Ubiquitous Capture

Twyla’s Box: It’s Where Everything Goes

Merlin — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 16:44:33 -0500

Self-Reliant Film » Blog Archive » Twyla Tharp: Getting Things Done (with Boxes)

This post by Paul Harrill is a great take on what I've been saucily referring to as, "Twyla's Box." (Yes, again with the Twyla Tharp book.)

I'm sharing it here, because in addition to delivering a thought-provoking slap at the self-abuse of productivity pr0n ("Certainly if you find yourself reading productivity book after productivity book you’re missing the point" [ouch]), it includes a canny synthesis of the overlap between (the best, non-fiddly parts of) GTD and those patterns that seem to help folks like Twyla Tharp to keep making for decades. Nice work, Paul. Loved this (and sorry for arriving so late to the party; I am now subscribed).

So, first a quote from Paul's post, followed by (forgive me) a long-ass re-quoting of Tharp's chapter, "Start with a Box", which I've lovingly copied straight from Paul's swell post. Paul said:

For one thing, the book caters to artists, not paper-pushers. Sure, in some ways, work is work. But getting things done can be a lot harder when the “things” are ideas you’ve dreamt up entirely on your own. (I imagine this applies to programmers, too. Merlin, are you reading?) [Heh. I am now, Paul. — mm]

[...]

As Tharp states in the first few pages, her book’s basic premise is that “[i]n order to be creative you have to know how to prepare to be creative.” The rest of the book talks about how to make a ritual of your creativity, how to work through creative blocks, and how to get out of (and altogether avoid) ruts.

From Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit chapter, "Start with a Box:"

Everyone has his or her own organizational system. Mine is a box, the kind you can buy at Office Depot for transferring files. I start every dance with a box. I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me.

[...]

There are separate boxes for everything I’ve ever done. If you want a glimpse into how I think and work, you could do worse than to start with my boxes.

The box makes me feel organized, that I have my act together even when I don’t know where I’m going yet.

It also represents a commitment. The simple act of writing a project name on the box means I’ve started work.

The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this even when I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constant reminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.

Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it in a safe place. I don’t worry about that because I know where to find it. It’s all in the box....

Dynamite, right? And I love Paul's post-script here:

No “tickler files.” No “weekly review.” It’s even more simple. Boxes. Just boxes.

As I said in my presentation the other day, I also love the related topic of "Scratching," where Tharp talks about kind of wandering around with a high tolerance for ambiguity, just letting ideas and inputs flow over her. And, where do those ideas and inspirations go? You guessed it. The Box.

I won't quote that one at length, but I do really feel like this stuff fits together in a sensible, secular way. It's just practical ideas, all pegged to pushing product out the door. Such appealing material that I feel I've barely scratched the surface of.

So excited to keep diving into this stuff. Feels like there's never been a better time to fire your muse.

PS: Can I also mention that Dan M., Paul K., and John G. were, to my knowledge, the only ones in the audience at my talk who audibly laughed out loud at the "Twyla's Box" slide? Which is, you know, disappointing. Because I did say, "box." I mean, come on, people, work with me, here.

PPS: All the sample slides above link to a Clips post with my full deck. Which, as ever, will make hardly any sense without my blathering alongside them. But, I think they're kind of pretty, plus they remind me favorably of Mike Monteiro's stuff (wonderful drawings you should totally buy).

”Twyla’s Box: It’s Where Everything Goes” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 13, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The Problem with Ubiquitous Capture

wood.tang — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:51:34 -0400

Years ago when I started my first job out of college, my employer sent its new crop of computer consultants to South Bend, Indiana for a week-long training session. Typical stuff: we watched a hilariously inappropriate sexual harassment video, learned how to use the company’s timekeeping system (a thick client C++ program named, aptly, “Data Time Entry”), and generally got used to the idea of living out of a suitcase.

Late in the week, an entire day was devoted to a presentation by a FrankinCovey trainer who showed us how to use the fancy leather-bound, three-ring binder/planner/organizer that our company purchased for us, complete with a storage case for archiving calendar pages. She ran us through the whole Covey system. We watched a video of one of Stephen Covey’s motivational seminars-cum-religious revivals and made lists of our goals, hopes, and regrets. I raised my hand and told a story about how lousy I felt for saying something nasty to my mom before I left that week. “Call Mom to apologize” went onto my Weekly Compass, marked Priority A.

