Even the most diligent among us can't always remember to pocket a pen and paper everywhere we go (or, shhh!, won't admit that sometimes we just don't want to), but of course that's always when our best ideas hit us. Last night when I was walking my dog, I'm convinced I came up with the answer to global warming, but before I got home to write it down, I had a conversation with a neighbor, checked my mail, and watered the plants, so I might as well have been thinking about the lyrics to "Sussudio" for all I could remember. And try as I might, I couldn't bring it back.

You've probably heard the advice to photocopy your wallet's contents; in the event that you lose your wallet, this makes it easy to know what you need to cancel and replace. Smart.

I recently received a new credit card and had forgotten what a hassle it is to change the info across all my various online accounts. Here's a few suggestions based on things I did this time around that should make it easier (or at least more interesting) the next time this happens.

I sometimes think that one factor in success as a business or as a human being has a lot to do with what kind of problems you're comfortable solving -- and how you get better at addressing the stuff that falls outside that comfort zone.

History is littered with revolutionaries who couldn't run the country they'd overthrown, Generals who've insisted on re-fighting the last war, talented programmers who were promoted to becoming ineffective (and very unhappy) managers, and, of course, there's the countless companies that just couldn't make the leap when technology or cultural change rendered their comfy old business model moot.

Seems like there's a thread here that's worth thinking about.

How do you get better at knowing when you’re trying to solve the wrong problem?

• The day the music industry died - Times Online - “The truth now is that a rudimentary cotton garment with a band logo stamped across it that has probably been manufactured for pennies in a Third World sweatshop costs about twice as much as an album recorded in a state-of-the-art western studio.” Related, don’t miss Yahoo!’s Ian Rogers’s post “Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses”
• Abused Workers Fight Back by Slacking Off | LiveScience - “Employees toiling under an abusive supervisor often rebel quietly and indirectly by slacking off on the job and handing in sloppy work.”
• What’s next, no potty breaks? [AskMe] - “My company just instituted a “no headphones” policy…how can I deal?” I don’t know how you can expect someone to do a data-entry job without headphones. That’s just inhuman.
• 43 Folders [Chris Glass] [PNSFW] - “Backstory: Merlin and I met years ago when we were teenage girls on LiveJournal.” Chris Glass talks a bit about he ended up redesigning 43f. Love that guy.
• HollenbackNet - BigCityBaby - If you hadn’t put the pieces together yet, I’m about to need advice like Phil’s. And, wow!, did I ever dig his long article on big-city baby-having.
• You Tube - Inbox Zero - My Google Tech Talk on Inbox Zero is now available on the YouTube — previously it was only on the Google Video (now clocking in at 186,000 views)
• Five rejected Spice Girl personalities - “5. Emotionally-Unavailable Spice.” A long overdue 5ives update. One of three.
• I’m not usually one to get squeamish, but this wigged me… (kottke.org) - I’m not too squeamish either, Mr. Kottke, but this bastard crab is literally haunting my dreams. Dear Lord.

There's an obscure rule in baseball for a situation that rarely occurs, when an ambidextrous pitcher faces a switch-hitter. The pitcher has to declare which arm he's going to throw with before the at-bat and stick with it, else the batter could keep jumping back and forth to either side of the plate in an endless game of one-upmanship that would make Tony La Russa's head explode. The intent of the rule is obviously to keep the game moving, but it also saves the pitcher from himself; it forces him to pick his weapon given the challenge he faces, and just go with his best stuff.

I need a rule like this when it comes to picking the tools I use to manage my system for getting things done. I know my last post gave the impression that I'm almost proud of changing my system more often than Barry Bonds changes hat sizes, but deep down I'm rather ashamed. I need something to force me to go with my strengths, and just throw strikes the best I can.

Someone suggested that I think about what causes me to monkey around with my system as much as I do, and what, if any, elements stay the same. Then maybe as a means of public psychotherapy, the hive mind can help me identify my best pitch.

To start, let's look at the reasons why I switch:

Scott Underwood from IDEO was kind enough to invite me down to their Palo Alto HQ for a tour of the renowned design group (they designed Apple’s first mouse!) and to participate with him in one of the company's internal "Know How" talks. It was very informal (and -- because this was during my recent "100-year sinus infection" -- I was completely high on cold medicine).

Now that I’ve primed your pump for an outsourcing extravaganza, it’s time to turn our eyes towards the quotidian.  Once you’re ready to hire help, there are two main challenges to face.  Firstly, you have to identify portions of your daily work that can be outsourced, and then you have to find the right person to do that work for you.

My name is Matt, and I'm a chronic system switcher. Read through some of my old forum posts and bear witness to my shame. You'll see me talking about using text files and Moleskines; Treos and Pocket PCs; index cards and Hipster PDAs; iCal, kGTD, Backpack, Gmail, and Mail.app. There have been stretches when I made so many wholesale changes in how I Got my Things Done, shifting from digital to paper and vice versa, that I never needed to do a weekly review because I was picking through every scrap on my plate so often.

