Notifications

Richard Kuo: Getting Outlook to clam the heck up

Merlin Mann — Tue, 09 May 2006 12:17:46 -0400

Richard Kuo’s Personal Blog : Optimize your life #3 - how to manage e-mail effectively (1/2)

Richard Kuo posts on email efficiency are quite good and cover a few of the best practices for managing your crazy email world (a few of which I covered as well in Inbox Zero). I bring it up here because one of his articles walks you through screengrabs explaining how to shut off noisome auto-check and notifications options in Outlook.

The stats tell me a lot of you folks are on the Windows, so I highly recommend checking this out and seeing if you can’t maybe do with a bit less interruption and time-burgling from your email world.

That’s good for warm fuzzy feelings…but taking hits from the digital crack pipe is hell on personal productivity. And again, unfortunately, I have to be realistic here and acknowledge that the warm fuzzy feelings win out for most people. I surmise that most people haven’t thought about their own productivity hard enough to derive any sort of pleasure from turning the notifications off…I’ve seen far too many people rationalize dumber things already. So while I don’t like the default configurations of e-mail programs, I guess I can’t blame the companies who make the programs either…at a superficial level, it’s what people want.

Now on to specific recommendations for Microsoft Outlook.

Part two in his series shows you how to set up a basic GTD system in Outlook and then do it. Good stuff!

”Richard Kuo: Getting Outlook to clam the heck up” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on May 09, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

NPR: Clive on "Interruption Science"

Merlin Mann — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 11:16:37 -0400

NPR : ‘Interruption Science’: Costly Distractions at Work

Good recap of Clive’s article in which he expands on a couple important points.

Technology forces us to juggle competing demands on our attention over the course of our workdays. Alex Chadwick speaks with New York Times Magazine contributor Clive Thompson about “interruption science,” the study of the effect of disruptions on job performance.

I really like that Clive stresses the distinction between actual productivity (which so often refers obliquely to the number of widgets you can generate) vs. happiness, or even just the absence of non-stop stress.

Personally? I don’t do this stuff so that I can make more;I do it so I can freak out less.

[ via Jon Udell ]

”NPR: Clive on "Interruption Science"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 19, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

NYT Magazine: "Meet the Life Hackers"

Merlin Mann — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 10:32:44 -0400

Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times

New York Times Select subscribers (coughFreeTrialcough) can login to preview an article by Clive Thompson that runs in the Sunday Magazine. It’s called “Meet the Life Hackers” and it’s a terrific overview of how people, companies, and products are responding to information overload and our (sometimes self-imposed) culture of interruption.

Danny and I pop up, as well as heroes like Mary Czerwinski and the late Bluma Zeigarnik. Clive did a hell of a job with a big and complicated topic, and I’d encourage you to check out the full article when it becomes available for free (Saturday night?). It’s really good—I’d never heard, for example, about the research on interrupting telegraph operators. Awesome.

Update 2005-10-15 19:04:08

Now available online for free: Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times

Extended excerpts on Danny and the Genesis of the life-hacking movement:

In late 2003, the technology writer Danny O’Brien decided he was fed up with not getting enough done at work. So he sat down and made a list of 70 of the most “sickeningly overprolific” people he knew, most of whom were software engineers of one kind or another. O’Brien wrote a questionnaire asking them to explain how, precisely, they managed such awesome output. Over the next few weeks they e-mailed their replies, and one night O’Brien sat down at his dining-room table to look for clues. He was hoping that the self-described geeks all shared some common tricks.

He was correct. But their suggestions were surprisingly low-tech. None of them used complex technology to manage their to-do lists: no Palm Pilots, no day-planner software. Instead, they all preferred to find one extremely simple application and shove their entire lives into it…

In essence, the geeks were approaching their frazzled high-tech lives as engineering problems - and they were not waiting for solutions to emerge from on high, from Microsoft or computer firms. Instead they ginned up a multitude of small-bore fixes to reduce the complexities of life, one at a time, in a rather Martha Stewart-esque fashion…

Many of O’Brien’s correspondents, it turned out, were also devotees of “Getting Things Done,” a system developed by David Allen, a personal-productivity guru who consults with Fortune 500 corporations and whose seminars fill Silicon Valley auditoriums with anxious worker bees. At the core of Allen’s system is the very concept of memory that Mark and Czerwinski hit upon: unless the task you’re doing is visible right in front of you, you will half-forget about it when you get distracted, and it will nag at you from your subconscious…

“David Allen essentially offers a program that you can run like software in your head and follow automatically,” O’Brien explains. “If this happens, then do this. You behave like a robot, which of course really appeals to geeks.”

O’Brien summed up his research in a speech called “Life Hacks,” which he delivered in February 2004 at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. Five hundred conference-goers tried to cram into his session, desperate for tips on managing info chaos. When O’Brien repeated the talk the next year, it was mobbed again. By the summer of 2005, the “life hacks” meme had turned into a full-fledged grass-roots movement. Dozens of “life hacking” Web sites now exist, where followers of the movement trade suggestions on how to reduce chaos. The ideas are often quite clever: O’Brien wrote for himself a program that, whenever he’s surfing the Web, pops up a message every 10 minutes demanding to know whether he’s procrastinating. It turns out that a certain amount of life-hacking is simply cultivating a monklike ability to say no.

