If you could pay attention to just one thing over the next 15 minutes, what would it be?
The list of categories of potential things to be alert to is too long, so it doesn't make sense to sort through them to find the right type of thing. Don't start by reviewing the list, because the list is too long to review without making that the one solitary task.
It's always good to remove things from the desk or desktop, particularly if that can be done quickly and ruthlessly; similarly, closing applications is helpful. Reduce the choice space.
If the inbox is open at all, it will quickly absorb 15 minutes just in care and tending. Thus any sub-task that involves the inbox will likely overlap the whole time span with the need to fully tend to that collection. Similarly, any review of any statistics, any perusal of any stream of novelty or items of possible interest, will easily consume that stretch of time just in picking through the list or going through it.
Some aspects of online life lend themselves to the 15 minute burst. A quarter hour can manage a few additions or subtractions to a mailing list, a few wiki pages tweaked harmlessly, a series of essentially mindless but unautomated two-minute tasks strung together until time runs out. The burden of diligence, to be certain, useful especially when maintained daily for years, but not the contemplation of one moment.
I've used systems for task-reminders (the infinite todo list) that let you pick a task at random and then use that as the suggestion for the next thing to do. Taken to some logical extreme you might want a machine to prompt you for the next thing that you wanted it to remind you of and just iterate through that until some pile of tasks got managed into submission. (Pity you if you fill the system with the wrong tasks.)
In 15 minutes I can walk about 1600 steps, about 1/6 of my daily stated pedestrian quota. If the ground is level and not too slippery, some of the tasks requiring diligence can go with it, the walk through the quiet neighborhood allowing email deletion and some amount of phone calling as possible.
Not coincidentally, this post took about 15 minutes to write the first time through. I'm expecting that another 15 would give it a good edit more suitable for publication (links! references to witty bloggers! links to lifehacker so that I get some traffic!) but that's less important than getting home to family right now.
Time for back to school! Here's a roundup of the best posts I've found.
Our school year has started well, and we're adjusting to new routines. I went to the first day of school with Saul at Burns Park, met a bunch of parents at the PTO coffee, and am eagerly awaiting the new school directory so we can know who our new neighbors and schoolmates are. Days have changed, wake up time has changed, pretty much everything says school and not summer.
I went through a bunch of back-to-school stuff on the net - mostly not the back-to-school shopping things, but the first week of school stuff - and pulled out a bunch of highlights relevant to this year.
When you’re putting together the perfect family schedule, you have to do more than just tack up a Puppy Of The Month calendar on the wall.
The Regular Schedule
Book clubs. Soccer practices. Or, if you’re like us, physical therapy appointments. Some appointments are regularly scheduled, and the times don’t change week-to-week, but rather month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter. Rather than write down the same information every week, have one whiteboard or poster board with everybody’s regular schedule Mon – Sun.
Deb and I maintain our calendars two different ways - hers is paper, mine is mostly electronic - and there are enough standing dates on the calendar that this sounds like a great idea.
Top 10 Back to School Tools, #9: Perfect your note-taking skills this semester—get a primer on how to take study-worthy lecture notes using the Cornell method, and customize and print Cornell templates to get started.
I've written about Cornell Notes before, but somehow missed Ryan Stewart's Cornell-Notes.com. The template is nifty. Another nifty thing I've found recently in the print-your-own-pages world is Page Packer for making pocket-sized books from PDF files.
3. Cool Mom Picks Back to School Guide 2007 is a shopping guide. Saul ended up with a new used bike (garage sale plus brake work rehab at Ann Arbor Cyclery) and new backpack from Land's End. Cool Mom Picks found this source for book plates to put in your books from One Good Bumblebee:
Library card bookplates are so so cool, and help insure that the books your kids brings to school come home with them too.
4. Parent Dish's Angie Felton notes that here in Michigan schools start after Labor Day (to make sure that tourist dollars flow freely) and unearths this fun MasterCard commercial on the backpack theme:
Lisa Wever Koski, a Miami-Dade teacher, is surprised that more people don't use this simple tool -- a monthly calendar. She prints hers from the computer, attaches a magnetic strip and hangs it on the refrigerator where everyone will look at it several times a day. She puts all family members' activities, meetings, appointments and birthdays on it. ``I see that kids do not consult their parents about their schedules. They will sign up for an activity, pay the fee, then back out because they didn't know it was their grandmother's birthday.''