At one point, the trainer demonstrated a little pocket notebook that could be detached from the binder when you didn’t want to lug around the whole thing, “a satellite that always returns to the mothership,” she called it. We snickered while she pantomimed writing down someone’s phone number at a Bears game; she was crazier than the guy in suspenders from the day before who taught us about management with a modified version of Monopoly. Most of us were planning to buy Palm Pilots with our first paychecks anyway. But I didn’t realize then how prescient that moment was. Training class Matt would laugh Matt circa 2008 all the way down I-90 if he could see me now.

The Capture Obsession

Those of us who use GTD obsess over our little satellites for capturing “stuff” the second it pops into our heads. I’ve used all types: index cards, Moleskine notebooks, legal pads, PDAs, voice recorders, you name it. Lately I’ve taken to using a Field Notes memo book mainly because I like the way it fits in my back pocket. Coincidentally, the Field Notes motto also sums up the whole capturing idea well: “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”

We have this capture thing down pat. Not a stray thought floats by that doesn’t get recorded, sorted, and filed. The problem with this highly optimized process is that it tends to collect a lot of crap. That notebook sure is handy when I run out of orange juice, but it can also fill up with a lot of bad ideas, things I don’t need to buy, and books I’ll never have time to read. My classic capturing overkill happens when I’m monkeying around with my wireless network at home. I get a notion to do something simple like buy a new backup disk, and the next thing I know I’ve written a bill of materials to build a server farm in my coat closet.

The “What the hell was I thinking?” Moment

I concede the value of David Allen’s point that we have to get things out of our heads so they don’t bogart mental RAM, and he does account for some processing time to weed out the silly stuff. My point is that a lot of the detritus floating between our ears shouldn’t make it that far, and this obsession with perfect capture is at fault. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where Jerry writes himself a note in the middle of the night and can’t decipher it in the morning, because it was really about a B-movie he had been watching where Larry David is dressed like an astronaut.

Treating every little harebrained idea and irrelevant suggestion the same way you treat remembering to buy your wife a birthday present isn’t a wise use of time. If I had back some of the time I spent calling Jott to, I don’t know, play fetch with my dog, I’d be a much happier man. Actually, I live with someone else who acts on every impulse like that, and it’s not always pretty. He’s also three years old.

The real killer is that some of the bad stuff can filter through and land on one of your to-do lists. Most of us are smart enough to recognize bad ideas when we see them, so the danger isn’t that we’ll find ourselves doing things we shouldn’t simply because it managed to worm its way onto our list. But a lot of us do have issues dropping something once it’s reached that level of commitment. So we keep it on the list, taking up space and adding to the cumulative dread of a to-do list bloated with junk.

The Important Stuff Will Come Back

I don’t buy this theory that simply writing things down somehow reduces stress. All it means is that those things are now on a piece of paper or some kind of digital list, usually in our pocket at all hours of the day, mocking us for not being able to finish them. Maybe instead of optimizing our means of capturing ideas, we need to optimize our brain’s spam filter. Good ideas and important reminders will rise to the top, and if we think about them once we’ll think about them again.

Next time, try controlling that impulse to write something down the second you think of it, and save it for a time when it’s more convenient. If it’s worth your time, you’ll be able to think of it again. I often have ideas when I’m walking my dog, but I purposely don’t stop to record them. If they’re still on my mind once I get home, then they go into the inbox. Since I’ve started doing this, my real to-do list has shortened considerably, the bills still get paid, and the house hasn’t burned down. I may have cost myself a few router resets, but my dog and I are okay with that.

”The Problem with Ubiquitous Capture” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 22, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Preemptively Save Christmas '08 with the Amazon Gift Organizer

Merlin — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:23:58 -0500

Amazon.com : Amazon Gift Central

With the holidays' major combat operations now complete -- but while the trauma of bell fatigue and the stink of Orange Julius are still fresh in your mind -- I wanted to share a simple tip on something that was really useful to me this past Christmas and that might make your own life easier for next December or any other giftable event along the way.

So, you certainly know that you can create an Amazon Wish List to let people locate and purchase items you would enjoy having as gifts; that's been around forever (and most needy cam girls have the iPods and panties to prove it). And you may even have caught on that you can now have multiple Wish Lists (with differing privacy settings). And if you're a power user (read: "Amazon Prime dork"), you will surely be utilizing the very helpful Shopping List for finding and re-ordering repeat items like printer toner and blank CDs. But were you aware of the crazy-useful "Gift Organizer?" Well, okay, then.

