Remainders

Organic, grass-fed remainders, 2007-06-21

Merlin Mann — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 11:47:11 -0400

Herewith: news bits, remainders, and low-threshold links for your dining and dancing pleasure.

ChronoSync | Handy Tips for Using ChronoSync | Econ Technologies - I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of ChronoSync for automatically backing up or syncing folders between two Macs. This is a bunch of handy tips and recipes for setting CS up to do your bidding.
Rule the Web - My pal and frequent co-conspirator, Mark Frauenfelder, sent me a copy of his swell new book, Rule The Web, which is an up-to-date edition that answers the years-old question: “So, what cool stuff can I actually do with the internet?” While many of Mark’s tips and links will be familiar to most of you, this would make a fantastic gift for friends and relatives who are new to intermediate web surfers. Recommended, as is Mark’s companion site for the book. (And thanks for the very kind words about 43f, Mark)
The Universal Traveler - Speaking of books, I keep meaning to write a followup to the post about Ze Frank and “morphological synthesis” since it led me to a couple good books on creativity. I’m particularly enjoying The Universal Traveler (whose title I mangled horribly on The Heather Gold Show last Friday). It’s a lo-fi, somewhat hippie-looking tome, but don’t let the clip art and Courier 12 fool you — this thing is chock full of great ideas for approaching any kind of creative challenge. I love that the authors understand that different people and different problems will require a wide-ranging set of tools and approaches. Good stuff.
YouTube - Microsoft Surface Parody - I’m sure you’ve seen it already, but I just can’t get enough of this Microsoft Surface sendup, courtesy of Sarcastic Gamer. I’m a long time fan and advocate of the adjective big-ass, so this cracked me up.
MacBreak Minute: Sogudi (1080p) - Episodes of MacBreak’s tiny little brother, MacBreak Minute, have started going out. I did a quickie on Sogudi (featured on 43f twice previously) that you can download in either iPod size (yikes, tiny!) or 1080p (yikes, ginormous!). Related: please remind me to shave next time I do one of these.
Tonight in SF: Merlin’s OmniFocus Demo - Finally, a friendly reminder that I’ll be at the Stockton St. Apple Store tonight at 7pm to demo OmniFocus and talk about how I use it. OmniGroup’s CEO (and lead fantasy-gamer) Ken Case will be in evidence too, and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you have. It’s free, open to the public, and I hope I’ll see you there.

”Organic, grass-fed remainders, 2007-06-21” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 21, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Hand-picked, artisanal, remaindered links, 2007-06-04

Merlin Mann — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 12:34:14 -0400

These are lower threshold links to stuff I’ve recently enjoyed.

The Macalope On MacBreak Weekly - “Yes, it’s true. The Macalope will be on next week’s edition of MacBreak Weekly.” The MBW crew seems to remain convinced that I am the Macalope. Tune in this week, and we shall see…
Daring Fireball: iPhone SDK, iPhone SDK! Wherefore Art Thou iPhone SDK? - Gruber’s analysis seems spot-on to me: with a product this big, it pays to manage expectations and hold out the possibility of an unpromised lagniappe or two.
How to talk to the press | fortuitous - Mathowie talkes to the press a good bit more than I do, so I learned a lot from this. Love the tip about listening for frenetic typing.
Jonathan Coulton » Blog Archive » How I Did It - JoCo tells the story of how he got where he is with his music and the internet. Essential reading for those who want to go indie on the web today. Would love to see more of these from other folks as well.
Rosetta Stone for Unix - (PDF) - Ginormous table that lets you compare commands between different flavors of Unix. (via: adurity’s bookmarks on del.icio.us)
MailTags 2.0 leaves beta, goes official - The sine qua non Mail.app plugin goes 2.0. Can’t imagine using Mail without this guy plus Mail Act-On.
Twitter Blog: Are You Twittering @ Me? - “In other words, if somebody Twitters “@biz liking the new Replies tab!” it will get saved at Twitter.com/replies.” I love this feature. I can’t keep up with the (gulp) 2,300 folks who’ve been kind enough to “friend” me, but at least now I can see when they’re saying something in my direction. Very cool.
Facebook | Merlin Mann - In related news. I succumbed. Largely because of this awesomeness. (links require Facebook membership)

Submit your ideas for links to del.icio.us, and be sure to include the tag “for:43folders.”

