Vacuum

Open every tab, close every tab

I'm testing a new theory of work within a tabbed browser, using OneTab to help manage things.

The thought is that at some times I'll be working and opening a lot of tabs to do that work, and that another time I'll be finishing up things and closing tabs down.

The goal of a tab-closing session then is to type something meaningful into every open tab (or to pinboard that tab) and then close it out. When I'm done, there will be no open tabs, and everything will have moved forward just a little bit.

Worth a try!

Being partially online is worse than either being online or being offline

There's nothing more frustrating to me than being almost but not quite on the Internet, as I discovered today when going to a cafe (unnamed, but linked) which advertised free wifi. My connections were slow and unreliable and frustrating to use. It looks like you're online but any applications that depend on always-on Internet for their well being work out badly.

The best reaction that I have for this state of interrupted connectivity is to go offline and write in my little notebook. I've written before about Pocket Twitter; there's also a very effective Pocket Issue Tracker where you write down things to do and then re-sync them with your online issue tracker once you are online again.

There is technology that will help this state of interrupted connectivity, and I use it when I can. Of all of the applications that I use, Gmail and Evernote are the two that have the best developed clients that can intelligently buffer things when you're offline. If I have my laptop and no connectivity, I can also use "git" and "vim" to work on my writing projects, knowing that a "git push origin master" command will resync when I'm ready to update changes.

Once upon a time there was no internet and every application worked well offline. Netnews was delivered one batch at a time, and you'd read it while the modem was quiet; email, if it was important enough, might warrant a long distance call to deliver. Now, when the net is down or flaky you should still be able to get work done. And yes, I should really get a data plan for my new phone so that I don't have to rely on the quality of random coffee shops for personal productivity.

Related articles

Pocket Twitter - a suitable replacement for the Internet when offline

Pretending to be on an airplane

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Digital dualism denialism

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Deciding which one thing to do can be harder than getting that one thing done.

Yesterday was a day of careful attention to small details.

I'm particularly proud, in a peculiar way, of the effort that I made to unclog a slow drain in the bathtub. This particular drain has been draining slowly for months, and it's stumped me before. I've tried boiling water, a plastic drain snake, baking soda and vinegar, and a plunger, and none of it worked.

The key bit which I didn't use before was a screwdriver. The particular tub in question has an overflow hatch which holds the drain plug lifter, and by using a screwdriver I was able to disassemble that hatch and remove a gizmo and then, once all the pieces were apart, I could use the plastic drain snake to get at the hair clog. (Ew.) About ten minutes after starting work on the project today, the drain ran free. Hooray!

How hard can it be to clear a drain? Well, the challenge is to have the right combination of the time to work on it, the necessary tools, the insight as to what all you might try new that you hadn't tried before, and a determination not to allow a temporary setback to slow you down. Don't have a screwdriver? A quarter and a vise grip make an adequate substitute. That fancy drain snake you tried before didn't work out so well? Visit the hardware store and see what other designs there are.

What makes this project different from most is that it had been waiting months to complete, months where I stood in the shower with the water accumulating wondering how I was going to fix the problem, months where various other attempts to fix didn't work out so well.

I suppose that a lot of problems we run into look like this. The head on approach with a simple set of tools fails to fix the problem, we're frustrated by the results, and then the situation languishes for a long time without any headway. Some day you look at the problem with fresh eyes and get an aha! insight that transforms the issue from one thing into something completely different, and the fresh attack hits the transformed problem and it clears up quickly.

The unsuccessful problem-solving of the day was a friend's snow blower, which had sat for an entire winter last year unused and thus we think has bad gas in the tank. The obvious approaches of trying the electric starter and the pull starter failed to result in the motor catching, and so the best guess is that draining the gas tank and refilling with fresh fuel will be the right way to solve the problem. This of course transforms the problem from "start the snowblower" to "refill the gas tank of the snowblower" and assumes that all of the starter motors work just fine and they do seem to.