Amazon has been smart about combining several pieces of existing functionality to create the Gift Organizer. For example, you'll probably start simply by identifying the wish list of a friend or family member. That's pretty useful, because you can see when birthdays and anniversaries are arriving in order to gift accordingly, plus, what's better than giving someone something they actually want? Quick win, there.

But then it gets better. Once the folks in your gifty circle are identified, you can also start bookmarking gift ideas that might be nice to give them in the future. So, as you surf Amazon and notice stuff that might be cool for Mom or Aunt Sue or that nice UPS man, just click "Add to Wish List" and select the person it's intended for. Into the hopper it goes. Ubiquitous capture. Swish.

Furthermore, as you purchase actual things for the people in your circle, Amazon lets you identify who the items were gifted to (you can even clean up your recent purchase history this way). That information gets stored in your per-gifted-person area where you can continue to add new ideas for future gifts from any Amazon item page (again, very much like adding to your own wish list, but for others). On top of it all, Amazon will then employ their awesome collaborative filtering to suggest more items that this person may like, and the music goes 'round.

Now, the cool part of all this -- even if you don't use Amazon very much -- is that Amazon.com is friggin huge. Which means that they (or their "Marketplace" partners) carry a ridiculously high percentage of the purchasable, shippable items available in the consumer universe. So, if you start using the Gift Organizer today -- even for stuff you have no intention of buying from Amazon -- your life is going to be much easier the next time a gift-giving occasion rolls around; you've capitalized on several months of passive, half-assed attention to actually do something useful.

Other ideas? One might be to create a few notional gift recipients to represent clients, co-workers, or the other compulsory gift recipients in your life; finding that clever, inexpensive gift at your leisure is a lot less stressful than having to tear ass on December 21st.

In an ideal world, giving gifts to your pals shouldn't feel like a stressful race. If your heart is willing but your tolerance for malls is weak, try giving the Gift Organizer a spin. You can always make your own Orange Julius.

”Preemptively Save Christmas '08 with the Amazon Gift Organizer” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 22, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The Missing iPhone To-Do App: Not Missed

wood.tang — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:05:33 -0500

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.

I work with serious time constraints. As a stay-at-home parent, I need to think hard about what I can actually accomplish with my son hanging on my pant leg, or during a few hours of nap time in the afternoon. Very rarely do I execute the classic GTD use case where I say, "Let's see, I'm at my desk right now with a phone and a computer: so let's look at my @calls, @online, and @printer lists to see what I can do." Instead, it's usually, "He's occupied with his Legos for next 10 minutes, so what's the most important thing I can knock out before he starts screaming for a popsicle."

In that sense, my contexts are "with the kid" and "without the kid." I'm very limited in what I can do con toddler, and I have to be prepared to do everything possible the second that status changes to sin toddler. So carrying around my entire task list, sliced and diced into neat contexts with due dates and dependencies to peruse at my leisure, doesn't do me a lot of good.

Years ago I was a dedicated Palm/Treo user, but during one of my patented switches I decided to scale back to carrying a standard cell phone plus some index cards or a notebook to keep track of stuff. Until last week, I'd been working this way for over a year, and I've developed some pretty useful ways for planning ahead, printing out a portable copy of my agenda or jotting down a subset of my larger list to do each day. Instead of carrying every possible contingency by default, I had a conservative, tactical plan.

Part of this grew out of necessity; I simply couldn't go running back to the computer every few minutes to look at iCal. But it also fit my new "work" environment. I needed something fast and easy on which to scribble reminders, something impervious to pureed foods and projectile fluids, something easy to shove into a pocket while I was juggling a squirmy kid, dog leash, diaper bag, and stroller handle. And because it wasn't an entire list of everything on my plate, it made me focus on just the few things I could reasonably tackle that day, instead of being paralyzed about what I couldn't.

So why bother with an iPhone at all? I don't really have to answer that, do I? It certainly upgrades the ways I can waste that interstitial time waiting on the boy to finish his lunch. And I'm not above peeking at my email to start thinking ahead about what I have to work on later. But I don't really miss that iPhone to-do app, because had it been there, I wouldn't have given up my notebook anyway.

”The Missing iPhone To-Do App: Not Missed” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 19, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Provide context for better ubiquitous capture

Merlin — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:01:55 -0500

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

Okay, there you go! "Once." Good night, everybody!