”Hand-picked, artisanal, remaindered links, 2007-06-04” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 03, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Remaindered links, 2007-03-21

Merlin Mann — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 08:01:13 -0400

Lower threshold links to stuff I wouldn’t want you to miss. It’s been quite a while since we’ve done some shorties, so what the heck.

Inquisitor 3. Spotlight for the web. - I tried Inquisitor when it first came out, and, for some reason, it didn’t move me. But now, I love its smartypants, mind-reader replacement for Safari’s search bar. Sogudi is still my first love for ad hoc location bar searches, but the ability to add custom search engines to Inquisitor is hot hot hot. Free as in beer, too.
Picked up one of these Behance notebooks the other day. It is very lovely and well-designed. Not sure if it’s a quantum functional improvement over a sheet of printer paper, but it’s definitely a classy piece of productivity pr0n. And the Helvetica! Ah the Helvetica.
Service Scrubber - I’ve mentioned before that I think OS X Services are one of the most woefully under-utilized tricks in the current Apple world. But the actual Services menu can, over time get cluttered. This handy little donationware app will shut off Services you don’t want to appear in the menu and let you re-map the key bindings of ones you do use. Very handy.
010: Interview: John Vanderslice, Part 2 | The Merlin Show - John Vanderslice on high-volume email: “You can’t make sense of all that correspondence. You just can’t.”
On the advice of my pal Katie Spence, I picked up Unstuck, which looks to be a pretty neat little book about generating ideas and then seeing them through into real “stuff.” Presented in a “choose your own adventure” style that makes for interactive fun. They also have a website that (with a bit of typo-correction and expansion) could turn into an excellent adjunct to the hardback edition (the book clearly wants to be hypertext).
Gizmodo reports on less costly options for hooking up your new Apple TV. My take: A) it’s crazy for Apple not to include at least gratis composite cables for a device aimed at the fat part of the media-viewing curve, and B) the charlatans at Monster and their ilk should be horsewhipped for what they’re charging media noobs for cables.

”Remaindered links, 2007-03-21” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 22, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Cool Stuff Remainders, 2005-12-15

Merlin Mann — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 07:27:14 -0500

A few books, apps, and other baubles I’ve enjoyed lately.

As a kid, I devoured dorky books like Haley’s Hints, and I’m convinced it’s partly what made me into the sort of person drawn to the life hacks phenomenon. If you suffer from the same affliction and nurse a passion for clever little tips on removing stains, moving furniture, or drying a sweater, you’ll love this one, too. It’s nicely indexed and the nano-sections make it perfect bedtime (or bathroom) reading.
SuperDuper, the most excellent backup tool/disk cloner, had a recent upgrade that added scheduled, non-attended backups and several other nice features to the mix. I love this app. Love it.
Xinha Here so rules. True WYSIWYG HTML editing inside Firefox may be (I say for the umpteenth time) what finally moves me to The Fox and keeps me there. Combining Xinha with Writeboard — or even Writely, I guess — gives me a glimpse of where the web might be heading (and Redmond’s Office team may have a lot to find troubling about it). Great little chunk of func. Go, Firefox. [via LH]
A wonderful reader gifted me with a much-desired item from my AMZN wishlist — a terrific little book called Buddhism Plain and Simple. In the 20 years I’ve flirted with learning more about Buddhist practice, this book has brought the clearest and most practical presentation I’ve come across. Re-framing Buddhism not as a religion but as a way of seeing has really flipped a switch in my head. Great little book that I can highly recommend (and many thanks to my kind giftor for bringing it to me).
On a recent field trip to pester my friends at Mule I found myself jealously coveting a lot of the toys and tech on Mike Monteiro’s desk, including a most excellent wireless Microsoft mouse. As a consequence, I dropped by CompUsa on the way home, picked up the Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 6000 and have been really pleased with it so far, I’m happy to say. It has a bunch of programmable buttons, nice precision, and a wacky “zoom in” feature that’s probably fun at parties. I also love that the scroll wheel goes side-to-side as well as up-and-down — if you ever have the kind of hot and heavy makeout sessions with Excel that I do, this is a Very Good Thing.
I also nabbed me a RadioShark which is kind of like a TiVo for your favorite local radio stations. It’s a plastic thingee that connnects to your USB port and ships with some fairly janky software for automating recording. The reception also sucks, and it has a very 1.0 feeling in general, but combining it with RadioTime is actually ace. You can use the RadioTime site to schedule all your favorite shows (local and otherwise accessible via the web) and RT does all the heavy lifting of recording streams, bodyslamming the RadioShark in line, then dumping the product right into iTunes. At $39.95 a year, the RadioTime service is steep, and I do wish the next-gen Shark could be “flashed” in a way that allows for independent (un-connected to the Mac) recording. Still if you’re a huge Public Radio nerd like me, it’s nice to know you’ll never miss another “Fascinatin’ Rhythm” or “Writer’s Almanac”.