I really should be able to tackle more straightforward tasks head on. There's a temptation to write down the task before addressing it, and then turning the written down task into something which is a subject of some endless refinement. So often it would be easier just to decide to tackle something and do it than to sort through an infinite list of possible tasks saying "no, not now, later" over and over again. It is not always obvious which things are straightforward and which will take hours or weeks of work.

Often the best way to get something done is to simply say that you're not going to stop until it's complete, sit down, get comfortable in working on it, and then grind through the problem until it has reached a single satisfactory answer. Deciding which one thing to do can be harder than getting that one thing done.

 

Some reflection on use of Github as an issue tracker, two weeks in

Two weeks ago, I started using Github as an issue tracker to keep track of things that I intend to do. So far so good. According to its tally, I've closed 139 issues and have 88 open issues. Here's some reflection on that use.

I started up with Github in part because I have an infatuation with new technologies for self-organization, and this was the latest in a series of attempts to get my life in order. I've tried systems on paper, a bunch of electronic systems, various gizmos, you name it I've probably either done it or considered it. There's a piece of me that expects that this is a temporary enthusiasm and that I'll be printing out some of this before I close my Github account down. But while that temporary enthusiasm lasts, it's been a pretty good run.

I've tried to work the process in parallel with an "inbox zero" approach of getting tasks out of my inbox and into my issue tracker. At the moment the inbox is down to five, and it's probably ten minutes work to get it back to zero. It's been nice not having an infinite inbox to plow through, and often that has meant that when there's a quick answer to something that I can dash it off and get back to zero status for a while. That feels good.

As I've used the system what has evolved into a routine is labeling each task, so that everything has a proper color code. "Housekeeping" is bright yellow, "finance" is green, "connect" is blue, and so forth. Obtaining sensible and non-overlapping categories is a challenge, and that will probably continue to evolve slowly over time. An item can be in more than one category and it's easy to switch categories so there's no burden of getting it wrong permanently.

The goal in these categories is to identify some kind of balance among all of the various things I'm trying to take on and not to let any one part of my efforts get out of line with the others. For example, earlier this week I noticed that the "finance" category had 11 outstanding tasks and 2 completed tasks, whereas the "connect" category had twice as many completed tasks as outstanding. If things are going to pile up in my life, I want them to pile up evenly, and it's always reasonable to look at the category with the most tasks and do a quick review and see if there's anything easy to lop off.

A memorable success in this ongoing struggle to keep things in order is the ongoing task of cleaning the basement, which somehow went from being tidy to being a mess over the last few years, and which is inhabited by way too much in the way of dead electronics. A whole string of tech support tasks were gated behind being able to get a good backup of my Mac, and in the process of cleaning the basement I realized that I had a Firewire cable entangled in amongst dozens of old and useless power adapters. A bit of cable unsnagging and I was able to plow through half a dozen system upgrade issues that had piled up, all dependent on one another.

Github has a remote access application to its issue tracker from mobile devices, so at least in theory I should be able to manage the list from my smart phone. Alas, issue #1 is "get a new smart phone", since my elderly Blackberry is more of a dumb phone than anything these days. The Android app is serviceable if a bit clunky feeling, and I'll see how the iPhone/iPad app compares. In practice it's not 100% necessary to sync up with tasks the instant they come to mind or are completed, and paper still comes in handy when compiling the short list of things to do next or brainstorming new ideas that might eventually get done.

Of course I haven't done everything I set out to do; no one could. What I figure is that there's some happy number somewhere more than 100 and less than 150 of things that I might want to do or need to do soonish, and that if I set my mind to it I can write down enough stuff so that there's always something easy to pick from that is useful. The harder tasks (that new phone, and all of the choices around it) gravitate to the bottom of the list, and you can sort through the bottom just as easily as you can sort through the top. I'm not convinced that this is the only way or even the best way to feel like I'm staying on top of the world, but it's really nice and reassuring that I can look at the "closed issues" list and say "yes, I did that".

