Classics

How I Made My Presentations a Little Better

Merlin Mann — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:51:49 -0400

Since my Google Tech Talk (previously) caught fire last month (it’s gotten over 100,000 views so far), I’ve been receiving a lot of really nice email, comments, and questions about how I put my presentations together. I’m happy to oblige.

First, of course, please understand that I don’t pretend to be any kind of expert about this stuff — I’m barely even a student. I’ve cobbled together whatever I have right now based mostly on the work of much smarter and more talented people, so I’m not claiming to have invented any of this stuff. I’ve been fortunate to finally start figuring out the right mix of visuals and presentation style that (I hope) works for my personality and what I have to say.

Anyhow, here’s what I’ve been learning so far, starting with the giants on whose shoulders I’d love to stand.

Presentation Zen

I’ll confess that I giggled like a schoolgirl when Garr Reynolds said he was featuring my Google Talk on his site today. Especially since I’ve studied his own slides, posts, and links for months now, and have stolen liberally from what I learned there. Thanks, Garr. I’m totally honored.

I love that Garr gets how the slides in your presentation are about visual story-telling that complements your presence and speaking. They are not a script to be acted-out, or a book to be printed and read aloud, word for word.

Some of my favorite links on his site led me to learning more about Guy Kawasaki’s approach and to seeing the power in the simplicity of “the Takahashi Method”.

Again: all inspiring stuff, even if you don’t precisely emulate or follow every tip on the site.

Beyond Bullet Points

I learned about this book from Matt Haughey, and I agree with Matt that the premise of the book is just invaluable.

While you will get most of the (often-re-re-repeated) gist quickly, the message of Cliff Atkinson’s book is worth tattooing on your forehead: “Tell a story that makes the audience into the protagonist, then demonstrate how your approach to solving their problem will help them win in the end.” (Paraphrasing, but I think that’s pretty close)

Also, suck up your pride, and make yourself fill out Cliff’s Word template (available here) for telling your story. Even if you don’t use it as the basis for your final presentation, you might find the experience more useful than any other single thing you do to improve your show. Helped mine a lot.

Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 Rule

Although I don’t always follow Guy’s rule, it’s always in the back of my mind. So much so, that, in my opinion, if you’re really struggling with your visuals, it’s worth making “10-20-30” a rule that you break only with mindful and deliberate care. At least until you’re more comfortable with what you want to say, and how you want to say it, hew to Guy’s party line:

It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Get in, get out, and don’t make people squint. Awesome.

iStockPhoto

I love the look of a very simple graphic alongside a very few words. It’s something Steve Jobs does really well, and it’s a look I wanted to steal.

iStockPhoto is my favorite resource for finding inexpensive images to license for presentations. Their search engine is swell, and their lightboxes make it easy to snag interesting images and save them for potential use in the future (which I recommend you do as you browse on each visit — regardless of the specific preso you’re there to shop for).

43F: Your best tip on doing presentations

The response from readers on this thread was amazing, and it taught me a dozen great techniques and tricks that I’m trying to put into use every time I prepare to speak now.

What I’ve (finally) learned about presenting

I’m still pretty C+ at this stuff, myself, and free advice is worth what you paid for it, but here’s my favorite things I’ve learned about actually getting up there, in front of a crowd of warm bodies.

Do a cold open

Metaphorically: clear your throat as little as possible when you start. Try to open with something in the real world — an anecdote, a memory, an image, something that grounds your talk in the “right now” and that skips the whole “Here are the nine things you will learn today…” jibber jabber. You can always do an introduction second, once you’ve set the tone and gotten people’s interest.

Work the notes field

I capture the 2-4 mini-points I want to hit in each slide’s Notes field (Can I just mention? I love Keynote!). I make the type ginormous and start each line with 1-2 ALLCAPS words that are a glance-able cue for the point to make. I can riff and boogie all I want, then know where I need to land to keep things moving in the way I want.

Think: “Stephen Colbert”

You know how Stephen Colbert does “The Wørd?” He directly addresses the audience while “slides” appear next to his head acting as a kind of Greek chorus. He not only doesn’t acknowledge the slides — they often contradict exactly what he is saying. (This is what makes this — as we say in the business — “funny”)

I’m not suggesting your slides should undermine you, but consider sometimes showing images and text that make an orthogonal point to what you’re saying aloud to the audience at that moment. Let them discover the point (or the joke) without you leaning on it.

Let the slide serve your message, rather than letting you (and your personality and timing) be governed by the slide. That’s ‘death,’ and that’s “The Wørd.”

