On a recent TWIT / MBW show Merlin ranted about “the best song ever”. Of course I was driving so couldn’t write it down, but want to check it out. Perhaps by the Smiths? Something about “a bomb”? Sorry to be so vague! Ring a bell with anyone?!

Thanks.

• Timbuk2 - Steve Sleeve - Timbuk2’s MacBook Air sleeve stylishly adopts the look of the interoffice mail envelope Steve demoed at Macworld. Very clever. I’m gettin’ one.
• persistent.info: Mail Trends - “Thus was born Mail Trends, an IMAP-based email analysis project. It can generate a bunch of tables, graphs and distributions based on time of day, senders, recipients, mailing lists, etc.” Mihai is a stone cold stud.
• Hivelogic: Offices and The Creativity Zone - “In the very same way you’d want to find the right time and place to read a book, creative types need to setup the specific conditions they need to enter The Zone.” [via DF]
• Clipboard History triggers unwantedly - If your QS Clipboard window has taken on a life of its own, try deleting and re-installing the Clipboard plug-in. Saved my sanity. Also: I’m kind of liking the adverb “unwantedly.”
• Leather Hipster PDA Case from Staples on Flickr - Handsome-looking $10 case available at Staples. (By the bye, Levenger, thumbs-down for appropriating the Hipster PDA name without attribution; not classy) [Flickr photo link via djohnson]
• Apple - Downloads - Dashboard Widgets - HostsWidget - “Allows you to manipulate your “/etc/hosts” file quickly and easily.” [via siliconmeadow]
• Nothing Up My Sleeve: Twitter as a Moral Compass - Gordon shares how to use htaccess to alter a hotlinked image on just the one thieving domain. Man, I’d love to see Yahoo! do this to the Drudge Report (check the man’s code for imgs src’d from straight off yimg.com).

I am an environmental designer (fancy-speak for architecture and related fields) looking to create a database of media - best practices, inspirational photos, links PDFs, text files, video, snippets and so on. 

I am searching for an app to help me do this.

Ideal Criteria:

OS X Must include tagging I would like to add captions/notes to accompany media files Searchable Linkable (internally) Exportable Easy capture/input of media

Any and all help is appreciated.

Cheers,

Freeman

Hi guys

I am working on a special project to combine GTD with RPM. RPM(aka OPA) is developed by Anthony Robbins, a top-down time management approach. I also aim the approach to be compatible with covey’s 7 Habits.

I used both GTD and RPM in the past few years. To the contrary belief, they are not really competing with each other.

GTD did a great job in capturing, that’s what RPM lacks. RPM did a great job in higher level planning aka 10,000-50,000ft stuff. Develop visions and goals etc.

I implemented this fusion approach using DevonThink and iGTD.  read more »

Hello all.

I teach math and write out solutions to homeworks by hand. (It would take forever to typeset them, and I like to show the students that it really is possible to write out all the solutions by hand. If I can do it, they can do it.)

For now I’m scanning them and posting pdf files on Blackboard (a web thingy for education… students can access the files there).

When I make a mistake or want to revise the homework assignment for the next semester, I would like to be able to edit a file on my MacBook instead of cutting and pasting (literally) and rescanning.  read more »

Hi. I just discovered you folks and will post my first question in a minute. I’m a math professor and a knitter. I can see that you’ll be providing me with the opportunity to procrastinate by reading about ways to avoid procrastination.

Looking forward to exploring.

Mathknitter

http://drupal.org/project/xtracker has what appears to be a drop-in replacement for the regular tracker module, currently visible at http://www.43folders.com/tracker. It allows people to filter out particular tracker entries that are uninteresting (like usernode creation), perhaps making it easier to keep up with new replies, new topics, and new blog posts? Or to just keep up with people signing up without having to wade through a bunch of post entries?

I’m giving a two-hour seminar to a mixed audience of faculty, medical professionals, students and the general public at my graduate school in a couple of months. The title of the presentation is “The Truth About Cholesterol: Separating Fact from Fiction”.

Because of the varied nature of the audience, I will be expected to present a fair amount of data - but to do it in such a way that the layperson with no scientific training could understand.  read more »

So I leave my desk for a couple of hours, get 10 min to process the 30 new emails that have arrived before next meeting….sound familiar?

This is the greatest tip I have found for outlook and will usually ensure your must read email is at the top of your inbox, and makes scanning the rest of the email very very easy.