Related articles

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Task surfing, which is to say not multitasking, with github

The phrase "task surfing" came to me, and I'm trying to figure out what it means.

The searches I run for the phrase make it sound like other people think it's multitasking, but my experience is that I don't multitask. My screen generally has one window opened up full to whatever I'm working on, and I try to keep extraneousl notifications and other distractions hidden away. So it's not that.

What I think it might mean is working with my todo list - which is currently in a github issue tracker - and approaching it in an associative fashion rather than going strictly linearly through it. The goal is to make progress on a variety of things, but not necessarily to work down one long deterministic ordered list. I've organized my github list so that pretty much everything has a tag or two, and thus I can turn a 100-long list into a 10-long list and crunch through it without it feeling infinite.

Ideally you find yourself in a situation where there are a few easy things that have been languishing for a while that right now you just know that you can do, so you get up from your computer and you do them. This works especially well when you've salted away some easy, but not for now tasks into the list so that they can get done at some impromptu opportune moment.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this approach to self-tasking is related to the concept of structured procrastination. My 2005 self had the idea that it was good to write things down that you weren't ready to do just yet, so that you could randomly (!) generate suggestions that would be productive when you had some down time that you weren't ready to focus on the big things.

daily aliquot of love

A very brief writeup of a technique for doing online task management, in a world where there are so many social media channels that you need a spreadsheet to keep track of them all.

The software is Google Spreadsheet, used with a private sheet all for myself.

The structure of the worksheet is a set of columns, with column headings indicating the piece of software, online system, or media channel that you are tracking; the rows are dated or time stamped.

Each cell has a brief summary of events, activities, or other goings-on for that channel at that time. "Birthday deals" is my notation from Facebook for Jan 5, 2011, noting that on that day I wished people a happy birthday by sending them the Arborwiki birthday deals page (my customary greeting card). Keep it short, down to a name, a keyword, a tag, or anything else minimal.

The key technique is hyperlinking each of these (column header and activity cell) where possible, so that you can go back and re-animate your activity on a minimum notice. The syntax is

=hyperlink(URL,"text")

which is simple enough to make it not be a big deal to do.

The locus of activity moves. Rather than opening a new window, looking for page changes to the more frequent sites that you visit, and hoping mindlessly that there's something new, the unit of online activity becomes working your way across the columns and methodically filling in each of them with a daily aliquot of love.

The challenge is getting the column headers right, so that you focus on the correct systems, and ignore the irrelevant ones.

Why do I call it task sandwich? Darned if I know, that's what got typed in.

What we can learn from procrastination : The New Yorker

Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.) But the academic buzz around the subject isn’t just a case of eggheads rationalizing their slothfulness. As various scholars argue in “The Thief of Time,” edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White (Oxford; $65)—a collection of essays on procrastination, ranging from the resolutely theoretical to the surprisingly practical—the tendency raises fundamental philosophical and psychological issues.

via www.newyorker.com

Naturally, I am reading this while procrastinating.

I gave precise instructions to myself in my journal in 1999, repeated in 2004, on how to avoid procrastination, under the guise of "time management". This presumes, of course, that all you need to do is make a few rational decisions and buck up and buckle down to work, in the ignorance of all other possible motivations.

A challenge in a world of infinite possibilities is that choosing to do anything means you are choosing not to do something else. This brings to mind Jim Benson's Personal Kanban, which only has two rules at its core:

• Visualize your work
• Limit your work in progress

A sure cure for procrastination, then, is simply to not do something, rather than putting it off. Alas not all tasks can be discarded so easily.

Personal Kanban from Jim Benson and Modus Cooperandi

I'm reading PersonalKanban.com.  There are at the simplest only two rules:

1. Visualize your work 2. Limit your work-in-progress

to which is added a third, "prioritize". The rest is commentary.

