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Based on the dealings I have had with IBM over there years (several companies, different projects), IBM needs to spend their time figuring out how to make their own products work rather than trying to figure out user behavioral patterns. The fact that I've never seen a single IBM project completed at an employer of mine in the 20 years I've been in IT tells me that instead of searching their email, folks might actually need to use it as a "To-Do" instead. http://43folders.com/ http://inbozero.com/

Exactly. That is why I'd tell every Ubuntu dev to stop work and read these articles and other related ones.
http://www.43folders.com/2006/10/17/robert-peake-part-one
GTD (Getting Things/To Done) is really important. I don't think Canonical understand this at all.
They should stop all new features and then just put their 6month sprint into bug fixing and producing CLEAN CODE (another Agile dev mantra)

Chrome and Fire Fox are both starting this six month release cycles and we are going to see bugs upon bugs.
Debian has the right idea and everyone should have once a year release cycles.

Exactly. That is why I'd tell every Ubuntu dev to stop work and read these articles and other related ones.
http://www.43folders.com/2006/10/17/robert-peake-part-one
GTD (Getting Things/To Done) is really important. I don't think Canonical understand this at all.
They should stop all new features and then just put their 6month sprint into bug fixing and producing CLEAN CODE (another Agile dev mantra)

LOL :) My wife an I are forty something, well outside the 'hipster' demographic.... Though we have carried hipster PDA's in the past.

For starters, paying attention to your health is critical. If you are overweight, set a goal to get your Body Mass Index down at least to 22-23. Get your vision and hearing checked so that you don't miss key points of a presentation or conversation. Get a physical exam to check on blood pressure, cholesterol, blood glucose, and other health issues that can affect your mental acuity.

Exercise is important, so make room in your life for bicycling, running, swimming, or some other form of regular exercise. Get custom-made orthotics for your shoes so that you can walk/run without pronating or hurting your knees.

I have three effective memory aid techniques. First, focus on one thing at a time. No one really multitasks very well, though it's easier when you are younger. You can't sit in a business meeting and check your email or surf the web. You definitely can't drive and talk on your mobile phone.

Second, keep a physical todo list. For me, it's just an index card, updated or replaced each morning with a list of things I'd like to accomplish that day, grouped into A, B, and C priorities, freely mixing personal and professional items. The card idea is based on both the GTD approach and the Hipster PDA.

Third, save online text and links that you might want to see again. I use Foxmarks and de.licio.us to give myself access to those bookmarks from multiple machines. I use Google Notebook and Evernote to clip articles, links, and more. The ability to quickly retrieve useful information comes in handy if you are unable to instantly recall something.

I love David Allen's GTD, and I've a few productivity RSS feeds that I follow;
David Allen Co.'s official RSS feed has a lot of interesting GTD-centric tips.
43Folders is Merlin Mann's productivity feed with a little more unrelated noise.
Lifehacker has a lot of productivity tips, but again, more noise. On the other hand, Lifehacker is also a lot more down to earth.
Get Rich Slowly isn't directly productivity--related, but it's a good reminder to mind your finances.

(I've linked to the sites and not the feeds so that new readers can get a glimpse of the content before choosing whether or not to grab the RSS feed)

They could use Hipster PDAs, they are all the rage and don't crash:

http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Hipster_PDA

I'd be willing to provide say a million of them for a mere 20% of that projected overrun.

Sheldon

Leo Laporte's rant on the latest Macbreak Weekly about how it's some new lock in for non-open standards was very disappointing.

That really bothered me. And he and Andy Ihnatko kept going on and on about until Merlin Mann was basically like "Um, do we have any reason to believe its proprietary?" (links added in case people don't know who they are). Leo's usually not like that, and it surprised me, a lot. I wonder what pushed him in that direction.

Not sure where they're getting their information from, but I use sites like

http://www.freemacware.com/
http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/
http://www.opensourcemac.org/

and have never had any problem finding the right OSS or freeware tool to do a job.