”Cool Stuff Remainders, 2005-12-15” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 15, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Remainders: The Multiple Self, OS X plugs, a year of 43F, and Grandpa's crappy art

Merlin Mann — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 08:29:50 -0400

The Multiple Self - This is a post by Phillip J. Eby that I’ve read at least 5 times now, and I can’t stop thinking about it. For some reason, it really resonates with me. I’ve been struggling to put together some thoughts on the Linux stream metaphor (and how it relates to a bunch of related stuff I’ve been thinking about), but I haven’t done it justice yet. Until I do, check out the article, and see what you think. More soon.
Minuteur - Linked via del.icio.us, but this is too cool not to re-mention. Ready to kick procrastination’s ass, but don’t want to shell out for a kitchen timer? No sweat. Minuteur is an amazing and very flexible little timer app for OS X. Lots of control via the keyboard and control keys. Countup, countdown, or set a HH:MM alarm. Definitely read the “Minuteur help” menu for usage details. There are many non-obvious features in that weird little window. And it’s free. Mais oui! [Thanks, J|RSHAW]
Painless disk cloning - Just a quick plug for SuperDuper which may end up joining DiskWarrior as my must-have Mac utility. It does exactly two things very well: a) it creates bootable DMG clones of Mac disks and b) it lets you very easily update the disk images using boilerplate or customized scripts. Part 1 has historically been the domain of Carbon Copy Cloner—a great little app. One thing SuperDuper adds is a simple interface for scripting the items/folders you do and don’t want to clone as well as how you want them to behave (new vs. changed, etc.). This basically means you now have a perfect copy of your drive that can be restored very easily in case of calamity. Ditto for doing a “safety clone” before you install a bunch of dicey system upgrades. Highly recommended utility.
Good widgets - Dashboard developers keep coming up with useful widgets that defy my original impression of “whizzy eye candy.” Right now I’m loving Oblique Strategies (cards from Eno & Schmidt’s oracle-like card deck), Gas (cheapest petrol in your ‘hood), Azureus (monitor and control Azureus torrents on a remote box), and BART (a really slick trip planner and schedule viewer for BART trains).
HPDA on the Wiki - Hipster PDA Hacks, on the wiki, has some cool tips and links collected from the web.
Coming Monday: A better to-do list - Be sure to drop back by on Monday morning (2005-08 09-12) for the first of a two-part series called “Building a Smarter To-do List” (part 2 runs on Tuesday, natch). Given the new folks arriving here every day, I thought it would be useful to collect and expand on a few favorite tips behind developing a lean, actionable, unintimidating to-do list. Don’t miss it.
Happy birthday to us - I would note in passing that this week marks the anniversary of 43 Folders (thanks for kicking things off with a bang, Andy). I send you all horns of rock for visiting, linking, supporting, and for telling your pals. Thanks also to the 43F posse for guidance, and encouragement. You all rock. But you knew that.
Quote of the week - “Someone could appreciate it; it wasn’t a total disaster.” — My Mom, commenting on the dubiously executed paintings of Grandpa Mann.