Step 1. Write down the 10 or so people who’s email you really need to see quickly in order to create greatest value from your limited time i.e. your boss, his/her boss, key customers (internal/external), your significant other half etc.

Step 2.  read more »

I’ve been reading all of Merlin’s posts on giving presentations, and I recently bought Presentation Zen and Beyond Bullet Points.

I have a few questions I’d like to post to the forum here in the hopes that others who follow these methods can answer. But I’m unsure of which forum to post in. What do you think?

Thanks, Chris

Hello: This is a follow-up to the topless meetings post. I did some searching and found a some past posts, etc about meetings. This seems to be a popular topic.

I wonder about a few things, if anyone cares to comment on any of them:

What about bringing the meeting to people where they are — online chat rooms and the like?  read more »

My full-time job is split between coding and management — this means I’ve got my GTD system going — inbox zero and all that, and I’m currently using Remember The Milk — after trying KinklessGTD, iGTD, OmniFocus, and TaskPaper.  read more »

When it’s hard to stay focused, try going ‘topless’ to meetings - San Jose Mercury News

Our good pals over at Adaptive Path have been experimenting with banning laptops and other communication devices in meetings (something I’ve supported in the past). From today’s Mercury News:

Frustrated by distracted workers so plugged in that they tune out in the middle of business meetings, a growing number of companies are going “topless,” as in no laptops allowed. Also banned from some conference rooms: BlackBerrys, iPhones and other personal devices on which so many have come to depend…

But as laptops have gotten lighter and smart-phones even smarter, people have discovered a handy diversion, making more eye contact these days with their screens than one another. The practice became so pervasive that Todd Wilkens turned to his company blog to wage his “personal war against CrackBerry…”

His San Francisco design firm, Adaptive Path, now strongly encourages everyone to leave their laptops at their desks. His colleague, Dan Saffer, coined the term “topless” as in “laptop-less.” Also booted are mobile and smart-phones, which must be stowed on a counter or in a box during meetings. It took some convincing, but soon people began connecting with one another rather than with their computers, Wilkens said.

“All of our meetings got a lot more productive,” he said.

[via Dan Saffer]

There is one part where I end up not knowing what to do with GTD. And that’s when I can’t figure out a way to break down my ‘next action’ into discrete actionable tasks. At the risk of being too abstruse, these are tasks that you ‘measure like water’ — one part flows into the next too smoothly; you can’t count the individual drops.

For example:  read more »

A Brief Message: No Resistance Is Futile

Paul Ford has been posting six-word Twitter updates for a few weeks, and now he’s also created the magnum opus of six-word criticism: sexological reviews of the 763 mp3s in this year’s SxSW torrent.

Writing on (the 200-words-or-less site) A Brief Message, Paul talks about how the constraint changed his approach and his thinking:

Now when I face a new writing project, I open a spreadsheet. I want a grid to keep track of sources and dates, or to make certain that the timeline of a story makes sense. The grid imposes brevity. Relationships between sentences are exposed. Editing becomes a more explicit act of sorting, shuffling, balancing paragraphs. In this spirit, I’m rewriting some blog software to read directly from Excel. We’ll see how that goes.

Yes. Constraints. As Paul shows, constraints get you thinking about the creative process in a whole new way.

Me? I ♥ constraints. 30 seconds. 5 things. Less than 140 characters.

In fact:

Twitter’s making me a stronger writer. I think harder about how to say more using fewer and shorter words. Nothing beats hitting the Twoosh. (140 chars)

Let’s close with a favorite quote on creative constraint from Anne Lamott’s wonderful Bird by Bird. She explains that she keeps a one-inch-square picture frame on her desk to remind her of “short assignments:”

It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being.

Well put. (And only 17 characters north of the Twoosh.)

Hello: I apologize if this has been covered before, but I couldn’t figure out what search terms I needed to use. After trying several I decided just to post.

So David Allen repeatedly says that you need a system for capturing thoughts as they occur. “Your best thinking about work won’t occur while you’re at work.” However, I can’t figure out what system he recommends to capture those thoughts and put them into the larger system. Am I missing this, or what do the rest of you do?  read more »

Here is a great link to Dmitri Zimine’s blog about his 15 Minutes to Move Your Project Ahead. I have worked with Dmitri and he has put GTD to the test in his life as a software team manager.

http://www.softwarefrontier.com/2007/09/15-minutes-to-move-your-project-ahead.html

MacBreak Weekly 81: Click the Throbber

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Andy Ihnatko, and Alex Lindsay Safari 3.1, security update, Apple mulls music subscription plan, this week’s picks and more.