I also enjoy perusing individual people's lists such as

http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/OS_X_Inventori es
http://generaldisarray.wordpress.com/2006/02/11/ni fty-os-x-apps-list/
http://www.digitaldarknet.net/thelist/index.php?pa ge=macintosh
http://macskill.com/softwareupdate

and getting some great recommendations for apps to try out.

It seems like the author simply didn't do enough research before making his report.

Hope these links can help others find stuff they might otherwise not have known about.

I used to like Palm, but I eventually moved to Hipster PDA. It works better.

A quick once-over of the Deskbar site suggests that DB is pretty much the same sort of application as Quicksilver.

QS's default skin (and most of its alternate skins) is really Mac-pretty.

Mostly, I use QS as an app launcher and iTunes controller. It is not a major component of my every interaction with my Mac, the way it seems to become for some people. But the fact that it knows a lot of semi-private formats means it's how I dig in a lot of things - I never open Address Book unless I'm editing a contact, for instance; I'll just double-tap the Apple key, type a few letters from the name I want until it's the top choice in QS over any file/app/bit of data with a similar name, and then use the cursor keys to navigate into the contact and copy out the info I need. Or just show it big on the screen.

It takes me 3 minutes to figure out if something will take me less than 2 minutes to do, so I get a deadlock. The only real solution is writing post-its on a whiteboard.

As with most things, people like to nitpick the fine details as a way of criticizing the whole.

As a fairly new GTD user, I've discovered that much of GTD is meant to be used as guidelines or strategies, not divine commands from on high. The important principles of GTD are:

1) Collect all of the unfinished tasks and projects in your life ("open loops" in GTD parlance).
2) Go through that collection and decide what needs to be done with each open loop:
      * Can it be done right now, in 2 minutes or less? If so, do it.
      * If not, can you delegate it to someone else? If so, do so.
      * If not, what's the "Next Action" (more GTD jargon) that needs to be done, either to finish it or to move it to the next step?
3) Keep track of your Next Actions in a trusted system -- notebook, PDA, text files, whatever -- so you know what needs to be done when you have time to do it.
4) Once you know what all needs to be done, you are capable of making informed decisions as to what you should be doing at any given moment. (To me, this is the most significant point of GTD.)

If you can make those principles work, the details are negotiable. If it takes you more than two minutes to figure out what needs to be done and your incoming traffic and workload permits it, set the threshold to 5 minutes. The GTD book itself usually describes seveal methods of approaching a step.

This is what drives websites like Lifehacker and 43 Folders; people are sharing things that work for them or pointing out new things that can be used to implement GTD or otherwise improve personal productivity.

(Yes, I know that parent was probably just trying to be funny. But I still wanted to throw my two cents out for people who haven't tried GTD, or tried and haven't been able to make it work.)

Jay (=

Or any of the other techniques from 43folders.com http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/15/recap-procrast ination-hacks-email-overload-kinkless-gtd-and-a-vi sit-from-the-word-spy/ .

Great advice on getting your inbox near zero and keeping it there:

http://www.43folders.com/2006/03/13/inbox-zero/

While the moleskines address those points, I never understood the fad. It is so completely overpriced & overhyped. I've received & diligently used a couple as gifts. The paper isn't all that great. The smallest moleskines are made of even cheaper materials & the larger ones aren't pocket sized.

Agreed. I remember looking at some after hearing all the hype and thinking... "What's so magical about this notebook versus that one that this one is close to triple the price?" - I couldn't come up with any real answers, and looking around 43F, one of the biggest champions of it, neither could people there, really, either - "Wow! It's great!", "I love it!", "It's gorgeous!" aren't really objective reasonings.

Seriously, after fighting through multiple PalmOS devices, each having a prettier display and more manufacturing defects than the one before it, I've taken my own advice above. I prefer the latter for its sleek lines and excellent performance, although the former still has my respect for its near-infinite adaptability.

Ever since discovering Inbox Zero, I am a happier man.