Finish early

Man, I’ve always been terrible at this, and it turns out it’s about the rudest thing you can do.

Running long not only says you weren’t properly prepared for the time you were allotted, it leaves no time for the best part of every presentation for me: the Q&A. I love interacting with the audience and getting a chance to apply all that hand-waving to real-world questions.

There’s tons more for me to learn, but it’s already been a lot of fun to take this information and test it on the road.

It’s an exhilarating experience to get to talk to people about something that genuinely excites you. I believe that finding a way to get them excited, too, is essentially what this stuff is all about.

”How I Made My Presentations a Little Better” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

My War on Clutter: Never "organize" what you can discard

Merlin Mann — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 12:32:11 -0400

One of the most basic concepts Peter Walsh talks about in It’s All Too Much brought a total breakthrough for me. If the stuff that you accumulate doesn’t help get you closer to the life you want to have, it’s simply not worth keeping. Period.

Obviously (and unavoidably), this goes for a family room that’s turned into a junk drawer for DVDs and books, and you can clearly see it evidenced in a kitchen where no flat surface is free of junk mail, bills, and newspapers. Those you can’t miss.

But, for me, the real story is about the ways you try to solve clutter problems solely by getting more space or obtaining more containers — jamming all those DVDs into cabinets and stuffing those newspapers into bigger volume baskets. The clutter doesn’t need a prettier package; it just needs to go. Now, and in very large quantities.

Historically, my “housecleaning” has almost always consisted of precisely this kind of illusory shuffling — just getting things out of sight with only minimal discarding. If I could cram random stuff into a spanking new “solution” from The Container Store, I’d tend to feel like I’d really made progress.

The truth is that this is like covering your tumor with a bandage, and without thoughtful paring-down, all those crates and boxes and storage spaces do nothing to improve the basic problem. In fact, in my own experience, it makes the matter ten times worse, since you generate an entire underworld of physical goods that mean nothing to you. Your home or office becomes little more than a costly bucket for dead and useless crap.

So, above all, my first change in attitude has been about making things that definitely don’t belong go away quickly — not by generating false relevance by “organizing” them. For me, this means the opposite action; disinterring every sarcophagus of crap in my house and, item by item, evaluating how it’s making my family’s life better. You can’t believe how emotionally complex this is for a craphound like me, but once I get started, it’s completely exciting — the illusion that all this junk is making me happy melts away with every scrap of paper or broken piece of equipment I can get out of the way.

Also, I’ve found that something unbelievable and almost magical happens once I get into this mode: I start seeing things that I hadn’t ever noticed. Like the phone cords and SCSI cables.

See: during my last attempt at “cleaning up,” I (seemingly sensibly) focused primarily on organization, or the idea that most of my problem came out of not keeping like with like. So, I was very proud of myself after I’d spend the better part of two days ensuring that USB cables, ethernet cables, firewire cables, SCSI cables, and RJ-45 phone cords were all neatly separated and stored in their proper boxes.

Whoa, wait a minute. SCSI cables? Phone cords?

About half a day into my current scorched earth purge, I glanced across the office to see a box with eight different phone cords in it. Eight. This notwithstanding the fact that I have a single VoIP line and haven’t used a dial-up modem in 6 years. And SCSI cables? My God! I haven’t had a SCSI device hooked to my Mac in almost as long. Yet there they were, nicely organized and ready to serve their non-existent purpose.

Now they’re gone.

I’m finally getting my head around the idea that organization is what you do to stuff that you need, want, or love — it’s not what you do to get useless stuff out of sight or to impart makebelieve meaning. And even though that 50-pin SCSI cable cost me a fortune in 1998, there’s zero reason for me to have it today. And, yet, there’s an invisible but very real cost associated with keeping it around.

As you wage your war on clutter, you will have many moments where you pause, item in hand, over the trash or recycling and feel resistance and fear. Sometimes its for cause, and you’ll elect to keep it, but also be prepared to let go on an unprecedented scale. Think volume and be brutal in your evaluations.

GTD‘ers know not to let pointless actions into their projects; why would you suffer pointless physical crap in your life?

”My War on Clutter: Never "organize" what you can discard” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 02, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero

Merlin Mann — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:37:00 -0400

These are posts from a special 43 Folders series looking at the skills, tools, and attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way. You can visit each of the posts by clicking the title.

And don’t miss the “Related Articles” for our all-time popular posts on productively dealing with email.

**Looking for the Inbox Zero video?**

The full 1-hour video for Merlin’s Inbox Zero presentation at Google is available for free down here — or check out this post about the video and slideshow.