Starting in 1st grade, schools with computer labs allow children to spend time creating pictures on computers. In second grade students start to do research for projects using the school computer lab. Before third grade they are allowed to store files on the school's hard drive related to the work they are doing in a computer lab. In 4th grade, the school tech office creates private (password protected) folders for students to store their work. I have heard some students using word processing or spreadsheet software for school projects as early as 3rd grade but defintely by 4th.
Saul, who is starting 2d grade, has been using a computer for a while now - some of his drawings of Ann Arbor Fairy Doors are up on Flickr.
It's that time of year again. Back to school. Some Moms are thrilled. Some Moms unsure. Some are just in a state of shock over the hit the wallet takes. One thing consistent about it all: there are moans from kids heard around the country that their summer is ending. But the Moms? Ahhhh, the Moms have other ideas.
Personally, I always get a bit freaked out as if it was my first day of school when they start up. But that probably has more to do with the fact that they have not yet instituted a "start at noon" school day with our public school system. Now that would rock my socks off! Alas, my cries to let my kids (and when I say my kids, I of course mean me) sleep in late and then go to school.
DO plan a get together with other families before school starts. Get a class contact list from the school and invite the parents and kids over for a play date. My friend, Laurie, invited new classmates to her daughter's birthday party (which happened to fall two weeks before the first day of school) -- it presented the perfect opportunity for the parents to get to know one another and for the kids to get to know each other before the big day.
The Burns Park PTO organized a picnic at the playground for each of the incoming classes, and we all had a great time talking to the other 2d grade parents. I'm organizing our Math / Science Night this year - and the PTO has an event calendar that it looks like you can subscribe to with iCal.
I'm selling a bunch of Pokemon cards. Why? Because my kids sneaked them into my shopping cart while at the grocery store and I ended up buying them because I didn't notice they were there until we got home. How could I have possibly not noticed they were in my cart, you ask? Let me explain.
The winning bid was $142.51 (with 53 bids), which just goes to show you how much writing well can help you.
How long did it take you to get your company’s products in Target stores?
2 years from when we started Buttoned Up.
What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Do not give up. People will tell you what is wrong with your idea, why its already been done (there are no new ideas), etc… If you believe in what you are doing, keep at it and you will find success.
What motivates you?
I love the challenge of making products that will help women get organized and that will really mean something to them. There is no greater high than when people write or call and say they love our products.
My knee hurts (ow). Some combination of several days straight of 18000+ step days, berry and pea picking on my knees, the usual kid wrangling and what I think is an old injury conspired to make my left knee unhappy. I did the minimal pedestrian thing today (and still had 7000 steps) and found an ice pack to keep the knee cool.
Coincidentally I noticed that my laptop was running hot, and so made the ice pack do double duty as a laptop cooling device.
Wow, what a difference!
This is what iStat Nano reports (degrees Farenheit). I don't have a before number, but I know that the "enclosure bottom" is usually way higher and hot to the touch.
The icepack I have is a Ace Hot And Cold Compress of uncertain vintage. It's flexible with a cloth cover so there's no risk of condensation on the bottom. I've linked a few likely candidates from Amazon if you want to experiment.
Derek Mehraban, Debbie Merion and I got together for coffee at Caribou and talked about group organization and group building. Here are her notes:
Here are the top four social networking ideas I heard from Ed and Derek
during our 6/4/07 chat as we talked about starting a large group
quickly (Connect Ann Arbor) and a smaller group more slowly (A2B3):
1. Call up the leaders of organizations to mobilize a large group of
people quickly
2. Use the moderator tools of Yahoo groups to send out an automated
monthly reminder to group members and a welcome message
3. Assume that starting a new group takes some period of time (2
years?!) and regular messages and face meetings to find the best place
to meet and engaged folks.
4. The payoff for being distracted online by others is that they get
to know you and will also allow you to distract them, meaning you can
mobilize a large group of quickly when you have something to say.
