The always-enjoyable Mark Morford has a cure for the clutter in your life that doesn't involve gnashing of teeth or the intervention of a TV show. He calls it getting rid of stuff.

a million monkeys typing » The Beginner’s Mind

Douglas’s post reminds me of that unintentionally hilarious scene in Metropolis where the Beleaguered Iconic Worker is pushed to exhaustion in the clearly meaningless work of moving the clock hands around on the Big Futuristic Machine he’s charged to attend. (God, I wish I had a screengrab to share; it’s a stitch to watch. Found one. Thanks, Douglas.)

There have definitely been times in the past couple years when I’ve felt the same way about maintaining “my system”—driven as if by a motor from one list to another, dashing to connect all the pieces into some theoretically unified field theory of my life. It’s nutty.

The irony is that I, like many of you, tarry in this productivity sweat shop in order to achieve what David Allen has called “mind like water,” or the ability to adapt to change and disruption in a relaxed manner. So often, of course, the result is the virtual opposite. You get so stressed out about moving the meaningless clock hands on your Big Futuristic Machine that you forget what they’re supposed to be attached to.

myStatus plugin for WordPress // eightface

Remember the "status page" post? Well our pal, Dave Kellam, has whipped a sweet little WordPress plugin that makes it really easy to bullet out some points right on your page:

43 Folders Podcast

I'm a far from prolific contributor to the personal podcasting scene, but 2006 brought several episodes of the podcast that people seemed to enjoy and that I'm pleased to have made.

If you're new to 43f's podcast (subscribe for free) or just want to amble down memory lane with me, here's my five favorite episodes from this past year. Unexpurgated, unedited and, as ever, featuring candid depictions and the occasional swear; because sometimes productivity talk is just NSFW.

rethink(ip) - Controlling RSS Overload...Animal House Style

Good idea for managing the RSS feeds you think you might be able to live without:

Most aggregators allow you to create "groups" for your blogs. I have groups for "blawgs," "bored," "technology," etc. (see a picture below). The most important group of all is called "Probation." Into the Probation group goes every new blog I add to my aggregator. EVERY one. Consider it a quarantine tank for your RSS aquarium. Once a month, go through your Probation group and cull the herd, promoting some to the big leagues, while giving others the boot.

At a more byzantine stage, I did something kind of similar to this--but in less-effective reverse.

Great tips that are useful way beyond studying—really for any kind of work that requires your mind not to wander off on its own.

43 Folders Clips (RSS)

If you're curious about the stuff that gets my attention and inspires me (and, consequently, inspires the longer essays you see here on 43 Folders), you may enjoy my informal new sub-blog, 43 Folders Clips.

TextMate: The Missing Editor for OS X

It's been a while since I've checked in on Textmate--my steady date this last year for most text editing work.

The updates have been coming fast and furious lately, and have included tons of tiny features I love. In the last couple days, we've gotten a cool little menu bar that lets you change code highlighting language or run bundle-based commands, macros, and snippets (how I love you, snippets).

The lack of polish that a lot of people ragged in the app's early days keeps being corrected with smart, good-looking little tweaks. It's still a lean and mean geek app, but I like where it's headed. Might be worth having another look at if it's been a while for you.

(Also, here's the appcasting RSS feed of the changelog. Yes, thanks, I am a huge dork.)

So my question, for you Mac developers in the house: I'm curious to learn more about Full Screen mode and how hard it is to make it a part of Cocoa applications. I've gotten the impression that Cocoa has "hooks" in place to hide the Menu Bar and claim all the screen space with a given document's front window, so I'm curious whether it's something that's difficult to implement. I'd love to request it in some favorite applications of mine (Hi, again, Allan!). _What do you guys say? Piece of cake or pony? _