For me, this means:

• Only check email every 30 minutes or 1 hour, on a schedule. No notifiers, no gorgeous translucent summaries, no stinkin' badges. I don't jump when email says to jump; I deal with it when I'm ready to.
• When I'm reading through new mail, every message has one of four fates:
  1. Deleted, if it's useless
  2. Archived, where I can find it if I need to later
  3. Replied to or handled, if I can do so in 2 minutes or less
  4. Transformed into a todo -- either to do later in the day, or on a specific date -- and archived

That way I don't have to wonder, "Say, I think there was some email I was meaning to deal with, where was it, somewhere in here, was it last week? And it's such a joy to have a perfectly empty It really is a great methodology / philosophy, and I heartily recommend it.

Of course, I'd have more cred as a gettting-things-done wizard if I weren't reading Slashdot at the moment...

More tips appear here.

Hipster PDA all the way!

...today, and in fact, there are numerous websites, blogs and podcasts focusing on solving the issues brought by "always on", "continous partial attention" etc.

At the center of attentions stands a certain book, Getting Things Done by David Allen. (Slashdot review) This book does not deal with this particular issue, however, it provides a framework for managing time in the age of continous partial attention.

One site I would particularly recommend as a starting point is 43Folders. It's a blog, a community and a useful portal to the part of the Web focused on this issue. If podcasts are your thing, there is a funny yet educational speech available from BayCHI held by 43Folder's founder you might want to listen to - if it sounds familiar, it would probably be a good idea to check out the book.

It doesn't make sense to ask 'Why not eBooks?' (unless you work for an eBook company). I can't think of a single reason why I would want an eBook instead of a real book. A paperback costs $5 and I can jam it into my pocket and bring it anywhere with me. If I lose it or destroy it, no big deal. The print is at least 16 times better resolution than any electronic screens available today. The user interface is simplicity. Fold a corner to bookmark. Flip through pages. Table of contents.
When eInk is available, it will improve the resolution problem, but I still don't see the benefit...

Then again, my PDA is a version of the HIPSTER, so my opinion may be biased...

The cure for the 11 lb pencil is the one ounce Hipster PDA.
My laptop and Palm have been sitting in a drawer since I started using a Hipster...

The one class of PDAs I know to be on the rise is... analog!

I just splurged and dropped ~$20 on a new PDA. This PDA I purchased is great! The batteries never run out, it is almost totally immune to shock from being dropped, I can transfer data easily between home and office, and the format is universal so I never have to worry about incompatibilities, and it is so fast and easy to use that even my parents can understand it. I went ahead and purchased an add-on module for it so I could have the advanced calendaring to track my gigs and rehearsals. Luckily, I already had a docking station for it with extra storage capacity as well as a variety of other add-ons, so it fit right into my daily routine.

I consider it one of the best investments I've made in years. Spending $20 to successfully replace a $300 device may not sound realistic, but I've never been more organized than I am now. All I had to do that I got rid of my old PDA systems (Palm OS based devices) and find something that fit better with my new filing system.

But U.S. workers have to some extent let them get away with it.

I think there is some truth to this. On This week in Tech ( http://www.thisweekintech.com/ ), the most recent Inside the Net podcast has a very interesting interview with the founder of a website by the name of 43Folders ( http://www.43folders.com/ ), where Merlin Mann discusses this very issue.

People often feel buried because they have to spend so much time tending to their "connectedness" - email, text messages, voice mail, etc - mostly because they simply don't know how to say "no". He mentions one associate who has to contend with 300 messages per day from inside the company, and suggests that allowing this to occur (as a matter of company policy) is highly counterproductive. It's an interesting podcast.

Paul Graham's thoughts on procrastination overlap well with Paul Ford's thoughts on distractions, Followup/Distraction, and Are there "good" distractions?.

Graham:
I think the way to "solve" the problem of procrastination is to let delight pull you instead of making a to-do list push you.

Ford:
The most productive times in my life are the ones where I'm just doing my own thing, focused, and trying to solve some problem that I find interesting-when I'm narrowly distracted.

Same idea, different angle.

Reading your comment and a number of others, I had to keep checking the names to see if I accidentally posted this. Weird. Looks like quite a few of us have this problem.

I tried quite a few digital solutions, my best success is a Hipster PDA Get 3x5 cards, punch a hole in them and use a binding ring. Each project gets its own card. Write down start and stop times (and task description if you like), and that's it. I aggressively avoided paper for so long, it's amazing how much better it can capture what I need.

