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.

December, 2007

Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness in Work

The trite wisdom of contemporary folklore instructs us that the arrival of the New Year is a time to reflect on the achievements of the preceding 365 days and to bear down and "resolve" to achieve more in those to come. Over time, we learn what a hydra-headed beast this is: no matter how many projects or actions we may whack off our ineluctable lists, it seems that yet more (often increasingly ambitious) commitments spring up in their place. With each new year come self-recriminations for our failure to meet the unlikely goals we've set for ourselves—lose weight, read through those piles of books and RSS feeds, start picking up our socks—and a stultifying brainstorm of new projects we'd like to take on.

This New Year as I contemplate my resolutions, it's the underlying concepts of achievement and productivity that are on my mind—and by extension the still grander issues of purpose and meaning in work. I invite you then, patient reader, on a desultory First Night journey with me as I take our mutual favorite hobby—the idle navel-gazing contemplation of productivity—to its most absurd yet logical conclusion: to ask whether eradicating the need for achievement itself might not be the key to happiness in work.

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Grids, The Rule of Thirds, and Rethinking Slide Presentations

'Presentation Zen' by Garr Reynolds

Presentation Zen
by Garr Reynolds

I received my contributor copy of Garr Reynolds's Presentation Zen book last week and proceeded to devour it over the weekend. A fuller review is coming to this space soon, because this is the book about presentations that's needed to be written for years, and it's just fantastic. Best of all it's not another recipe book about "how to make slides" -- this is about re-imagining how your entire presentation will work together as a persuasive and integrated show, from conception through delivery. Awesome.

Anyhow, with my inaugural Macworld talk looming on the horizon (T-minus 16 days, thanks), I've been inspired by Garr's book (and the top-notch site on which it's based) to, among other things, try revamping the approach to how slides fit in to my overall show. As I said on the Twitter, that starts with shit-canning the PowerPoint-y Keynote templates I've previously torn up and pasted together for stuff like Inbox Zero (here's the slides for that one, which Garr was kind enough to feature in his book).

But, now, rather than strictly trying to reinvent the wheel, I have a quest. A quest for a crazy-simple, design-centric Keynote template that's more about composition than gradients and 3-D bullet points. Ever heard of The Rule of Thirds?

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Gift Card Sprees

If you're like me, you probably got a whole playing deck worth of gift cards over the holidays, those presents that say, "I felt like I needed to get you something, but put the least amount of thought into it." And if you're like me, getting one of these cards is a mixed bag of emotions. For one, there's the "Woohoo!

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TOPICS: shopping

Borges on iTunes. Sort of.

Quote:
For one of those gnostics, the visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it.
- Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," 1967.


For Christmas, I was quite pleased to get a Zen Stone Plus in my stocking. I'm one of those people - the ones who exist between platforms. (I lost my true allegiance decades ago, and have been a switch-hitter ever since.) One of the things this means is that I do some things by hand that other people - the loyalists - are used to having done automatically.

So there I was, Christmas afternoon, moving playlists from the iTunes on our Windows machine onto the cute little non-iPod. Grab, drag, copy.

The process immediately reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges' riffs on mirrors.

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Ask MeFi on sane solutions for book clutter

Advice for clearing literary clutter | Ask MetaFilter

There's a thread on Ask Metafilter about book-centric clutter that's getting lots of good comments right now. It started when matildaben asked for "practical and creative systems for reducing the number of books I own," saying:

The vast majority of my possessions by weight and volume consists of books. I would like to develop a system for getting rid of them that will have a very practical, behavioral, methodical approach to the emotions that compel me to keep them...

The solutions people offer are thoughtful and suggest that many of the better ideas are coming from fellow bibliophiles who've struggled with The Book Problem.

Like several folks in the thread, I think this comment from occhiblu gets to the heart of what makes clutter such an emotionally complex problem:

 

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New Jobs, Great Coupon, and How to Get Featured Here

This Week's Featured Job

➪ Interface Developer - MetaFoundry, New York, NY

More jobs

Here’s a few more of our 43f jobs for this week:

Job Coupon: 30 days for $30

January is a popular time to start job-hunting, which also makes it a great time to find new talent for your organization through the 43f Job Board.

To get that ball rolling for '08, post as many jobs as you want to 43f and use coupon "30for30til0106" at each checkout to receive 30 days' placement for only $30. (that's over 60% off the current rate). Jobs must be posted by 1/6/08 to qualify, so hop to it.

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TOPICS: Admin, Jobs, Promos

Links for December 26th

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TOPICS: Daily Links

Back to MacBreak Weekly with Episode 70

MacBreak Weekly 70: Happy Life Day!

>

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko, Chris Breen, Merlin Mann, and Scott Bourne

It's the Macbreak Weekly Year Ender!

Here's a direct MP3 download of MBW 70.

And here's linkage to a few of the things I mentioned (adapted from this episode's show notes):

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The Missing iPhone To-Do App: Not Missed

I thought for sure the one thing that would nag me about the iPhone when I finally got one was its lack of a to-do list app. To my surprise though (and maybe it makes sense, as I'll explain), now that I have an iPhone I haven't felt the need for a to-do app at all. It's an egregious omission for most people to be sure, but for me it's turned out to be a non-issue. To understand why, I need to provide some context.

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Luggage Pr0n: Five Head-Turning Bags for Your Notebook

Transitions can be a bitch. I’ve just traded in my big black Sony Vaio tower for a slim silver MacBook Pro not-laptop (because it runs so hot). On the one hand, I’ve said good-bye to a 750Gb RAID drive and a dual-monitor video card capable of running two 30-inch Cinema Displays. On the other hand, I’ve also said good-bye to daily virus updates and the constant fear that my entire system is going to become unstable and turn into a Russian Zombieputer overnight and start to spam myself about how small my penis is.