”Remainders: The Multiple Self, OS X plugs, a year of 43F, and Grandpa's crappy art” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 09, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Remainders: Notebooks, NextBus, the Wiki, and more

Merlin Mann — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 08:32:48 -0400

Reporter update - So I got my Moleskine Reporter’s Notebooks a few weeks back (see earlier drool) and I’m ready to share two opinions. First, although the Large Reporter is beautiful and pretty well-made, somehow it’s not really doing it for me. Way too bulky and cumbersome to use, and the top-flip isn’t happening for me. Could be cool to use an unlined Large horizontally for sketching (if I sketched). But, the Small Reporter is totally ace. Great for jotting on MUNI. Although, I must say I’m a bit disappointed that neither model is a true reporter’s notebook in that they can’t completely flip open any better than a standard bound notebook. (Ironically, it inspired me to pick up a real $1.80 reporter’s notebook to play with. Loving it.)
Engineering notebook affection - Tip of the propeller cap to Josh Carter for turning me on to BookFactory.com and their amazing engineering notebooks. Apparently, it’s very important for engineers, scientists, and researchers to carefully document all their work since it may eventually need to be used to defend a patent, etc. There are tons of squirrely rules for using these things that don’t apply to us uncreative civilians, but I do love the table of contents, line numbers, page names, and how it makes it easy to point to the pre-numbered page that something is “continued on” or “continued from.” Dunno if I’ll keep buying the wire-o laboratory model I got for perpetuity, but there are some smart new notebook habits I’ve learned that I’ll be taking with me, for sure.
NextBus adds SF bus lines- My old pal NextBus has recetly added two new SF MUNI lines to their amazing, GPS-based tracking service, including the 24-Divisadero and the 33-Stanyan buses. W00t.
Lazyweb: Widget for SF Muni - Related to NextBus, if any of you smart Tiger-loving kids can come up with a Dashboard Widget that pulls up NextBus data, by stop, for SF MUNI, it’ll buy you a home page link from one grateful middle-aged man’s moderately popular website about filing things. Just saying. So, let’s go: chop chop!
Wiki getting really good- If you haven’t been following the 43F wiki—and I know it can be a little bewildering if you’re new to the wikiwiki world—there are a few bits that I do recommend you check out, because they’re growing fast and furiously. In particular the Life Hacks category is blowing up with great submissions from readers, and has even broken out into myriad sub-areas. So many great tips.
html2wiki - If, like me, you’re spending an increasing amount of your time on a wiki, you should check out html2wiki. It’s a badass little perl module that converts HTML into Wiki markup in the language of your choice (including converting URLs). In related news, if anyone can hack Mediawiki to work with Markdown, we should talk.
Quicksilver to go - We Quicksilver fans frequently complain that whenever we use a Mac that doesn’t have our favorite app installed, we feel like we’ve lost a limb. To get around this baleful situation in the future, zip up the latest copy of Quicksilver and mail it to your own Gmail account. Wherever you go, you’re just a couple clicks away from sanity. I’ve also been doing this for a few weeks with my big pile of txt files; takes less than a minute to gzip it and mail it to myself. Never hurts to have the extra backups, either.
Many thanks - A few folks have kindly sent lovely presents from my Amazon wishlist and I just wanted to say “Thank you, thank you!” Unfortunately, stupid Amazon makes it virtually impossible to figure out how to contact the giftor. Grr. (Steal this idea, AMZN: make it easy to send an electronic thank you note when you receive a gift, including the ability to send in return something off that person’s wishlist. Think “online greeting card.”)
Quote of the week - Since there seems to be a lot of fellow Anne Lamott fans here, today’s quote comes from Bird by Bird: “[Y]ou can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Enjoy Tiger, and have a swell weekend.