Posts in the Inbox Zero series

43F Series: Inbox Zero [Introduction] - “Clearly, the problem of email overload is taking a toll on all our time, productivity, and sanity, mainly because most of us lack a cohesive system for processing our messages and converting them into appropriate actions as quickly as possible.”
Inbox Zero: Articles of faith - “When I first suggested the email DMZ and said there was a way to get your inbox to zero in 20 minutes, I wasn’t lying. But I was using a definition of “empty” that may not square with your current conception of the email world. So let’s start with a few of my own articles of faith to ensure we’re on the same page going forward.”
Inbox Zero: Five sneaky email cheats - “In the words of the great Lucas Jackson: ‘Yeah, well, sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.’”
Inbox Zero: Where filters will and won’t help - “[F]ocus on creating filters and scripts for any noisy, frequent, and non-urgent items which can be dealt with all at a pass and later. ”
Inbox Zero: Delete, delete, delete (or, “Fail faster”) - “Just remember that every email you read, re-read, and re-re-re-re-re-read as it sits in that big dumb pile is actually incurring mental debt on your behalf. The interest you pay on email you’re reluctant to deal with is compounded every day and, in all likelihood, it’s what’s led you to feeling like such a useless slacker today.”
Inbox Zero: Schedule email dashes - “If you can get away from being driven by email’s motor and find a way to deal with your work mindfully and on your own terms, you may be startled to see how much easier it is to keep that inbox at zero.”
Inbox Zero: What’s the action here? - “Focus on finding the fastest and straightest path from discovery to completion, and your inbox fu will be strong.”
Inbox Zero: Processing to zero - “You’ll never stay ahead of this stuff if you don’t recalibrate starting today. Give each message as much attention as it needs and not one iota more. Remember the contextuality of triage: if you keep trying to care for dead and doomed patients, you’ll end up losing a lot of the ones who could have actually used your help.”
Inbox Zero: What have you learned? - “Try to learn from what you’ve just experienced, and reapply your new wisdom to the way you treat email every day — nay, every time that little “new mail” chime sounds. You’ve just come out the other side of productivity bankruptcy and have, perhaps for the first time, a clean record and a fresh start.”
Inbox Zero: Better Practices for staying (near) zero - “As a person who has done the near-impossible and managed to establish a temporary beachhead against the occupying email army, you are your own best expert in what needs to change to keep things together, but I’d like to share a few things that have helped me stay email-sane (most of the time).”

These are, to date (2006-03-13), our most popular posts on email and were recently collected in a recap article, “Becoming an Email Ninja.”

Five fast email productivity tips “There’s been a lot of great discussions about email productivity going around on sites I enjoy, so I thought I’d throw in five no-brainers that I’ve seen help a lot of folks.”
Quick tips on processing your email inbox - “The basic idea is to firewall processing as a discrete phase you go through no more than every hour or two at the most. For God’s sake, don’t live in your Inbox if there’s any way you can avoid it.”
Writing sensible email messages - “As we’ve seen before, getting your inbound email under control will give you a huge productivity boost, but what about all the emails you send? If you want to be a good email citizen and ensure the kind of results you’re looking for, you’ll need to craft messages that are concise and easy to deal with. ”
Five email tics I’d love for you to lose - “For the love of God, people; can we get the word out on these?”
My email diet - “Gmail’s made me see the value of having very few actual folders for storing new and archived mail. It makes it much easier to track and organize your mail on the fly, plus Google’s search and labeling tools let you confidently shunt items out of your inbox constantly without fear of having stuff disappear. So I decided to try a little experiment.”
Fresh Start: The Email DMZ - “Think about it: how much stuff in your life has gotten unmanageable simply because you decided at some point that you were too behind to ever make a difference? More than anything you need a way to recover these projects from the brink — to find the handle that lets you stop making it worse and start seeing a way back toward daylight.”
4-1/2 tiny ways to master Mail.app - “Seriously, though, suck it up and just check for new mail as seldom as your job and your patience will possibly permit. Really push the envelope on this, even just for half a day, and see if you don’t notice a difference. The world actually can spin without you for a while (but just a little while).”
Open Thread: The value and quality of email at work - “If I ran a company and learned that most of my employees were spending that much time touching internal email, I’d ask my managers: ‘For how many and which employees is six hours of email each day adding value to the company?’ Maybe that’s just me.”

