every piece of software I want is just minutes away. The few little hitches I’ve had have been easily solved by the Ubuntu Wiki and the Unofficial Ubuntu Starter Guide.
Released simultaneously with this GNOME-based distro is Kunbuntu, a KDE-based distro for those people who prefer that desktop envirionment.
Note that the Ubuntu servers are quite overwhelmed at the moment, so I’d advise picking up the torrents for a very quick download. They can be found at the regular download sites (direct link: i386 install torrent from US mirror).
By the way, “hoary” means “ancient and venerable”.
April 8th, 2005
Update : This set, and many more, are now available free at www.DIYPlanner.com.
I’ve heard your requests, and thanks again to Nate Howland, we have a version of the main template file as a 2-up. This means that you can print two 5.5″x8.5″ pages on one letter-size piece of paper, then guillotine them afterwards, just like the original DIY Planner 1.0.
Tell Acrobat Reader to auto-rotate and center but not scale, and print even pages on back of odd pages. Experiment, and you’ll pick it up easily enough. Link to download: diyplanner2_2up.zip.
Note that this does not include the other files from the D*I*Y Planner package, only the main PDF template file. (If you’re looking for two A5 pages printing to one A4 sheet, check out the A5 Version entry.)
April 5th, 2005
Update : These sets, and many more, are now available free at www.DIYPlanner.com.
Well, my little simian office-mates have come through yet again. I’m pleased to announce the release of the D*I*Y Planner 2.0, A5 Version.
As we don’t have access to A5/A4 paper or planners, we were especially reliant upon overseas testers for this release, and a few people really stepped up to the task and provided some excellent feedback. If you find this version useful, there are a few people who really deserve your appreciation: Yann Abraham, René Yssing Rasmussen, Ronald Schaten (yet again), and especially the eagle-eyed Krzysztof Wysocki. Any errors still left are mine, and mine alone.
Note that most of the templates have been scaled slightly to allow for the difference between the original 5.5″x8.5″ paper size and A5, the receipt envelope should work with A4 paper, and the cover kit has been redone for A5. Please draw my attention to any weirdness you might notice.
Without further ado: diyplanner2_a5.zip.
As an added bonus, Nate Howland has created a version of the main template file as a 2-up, meaning that you can print two A5 pages on one A4 and then guillotine them. For this, tell Acrobat Reader to auto-rotate and center but not scale. Link to download: diyplanner2_a5_2up.zip. (This does not include the other files from the main package, such as the covers and handbook.)
Enjoy!
…
Shameless plug: Oh yes, and if you can’t send bushels of bananas as thanks, please feel free to buy yourself some productivity books (like Getting Things Done or First Things First) at Amazon.co.uk: the monkeys will get a cut.
April 5th, 2005
Warning: Linux geek territory. Enter at your peril.
Now, I’m both a tweaker and an operating system junkie. I use Mac OS X for multimedia production, Linux for web development, and Windows for… for… hmmm… tech support issues. However, I’ve also tinkered in the guts of Solaris, VMS, *BSD, QNX, BeOS and a half-dozen other OSes, just to see what they had to offer. I switch operating systems like people change their clothes.
I made a mistake about a month ago. I had to burn down and build up one of my chief production machines, a Linux SGI box. It had an ancient version of Red Hat on it and it was unsecure and unstable, not to mention extremely dated (Open Source development moves very fast). On my previous laptop I had been using a Frankenstein variant of Debian Linux, originally installed from a Knoppix live CD-ROM, but I was frustrated by being forced to choose between either very unstable software packages or very old ones. After a brief but unfortunately ill-suited dalliance with Fedora (it didn’t like my hardware), I started looking elsewhere for my new distro.
I had heard a lot of good things about SuSE Linux, so I tracked down SuSE Professional 9.2 and installed it on the SGI box. At first, I was quite happy with it. It came with a recent and very pretty version of the KDE desktop environment, along with Java, Flash and plenty of bells and whistles.
But about two weeks ago, the discontent really started. I continually found KDE far too slow and bloated for my day-to-day use. KDE is a pretty heavy-duty system, and it has always struck me as focusing on providing a user interface that matches or outdoes MS Windows feature-by-feature. I didn’t need all that. Heck, I’m happy with just Emacs and a web browser. I tried switching over to GNOME but found out that the SuSE packages were ancient — about a year old. I tried sucking down newer packages from third-party repositories (including apt-get), but many things didn’t work well — for example, anything using the Gstreamer multimedia kit crashed. Garnome was a three-day compile-fest that left me with many other problems, including incompatibilities with existing libraries. Finally, I couldn’t stand it any more. Two days ago, I burnt down SuSE.
Now, I’ve never really been a Debian fan. Most Debian users I’ve met have had all the subtlety of religious zealots trying to convert me at swordpoint. The “live free or die” mentality also tends to get in the way when one is forced to commercial means of making a living. Yes, I do believe in the Braveheartian notion of freedom, but this isn’t very convenient when it conflicts with my “use the best tool for the job” rule: sometimes you need a screwdriver, not a hammer. I don’t like to be told, “Well, you can’t do it that way because the software license isn’t worded correctly, but here’s a simple 48-step way to do it… first, download the new kernel source and modify the Makefile like this….” And don’t even get me started about the user-unfriendliness of the Debian website. All that, plus the very infrequent updates to the base system, led me away from this distribution in the first place.
However, I had been hearing about Ubuntu, the Debian-based distro with “the strange name”, for quite a while now. Convinced that there was something inviting in those waters, I did a little bit of research into it, and arrived at the following conclusions:
- Ubuntu is Debian, but with a very current set of packages, including the recent GNOME 2.10. It can also connect to all third-party repositories for extra and “non-free” packages.
- Because it is Debian, and uses the famed Debian package management system, installing and upgrading software is an absolute breeze.
- Ubuntu is a very philosophical operating system, rather than a religious one. Ubuntu means “humanity to others,” whereas I find Debian Prime to be a “convert or die” sort of experience.
- A very strong effort has been put into usability issues. Not only are most things very intuitive (a lot of credit must go to GNOME Human Interface Guideline adoption), it carefully balances the need for an administrator with the need to be a regular user.
- Ubuntu offers a “live” CD-ROM, where you can boot from the CD and experience how everything works. It detected everything on my system perfectly, and it was extremely nimble when compared to SuSE’s KDE (even though it was running from a CD-ROM!).
- It installs very quickly, and lets one immediately update the system with whatever other packages one wishes.
- The community support is amazing: lots of people helping each other, and plenty of knowledgeable folks creating how-to’s, handbooks, unofficial guides, and wiki pages. And hardly a flame or rude person to be found. Maybe this distro does bring out the humanity in geeks. Heh.
- Get this: Ubuntu will actually send you CD-ROMs by mail, and pay the shipping. I have a stack of 20 x86 and three PPC CD’s on the way to give to friends and volunteer organisations. (Of course, being at least partially funded by a humanitarian billionaire Debian developer — Mark Shuttleworth, also the second space tourist — probably helps in this regard.)
Whereas SuSE took a few days to set up to my liking (and even then, it felt far too sluggish), I installed Ubuntu in less than an hour. It took only a few more hours to download other software packages, choose fonts and themes, slap on Java and Flash, and set up my panels exactly right. In less than four hours, I had a smoothly humming Linux box with everything I wanted, and nothing I didn’t. I’m even getting used to the… uhm… brown-ness of everything: very earthy.
I think I’m going to be happy with this one….
April 2nd, 2005