”Remainders: Notebooks, NextBus, the Wiki, and more” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 29, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Remainders: Vim, The One-Fork Rule, dashes, and ETech, ho!

Merlin Mann — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 08:05:32 -0500

Vim: The Journey Begins - It’s official. I’m learning Vim, one of the storied UNIX text editors that so many geeks live in. My copy of Learning the vi Editor arrived last week, and I’ve been spending at least an hour each night getting through the basics. I can definitely see why this is so popular with people (even though I’m having a heckuva time un-learning five years of what I now realize are Emacs key bindings). It’s totally configurable and scriptable, and once you get the hang of switching between command and insert modes, it’s just faster than hell. If you want to join in with me for the long walk, ala Oprah’s Book Club, feel free. I’ll be posting on my progress periodically, and have been bookmarking good vi/Vim links to help us out. Also, I do recommend grabbing the Vim carbon app, since it behaves and interacts more like a Mac program and is much easier to customize and use. (Vim studs in the house? Got a good trick I need to know? Dish!)
Plan before you buy - I keep running lists of all the features and geegaws that I know I’ll want in the next version of a costly product I’ll need to buy someday—from little stuff like a mobile phone or TV to bigger stuff like a car or a house. Capturing these ideas as they occur to you over 1-5 years is a lot less stressful than having to pore manically over a bunch of spec sheets on the day your cell phone falls in the toilet.
The One-Fork Rule - At one point in my third year of college, my housemates and I felt entropy’s hot breath on the back of our necks. As the dishwasher overflowed with week-old plates and the crisper teemed with blue and brown goo, we acknowledged it was time for a radical change. Thus, Richard, Jake, and I made a pact to instantiate what we called “The One-Fork Rule.” Each of us was issued one and only one of each eating tool: cutlery, plate, bowl, glass, etc. We were to bond with our tools like an infantryman with his rifle. If your fork was dirty when it was time to eat, you were to clean it. You were not to breach the sacred seal of the duct-tape-sealed boxes containing all the additional forks and plates. Like all emergency measures “The One-Fork Rule” passed in time, but I can tell you, it really works if you’re ever feeling overwhelmed by the crufty multiples in your kitchen—or elsewhere your life. Consider trying it for a week or so whenever you need to simplify or just get it together.
Research dashes - I keep a plaintext file with a long-ass list of stuff to learn, fix, or improve on my computer. Stuff like “learn Perl,” “find out why Mail crashes on CTRL-click,” or “research cheap external hard drives.” These kinds of items represent very low-pressure and low-priority on my radar screen, but I do like to make progress on a few of them from time to time. Try scheduling “a dash”, 2 to 4 hours, twice a month for researching and conquering little stuff that’s been driving you nuts. This not only gives you a chance to review, update, and solve the stuff that’s probably stealing seconds from every day, but you can also start to watch for interesting patterns that might indicate bigger problems and opportunities (“Whoa: time to get a new laptop”).
Mass-mailing Customer Service - I sometimes fantasize that I can breach the gates of “Customer Service” at a given company by sending regular old email to several logical addresses. It doesn’t always work—I mean, gracious me, why would you ever want dissatisfied customers to contact you—but I wanted a way to quickly try it without a lot of hassle.
Fellow TextMate fans can make the following bit into a Snippet and assign it a key command.

support@${1:`echo $TM_SELECTED_TEXT`}, help@${1:`echo $TM_SELECTED_TEXT`}, customerservice@${1:`echo $TM_SELECTED_TEXT`}, web@${1:`echo $TM_SELECTED_TEXT`}, webhelp@${1:`echo $TM_SELECTED_TEXT`}$0

In a blank TM document, type the domain of the company (“example.com”), select it, then apply the Snippet via menu or key command to quickly generate a handy, comma-delimited list of potential help sources.
General ETech slowdown - Things have gotten a bit busy around here with ETech and a few other pet projects coming to the fore, so I’ve decided to hold off on a couple announcements until next week; sorry to be a tease. Check back next Monday (I hope). Since I’ll be pretty heads-down on all things ETech (and post-ETech catchup) over the next week, the volume here will likely stay fairly quiet until then. Still, I’ll probably be posting occasionally here, and watch for ETech related stuff from me on del.icio.us (link | rss) and Flickr (link | rss). Like my friends currently at SxSW, I’ll probably be posting lots of pictures of pleasant-looking people you don’t know eating and sitting in chairs.

