Calendars

Page-a-Day PDA

wood.tang — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 10:36:08 -0500

Every year, somebody gets me one of those Page-a-Day calendars for Christmas. I never have the heart to tell them that I really don't want another, and every year I try to stick it out and dutifully tear off a sheet each morning. "There has to be something interesting in this 'George Washington Carver's 365 Interesting Uses for Peanuts' calendar," I say, then here comes the third week of the year and it's still stuck on January 8, "Anthropomorphic Dandies."

Even if you don't have the stamina to put the calendar through its intended use, you don't have to waste it. Chuck it in a drawer to make an excellent notepad. And folded in half, the pages by themselves make a fair substitute for the venerable index card, with the added bonus that when you pull them out of your pocket to jot a reminder, you get to bone up on the provenance of Prohibition era agricultural byproducts.

”Page-a-Day PDA” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 23, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43F Recap: Best of iCal Tips

Merlin — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 08:47:26 -0400

Wow. It's been over nine months since I quit Entourage in favor of the kGTD/iCal productivity tag-team. In that time, I could have had an infant, finished a school year, or been responsible for a couple failed sitcoms. (I mean: if I had a uterus, was still in college, and were, say, McLean Stevenson)

Yes, friends, I do still spend a lot of my day shaking my hammy fist in impotent rage at iCal's numerous shortcomings, but I've reached a kind of détente with Apple's stock calendaring app, and along the way I've discovered some modest ways to squeeze more drops of Cupertino-y goodness from its moist Jolly Rancher-like pages. Here's a few of my favorites.

Getting more out of iCal - "The truth is, iCal works great with kGTD (mostly of course), and once you make your peace with the perplexing stasis of its feature set, there are some not-bad hooks and affordances hiding in its pastel, roundy corners. Here’s a few I like."
HOWTO: Flag “penciled-in” events in iCal - "When I create the event, I just put a Spanish-language question mark “¿” (hit: OPTION-SHIFT-?) in front of the event’s title. Like so..."
Schedule (and choose) a dash in iCal "If you start the name of the task with the number of minutes in the dash, you have a very easy to way to see items that can be knocked down quickly (hint: sort “To Dos by Title”)."
Dr. Contextlove or: “How I stopped worrying and learned to love iCal” - "But why bother with organizing these into meta-groups? Ah, because it makes it so easy to reveal or hide all the tasks that I can work on at a given time, just by ticking the group’s little click box."
Kinkless GTD .83: Enhances Quicksilver and iCal integration, much more "I really like to plan in kGTD and then do out of iCal since it reduces the amount of fiddling and meta work temptation. That doesn’t mean, however, that I wouldn’t benefit from a little extra backward integration."

”43F Recap: Best of iCal Tips” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 30, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

HOWTO: Flag "penciled-in" events in iCal

Merlin — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 10:34:22 -0400

As I've mentioned before, I like using iCal's invitations to share appointments with people -- especially since this lets them easily respond to let me know whether they 1) will attend, 2) won't attend, or 3) are just "tentative." Unfortunately, there's no analogous tentative flag for the (seemingly endless) number of appointments and events I want to just pencil-in -- you know, those times when you want to make sure to block out time for a call or lunch, but are waiting on confirmation from folks who don't use iCal (or for whom it makes no sense to pester with an invitation). My workaround -- yes, like many of these things -- is really simple.

When I create the event, I just put a Spanish-language question mark "¿" (hit: OPTION-SHIFT-?) in front of the event's title. Like so:

So, why's this work?

most importantly, I never accidentally book two Canadian actress pancake breakfasts in the same time slot
if/when the event is finalized, all I have to do is remove the "¿" flag/character
if it never gets finalized, but the notification still pops up, I can quickly see that it's not a "real" appointment, and I can just delete it
because this hacky "flag" is the first character of the event, it won't be cut off when viewing events in the crowded week or month views

Like I say, simple little trick, but it's saved my non-Canadian bacon on a number of occasions.