New: Merlin’s Inbox Zero Presentation

Merlin does a live presentation on Inbox Zero from time to time. The latest version of the presentation was delivered on July 23, 2007 at a Google Tech Talk in Mountain View, CA. You can download a PDF of the slides for the presentation and can watch the 58-minute video of the talk and Q&A right here:

Get Inbox Zero — Live and in Person

Bring Inbox Zero to your company by inviting Merlin to speak at your next event. It’s fast and painless to book Merlin through Premiere. »

”43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 13, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Stikkit: Magic words, functional emails, and a handy cheat sheet

Merlin Mann — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 11:20:55 -0500

(Disclosure: I’m a proud member of Stikkit’s advisory board)

As promised, I wanted to start sharing some of the reasons I’ve been digging Stikkit, so I thought I’d begin at the beginning: Stikkit’s use of “magic words” to do stuff based on your typing natural (albeit geeky) language into a blank note. There’s a lot more to Stikkit than magic words, but this is a great place to start. (And, yeah, future posts will be more about how to implement stuff with Stikkit, but it’s worthwhile to start with the mechanics.)

[Note: this is one of those posts that you might want to print out]

So let’s say I want to schedule lunch with my old roommate, Jake, during a notional trip to Sarasota later this week. I might create a new blank stikkit then add the following contents:

Lunch with Jake at The French Hearth on Friday at 11:30 directions: http://map.example.com/76868/ We talked about this on the phone !1/30 @ !12:50pm (see: {123456}) Jake Short 850-555-1212 share jake@example.com myadmin@example.com remind us all @appointments travel Sarasota JakeShort p:social

Ok, first — and as usual with my infamously over-the-top demos — there’s a lot more going on here than is strictly necessary (e.g., I could have just typed “Lunch with Jake on Friday at 11:30” and been done with it). But, since this is partly about showing the flexibility of multiple magic words in action, I wanted to demonstrate to you how that crapload of text up there turns into this finished and functional Stikkit:

After the cut are a couple more detailed pics, followed by an explanation of what’s happening in my example, as well as an Unofficial Stikkit Cheat Sheet.

So where ’s the magic here? Well, roughly in order of appearance…

Stikkit gets that this contains a calendar event (“…Friday at 11:30”); so, it generates a new calendar entry for me
- I could put all of that info on one line, but I think this way looks a bit tidier; note that Stikkit doesn’t care either way
- Your calendar can be subscribed to in iCal, GCal, or 30 Boxes
Stikkit gets that those directions are a URL, so it hotlinks it
Stikkit gets that I want to reference another stikkit ("123456" is the Stikkit ID for a note about having called Jake), so it hotlinks to that stikkit inline.
Thanks to those handy “!”s I added in front of words I want not to be magical ("!1/30 @ !12:50pm"), Stikkit understands that the date and time in that line shouldn’t be understood as a new event (so it skips over parsing them).
Owing to the familiar pattern of two consecutive title-cased words, Stikkit gets that “Jake Short” is probably a person (or, what Stikkit calls a Peep); it creates a new peep entry for Jake in the address book and adds what it gets is his phone number
Stikkit gets that I want to share this particular stikkit with someone who probably doesn’t have an account on the site yet (but whose email I know); Stikkit sends the person an email and gives them access. (more on the functional contents of that email in a minute)
Stikkit gets that I want to be reminded of this event via email and SMS (and that I have asked that all other shared users be reminded as well)
Stikkit gets that I have my own squirrely personal taxonomy for organizing my stikkits so, recognizing that “@” symbol (or “tag as”) it files this stikkit under my tags for “appointments,” “travel,” and so on. (This lets me later view all stikkits under a given tag at once.)

So Stikkit seems pretty smart in its own way. Once you and Stikkit get good at talking with each other, it’s generally smooth sailing.

Now let’s go back and have a look at the email that my pal, Jake, will get out of this:

Merlin has passed you a stikkit named “Lunch with Jake at The French Hearth” [...]

You’ll find this stikkit on the web at http://www.stikkit.com/stikkits/REDACTED

___STIKKIT STARTS HERE___ Lunch with Jake at The French Hearth on Friday at 11:30 directions: http://map.example.com/76868/ We talked about this on the phone !1/30 @ !12:50pm (see: {123456}) Jake Short 850-555-1212 share jake@example.com myadmin@example.com remind us all @appointments travel Sarasota JakeShort p:social ___STIKKIT ENDS HERE___

[x] send me email when anyone updates or comments on this stikkit (delete the x in the box to turn this off)

See you there!

A few things to note.