Jim is good at commentary, so the blog and the rest of the effort is well worth reading. Here's Personal Kanban 101 to start.

Personal Kanban 101

View more presentations from Jim Benson.

Should I ditch my smart phone?

I have a shiny phone with more computing power than the first computer I ever owned.  I also have a shiny brick, because the phone isn't working now, and when I took it back to where I bought it they gave me a phone number to call to fix it.  (I call it my BrickBerry.  It's so bricked, it doesn't even play Brickout.) There's nothing worse than talking on the phone, trying to fix your phone.

Get in touch, free of charge: Just dial 611 from your T-Mobile phone or call 1-877-453-1304. Customer Care representatives are available from 3 a.m. to 10p.m. PT, daily. Automated account help is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

You can either call Toll Free # 1-800-937-8997 or we here in Technical Care web chat can assist you.

I am tempted to go back to the worst possible phone that could possibly work.  I had an old, old Nokia candybar-style phone, which at one point I called my "WAP phone" because I had to wap on the side of it to get it to work.  Yet it did work, and it made lots of phone calls, and it seemed cheap at the time.  And it was cheap - it had a monochrome screen, only the most rudimentary games, no camera, nothing.  Cheap but reliable.  

JVM Error 517

An unrecoverable error on the phone.

T-mobile policy for this error is to ship a replacement phone.

An inconsistency has been detected in the VM persistent object store.

Smart phones aren't cheap, but increasingly they don't seem all that smart either.  Shiny, yes; futuristic and wonderful, sure.  But smart, not so much.  Does your phone remind you of what you need to do, when and where you need to do it, but not so naggingly that you turn it off?  Probably not.  Does that smart phone make you look smarter when you're walking down the street punching buttons on it?  Not so sure. Twittering from the bus to let the planet know which bus has squeaky brakes?  Uh huh.

The trap, perhaps, is confusing "smart phone" with "smart person".  Does a smart phone make you smart?

One possibility is to ditch phones with contracts entirely and go to a prepaid plan, which means that every call would cost something and I've have to be smart about how to use my phone.  That turns out to be easier now that I have Google Voice, which gives me more tools than ever to not answer my phone but still get a message to me.  Google Voice lets me direct any call to any phone, and thus the cell phone simply becomes another selectable destination to originate or terminate calls on the same number.

Other people's take on this:

My monthly bill says buying a dumb phone would have been smarter.

finding buckets to refill regularly

Much of the writing I do these days has tags but not much in the way of categories. There are a few very broad categories that things can go into, but not much in the way of narrow ones, and the world of tags means that you can always think up one more new tag to apply rather than revisiting an old one.

In some ways I miss the regular reinforcement obtained by the reminders that I've written on items in a category previously in the past.  This blog has a "garlic mustard" tag, which signals that I should write about that at least once a year; without that reminder, somehow I might miss that opportunity to refresh that annual recipe opportunity.   The category list is long, but finite, and it's idiosyncratic to reflect some peculiar sense of evolved focus.

Tags are much harder, especially in a world of tags shared across a team.  There are enough variant spellings and punctuation in an 8000 unit tag cloud to make it tough to see which of those tags are most useful.  Perhaps I can carve out 20 or 30 to make my own, items to revisit repeatedly, but the system as a system does not constrain me as such.

It's very useful to have a bucket that can be usefully refilled periodically.  At the cycle of once per year, the cumulative knowledge of paczki rituals or cudighi recipes makes each successive year easier.  Monthly rituals leave room to breathe between attempts, and weekly cycles build up a substantial body of work in just a year.  

In many ways this is the mindless mindfulness approach to sustained productivity; don't decide what of 1000s of things you might do, simply have one picked for you and then go at it with a strict deadline to get you to where you need to go until the next time.  The effort can be impromptu and doesn't require much explicit preparation, since you've primed the pump with previous work.