Thanks, have a great week, and if you see me in San Diego, please do say hi, and introduce yourself.

”Remainders: Vim, The One-Fork Rule, dashes, and ETech, ho!” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 14, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Remainders: Sick box, subject lines, phone hacks, and 6 months of 43F

Merlin Mann — Fri, 04 Mar 2005 16:42:24 -0500

Create a “sick box” - Make up a little box filled with all the stuff you’ll want fast access to on the next morning you wake up with a cold. TheraFlu, cough drops, fresh box of Kleenex, unwatched DVD you’ve been saving, a nice trashy novel, and the phone numbers of anyone you’d need to contact at work. Believe me, you’re in no mood to collect this crap when you wake up with the flu kicking your ass.
Phonecam wishlisting - Use your mobile phone’s camera to give yourself a reminder about something you might want to buy later. Snag the UPC and pull it up later to add to your next Amazon cart.
Standarize your Subject lines - I think well-crafted email subject lines are largely a lost art today. Back in the day, people would use them like IMs, creating a message where the Subject line could stand as a request or answer all by itself. No more. I know I’m guilty of my share of “Subject: Hi” emails to be sure. We all are. But good subjects can save tons of time when used correctly and consistently. Whenever I manage projects, I encourage everyone to start the subject line for all project emails with the same 4-6 letter code. Spacely Sprockets’ project emails might start with “SPROCK,” for example. This makes filtering a breeze and helps you visually organize your inbox more quickly, especially when you work with a given person across several projects.
Acute Strategies - Everybody knows I’m a big fan of Eno’s “Oblique Strategies” cards (my favorite being “Honour thy error as a hidden intention”). I keep my deck right next to my computer and flip through them frequently. I’ve recently started a txt file of Acute Strategies. Half joke and half common sense, I sometimes find them helpful or at least good for a laugh. Samples: “Go change your shirt,” “Answer 5 emails,” “Stop interrupting people,” or “Clean the kitchen for 10 minutes”. (cf. “Hack your way out of writer’s block”)
Silence the nuisance - Another phone hack. If you’ve ever had your phone temporarily mistaken for a fax machine or been banged on by a rogue VoIP telemarketing farm, you may have wished you could just tear the ringer out. Until all phones catch up with the sexiness of Spam Assassin and regular expressions, we must hack, and hack we shall! (God, when is some smart company going to finally let me flash my phone a regex formula for dealing with incoming calls. Seriously, someone please do it.) Thanks to the wonders of Caller ID and unique ring assignment, I set my cell phone’s ringer-type for nuisance call numbers to None. Not perfect, but it keeps me from needing to dash across the house to be greeted by a screech, a pitch, or a hangup.
Check mail anyplace - Alcor threw me a nice bone about Quicksilver yesterday. If you have the Mail.app plugin installed, add “~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/PlugIns/QS Apple Mail Module.qsplugin/Contents/Resources/Scripts” to your catalog and restart Quicksilver (CTRL-COMMAND-Q inside Quicksilver). On relaunch, you can type “Get New Mail” and “Open New Mail” from any app without changing focus. Handy.
Thanks - Many thanks to everybody who’s been picking up stuff via our MoleskineUS and Amazon affiliate links. The support is very much appreciated.
Happy Half-Year - I’m not really one for time-based celebrations, but I’ll note that this week marks the 6-month birthday of 43 Folders. Half a million happy nerds served. Thanks to everybody for everything, with special props to my peeps and extra special kudos to my lovely, patient, and supportive ladyfriend, Madeline. She is truly the 44th folder beneath my wings. Or something like that.