Just a tiny bit more information would have made that note a lot more useful to me. How about:

"Once"
- movie KK likes
- Irish band "The Frames"
- DVD -> 12/18

Okay, now we're getting somewhere. Now I know that this is that movie my friend Kristine likes with music from that band she told me about. Without that bit of context, the word "Once" will mean nothing to me later on.

Think you're immune to the need for this kind of frippery? Try this handy home test.

Ever find a scrap of paper in your life that looked something like this?

408
996
1010

Ah, the classic 10 digit problem.

While a nutritious breakfast and a sound public school education can help me to deduce that this is very likely a phone number, the paucity of contextual data on whose number it is or why I wrote it down leaves me with a problem. It also suggests that my current system for capturing information ubiquitously is either incomplete or badly implemented. And, I have about 30 years of 10-digit scraps to prove it.

You don't need to go nuts with extra data, but just remember: you may really need this information later on to take some kind of action or just to decide whether and where it fits in your world.

If it's worth capturing, it's worth capturing well, so take the extra couple seconds to remind yourself what the hell you were thinking about.

”Provide context for better ubiquitous capture” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 17, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Meet Sandy

wood.tang — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:37:56 -0500

I Want Sandy is an email-based, automated personal assistant created by Rael Dornfest and values of n, makers of Stikkit. I've been messing around with her (in a totally platonic way) since Cory Doctorow mentioned it last week, and it's really slick.

Sandy herself is built on Stikkit and named after Tim O'Reilly's real-life assistant. You interact with her by sending emails to a special address, using keywords like "remind me" or "remember to" to tell Sandy what you want to do, just like you would with another person.

Sandy recognizes dates and times in a number of formats, and will send you reminders whenever you assign a specific time. For example, if you wrote "remind me to take out the trash at 5 pm tomorrow," Sandy would note this and send you an email or text reminder close to that time, according to your preferences. You can also email Sandy commands to lookup stuff and send it back to you, very handy if you're on the move with an iPhone or Blackberry, or, you can always manage all your stuff on Sandy's website.

Sandy also supports recurring events and tags, so GTD users could easily turn it into a nice, trusted system with mucho lists and contexts. It even has group functions, so that if you CC Sandy on an email to someone else and give her instructions (Sandy, remember to ...), she'll send reminders to you both.

Combined with a voice service like Jott, Sandy could make an immensely useful personal system for someone who lives in email or is inclined to keep their stuff on the web. That, and she's kinda cute too.

”Meet Sandy” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 21, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The Backs of Envelopes are Blank for a Reason

wood.tang — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 22:15:59 -0400

I wanted to piggyback off Merlin's post about paper yesterday because, A) I thought it was spot-on, and B) he scooped about 90% of what I wanted to write today. Nonetheless, he nailed something that sent me into a tizzy of note scribbling and bedtime brainstorming, about paper's sweet spot:

Still, for thinking, capture, and live collaboration, paper is one of the best friends you’ll ever have. And as long as we use it properly, it’s going to continue to enhance the creation of all downstream media.

This struck such a nerve because lately, I've become increasingly aware of how paper plays that role in my work. Like I said before, I'm the last person you should be listening to for advice on personal systems, but no matter what shape or form of digital doodads I'm using to hold my stuff, I always have some paper handy when I really want to get busy. Lately, it's been a Moleskine notebook, but it could be index cards, Post-It notes, or some good old fashioned college-ruled; it doesn't matter. My best work always comes out of sitting in front of the word processor with a pen and paper right next to me, ready for brainstorming, ad hoc project planning, and straight-up doodling. Sit down at Grandpa Wood-Tang's knee and let me tell you a story. Back when I had a real job, I worked on a project where I got to visit a number of clients overseas. Before I left on my first trip, my manager handed me a Boorum & Pease notebook with a Gordon Gekko-tastic, faux-cordovan binding and said, "Here, I don't want you looking like an asshole carrying some cheap legal pad around the world." I carried that notebook for the entire project to six different countries, and I still have it today. I can leaf through it now and recall specific meetings, conversations, and arcane details about the project that never would have stuck in my brain had I taken all those notes in some neutered software outliner or mind mapper.

The reasons that notebook feels like an old friend are probably familiar to long-time 43 Folders readers: the tactile experience, the creative, actively engaged act of taking notes by hand. But it's become the psychological artifact that it is because it captured my mind as it was working when I used it, not hours later when I copied my thoughts into a status memo, or even seconds later as I tried to translate brainwaves into keystrokes. The underlines, the bolded, twice-drawn letters, the double-back arrows and squished-in elaborations are still there, documenting my thought process in all its flawed, hungover 24-year-old consultant glory, with no tags, metadata, or other digital nonsense weighing it down. I turned in some of the best work of my career on that project, because I was able to work off my slick little notebook and its recurring backups of my brain.

