Work the Dash and Take the Break

43folders.com - To make the "(10+2)*5 Procrastination Dash" work, you have to actually take the break. Make a modal change, get away from the computer, and catch up on your neighbors' mail.

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen from here:

O, Quicksilver, that little minx. The way she hides her functionality in coquettish little corners vexes and delights me. Did you know, for example, friends, how much you can do with Quicksilver and your modest arrow keys? Me neither. Til now.

So, quick review: once invoked, Quicksilver primarily uses the arrow keys to let you navigate through hierarchies and sets of matches. Up and down arrows let you surf sibling contents of a given directory or catalog, while the left and right arrows allow you to drill down and back up out of hierarchical levels, such as nested folders and the like. (Related tip: you can also surf up and down most any hierarchy using / and Shift-/)

All easy enough, right? But did you ever try clicking the right arrow key with an application selected? Well, you should.

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]

I've got one of our every other month meetings coming up in a couple of weeks, and I thought I'd seek out some tips for taking notes. My preferred note taking tool is OmniOutliner, and I'll sometimes use MindManager for brainstorming during meetings. My OO notes are pretty much "stream of consciousness", just capturing what's said as it's said. I go back after the meeting and review the notes for action items. MM and OO have worked pretty well for me, but I'd like to hear how other people take notes in meetings. Thanks!

Where Work Is a Religion, Work Burnout Is Its Crisis of Faith -- New York Magazine

This enjoyable article on burnout includes a bit that I love (and sympathize with):

Woo hoo. Re: An appendix to the principles of Jewish Buddhism. Saying hi. Re: Hey pal. Burnout. WHEN are we eating? Open Enrollment Info. Quick q. Arrrrrrrrrrgh.

You are looking at nine e-mail subject lines I received in a one-hour period last week. It was then that I realized I answer an e-mail once every 6.66 minutes. The very thought of committing this fact to paper has kept me crippled for several seconds. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing my boss should know.

One has to wonder whether the developments of a high-speed world haven’t made burnout worse. First, the obvious: With the advent of e-mail, cell phones, laptops, BlackBerrys (or “CrackBerrys”—the argot here seems extremely apt), and other bits of high-speed doodadry, it has become virtually impossible, in senses both literal and metaphorical, to unplug from our jobs. As Schaufeli, the Dutch researcher, notes, one of the strongest predictors of burnout isn’t just work overload but “work-home interference”—a sociologist’s way of saying we’re receiving phone calls from Tokyo during dinner and replying to clients on our BlackBerrys while making our children brush their teeth.

I suspect that children will eventually support some kind of thin-client email-to-affection gateway. From an evolutionary standpoint, it may be the only solution that scales.

Questions and Answers--Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh on mining unexpected pockets of mindfulness in a busy world:

I dig how Doug’s combined his tools (and, like, three different memetic atoms) for his Hipster PDA mod.

gilest.org: The GTD Prayer

Giles Turnbull has added a long-overdue liturgical element to the world of Getting Things Done.

Values of n Blog: Stikkit quick with Quicksilver

(Disclosure: Merlin is a proud member of Stikkit’s advisory board)

As Rael writes on the Values of n blog, Alcor has just released his first public version of the Stikkit plug-in for Quicksilver:

The plug-in enables you to send text to a new stikkit, edit an existing one, append and prepend, search by text and tag, jump right to the Stikkit you were after, and more. True to form, QS has again revolutionized the way I use yet another app—this time my own.

I've been using a pre-release of the plug-in for a few weeks now, and personally I think it's just swell. A few little tips and suggestions:

• Append! - Just as you might do with a text file, you can create a QS trigger that allows you to append (or prepend) text to any of your favorite stikkits (your to-do list, per-person agenda, project list, and list of software bugs are all handy ones to automate with triggers)
• Tag access - Tags are now your friend, big-time. Start typing, and when the tag you want appears, hit enter, and you'll go straight to a page with all that tag's stikkits; RIGHT-ARROW into the tag, and you'll see all those stikkits in a clickable QS dropdown
• Proxy mania - Consider how you might be able to use a combination of Stikkit, proxy objects, and triggers to automate transactions like the one shown above and right. Specifically talking about this example, let me assure you: selecting a string of text and hitting one key to silently generate a new stikkit is just badass