Now everybody go out, and buy yourselves something real pretty. And do have a lovely weekend.

”Remainders: Sick box, subject lines, phone hacks, and 6 months of 43F” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 04, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Remainders: Capturing, saving, next next actions, and that damned Kelly Clarkson song

Merlin Mann — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 12:29:45 -0500

Today’s gonna be a quickie since I can audibly hear a couple deadlines whooshing past me right this second.

Mix it up - I was emailing with a friend recently about the problem of becoming too cleft to a single way of capturing information—with that one way often being a PDA. Personally, I think it’s a good idea to think about your capture processes as being decoupled from your storage and recall process. This is a fancy-pants way of saying: be very consistent about how you store information but exceedingly generous about all the ways you might capture it. I know, I know: you swear by your Palm XXVI with the 60 chiggerbyte bus driver, extensible cappucino maker, and onboard smoke alarm. But are all those steps of taking it out, turning it on, creating a new note, typing/writing perfectly, etc. really more efficient than just jotting a phone number on a matchbook? Hint: consider being as little of a digital martinet as you can manage. You’ll get more information captured and people will find you more charming, as well. As ever: one data point.
Next next action - I don’t know if this is heretical GTD talk, but, since some of my todos are really just dependencies for a more important next task (cf. “yak shaving”), I have a trick. Whenever I create a task of this sort in Entourage, I often type the title of the next next action in the message field. So, when “Buy Sugar” is done, I can copy “Bake Cake” and paste it right into the Title field. Reuse is better than recycling.
Safari Bookmark folders - As Zoltar, Lord of the Obvious, I am apt to tell you many things you already know, but here’s one I wish someone would remind me about every week or so. Whenever you start a new project, however small, immediately add a new folder to your bookmarks bar in Safari (or Firefox or whatever). When you create new bookmarks, get in the habit of putting them in the right place. This will save you countless minutes every week from not needing to hunt and peck. Prune and refactor every week or two to keep your freshest resources where you need them, and fast. (In other news: why the hell does a new bookmark get added to the bottom of a browser’s list? Been that way since ‘94 and I’ve always thought it seemed completely backwards).
Save. Save. Save. - First year of college. Nineteen hundred and eighty seven. Spring term. Jim the RA paid me to type his Bio paper on an old Fat Mac. I clacked away for almost two hours and finally decided to see how many words (and how much $$) had happened so far. “Select All”; “Word Count”; “OK”; “Backspace”; Wait! Wait! No, it had not been saved in two hours, and no I hadn’t learned CMD-Z yet. WANH-wanh. Existential pit ensued. Friends, type this, print it, and put it over your screen: “SAVE! Every paragraph and every time you think of it.” You can’t save too often.
Remind redux - Many thanks, again, to Mike Harris for last night’s amazing article on Remind. So far, the award for most helpful comment goes to Matthew, for unlocking the door to further command line fu in Remind. Suddenly this is starting to feel like a one-stop command line dashboard app. Amazing.
The Zen of Naming - Thanks so much to everyone for the insane names for this feature. In the end, I’m going to be a punk-ass bitch and just stick with Remainders. Show of hands from previous threads: who all said that? You get links next week. See? There’s power in stasis.
Off-topic time sink - Over on my LJ: I can’t stop listening to a Kelly Clarkson song (yes, that Kelly Clarkson. Shut up!). What are your worst, lifelong earworms? What songs have demanded to be played over and over to the point of madness? Dish (please leave a name in yr comment if you’re not an LJ user).
Closing quote - We wrap up today with Lao Tzu, who, centuries ago, provided the best defense of the Hipster PDA I’ve ever heard:

When the fool learns the Way, He laughs at it.
Yet if the fool did not laugh at it,
It would not be the Way.
Indeed, if you are seeking the Way,
Listen for the laughter of fools.

Have a great weekend, and keep laughing.

