43 Folders

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Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.

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”What’s 43 Folders?”
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

October, 2007

43f jobs for October 29th

Here’s our 43f jobs for this week. Many thanks to all our job posters.

Our Featured Job:

★ Software Engineer - RedPrairie, Denver, CO (1700 Broadway)
★ Sr. Rails Developer - Pathfinder Associates LLC, Chicago, IL

You’ll see your company or organization here next Monday when you post to the 43f Job Board.

read more »
TOPICS: Jobs

The "Leave it by the Door" Trick, Ninja-Style

When we moved into a tall and narrow townhouse last summer, its advantages--more space, bigger rooms--came at the expense of having everything spread out on separate floors. Even though I'm quick to point out the bulbous calves and firmly sculpted buttocks I (further) developed from the all-day exercise of trudging up and down the stairs, I've also learned to avoid unnecessary trips.

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TOPICS: Life Hacks

David Brooks on his "Outsourced Brain"

The Outsourced Brain

NYT's David Brooks on outsourcing memory, reference, and decision-making to things that theoretically do it better:

I have relinquished control over my decisions to the universal mind. I have fused with the knowledge of the cybersphere, and entered the bliss of a higher metaphysic. As John Steinbeck nearly wrote, a fella ain’t got a mind of his own, just a little piece of the big mind — one mind that belongs to everybody. Then it don’t matter, Ma. I’ll be everywhere, around in the dark. Wherever there is a network, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a TiVo machine making a sitcom recommendation based on past preferences, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a Times reader selecting articles based on the most e-mailed list, I’ll be there.

And, ironically enough, if you didn't catch the Grapes of Wrath reference, it's easy enough to find it. Because, if you're like me, sometimes you also outsource your pop culture knowledge to Google, Wikipedia, and IMDB.

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The original 43 folders.

I was recently skimming through my beloved old 1934 edition of Progressive Indexing and Filing, which I inherited at a young age from my grandmother—probably my first piece of productivity porn (the book, not my grandmother.) On page 85, I stumbled across a delightful little gem. Apparently, not only did the David not invent the tickler file (news to me), but it's been around since at least 1934.

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BlackBerry Unite - Wireless Ties that Bind

RIM recently announced a new package called BlackBerry Unite, which lets small groups and families use BlackBerry devices to do calendar sharing, wireless sync, and add other glue to keep everyone current.

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Oh, the places you'll go, October 25th

  • AppleInsider | Road to Mac OS X Leopard: System Preferences - Entertaining and nostalgic walk through the Mac's iterations on the [Control Panel](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_panel_(Mac_OS). I vividly recall sitting in the Science building at New College in 1987, staring at the 9-inch black and white screen of a Fat Mac, and thinking: "These little drawings have got to be coolest thing I've ever seen." God bless Susan Kare.
  • How-to: Proper Gmail IMAP for iPhone & Apple Mail - Metric buttload of great tips for using Gmail IMAP with your iPhone. Nicely done. [via Lifehacker]
  • Tasks bundle for TextMate - Henrik's TextMate bundle will surely be of interest to folks using TaskPaper.
  • dotfiles.org - "community for sharing dotfiles like .bashrc, .vimrc, and .bash_profile" Handy if you're getting started with the terminal and want to trick out your profile. Get a great bash .profile and half the work is done for you. [via torrez]
  • No Slippage! - Sean Bonner adds skateboard grip tape to his too-slick iPhone. So smart. I've been meaning to try this with the edges and corners of my MacBook Pro for months. Just ordered this guy to take a crack at it.
  • My evenings are a waste of time. | Ask MetaFilter - "So, bottom line, what can I do (and what do you do?) to be as productive, motivated, and energetic during the evening hours as I am during the day?"
  • Cool Tool: AlphaSmart Word Processor - Paul Ford has talked about the distraction-resistant AlphaSmart Neo here before. Very tempting little chunk of func.
  • jwz - PSA: backups - "'OMG, three drives is so expensive! That sounds like a hassle!' Shut up. I know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway." Possibly the simplest and most do-able approach to brain-dead backup I've seen. Recommended. [via Nelson]Bobby Hill
  • Food: Monitor Food Expiration Dates with Best When Used By - It would appear there is a web application that will help you track when your food is about to go bad. And here's a blog post that someone wrote about it. See, back in the coal-smudged, Dickensian second world of Web 1.0, you would have to monitor this kind of stuff yourself -- or you could hire someone like Bobby Hill. Alas, technology marches on, and I, for one, will not stand in its way. (Because I actually have some Bulgarian Rails developers building a web app that will stand in the way of things for me. Right now, it's in a private beta after closing a lucrative angel round.)
TOPICS: Daily Links

A2 ponies up new hosting packages and a 20% discount

A2 Web Hosting, who sponsors the electronic ladling of 43 Folders, recently upgraded their shared hosting packages, adding higher disk limits (alongside their standard PHP 5.2, MySQL5, Ruby on Rails, Auto-Install Blogs, Wikis, and mucho mas).