What are your tips for getting people engaged in a group?
From today's lunch: When we go around next time with the name-and-who-we-are thing, could we instead offer up name-and-what-we-want?
In other words, say one brief thing you'd like to do, or see, or learn. Somebody to talk to, a goal, a crisis looking for a solution. Regardless of scale.
Might make an interesting hook for setting up a reciprocity network.
The desktop at work is getting noticeably cleaner, and the calendar is pretty clean too. There's a cable tangle in my bookbag that just got untangled.
The next thing to tidy at home is my closet, which has some clothes in it to disappear. (Done - I'm not wearing that size pants anymore, the walking is keeping my weight down) After that, there's a pile of paper on my desk that needs some stern attention.
The electronic inbox is empty, though the pile of next action email is growing. (Correction: the inbox filled up again while I was out on my walk. I'd rather walk.)
The desktop at work is getting noticeably cleaner, and the calendar is pretty clean too. There's a cable tangle in my bookbag that just got untangled.
The next thing to tidy at home is my closet, which has some clothes in it to disappear. After that, there's a pile of paper on my desk that needs some stern attention.
The electronic inbox is empty, though the pile of next action email is growing. (Correction: the inbox filled up again while I was out on my walk. I'd rather walk.)
One of the tenets of agile project management is a focus on velocity, which means in this context some kind of accurate measurement of how long tasks actually take vs. how long you planned to do them. If you have good estimates from the past as to how many work units you have to do and how long each work unit takes to accomplish, you might just be able to predict when you'll be done.
I did some velocity estimation at the cafe tonight. As an exercise in writing a lot of words in not very much time, I twittered to myself taking notes on some thoughts I was having and wrote them down on paper (mercifully sparing my SMS friends who won't have to pay $0.15 each to get a record of my inner thoughts). At top mocha fueled speed, a quadrille page filled up in 17 minutes, and I time stamped each line. A second pair of pages took 75 minutes (37 min/page) after some of the coffee wore off and with the writing mixed in with conversations.
It was a really weird way to write, almost like instant messaging myself on paper. I love it when the structures of the net infect my paper notebooks, and it was a very productive way to capture a lot of thinking concisely and without getting too distracted. I cheated a couple of times by IM'ing friends (you'll note the previous entry about time tracking) from my mobile device while I was writing - the effect on paper is to have someone else's thoughts in the same format intermingle with yours.
I don't think it would work for me without coffee, not the top speed writing. I was able to keep up without any problems. As a practice of notebook keeping, time stamping your entries is a good standard practice, but I hadn't thought of them as twitters (as opposed to paragraphs) until tonight.
It's hard to have great weird ideas when you're tracking every minute to determine who it gets billed to. The cognitive overhead of deciding which part of your brain gets dinged for each good thought gets in the way of flow.
Some recommendations on time tracking software via an evening on twitter and jabber from the cafe (I love mobile jabber as a way to unobtrusively get good ideas from someone else):
This is my new favorite tool for freelance work. I don’t have to think, I don’t have to calculate, just press stop and start when I’m doing various tasks and spit out a report at the end of the month. And it’s free!
anotherjesse recommends Jabber::Simple by blaine as a toolkit for building Jabber applications, e.g. a Twitter based time keeper. I think all I'd have to have would be something that listened privately and kept a log, but then the mind starts to wander into nice things like ways to figure out where the bus is from an IM or Twitter and not from a browser.
credits: Peter Kaminski from Socialtext for the phrase "great weird ideas"; Caterina Fake for the phrase "cognitive overhead" as heard on a Tod Maffin interview on a CBC Radio One.
A2Brooklyn A neighborhood mailing list for people on my block and in Lower Burns Park in Ann Arbor, as noted in the New York Times "Circuits" section.
Ann Arbor District Library My local (and favorite) library. I'm on the library's technology advisory board.
Arborparents For parents and prospective parents in Ann Arbor, MI and the area, this is a great Yahoo group.
Assistive Media High quality audio recordings of short-subject fiction and non-fiction for the visually impaired and for anyone who loves reading, copyright approved. I'm on the board of directors.
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