All that information eventually made its way into permanent, digital storage in the form of the various design documents I produced, but they would have been useless boilerplate without that notebook. I'm as computer-centric as they come. I shunt every communication I can through the internet tubes and save every piece of digital flotsam and jetsam that floats my way on my hard drive. But I'm never without a piece of paper like that notebook to use as a mental scratch disk.

At the risk of sounding like some dreamy New Ager, my point in spinning that yarn is that sometimes we just need to let it go, man, and let our brains do what they will. Paper is the perfect place to do that, and if you're really rolling, for Pete's sake, don't stop to inbox-it, process-it, tag-it, and contextualize-it into some whizbang piece of software (or some formal paper system, for that matter). Save that shit for later, when the dust has settled, the bandits have fled, and you see how many horses are left to feed.

”The Backs of Envelopes are Blank for a Reason” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The downside of the outboard brain

Merlin — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:19:33 -0400

The fate of human memory

Clive Thompson writes on a phenomenon I think about constantly: if you really do start entrusting all your ephemeral memory work to external systems, might your wetware start to atrophy?

Apparently, yes:

This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative's birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.

Haha, big joke, right? Not for me. Between me and TextExpander, only one of us knows my new VoIP number by heart. Without TE to paste it anywhere on command? Yep, I'd have to look up my own phone number. Sad.

But, Clive goes on:

My point is that the cyborg future is here. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us.

And frankly, I kind of like it. I feel much smarter when I'm using the Internet as a mental plug-in during my daily chitchat...

And, in closing...

At the very least, I'd like to be able to remember my own phone number.

Now thinking that's something I might want to work on too.

”The downside of the outboard brain” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 11, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Tip of the Tongue Strategies

wood.tang — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 10:14:06 -0400

Even the most diligent among us can't always remember to pocket a pen and paper everywhere we go (or, shhh!, won't admit that sometimes we just don't want to), but of course that's always when our best ideas hit us. Last night when I was walking my dog, I'm convinced I came up with the answer to global warming, but before I got home to write it down, I had a conversation with a neighbor, checked my mail, and watered the plants, so I might as well have been thinking about the lyrics to "Sussudio" for all I could remember. And try as I might, I couldn't bring it back.

We've all had that tip-of-the-tongue experience where we can't quite recall a word or a name. Usually, we can yank those back with brute force, just by repeating a letter or phrase until is falls out. But what about a more complete thought that slips your mind? Last night I kept trying to revive my flatulent brain by picturing where I was on the street and recreating the moment, which obviously didn't work, and my dog was just no help at all. What else could I have done?

What are some of your best tip-of-the-tongue strategies? What tricks do you use to recover those auto-saved documents from your mind? Or better yet, how do I get my dog to take dictation?

”Tip of the Tongue Strategies” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 11, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Merlin at IDEO: "Know How" Talk with Scott Underwood

Merlin — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:06:47 -0400

Scott Underwood from IDEO was kind enough to invite me down to their Palo Alto HQ for a tour of the renowned design group (they designed Apple’s first mouse!) and to participate with him in one of the company's internal "Know How" talks. It was very informal (and -- because this was during my recent "100-year sinus infection" -- I was completely high on cold medicine).

We talked about Getting Things Done, life hacks, knowledge work, nostalgia for scarcity, and the problem of getting addicted to productivity advice, among many other topics. This one's a tour de force.

Video runs about an hour, and yes: I am wearing a handsome Big Lebowski tshirt. Abide.

Click To Play

Mea culpa -- this was an intimate little gathering held for the benefit of those in the room and wasn't intended as a for-video talk show shoot. So audience members' questions were not recorded on-mic. Apologies for you not being able to hear them, but I think you'll mostly catch the gist.

Many thanks to Scott Underwood for inviting me in and for hosting the talk, and thanks also to Eric Stangarone, who shot the video and who was kind enough to permit me to share this with you guys, as well. Awesome company. Great people.

Update 2007-10-09 08:14:45 PST

Oooo...almost forgot -- alternative media formats (thanks, Blip!)

”Merlin at IDEO: "Know How" Talk with Scott Underwood” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 09, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"