Here’s a direct MP3 download of MBW 81.

Very fun episode this week if I do say so. Andy and I nerded out a lot, there was much jollity, we worked blue a few times, and my (repeat) pick o’ the week is SafariStand — specifically for the amazing “Copy Link as Markdown” and “Copy Link HTML Tag” functionality. Dammit: go pimp your Safari!

Update, 2008-03-20 16:29:45

Next Week: Patrick Wilson from Weezer

Oh, man. How did I forget this? Next week, MacBreak Weekly’s special guest will be Pat Wilson, the drummer from Weezer and The Rentals and the multi-instrumental leader of That Special Goodness. Yeah, I know; I can’t believe it, either, but he actually asked Leo if he could be on the show. Weird. I wonder if he sent email to the wrong place and actually thinks we’re Grammar Girl or something.

Anyhow, it’s on, and I’m thrilled, because I go way back with Weezer. After the jump’s a live video of an old Weezer favorite (which, according to WikiPee, Pat co-wrote), “My Name is Jonas.”  read more »

• Do Not Reply - Now “/dev/null” has a posse. Owner of “donotreply.com” domain receives the flotsam emails generated by the work of half-assing IT guys (and their poor, hapless users). Maybe a good time to go and change those “fake” reply addresses, because right now some fairly sensitive stuff is getting “bounced.” [via codinghorror]
• Magical thinking - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - “Adherents of magical belief systems often do not see their beliefs as being magical.” Cf.: Cargo cults.
• Psychology Today: Magical Thinking - “Even hard-core skeptics can’t help but find sympathy in the fabric of the universe—and occasionally try to pull its strings.” Love the idea of any continuum that has “skeptics at one end and schizophrenics at the other.”
• Juggling Sheep: Fully Present - Fatherhood - “I’m not babysitting. I’m fathering. I’m being a dad. I’m doing the single-most important thing I could be doing right now - spending meaningful time with my son.”
• Health workers offer help to S.F.’s packrats - “Oblena has seen people unable to sleep on their beds because of the clutter. He inspected the room of one man who slept every night on a black metal folding chair, surrounded by mounds of clutter.” [via obscure store]
• SXSW day 2 - Worst Website Ever - Many thanks to Roo for videotaping my pitch for FlockdUp.com during Andy’s “Worst Website Ever” panel at SxSW. Here’s the slides if you want to follow along on the drilldown; Full video after the jump.

Using gmail I always missed a decent tagging feature. The labels provided are fine to mark general categories, e.g. @home, @work or @@waiting_for

If you are not working on more then a dozen projects you might use labels as well to sort your mails into projects. But when it comes to more granular tagging, labels definitely are no longer a solution.  read more »

Vintage Logos - a photoset on Flickr

Wow, this is fun for you design and identity nerds — 120 scanned pages from a book of logos that appears to be from the mid-70s or so (nb: the logos for the U.S. bicentennial and Montreal olympics are included).

I’m immediately struck that you could present this many logos in literal black and white; it’s amazing how many logos today fall apart if you remove the colors or (God forbid) the gradients.

Kinda Related: if you’re a logo nerd, monitor (43f site designer) Chris Glass’s “design” tag for running coverage and commentary on the (d)evolution of logos over the years. Highlights: “Accepting change,” “roundy, 3d, swoosh and twirl,” “dog eared,” “Another one bites the dust,” and “CBS, 2007.”

[via: Metafilter]  read more »

Does anyone know what happened to the iGTD site? I’m getting the evil 404 from the host. I don’t know Bart (I wouldn’t even hazard to pronounce his name) but I support his efforts on this.

I have a small Miquelrius notebook, 200 leaves, approximately 4”x6”. I intend to use it and two similar-sized Moleskine Cahiers as my go-everywhere notetaking system. What I am looking for is a cover for the Miquelrius that I can put the back cover into and then use the front flap to secure the two Cahiers. (Think one of those covers that people like At A Glance sell for their products, only a different size.) Oh, and something that doesn’t cost $70-plus, like all of the Levenger products.

Has anyone had this problem, and come up with a solution?  read more »