To me the advantages are a) you only have one task in front of you (top of the stack) so it's not as easy to get distracted. b) You can do all the math later, and write it on the side of the card c) when you invoice for the card, void the card somehow (I use another hole on the next line down). Use another card if you're not done. This prevents double-billing and (worse) forgetting to bill.

It would be great if every we product yahoo buys could conform to the yahoo music standard of requiring Netscape 4.7 on macs. Hooray for old school browsers!

* nerds are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
* nerds love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
* nerds crave actionable items and roll their eyes at "mission statements" and lofty management patois
* nerds like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
* nerds like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
* nerds are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they're currently using)
* nerds like fixing things on their own terms
* nerds have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff

* nerds are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues
* nerds love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
* nerds crave actionable items and roll their eyes at "mission statements" and lofty management patois
* nerds like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
* nerds like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
* nerds are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they're currently using)
* nerds like fixing things on their own terms
* nerds have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff

For all of those that wear fanny packs, this one's commin' atcha!

(w/ apologies to Ben Folds)

Seriously, though.

In Germany, where I lived for a spell, it was permissible for us young males to wear a small shoulder bag. Well, hell, I happen to be gay, right, but the straights were doing it too. It was INFINITELY more efficient than this pockets business every guy in America puts up with. (Or at least the guys here in Chicago.) I had my 'handy' (=cell), my keys, my iPod, my headphones, hipster PDA (http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/03/introducing-t he-hipster-pda/) and of course a broad selection of pens. And all in a cute little bag! So, red-blooded american mostly-males: Are you ready to hack gender normativity? Or are you TOO GIRLY to put up with some funny stares and SUFFER, like the 50's housewives whose conformity you ape?

Go to that store. Buy something cute. Put the iPod in it. No need to ask slashdot for silly permission or reassurance. GET A PURSE.

1) battery life

Your average iPod will play for 10 hours on a charge. You average PDA is lucky to last one hour. Putting the MP3 decoding in hardware is a huge battery saver. Although keeping it in software adds OGG support.

2) crash!

In the event that you didn't know #1, and your battery drains, those Pocket PCs have a nasty habit of deleting every file they can find.

3) effortless synch

With a PDA you have to manually move folders of MP3s over. Not much playlist support. The iPod with iTunes is effortless, especially with Party Shuffle.

Synching in general is my main gripe about my PDA. Its a royal pain in the ass to synch unless you use 100% microsoft, and it takes forever. No thanks. Palm is better on the Macs, but not by much. And considering problem #2, being able to quickly synch with many different apps and servers is VITAL.

Until somebody solves problem #3, Ive pretty much shelved my Axim. I use an iPod and a Hipster PDA instead. It wont synch, but neither will it crash.

(10+2)*5

Work for 10 minutes. Break for 2. Do something else for 10. Repeat, killing items on your list. Supposedly you can do quite a bit of "next actions" in an hour this way. DON'T SKIP BREAKS!

You could always link to the source instead of a reference to the source: http://www.43folders.com/2005/10/11/procrastinatio n-hack-1025/

Go read "Getting Things Done" by David Allen and make yourself a Hipster PDA. No joke, this system is magically effective. It keeps popping up on slashdot.

I can vouch for the GTD process, and if you want a more pragmatic (and less Amway-sounding) take on it, check out these two sites:

Geeks using GTD on Macs:
http://www.43folders.com/

A great merger between GTD and 7-habits using a PDA:
http://www.dkeener.com/keenstuff/index.html

But I just blew my last mod point.

43 folders just ran an article about making one big text file, which followed up on an O'Reilly post on the same topic. Bottom line is that one thing all productive geeks share is that they stay organized by just adding stuff to a plain text file. It is a good life hack, which is intrinsically cross-platform & easy to use & small.

1)Read the book Getting Things Done" by David Allen
2)Construct yourself a "Hipster" PDA
3)Buy a paper calendar

No PDA or software can beat GTD and a hipster.