The email Jake receives attaches a .ics version of the appointment, which lets him easily add this event to his own iCal, Gcal, or (I’m told by my wife) even Outlook.
Jake can reply to this email and change anything that appears between the 2 STIKKIT tags. Those changes are then automagically made to the web version of the stikkit. Anyone with whom this stikkit is shared can do the same thing, allowing us to collaborate almost exclusively through email. (I admit that, in practice, this email editing feature still kind of blows my mind)
In that reply, Jake can uncheck the [x] to stop receiving email updates whenever the stikkit changes
Anything in the reply that Jake types above the quoted text will be added to the Stikkit as an external comment (so we don’t start polluting our actual shared note with meta-chatter)

I realize this is a lot to digest, and you may want to just jump in and play with this for yourself. If so, it helps a lot to have a copy of the basic "magic words" in Stikkit (provided below). I also highly recommend visiting the Stikkit forums, where Michael Buffington maintains a terrific collection of tutorials and screencasts, and where many like-minded Stikkiteers participate actively in discussions, sharing hacks, and so on.

# Stikkit Cheat Sheet

Boosted directly from the Stikkit Help window.

Stikkit Events

today or tomorrow or next tuesday
michael’s birthday is on dec 30th
today at 4pm or tomorrow before 12p
party on dec 30th at 5pm
ski trip between 12/25 and 12/30

Stikkit To-Dos

get a dog
buy eggs
make an appointment
+ sweep floor
- mop floor

Stikkit Bookmarks

This is the name of my bookmark
http://theurl.com/

Tags

tag as one, two, three
@something, "something else"

Sharing

share with nickname
share with someone@somewhere.com

Reminders

remind me
remind us all

Stop Stikkit Thinking

!! turns off thinking for the entire stikkit
! turns off thinking for a paragraph
place an exclamation mark in front of any otherwise magical word like !tomorrow to hide it from Stikkit

Start Stikkit Thinking

stikkit, or stikkit: or s, or s: turns on thinking for a single paragraph

As you can see, there’s a lot going on in Stikkit, so this will most likely evolve into a regular feature here. I’m planning posts that’ll show you how to use Stikkit as your calendar and appointment maker, as a meeting notes app + light project management tool, as well as how you can set Stikkit up as a basic GTD-like personal producivity system.

N.B.: Comments for the post are open, but I have to warn you in advance that I’m not exactly a Level 3 support stud (and, believe me, you will have a lot of questions about how Stikkit works). The forums are much better staffed for troubleshooting, getting help, and hosting clever remarks on server uptime. Still, I’m happy to talk about the example above and field any questions that I’m qualified to answer.

(Disclosure reminder: I’m a proud member of Stikkit’s advisory board)

”Stikkit: Magic words, functional emails, and a handy cheat sheet” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 07, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Productive Talk Compilation: 8-episode podcast with GTD's David Allen

Merlin Mann — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 09:05:34 -0500

Productive Talk Comp.: Episodes 01-08 on Odeo

As promised, here’s the single-file compilation of the Productive Talk podcast interviews I did with David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done. The final version’s eight episodes clock in at a considerable one hour and twenty-six minutes, so this should give you plenty to listen to while you’re in line at the DMV.

Some editing misadventures stole the time I’d set aside to write up my final comments on the series, but those will be coming along soon, I promise. In the mean time, as I said in the podcast ep., I want to sincerely thank David, Rick Kantor, Robert Peake, and Zircon Skye Studios for their participation and help with the Productive Talk series. David in particular was unbelievably generous with his time, and I’m very grateful to have had this opportunity to interview him.

Hope you all enjoy hearing the whole series, in order, all in one place. There’s some nuggets of GTD gold in there, if I do say so myself.

Please note: the version included in the podcast feed is a lowly but compatible MP3 file; Apple-y folks with iPods and sexy AAC support can grab this tastier m4a version, which includes chapter markers that make it easy to flip through the individual episodes quickly.

You can learn more at Odeo.com, download the MP3 version, or just listen from here by using the Flash player below:

”Productive Talk Compilation: 8-episode podcast with GTD's David Allen” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 28, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users

Merlin Mann — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 10:56:21 -0500

The success of yesterday’s post on the basics of Smart Playlists makes me think you might enjoy seeing a few more. So, today I want to show you how to get control of a very large iTunes library — to save space by getting rid of stuff you’re not enjoying or listening to, as well as bubble up stuff you may not even realize you like.

If you are an iTunes packrat but feel overwhelmed by your collection (or are simply running out of drive space), try these recipes for Smart Playlists to help you get it together.

Step 0: Backup

Before doing anything too fancy with your iTunes (or with anything else for that matter), always do a backup.

This could be as simple as dragging your library to an external drive, although personally I’d recommend a smarter tool — I recommend rsync for geeks, and ChronoSync for civilians.