”HOWTO: Flag "penciled-in" events in iCal” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 06, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Getting more out of iCal

Merlin — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 11:01:07 -0400

Okay, I admit it. I've grumbled about iCal on and off since it came out. It's one of those things in life that makes you nuts with how it almost works. The alarm choices are amazing but there's no way to have them added automatically. The shared calendars are great, but only one person can make changes. The snoozing sucks, notifications magically disappear, and some days, the "moist Jolly Rancher" design motif makes me want to barf pink. Hrmph. But (and it's a big but)...

The truth is, iCal works great with kGTD (mostly of course), and once you make your peace with the perplexing stasis of its feature set, there are some not-bad hooks and affordances hiding in its pastel, roundy corners. Here's a few I like.

Calendar Groups

Yes, I've mentioned these repeatedly, but they're just so great. The killer trick here is the ability to nest contexts/calendars in a way that supports either "Areas of Responsibility" (if you use calendars as projects) or -- my preference -- grouping related contexts into "Super Contexts."

So, for example, I've put "email," "web," "design," "print," "google," and "buy online" tasks into a group called "Computer." When I'm planning for a time when I won't be at the computer, I deselect one box, and a couple dozen tasks I can't possibly do anything about just disappear. Print that list, and off I go.

Remember: whether or not you're doing GTD, it's valuable to always know what you don't need to be thinking about at a given time. Think about it.

Work the notes field

I use the crap out of iCal's various extra fields -- esp. for appointments.

Phone calls - paste the number you need to call in the notes field, so you have it right where you need it when you need it
Meeting and call agendas - When you set an appointment, paste in the contents of the email where the meeting's raison d’être was laid out. Or just type in 3-5 quick bullets on what you'll need to cover. You'll thank yourself when the notification pops up three months from now and you're thinking "Status meeting about what?!?!"
"Homework" assignments - When I send coaching clients an iCal invite for a call or appointment, I use the notes field to remind them what they'll need to prepare, read, or bring along before we meet. Easier and much more convenient than a separate email.
Attendees - Definitely use the "Attendees" field even if you don't send an invitation. As we'll see below, the print-out of your calendar can be set to include the phone numbers of everyone involved. Super useful when you're stuck on the train and want to let 'em know you'll be ten minutes late.
Address & Directions - I always drop in the address of the offsite location and usually include a link to the Google map for the location (invited attendees love this). When you get the morning alarm for an afternoon meeting, print out the map and drop it in your bag (or, be really cool: print it out the day you schedule the meeting, and put it in your tickler file)
From/To times - Yes this is a weird suggestion, and I'll own that. My friend Dennis taught me to make appointments at "odd times." Think about it: if you tell someone "I'll pick you up at 7:08" they're much more likely to see it as a time certain rather than the squishy quarter-hour SWAGs by which most of us schedule our world.

Print it out

Although it could benefit from a few more printing options, iCal's current print capabilities are actually pretty smart and can be used to great ends.

Calendars on or off - It's really handy to be able to say which calendars/contexts you want to see on your print-out. Having a day where you can't afford to fiddle around? Print a to-do list with a focused subset of "calls," "email," and "to-schedule" and then turn off all your "productivity" crap. Have a "vertical day" where you only work on stuff for one project. Let self-imposed constraints give you a little extra focus.
Travel light - Before you head out for the day, print an updated copy of your calendar for the next 3 months and stick it in your bag. It's a fast way to glance your availability on the road (without needing to truck a laptop around). Scribble changes on the calendar over lunch, and when you get home, enter the new events into iCal.
Daily agenda - I love printing out a List view for the day before I hit the road. Appointments (with, as above, phone numbers), plus a list of my current to-dos all in one place.

Random tips

Running dashes - If you could benefit from a few procrastination dashes, make sure to expose that right in the task. If you want to spend five fast minutes drafting a letter, create an item called "05dash - Draft letter to Anil." To show only tasks like this that are quickly "dash-able" do a search on "dash." Bingo.
Backup - It only takes a minute to back-up iCal "File > Back up Database" and it might save your ass some day. Do a backup every week and every time you think of it.
Rerrange to-dos manually - If sorting your to-dos by "Calendar," "Date," "Title," or "Priority" doesn't do it for you, try dragging them around "Manually." It's buggy and will probably lose its order if you click around (or sync with kGTD) but this manual shuffling is a fast way to reconfigure your per-day focus on the fly.