A tidied up version

I suggest you consider encrypting part of the drive, TrueCrypt is a great little app and will run from the USB Thumb Drive as a way to store any info you wish to be secure.

You might also want to consider EssentialPIM or Getting Things Done tools like GTDTiddlyWiki or Next Action (requires firefox)

Check out portablefreeware for more apps and Slashdot

Microsoft usb flash manager is a way to backup you flash drive and keep the info safe, you might also want to consider a second flash drive

(PS: Getting Things Done is a simple and effective personal productivity method by David Allen. You can get the book from Amazon.
Also check out the GTD community at the 43Folders website, wiki, and newsgroup.)

A tidied up version

I suggest you consider encrypting part of the drive, TrueCrypt is a great little app and will run from the USB Thumb Drive as a way to store any info you wish to be secure.

You might also want to consider EssentialPIM or Getting Things Done tools like GTDTiddlyWiki or Next Action (requires firefox)

Check out portablefreeware for more apps and Slashdot

Microsoft usb flash manager is a way to backup you flash drive and keep the info safe, you might also want to consider a second flash drive

(PS: Getting Things Done is a simple and effective personal productivity method by David Allen. You can get the book from Amazon.
Also check out the GTD community at the 43Folders website, wiki, and newsgroup.)

When I'm in from of the CRT I use the wonderful PlannerMode for Emacs to keep track of my day. I work on a lot of stuff on a day-to-day basis, so it makes sense to have a planner based on lots of individual day pages, and tasks that are linked to both a particular day page as well as to another page highlighting the task's usefulness to a particular plan. I also have it integrated to my ~/diary so it could show dates marked on my Emacs calendar, allowing me as well to procrastinate important tasks to be done in convenient time. Avoiding missing deadlines is easy, since PlannerMode also allows me to tag tasks with deadlines, so I have tasks that have me really do stuff while another set for actually clearing the deadline. And, as a side effect of PlannerMode being essentially an extension of EmacsWikiMode, I can publish my plans as a wiki (with RSS even ;) that I use as content for my site, allowing people who I work with to know what I'm up to as well. :)

Now, when I'm not, I use the Hipster PDA. I'm still green using it, but so far, it's great stuff, and I've been using it as my offline PlannerMode.

You may be asking: where's my {cellphone,PDA,laptop}? Answer: I have none of those, but if you're very generous and willing to give me either of the gadgets above, feel free to drop a mail. :D

For a calendar app, I'm currently using iCal because it syncs with my Palm (albeit poorly, thanks Apple). I really like Remind and I would commit to using it if I could get it to sync with the Palm (I'm tempted to use Remind anyway, regardless of the Palm, I could always output Remind to HTML and sync it with Plucker or something).

For todo lists, I have completely adopted the David Allen Getting Things Done method and I just use plain old text files which I can sync with NoteTaker on my Palm (and vim on the desktop for super rapid processing better than any Todo app I've ever seen).

I'm just a Hipster PDA away from being Merlin Mann.

For a calendar app, I'm currently using iCal because it syncs with my Palm (albeit poorly, thanks Apple). I really like Remind and I would commit to using it if I could get it to sync with the Palm (I'm tempted to use Remind anyway, regardless of the Palm, I could always output Remind to HTML and sync it with Plucker or something).

For todo lists, I have completely adopted the David Allen Getting Things Done method and I just use plain old text files which I can sync with NoteTaker on my Palm (and vim on the desktop for super rapid processing better than any Todo app I've ever seen).

I'm just a Hipster PDA away from being Merlin Mann.

Try a hipster PDA (http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/introducing_the. html)

The Hipster PDA (Parietal Disgorgement Aid) is a fully extensible system for coordinating incoming and outgoing data for any aspect of your life and work. It scales brilliantly, degrades gracefully, supports optional categories and "beaming," and is configurable to an unlimited number of options. Best of all, the Hipster PDA fits into your hip pocket and costs practically nothing to purchase and maintain.

I forgot to add that my favorite GTD-related blog is 43 Folders.