Important, remember that, as a fiercely good-looking 43 Folders reader, you’ll also get an additional 20% off your hosting for life when you sign up for A2 with the checkout code “43f20”. So you got that going for you. Which is nice.

Here’s A2’s three, newly-upgraded service levels:

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TaskPaper 1.0 adds new features (and "fiddling" isn't one of them)

Hog Bay Software's TaskPaper was recently released in a completed 1.0 version (previously), and if you're the sort of person who casts about for a simple way to manage projects and tasks from a Mac, this just may be your app.

But, even more significantly, if you're not looking for a simple action management system -- if you're that particularly pathetic sort of character who's convinced that features like tagging, syncing, collaboration, graph paper generation, and the introduction of an onboard artisanal breadmaker are all that stands between you and getting your stuff done -- well, you may need TaskPaper more than anybody. Because, friends, TaskPaper is just about fiddle-proof, and, frankly, I know a lot of people who could benefit from that today.

Here's what a simple document looks like in TaskPaper:

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The Backs of Envelopes are Blank for a Reason

I wanted to piggyback off Merlin's post about paper yesterday because, A) I thought it was spot-on, and B) he scooped about 90% of what I wanted to write today. Nonetheless, he nailed something that sent me into a tizzy of note scribbling and bedtime brainstorming, about paper's sweet spot:

Still, for thinking, capture, and live collaboration, paper is one of the best friends you’ll ever have. And as long as we use it properly, it’s going to continue to enhance the creation of all downstream media.

This struck such a nerve because lately, I've become increasingly aware of how paper plays that role in my work. Like I said before, I'm the last person you should be listening to for advice on personal systems, but no matter what shape or form of digital doodads I'm using to hold my stuff, I always have some paper handy when I really want to get busy. Lately, it's been a Moleskine notebook, but it could be index cards, Post-It notes, or some good old fashioned college-ruled; it doesn't matter. My best work always comes out of sitting in front of the word processor with a pen and paper right next to me, ready for brainstorming, ad hoc project planning, and straight-up doodling.

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The Annoying Productive Guy At Work: Shaming Users One Color At A Time

I was recently put in charge of on-site tech services after a two year apprenticeship as the assistant. Surveying the mess left to me by my former boss, I'm amazed at how many open projects he allowed to grind to a dead stop on his watch. I suppose it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Bloated from the effects of rapid growth, my company suffers from years of rampant position-creation and ill-considered solution grafts. Left to grapple with a culture of contradictory goals, incomplete training and an end-to-end process similar to Sartre's "No Exit" ("hell is other departments"), I'm surprised my predecessor got anything done at all.

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Why don't you just shut up?

I subscribe to a lot of email discussion lists for the various secret yet high profile projects to which I contribute. Most of these lists are active, with five to ten new threads every day, each consisting of several messages. Even when the lists stay on topic, most of the time, my contribution to (and interested in) the conversation only lasts a few messages.

This creates a problem for me, as I am a neurotic email checker. Constantly seeing a stream of new messages that I am not reading makes me feel stressed out. I do not feel like I have to read them, but I do feel like SOMETHING must be done. But I cannot silence the threads by reading the messages, or by deleting them -- as soon as a new message comes in, the thread will be back, bolding up my inbox again.

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TOPICS: Email, gmail, inbox, mute

Vox Pop: Workflow for the Fujitsu ScanSnap?

In comments about yesterday's "Making friends with paper" post, I was reminded by 43f member Adam Hooks...

A couple months ago, on a MBW episode, Merlin, you recommended some scanner/pdf solutions and you said you would elaborate on that on 43f at some point. I thought this was related to reducing your reliance on paper. How did your scanning experiment go?

Adam remembers correctly that I purchased and preliminarily fiddled with the Fujitsu ScanSnap S500M for OS X (Info, Amazon). It's a small-footprint, high-speed document scanner that a lot of people have been talking about lately. I'd read so many reviews and blog posts about how easy it is to use that I was intoxicated by the dream of a life -- if not without paper storage -- where I could at least try to minimize my unnecessary paper clutter and start making document archiving easier and more searchable.

Given the not inconsiderable cost of the unit, I'm embarrassed to say that I got busy with other stuff and haven't yet returned to using the ScanSnap in any automated way.

Doesn't mean I'm not interested or haven't gotten started...

read more »

43f Jobs for Oct. 22nd

Here’s our 43f jobs for this week. Many thanks to all our job posters.

Our Featured Job:

★ Software Engineer - RedPrairie, Denver, CO (1700 Broadway)

You’ll see your company or organization here next Monday when you post to the 43f Job Board.

read more »
TOPICS: Jobs

Making friends with paper (again)

Information R/evolution

I really enjoyed this video presentation by Michael Wesch on how we make, find, and share information in a world where we've shed the idea of paper as our sole medium for storage and communication -- where ideas can munge and mix freely, thanks to digital collaboration.

Gorgeous.