Got a great iCal tip? What cool stuff are you doing with iCal?

”Getting more out of iCal” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 29, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Researcher: "Bursty" email responses link us to Darwin and Einstein

Merlin — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 08:18:35 -0400

New Scientist Breaking News - Email and letter writing share fundamental pattern

New Scientist article suggests contemporary patterns for answering email may not differ much from the way people had previously dealt with paper correspondence—we tend to respond in "bursty" patterns that give high priority and fast turnaround to important stuff while allowing the less pressing stuff to languish for weeks. The basis for comparison? The letters of Einstein and Darwin:

The pattern could reflect some basic biological encoding that shows up in everything from humans at work to birds foraging for food, according to Albert-László Barabási, a physicist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, US...

Yet despite the differences between electronic communication and paper, the same pattern held up – both [Darwin and Einstein] answered most of their mail quickly, within about 10 days. But some of the answers took months or even years to send (Nature, vol 437, p 1251). "From the scientific point of view, the interesting thing is that there is a fundamental way that we do things," Barabási says.

I wonder if they also had to sift through 90% unsolicited ads for mens' patent medicines and daugerrotypes of Ladies Having Gone Wild.

Here's the home page for Albert-László Barabási and his book, Linked: The New Science of Networks.

[ Thanks, Mr. Kottke ]

Update 2005-10-29 12:38:34

In comments, Fazal writes:

That article has been pretty thoroughly debunked as suffering from sloppy and invalid data analysis. The actual distribution is not the fashionable power law, but rather the log-normal law, a cousin of the good old bell curve.

It's all pops and buzzes from here -- remember I got a C-minus in Geometry as a senior -- but the response does have lots of terms and formulas and appears to be written by someone smart. You guys are, of course, free to rassle over it.

Thing is: even if this research were written in crayon on the back of the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge, it wouldn't alter my (increasingly overstated) opinion on a larger point; technology adopted and applied without proximate (and self-aware) behavioral changes gives us little more than a more efficient way to send our lives out of control. True for Darwin and true for me -- and probably will be as true for George Jetson as it was for Gork the Caveman. Just saying.

[Thanks again for the heads-up, Fazal]

”Researcher: "Bursty" email responses link us to Darwin and Einstein” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 27, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

2006 Moleskine planners available

Merlin — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 07:38:25 -0400

Moleskine 2006 Datebook Planners, MoleskineUS

Just a quickie to let the Moleskine fans know that the 2006 diaries and planners are now available from MoleskineUS. They tell us:

The popular daily format is the same as ever, but - due to customer feedback - the format of the 2006 Pocket Weekly Planner has reverted back to the previous “row” format, while the 2006 Large Weekly Planner will keep the “column” format.

One pattern I’ve been hearing from people lately is the desire to separate work and personal calendaring. It may be prefereable to maintain an electronic work calendar in iCal or Outlook or what have you and then keep your home and family stuff in a paper diary like these. It’s still easy to take it from home to work and back, but some people feel the separation helps encourage them to leave their work at work (the larger trend I’ve been hearing lately).

In any case, if you dig the high-quality feel of the classic Moleskine, I think you’ll enjoy these a lot.

Moleskine 2006 Diaries & Planners:

Moleskine 2006 Large Daily Desk Diary / Planner - 5.25 by 8.25 inches; one page per day
Moleskine 2006 Large Weekly Desk Planner - 5.25 by 8.25 inches; week on two pages in a column format
Moleskine 2006 Pocket Daily Diary / Planner - 3.5 x 5.5 inches; one page per day
Moleskine 2006 Pocket Weekly Planner - 3.5 x 5.5 inches; week on two pages in a row format

(Your purchases from MoleskineUS help support 43 Folders)

Technorati Tags: calendars, moleskines, notebooks, productivitypr0n, schwag

”2006 Moleskine planners available” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 07, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"