I find just the opposite... When I'm using MacOS X, I have to think way to much about the program at hand. Say I'm browsing a folder and I want to put a file into it... I have to switch from the filer (which is way too much an app rather than a desktop environment) to the text editor, then type, then save, then find the folder in the minifiler if it isn't one of the default folders. I lust for the simplicity of ROX-Filer or even of Windows Explorer where you can just right click and choose 'New text file'!

I personally don't use that feature that much, but you're right, it's not really available on Mac OS X out of the box. On the other hand, if you already have an existing text file, it is effortless to append or prepend text to it. Take a look at a this.

Also, I haven't found out how you can switch between windows in a single application without using the mouse.

Cmd + `. You can redefine this if you don't like it.
Want to reach for a menu? I think it's Cmd-F2 but I redefined this to Alt + `. OS X is highly keyboard enabled -- the dashed problem is finding out what the keybindings are. The list in the Keyboard Prefs only tell you half the story.

There are tons of Emacs bindings (Cocoa-only) plus other stuff that are not mentioned anywhere except on some blogs and books like David Pogue's Missing Manual.

Some bindings don't work universally which is a pain. But this is due to OS X's heritage - Cocoa (NeXT), Carbon (Mac), X. And to top it off, Microsoft uses its own bindings in the Office suite (which are not always analoguous to the Office/XP bindings - e.g. the key to edit a cell is F2 in Excel XP and Ctrl-U in Excel 2004)

And the absence of virtual desktops... I know there's hacks, but the system isn't designed for it, so it doesn't always work well.

I don't know, these Mac virtual desktops seem to be much better than any pagers I've used on any Linux machine. Really. You should take a look at them.... they're no different from X virtual desktops. I suppose they're "hacks" but they're so transparent that they could just as well be a part of the system.

Desktop Manager
Virtue

And did I mention the way *some* options things are auto-apply, and *some* are manual? Coming from ROX/GNOME, where everything's auto (unless it's done in a different toolkit, so its obvious) this is painfully annoying. I don't understand what's so special about say iTunes that its view Options are manual apply, but the Finder's are auto.

True that. There are many subtle little UI inconsistencies in Mac OS X.

It's the accursèd menubar---it forces you to design applications, not windows/tasks/activities.

True, but I don't have a problem with that. This is kind of subjective, of course.

Of course, I have adapted quite well to some things. I now always remember to chose Copy when I want to Copy something, rather than expecting it to be done automatically.

Which is far more intuitive to me than the behavior in X. Especially if you only have one buffer. (Of course, with Quicksilver, I have n clipboard slots. Extremely useful when cutting and pasting many URLs).

I've also stopped trying to get windws to shade rather than minimise.

The most underused (and Mac-like) UI feature is Hide (Cmd-H). I was a minimize person until someone (I think it was Tim Bray in his blog) brought this to my attention. Now I use it everyday.

I find OS X forces me to focus on how I'm doing something, rather than what I'm doing. OS X isn't the be-all end-all of usability, just one inconsistently-followed schema.

I think you're right. There are many flaws in OS X which cannot be simply dismissed as being "stuff that are merely unfamiliar". Some things just don't make sense.

However, on the balance, OS X's UI is more usable than any other single OS that I've used. (Most OSes have some UI features that I like, but none except OS X just the right mix).

Link for the lazy...
http://www.43folders.com/

43Folders is an excellent blog, covering mainly Macs and Moleskines, but well worth subscribing for anyone interested in GTD or productivity. It's not been going long, but Merlin's already made a big impression.

I forgot to paste in some of my links:

- Excellent article with many links at the bottom from 43Folders - http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/getting_started.h tml

- http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/GettingThingsD one

- Tons of Links - http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~smerino/gtd/gtd-resources .html

There are a ton of resources for the Getting Things Done methodology. A few of the decent ones, other than the author's primary site are:

43Folders, A weblog, oriented toward the Mac - http://www.43folders.com/
GtD Palm Group - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GtD_Palm

There is a Google Group as well, and many more. Check it out!

I was going to say the same thing. 43 Folders is a great blog for implementing GTD, the guy has a lot of great insight. Plus a lot of good info about integrating GTD with computer use, especially on the mac.