In any case, don’t yell at me if you get confused and permanently delete your heirloom recordings. ‘Nuff said.

Big and Useless

This is the dullest instrument in our drawer, but if you’re on deadline for a video editing project and suddenly realize you have 200mb of disk space left — well, you need to delete some shit fast.

This Smart Playlist, as you can see, looks for the biggest bang for the buck in terms of deletion. It’s the fastest way to find very large files that you aren’t listening to much. You could also use something like What Size for this, but, you know, that would be cheating.

Basic Culling

This one’s not much more sophisticated, but, if you’re doing regular backups, it’s my favorite way to quickly and responsibly reduce the disk space used by your library. As with many of these lists, you’ll start to see the value of rating your music; in addition to improving the quality of your lists and listening experience, it eventually becomes a quick way to determine which music you can afford to dump in a pinch.

Old Podcasts

Man, if you aren’t careful, podcasts will eat your lunch. Although iTunes provides useful tools for managing the number of eps you keep, per podcast series, you’ll be amazed how quickly old episodes will fill up your drive.

This little fella does something insanely simple but critical; it pulls up any podcasts that you’ve already listened to, making it easy to select them all and delete quickly (without lots of COMMAND- clicking in the “Podcasts” window)

Sure you really like that?

This simple auditor calls you on your ratings. It looks at your higher-rated songs and sees if you’re skipping them often — a good sign you don’t like them as much as you claim. Very helpful way to refactor if you realize you’ve gotten too enthusiastic with the 5-star ratings.

Rate these

This does something like the opposite of the previous list — it pulls up songs that you’ve listened to a lot but have never rated. Again, if you’re going to get the most out of your Smart Playlists, it pays to rate stuff you have a strong opinion about. This is one of the fastest ways to do that.

You get the basic idea at this point. By tagging the crap out of your songs, adding correct genres, and rating rating rating, you can produce a library that is both more enjoyable and way more manageable. Even if you save every track you’ve ever added, you can always benefit from the history of your behavior that iTunes has collected and exposed.

”Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 10, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

"Music Only" for your iTunes playlists

Merlin Mann — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 12:18:28 -0500

New for Friday 11/10:
Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users »

In my MacBreak Weekly capacity as Vice-President in Charge of Digging Pointless Ratholes™, I recently mentioned some tricks that I use to create better playlists in iTunes. One of these tricks — which is an oldie, and which I’m certain I yoinked from some uncredited smarter person out in the blogtropolis — is to create a “Music Only” list.

So you know how you have increasing buttloads of non-music (podcasts, audio books, etc.) in your iTunes library? It’s really annoying to throw on one of your sexy Smart Playlists or the Party Shuffle, only to have a 20 minute nap or a Noam Chomsky lecture kick in.

I get around this by basing almost all my Smart Playlists on my one canonical “Music Only” list, which currently looks like this:

Yes, it’s very hacky, and yes there’s probably a more elegant way to accomplish this effect, but so far it’s been a handy jumping off point for my favorite Smart Playlists. This helps me build stuff like…

New and unlistened-to

My neglected lovers

If you’re even a casual iTunes user, it pays to spend some time rating your songs (no they can’t all be “5 stars”), adding rich metadata, and building Smart Playlists. So powerful. And it you’re using a (GUI-free) iPod Shuffle but not Smart Playlists? Man, that’s just nuts.

New for Friday 11/10:
Revenge of the Smart Playlist: 5 tricks for packrats & power users

By popular demand, here are five more Smart Playlists, designed to help you manage very large libraries and bubble up interesting tracks (that you may not realize you like). (more »)

”"Music Only" for your iTunes playlists” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 09, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Merlin's top 5 super-obvious, "no-duh" ways to immediately improve your life

Merlin Mann — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 07:11:49 -0400

How to get organized and stay that way

When I was up in Toronto last week, I was interviewed by Samantha Grice from the National Post about 43 Folders, productivity stuff, and the sad sorry state of my own day-to-day productivity. Very “Brady’s Bits.”

As a sidebar to the little profile she wrote, Samantha also asked me to draft a few words on my favorite fast tips for getting it together.

Although these will each be painfully old news for you who’ve been with 43F for a while, I wanted to share the original draft of what I came up with, because it’s sufficient as a cocktail-napkin version of what I think 43 Folders has to say to people. You may share it with the disorganized and confused in your own life, if you like.

I also loved the limitations of this particular exercise: 300 or so words in five bullets that represent my best day-one tricks. Due in minutes. My kind of challenge. Although I did go over on word count, and I’ll own that.