Now, of course, as a fan of paper for certain kinds of work, I always feel like jumping in at this point to defend our pulpy little friend from what sometimes turns into a blanket party.

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43 Folders Blogger FAQs

Since we've begun to break from the tradition of totally Merlin-centric blog posting on 43 Folders, here's some answers to theoretical questions people may have about our new bloggers and their contributions.

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Meeting Tokens, for creating time scarcity

My pal, Mike Monteiro, is making good on his idea to try giving his team Meeting Tokens.

'Meeting Tokens' by Mike Monteiro

Previously mentioned in this post about re-creating scarcity and, in more detail, in my IDEO talk.

Can't wait to hear how it goes. I love me some scarcity.

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A Tale of Disk Crashing Woe, and the Utilities That Saved Me

Apologies if I'm a little cranky, but I've suffered two hard drive crashes in as many weeks, and while I was able to recover somewhat gracefully, the aggravation of watching plodding status bars for hours on end while I wait for my data to load has been unbearable. Fortunately, my wife has employed Bobby Knight-proof safety features in our home office and chained everything to the desk, or else I would have chucked it all out the window.

But since I'm finally back online, I wanted to give a tip of the binder clip to three little programs that saved my bacon during these past two weeks, one crowd favorite and two lowly OS X utilities:

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Favored Links for October 18th

TOPICS: Daily Links

TextExpander 2: .Mac syncing and much more

One of my favorite things on my Mac is TextExpander, a PreferencePane that's come up here before and which lets you use text shortcuts for pasting larger blocks of text and graphics wherever your cursor is without batting an eye. Well, SmileOnMyMac has recently released a 2.0 of TE, that adds several useful features, including one that really got my attention:

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Vox Pop: What's on your iPhone app wish list?

Now that Steve has announced there's an iPhone/iPod Touch SDK coming in February, what's at the top of your application wish list?

The Question to You

What’s the first application for iPhone you’d like to see? Where’s the biggest hole in your iPhone world right now?

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Put Your iTunes Library on a Diet

My music buying habits have slowed considerably since my college days, when I'd rush down to the music store every Tuesday and spend every penny I hadn’t guzzled through a beer bong the previous weekend, but I still managed to amass a rather prodigious CD collection. When I got a Mac and an iPod, this turned into a rather prodigious iTunes library, and quickly became a major thorn in my side.

Having suffered through a couple hard drive crashes, upgrades, and subsequent backing and re-backing up lately, I've really been feeling the weight of that 100+ GB media millstone around my neck. I felt so great when I ripped that last CD and put all those unsightly jewel cases into storage, thinking it would simplify my life. Instead, it just created bigger headaches.

I know, I know, there are a bazillion ways I can slice and dice my iTunes library, storing it on different drives, shunting the videos off to a server, pimping out my machines with terabyte drives, etc, but it begs the question: do I really need all that crap in my life?

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43f Jobs for October 15th

Here’s our 43f jobs for this week. Many thanks to all our job posters.

Our Featured Jobs:

★ Software Engineer - RedPrairie, Denver, CO (1700 Broadway)
★ Lead User Interface Developer - LA Times Interactive, Los Angeles, CA
★ Conservation Education Portal - D.J. Case & Associates, Mishawaka, IN (Nationwide)

You’ll see your company or organization here next Monday when you post to the 43f Job Board.

read more »
TOPICS: Jobs

Clippings intelligently convert "stuff" into OmniFocus tasks

[Disclosure: I'm a volunteer contributor on the development of the OmniFocus app]

You could be forgiven for being exhausted by my harangues about the importance of putting actions into their own special place outside of email, web sites, or other action-bearing media ("Email is just a series of tubes," Senator Ted Stevens, might one day say).

In fact, liberating actions from the email in which they arrived and putting them into a system that you trust is arguably the most important tenet of Inbox Zero. But it's also advice that leaves a lot of people scratching their heads: "OK, big shot, so where do I put this new task, and how exactly is it supposed to get there?"

Well, I'm happy to say that recent sneaky peaks of OmniFocus now have a pretty neat way to help with this problem. It's called "Clippings," and if you're familiar with the similar feature in OmniOutliner, you can imagine how it might work in the context of a task-tracking app and the complementary apps whose contents you want to direct to it.

Alongside the recently-added Perspectives, this is a feature that is making me very happy right now.

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Links du jour: Saturday 10/13

TOPICS: Daily Links

Geek Throwdown: How to sync two or more Macs?

Enter the Octagon

Here’s an experimental new feature: The Throwdown. Take a problem that lots of people face and tell us your personal favorite way to deal with it — in as much detail and with as much persuasion as you can muster.

Today, a lot of us are living on two or more Macs -- which is great, except for the challenge of keeping the contents and settings of multiple machines effortlessly in sync.

Now before you pop in, holler "dot mac," and jump back on your Segway®, consider that many folks (including your author) are looking for a lot more than simple document syncing and perfunctory preference sharing. How about if your needs are more nuanced:

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