”Remainders: Capturing, saving, next next actions, and that damned Kelly Clarkson song” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 25, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Remainders: Coin envelopes, sprints, binder clipping & more

Merlin Mann — Fri, 18 Feb 2005 13:02:57 -0500

The rests are as important as the notes - Try to occasionally consider what else you could be doing whenever your primary focus gets locked up. I’m not talking about multi-tasking in that faux-productive way of splitting your attention five ways (hint: you’re not as good at that as you think you are). For example, if you’re stuck on hold for tech support, use the time to run through your “waiting on” list or read an article you’ve been putting off. If you’re running DiskWarrior and your Mac is tied up, why not run through some filing or chores you’ve been putting off. Get outside for a minute. For God’s sake, you’re as pale as a ghost. Look at you! In short, don’t burn cycles just because you have a progress bar or logistical background process running in front of you.
Coin envelopes for index cards - By now you’ve certainly seen Josh’s satisfyingly byzantine paper-based GTD setup. It relies on kraft paper coin envelopes (“Projects”) for holding sets of index cards (“next actions”). I’ve started using coin envelopes in a more modest way—to be a temporary holding pen for Hipster PDA cards that need to be processed. Keeps the desk tidy (plus it’s really oddly satisfying to put cards in those little envelopes).
Find your diurnal sweet spot - I’m convinced that each of us has an internal clock that knows when we’re best suited for certain kinds of work. Try to schedule your work around the times you’re best at it. For example, I prefer writing in the morning and reserving brainless monkey stuff for the late afternoon. Whatever your preference, avoid scheduling creative or intense tasks at the times your ass tends to drag. Watch yourself and learn when these times are.
Learn to sprint - For certain kinds of work, I’ve found it really effective to do timed bursts of very focused activity. Stuff like cleaning off your desk, tidying the living room, or making a dent in a big pile of things to file. Try 8 or 20 minutes, set a timer, and go! Collections of micro-tasks can be knocked down quite nicely this way, and the timer gives you assurance you only have to work on it for so long. (“sprint” is a term I stole and bastardized from Scrum development. Sorry, Scrumsters.)
Hand writing - I totally forget who told me this one (update: Jasmeet!), but I love it. If you need to absolutely remember something first thing in the morning, write it on the palm of your hand the night before. When you wake up to wash and do your business, there you go. I also use mine sometimes for writing down my Oblique Strategy for the day.
More uses for the mighty binder clip - As the administrative grunt for a Netflix household, I’m responsible for hoofing it down to the big blue mailbox every couple days. To make sure I don’t forget anything on my epic, two-block trek to 23rd Avenue, I hang all our outgoing mail on a large binder clip on the front door. When I somehow have managed to miss that subtle clue, I hang the mail off the actual dead bolt; I literally can’t leave the house without being reminded that Napoleon Dynamite needs to go home now. (“Dang!”)
Custom View post preview - As promised the other day, the post on Entourage Custom Views is on the way, although it won’t make it up today as I’d hoped. Maybe this weekend, but probably next week. Lo siento about that. To tide you over, though, here’s a peak at my favorite custom Tasks view, “All Tasks - Not Lo,” to which I return probably 20 times a day:
- match UNLESS ANY criteria are met
  - due date is greater than 1 days from now
  - is complete
  - category is maybe-later
  - category is waiting
  - category is reference
  - category is agenda
  - priority is lower than normal
Jury’s still out on the name - Per last week’s post, I’m looking for a name for this feature. So far Madeline (and a few of you) are in the lead with keeping it “Remainders” and adding a few bullets (like today). If I called this “the 44th Folder” I fear I’d earn a well-deserved citation from the cheese police. I’m still thinking about it though! Nominees still accepted.
Closing quote - We close out today with a word from the shredding Mr. Kirk Hammett, who, via the wonderful documentary Some Kind of Monster defines the “Metallica Mission Statement” for his bandmates: “So you can, like, just, always be reminded of what the ultimate goal is!” It’s so true, Kirk. So very true. I really need to get me one of those.

’Til next time, friends, and may your weekend be as capital as your letters.

”Remainders: Coin envelopes, sprints, binder clipping & more” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 18, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"