Herewith: Merlin’s top 5 super-obvious, “no-duh” ways to immediately improve your life.

Reduce noise - We all have innumerable inboxes, interruptions, and distractions that are part of work and life — you can’t change that. What you can do is get more hard-nosed about the elective diversions that you invite into your world. Cancel a subscription for a magazine you never read or sign off an annoying mailing list. Needles get easier to find when you aren’t constantly adding new hay to the stack.
Write things down - Ever find a piece of paper in your office with seven digits on it? You know it’s a phone number, but whose? Get ruthless about jotting down ephemeral information if you’ll need to recall it later. Remember that your brain is a creative organ with limitless creative possibilities — but it makes a really crummy whiteboard.
Focus on action - My favorite productivity book, “Getting Things Done” highlights how anything you want to do in life eventually comes down to intentional physical activity — even if it’s something as mundane as “take out trash” and “call Mom.” Learn the habit of planning your world around action verbs rather than fuzzy nouns. “Implement Strategy” is not a task; it’s a project. “Call Jim about strategy” is a very do-able “next action” that keeps the ball in motion.
Get out of your inbox - Many of us are habituated to living out of our email inbox, voicemail, and the other “in baskets” of our lives. Instead, try to set aside regular, periodic times when you trawl for the new content in your life — then get back to work! Inboxes are delivery systems, not workspaces. The real work is happening in your brain and practically every other place that’s not an inbox. Stop allowing yourself to be brow-beaten by the latest, loudest, or most dramatic item that’s landed in your world.
Get pickier - You are the sole person in your life who gets to decide where your time and attention can go. Take that responsibility seriously by not wasting time on junk. You know in your heart what’s really important to you — does the current direction of your time and attention reflect that? Is “kid hugging” time where it should be in proportion to “Blackberry checking” time? Be mindful at the highest level about where you focus your energy, and always strive not to squander it on undeserving activities.

”Merlin's top 5 super-obvious, "no-duh" ways to immediately improve your life” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 11, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

GTD: Priorities don't exist in a vacuum

Merlin Mann — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 20:02:15 -0400

If you’re a fan of Getting Things Done, you’re familiar with the Four Criteria Model for choosing tasks. It’s where the rubber meets the road in GTD, because it’s the way you decide, in the moment, how any one of those wonderful tasks you’ve been tracking in your big system actually gets done.

As common sense as it seems to GTD’ers, this model is one of the more controversial aspects of Getting Things Done for a simple reason: it posits that priority is not the only factor in deciding what to do at a given time. It’s just one of four factors, which include, all told:

Context - Where are you? What tools are available? What are the limits and possibilities unique to this moment?
Time available - Do you have, for example, 30 seconds, 30 minutes, or 30 hours available to you right now? What tasks could you accomplish given the time you have?
Energy available - Are you full of energy, is your ass dragging, or are you somewhere in between? Which of the tasks on your list could you finish, given that energy level?
Priority - If you had access to all the tools, opportunities, time, and energy you needed, what’s the most important or time-sensitive thing you could do right now?

When I’m helping coach people on getting it together, they’re often puzzled by this seeming bit of new-agery — partly, I suspect, because most of us have been conditioned all our lives to think that pre-ordained Priority stamps always trump everything, all the time, always, forever, in all cases, end of story. But is it true, reasonable, or even physically possible to always work this way? Can you will yourself into doing only your identified high-priority items anytime, all the time?

Nope, and I’ll show you one reason why.

Stressful times for Worker Bee

Let’s look at a few challenges that, over the past six months, have faced a notional Worker Bee, leading him to generate high-priority tasks.

You learn you got a citation from those choads in the Homeowner’s Association, and they declare that if you don’t remove that El Camino from your front yard today, they’ll start fining you $200 a day.
Your favorite client emailed you a freakin’ week ago, and you still haven’t responded. You fear that your relationship will be permanently damaged if you don’t respond this morning.
Your bank account is overdrawn and you have to make a deposit or else the late fees and penalties will go up and up and up.
Your sister leaves a voicemail saying that if you don’t pick up the crap you left in her garage, she’s throwing it out tomorrow. Your Boba Fett action figure and Dungeon Master’s Guide are in that garage, and you can’t bear the thought of losing them.

All extremely high priorities to this person, and for good reasons, each. So he has to do them all the second they come up, right? Well, maybe.

Worker Bee buzzes into high-priority action!

But let’s look at some additional factors in the worker bee’s life that affect the immediate do-ability of each of these high-priority tasks — things for which raw priority may not account.