And we mustn’t forget another of DOB’s contributions: the webolodeon.

Great work, Clive (and many thanks for including me).

[via Mother Stiness]

”NYT Magazine: "Meet the Life Hackers"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 14, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

On the culture of distraction; one pipe for all interruptions?

Merlin Mann — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 08:02:35 -0400

Driven to distraction by technology | CNET News.com

Really good article on the problems and implications of the interruption-driven lifestyle. Full of great bits, including this:

Businesses could benefit from introducing a collective effort to switch off, Honore said. He points to the marketing department at Veritas Software, which last year instituted “E-mail-free Fridays” for its marketing department. The move came at the behest of Jeremy Burton, an executive vice president who was finding his in-box stuffed with 400 messages a day, many from his own department.

In Burton’s department, employees can’t e-mail one another on Friday, but they are allowed to e-mail customers or other parts of the storage company if they have to. The result? Workers spend more time connecting face to face, and Burton finds his in-box is only half as full.

And when it comes to finishing up a big project, many workers are unplugging altogether—something that Microsoft’s [Chris] Capossela says should not have to be the answer.

Well-written software could offer a better solution, he said. It should help employees stay connected but enable them to receive only messages they want to get—from a boss or family member, say.

Also, Carl Honore, the author of In Praise of Slowness (Amazon.com: US | UK | CA | FR | DE | JP) offers great tips like this, among others:

Before using any time-saving technology, ask yourself if you could perform the task…more efficiently using an old-fashioned method such as walking across the office and talking face to face.

I really do encourage you to read the whole article, because it gets to the heart of a problem that’s contributing to most everyone’s stress and feeling of being constantly overwhelmed. And you might want to follow it up with seeing how Billy G. reportedly carves out a “Think Week” each year.

The piece of technology we could really use

Danny and I (as well as many other folks, obviously) have been thinking about this stuff a lot lately. Seems like most of our problems today don’t stem from a dearth of technology or a lack of access to the tools we need; we have faster, bigger, and more powerful crap than most of us can ever hope to fully use, plus it’s available everywhere. We’re drinking from a freakin’ fire hose. The real trick will be figuring out how to get all these devices’ copious output delivered in a way that’s meaningful, contextual, and timely.

I’m starting to think that devices and applications should share a standard—like an API, I suppose—that can pipe to something like Growl (or what Quicksilver calls its “Notification Hub”). That way, we could each adapt all the streams of data, alarms, and updates in our lives into our own logic-based system. That way you’re not beholden to how Outlook, iCal, Bloglines, AIM, or what have you chooses to tap you on the shoulder.

Add Bayesian filtering and rules-based behaviors to the mix and there’s at least a hope that we could only be notified (read: “interrupted”) when something truly important is happening within the froth of information that’s sprayed at our heads all day. Here’s hoping, anyhow.

The standard part would be a relative breeze; I’m guessing the tricky part would be to get adoption from a bunch of competing companies. Still, everybody would benefit from having a product that “plugged in” to a popular notifications protocol. Standards worked for light sockets, headphone plugs, sewer lids, and railroad tracks. Maybe it’s time to demand our “productivity” products play a little nicer together, too. Pipe dream? You tell me.

”On the culture of distraction; one pipe for all interruptions?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 25, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Calm Technology: How do I know when I need to know?

Merlin Mann — Mon, 09 May 2005 05:20:00 -0400

Designing Calm Technology

This nine-year-old article on “calm technology” seems more relevant than ever today.

A calm technology will move easily from the periphery of our attention, to the center, and back. This is fundamentally encalming, for two reasons.

First, by placing things in the periphery we are able to attune to many more things than we could if everything had to be at the center. Things in the periphery are attuned to by the large portion of our brains devoted to peripheral (sensory) processing. Thus the periphery is informing without overburdening.

Second, by recentering something formerly in the periphery we take control of it. Peripherally we may become aware that something is not quite right, as when awkward sentences leave a reader tired and discomforted without knowing why. By moving sentence construction from periphery to center we are empowered to act, either by finding better literature or accepting the source of the unease and continuing. Without centering the periphery might be a source of frantic following of fashion; with centering the periphery is a fundamental enabler of calm through increased awareness and power.

I’m convinced—as I believe Danny is—that doing this sort of thing well will become increasingly important to overstimulated, easily-distracted people (like me). There’s no way we can process all the stuff that begs our attention, so we’ll need to rely heavily on smarter, less disruptive ways to know when our attention is really needed. To do this with a minimal amount of focal change is a challenge in need of some very clever solutions.

[Via: heyblog: Thoughts on Dashboard and ambient information]

”Calm Technology: How do I know when I need to know?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on May 09, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"