Now, I can carry my digital world around with me. Convenient, sure, but also it presents a quandary to a homosexualist like myself. Pardon me if I seem cliched and stereotypical, but it’s important for me to try to look good no matter what I’m doing, and that goes for my computer, too. If I’m going to be hauling my notebook into the latest trendy coffee shop and stare at my 15” glossy LED-lit screen as I sip a latte and nosh a bagel, I need it to look good not just sitting there glowing softly, but also look great coming and going.

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20% Lifetime Web Hosting Discount (Ends 12/31)

A2 Web Hosting

Just a reminder that my offer for a crazy amazing 20%-off lifetime discount with A2 Web Hosting expires in 13 short days.

That means you have until December 31st to join up at A2 with checkout code "43f20" -- that locks-in 20% off your web hosting fees for the life of your relationship with the lovable A2 crew. They've hosted the 43 Folders empire for over 2 years now, and they've been awesome to work with.

View A2's Shared Hosting Packages »

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43f Jobs for December 17th

Here’s a few of our 43f jobs for this week:

<

p>Many thanks to all our job posters. You’ll see your company or organization here next week when you post to the 43f Job Board.

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TOPICS: Jobs

Provide context for better ubiquitous capture

Although the first priority in ubiquitous capture is getting it down, the red-headed stepchild trailing in at number two is providing context. And I don't mean the GTD kind of contexts, but the kind of context that minimally explains what this information means, where and when you collected it, why it matters, or anything else that will help you find a meaningful place for it in your life later on.

Example? Sure. Here's one from my real and recent world. Index card with one word on it:

Once

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Life Without a Laptop, Week 1

When the iPhone came out this summer, I was locked into a contract with another cell phone carrier, one that I couldn't escape on pain of a $200 surcharge. So I waited it out, and dreamed my little iPhone dreams all alone with my Plain Jane cell phone and suddenly archaic-looking iPod Video.

To be honest, I didn't really need an iPhone. I work from home, rarely more than a few yards from a computer (we had two laptops and a Mini in our house at the time). I don't travel for work, and when we go on vacation, I never bring work with me anyway. When I do leave the house for extended periods of time during the day, running errands, taking appointments, etc, it doesn't matter because I'd trained myself to plan ahead for that situation. Besides, I never get any messages that can't wait a couple hours until I get back to a computer anyway.

I was amazingly good at rationalizing away my need for an iPhone, but I still wanted one ever so badly. So last week I created a way out.

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Dick on Kipple

Quote:
There's the First Law of Kipple... 'Kipple drives out nonkipple.'

...Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.

No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot.
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick, 1968

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The Great Keyboard Bath of 2007

A few months back I read Scott Machella's story, via BoingBoing's post, about cleaning a computer keyboard by putting it in the dishwasher. From the little bit I know about electronics, it rang true to me but I didn't feel compelled to actually try it. At least, not at first.

The thing about a dirty keyboard is that it's only dirty if you notice it. I'm a touch-typer, so I rarely look down. But once the aforementioned articles caused me to examine my own keyboards, I was sorry that I looked. Yuck. Clearly, I had to do something about it.

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Why Are You Reading All That News?

When I wrote about my method for controlling RSS overload a couple weeks ago, 43 Folders user terceiro left a comment that put me in my place:

You’re feeling stress about your RSS feeds? Talk about self-created problems. The real solution to managing RSS feeds is to stop reading RSS feeds. It’s simple ... when a purely optional “convenience” technology is causing stress, it’s time to re-evaluate at a pretty fundamental level.

I read this and thrashed and spluttered like Yosemite Sam for a while before I admitted it: he's right. It is a self-created problem, and I need to understand what makes me feel the need to consume the equivalent of a Carnegie library every day, instead of just finding a more efficient way to choke it down.

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43f Jobs for Dec. 11th

Our Featured Jobs:

➪ World-Class Design Lead - Angelsoft, New York, NY
➪ Senior Front End Developer - Angelsoft, New York, NY

Many thanks to all our job posters. You’ll see your company or organization here next week when you post to the 43f Job Board.

Here’s a few more of our 43f jobs for this week:

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TOPICS: Jobs

WWLD? No. 4: Living Your Life

Our great friend, Leslie Harpold, passed away one year ago this week. In addition to being a swell pal and an old-school web mandarin, Leslie was an endless source of advice and opinion on practically everything.
To commemorate Leslie’s life and to help share her wisdom with folks who never got to know her, I asked our mutual friend, Lance Arthur to answer the question: What Would Leslie Do? Here’s part 4 of 4. — mdm

The biggest part of my life lessons from Leslie concerned those kind of things one doesn't often consider, but which exist all around you every day. I tend to get up and shower and check email and eat a bagel and get a latte and so on and so forth, day in and day out, every day like clockwork. Repetition and expectation. Leslie was very good at listening to the gamut of my life's little disarrays and annoyances and nail the bigger picture to the wall, and usually her advice was completely obvious once you heard her say it out loud. It just took her perspective to bring it into focus for me.

I often wished she would write a book of her life lessons, and now I wish she had dictated them to me so I could write it, so I'll provide you with four of her broadest pieces of advice for instantly improving the quality of your life, and let you figure out the rest on your own.

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43f Jobs for 12/03


Our Featured Jobs:

➪ World-Class Design Lead - Angelsoft, New York, NY
➪ Senior Front End Developer - Angelsoft, New York, NY
➪ Web UI Developer - Confidential, Cambridge, MA ((walk from the Red Line))

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

More 43f Jobs:

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

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TOPICS: Jobs

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