#1 The errant El Camino citation comes up while you’re in Kazakhstan, and the only keys to the car are currently in your right hip pocket — which is also currently in Kazakhstan. How will you move the car right now? You can’t. The context is wrong and, by extension, you don’t have the time (to fly overseas) to take care of it by sundown today. BZZZZZT!
#2 The late email you wanted to send is briefly on your mind as you sit in the Emergency Room holding your sick kid. Well, for one, your priority just got changed for you. And for another, you don’t have a computer or smart phone with you anyhow. No dice, Superdad. BZZZZZT!
#3 That stupid overdraft shows up via BlackBerry while you’re on a quick break from a marathon meeting with your bosses. But you don’t have either your checking account number or your bank card with you, plus you’re due back in that career-defining meeting in 20 seconds. BZZZZZT!
#4 Your beloved geek toys’ endangered status update arrives at the very moment you’re vomiting yellow, half-shrimp-filled goo thanks to the food poisoning you just picked up from that leftover quart of paella. If you weren’t blowing golden chunks, you might be able to make the trip to her house in time, but for now, it’s probably a non-starter. BZZZZZT!

So, did I cheat to start with just priority and only later give you the contextual details? No, not really. That’s actually the point.

Priority mania considered harmful

On some level, this happens to you every day, but even the hugest priority can only be seen clearly in terms of the big picture. Priorities don’t care who they compete with, and, from one vantage point, that’s kinda what makes them priorities.

Hell, Priority Task Number One (flagged “HIGH PRIORITY!!!”) could give a fig whether “HIGH PRIORITY!!!” items 2 through n ever get a single gulp of oxygen. Priorities, left to their own devices, are selfish bastards. That’s their job.

But, remember: priorities represent a snapshot in time and space — they may escalate, de-escalate, disappear, or, more often than not, they’ll be subject to getting bumped by both bigger priorities and by the immutable limitations of time, space, and being a corporeal (sometimes vomiting) human being. Sucks, but it’s life, right?

Sidebar: Flag burning

Consider how often you use the “HIGH PRIORITY!!!” flag not as a practical planning tool, but as a way to try and motivate yourself. Is it really the priority that’s set to “HIGH” — or is it just your anxiety and guilt about being behind right now?

Negotiation skills

The first thing to know is that in GTD, there are three ways of resolving a problematic commitment — you can either:

complete it (jump on a plane; borrow a computer; cancel the boss meeting to fetch your bank card; drive while barfing copiously all over yourself)
renegotiate the commitment (sweet-talk the ultimatum givers; plan to apologize later to the client; reschedule the meeting)
break it (suck up the fact you’re getting fined, losing a client, or never seeing your Dungeon Dice again, then just pick up the pieces later on)

You can choose how you deal with high-priority items that can’t be done when and how you’d like, but you’ll never bend the space-time continuum. Plus, you’ll probably strain your lower back trying.

Who’s flagging who?

This is not by any means to say that priorities aren’t important. I mean, that’s why they’re called priorities. But you have to take care to understand the larger picture at all times, and to not become so obsessed about priority-centric planning that you create impossible situations and unreasonable expectations for yourself. It’s a sure path to serial procrastination for one thing.

When you’re self-aware and honest enough tomorrow morning to say “Screw it, I’m going to sharpen pencils for 10 minutes” or “You know, this deadline is impossible without flipping my life upside down” you’re turning a corner. You’ve begun to permit yourself a broader understanding of the real world, in which, as the sole traffic cop for your life, you are in the unique position to decide what’s do-able at any given moment.

“But…I’m, like, important”

I imagine I’ll hear from people in comments who have the kind of incredibly important job where Horrible Things happen if they don’t prioritize the shit out of everything and do it all flawlessly each day. Or maybe they work in Candy Land, where lollipops grow on trees and any perceived priority can be made to trump reality as easily as delicious nectar can be sipped from a flower. But, for the rest of us, I stand by the point: obsess single-mindedly over priority at your peril.

Unless you can always satisfy the big red letter commitments you’ve created for yourself — as well as the ones that are constantly being generated for you by others — an obsession with priority alone is pointlessly stress-inducing, unhealthy, and unrealistic. The truth is that sometimes you have crap days, pencils need to be sharpened, or maybe you just don’t have the tools or energy to do what you want the second you want. That’s life, pal. Deal.

So, instead of having an aneurysm about it, just rally, and do what you can with what you’ve got. That’s all any of us can really do, and faking it in order to feel more productive (or more important) gets you no place fast.

”GTD: Priorities don't exist in a vacuum” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 01, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43F Recap: Best of iCal Tips

Merlin Mann — 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 ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"