This is highly ill-advised behavior, I know. You're not the one who has to look the Staples clerk in the eye every other week when I pay for that armload of binder clips and gold star stickers ("They're for metadata," I say). And yet while I've tried every combination of bits and black ink known to man, I've never once felt like I was letting things slip through the cracks.

In yesterday's post about putting customer service numbers onto your mobile phone, commenter Joe suggested checking out Paul English's wonderful GetHuman, a website that diligently collects and updates the phone numbers (and key punches) necessary to get you straight through to a human being at 500 well-known companies.

I realize this site is ancient news to a lot of you, but I couldn't believe I'd never featured it in its own post here; I've been loving and using the crap out of GH (and the preceding IVR) for years now. Consider the oversight rectified.

Paul also shares some smart tips for intrepid information seekers (Hint: that fast "0" mashing tip has worked great for me):

This morning, like a lot of other people, I was locked out of using my PayPal debit card while the site (and apparently its glass-jawed transaction processing network) took a total dirtnap. So it goes. That’s only indirectly the point of this post (although I did kind of feel like opening a “Can of Cory” on The Pal).

Point is, my pal dansays left a great comment on my whiny Flickr post laying out why he's put all the customer service numbers of products and sites he uses right into his Apple Address Book. Great advice that I'll be taking this weekend:

You’ve heard the hype about tagging. You’ve seen people flocking to sites like Flickr and del.icio.us, where they jump head-first into a pulsing mass of disjointed tags, possibly never to be heard from again. And you’ve wondered: how exactly is tagging worthwhile again?

Any idiot can tag, but you want tags that are useful rather than a disorganized mess. This is not an unreasonable desire, and by completing three simple steps before you start tagging, you too can become a tagging kung-fu master. (Or, if you want more intellectual cred, explicate your personal taxonomy.)

Since 43 Folders launched three years ago, I've been thrilled and humbled by the insight that readers, commenters, and the occasional guest blogger have brought to this modest undertaking. And I've regretted that it's been a little clunky to properly share those insights with the same authority and promotion as your hapless author's contributions. Well, I think we're about to get better at that.

How to Unschedule your work and enjoy guilt-free play

Chanpory, over at LifeClever, has a useful piece on what Neil Fiore calls "The Unschedule:"

According to Neil Fiore and 30 years of research, procrastination isn’t the result of laziness. Rather, procrastination is a symptom, a way of coping with deep psychological self-criticism and fear. It’s because we’re taught to believe that working is good and playing is bad. To reverse this unhealthy model, Neil proposes a tool: the Unschedule.

The Unschedule looks like a normal schedule, but with a twist. Instead of scheduling work you have to do, you fill in everything you want to do.

Like a couple of the exercises in Fiore's book (Oy, vey, who actually keeps a "procrastination diary?"), I think the Unschedule is best seen as a fascinating way to think about thinking.

Here's a wonderful tour de force on Concentration that's written for students and which includes tips on identifying distractions as well as a useful list of techniques for putting your attention where you want it to be and keeping it there.

A few I liked:

Cory Doctorow has a short piece in Internet Evolution called "The Future of Ignoring Things" that really resonated with me. Excerpt:

Take email: Endless engineer-hours are poured into stopping spam, but virtually no attention is paid to our interaction with our non-spam messages. Our mailer may strive to learn from our ratings what is and is not spam, but it expends practically no effort on figuring out which of the non-spam emails are important and which ones can be safely ignored, dropped into archival folders, or deleted unread...

Figuring out what you can afford to ignore in life is starting to seem like an art form to me. Since failure to filter incoming stuff properly over time has consequences way beyond annoyance, I'm starting to think that getting it right may be another one of those emerging knowledge worker skills.

It's definitely one I'm working on (and struggling with).

[via: BB]

• Inconsolata - "It is a monospace font, designed for code listings and the like, in print." This has quickly become my new favorite monospace font. It’s kicky, and looks great in TextMate, esp. at larger sizes.
• Star Wars viewing order (kottke.org) - Veen has wisdom on the proper order for showing your child the Star Wars movies: “Show him Episodes 4 and 5 together and let him know that ‘They find Han - he was ok.’ Leave it at that. Let him experience the later disappointments as we did - all grown up.”
• Wakerupper.com - Free Wake-up Calls and Telephone Reminders - Get fancy-hotel-like wakeup service for your phone. Optimized for iPhone
• The Onion: Google Launches ‘The Google’ For Older Adults - "All you have to do to turn the website on is put the little blinking line thing in the cyberspace window at the top of the screen…" (see also)
• Getting things done with mutt - "Mutt is extremely powerful, but lacks a little when attempting to implement GTD and the ‘Inbox Zero’ concept." Looks like a cool patch.
• your monkey called - "LIFEHACK: Create a simple but effective 'mood necklace' from freely available materials!"

I've started collecting stories -- some of which may be entirely apocryphal tall tales -- of the purported lengths to which people are going to filter noise and to ensure that their time and attention aren't ceded to bad ideas, thoughtless people, or garden-variety time burglars.

Here's a few of the more novel ones I've picked up. I'd also love to hear your favorites from amongst the cheats, tricks, and squirrely rules you've heard about: