Books

Sample Chapter from "The Creative Habit"

Merlin — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:53:43 -0500

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life (Free 1st Chapter)

As long as I've outed myself as an obsessive fan of Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit, it seems sensible to point you to this free excerpt of the book, which includes the full text of the book's first chapter.

While it doesn't capture the clear-eyed usefulness of the book nearly as satisfyingly as each subsequent chapter does, it will give you a feel for why this book's different from your garden-variety aspirational artist porn -- this woman does not believe in "natural genius," and she damned well expects you to work your ass off, every day:

After so many years, I've learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That's why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves. The most productive ones get started early in the morning, when the world is quiet, the phones aren't ringing, and their minds are rested, alert, and not yet polluted by other people's words. They might set a goal for themselves -- write fifteen hundred words, or stay at their desk until noon -- but the real secret is that they do this every day. In other words, they are disciplined. Over time, as the daily routines become second nature, discipline morphs into habit. [...]

The way I figure it, my work habits are applicable to everyone. You'll find that I'm a stickler about preparation. My daily routines are transactional. Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is raw material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. Everything feeds into my creativity. But without proper preparation, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it. Without the time and effort invested in getting ready to create, you can be hit by the thunderbolt and it'll just leave you stunned.

Yep. And, as Samuel Goldwyn said, "The harder I work, the luckier I get."

Have a look at that excerpt and see what you think. More on this soon.

”Sample Chapter from "The Creative Habit"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 01, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive Heuristics

Merlin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:42:04 -0400

People send me lots of books, so I have to decide rather quickly whether one should be added to the ambitious pile of stuff I already really want to finish reading.

On the off chance that you care or find it useful in developing your own filtering, here's my insanely reductive, mean-busy-guy way to make a 90-second decision on whether to read a new non-fiction book from an author I'm not familiar with.

It does not matter whether you agree with these; that's how you know they're personal heuristics. Also, they are almost uniformly unfair and unkind. So.

For each question, my preferred answer would be "No." Few of these are dealkillers, but they do quickly aggregate to make the decision easy and obvious for me.

At the highest level, is this book's topic based on the typical "zeitgeist" product that gets greenlit by someone who watches lots of golf on TV and who seldom finishes reading the 1,000-word "features" found in in-flight magazines?
Does the book have one of those irksome, "Everything You Know About Everything is Completely WRONG!" titles?
Is the author's large, whitish face the primary feature of the cover?
Does the cover art contain high heels, Mistral, or any reference to either Oprah Winfrey, Joel Osteen, or "Dr. Phil?"
Can you find the word "secret" anywhere on the cover of the book?
Is the book published by a company that you've never heard of -- or, far worse, does that company appear to share the last name of the author or his yacht?
In the event that this is a book by a "famous" person: if the book were written by someone you'd never heard of, would your interest in the book or its topic wane significantly?
Are there a very large number of "intentionally blank" white pages at the beginning and end of the book? Are there an astonishingly large number of pages that have been provided for "Notes?"
Does the Table of Contents lack at least 10% stuff that sounds kind of familiar to you (and at least 30% stuff that does not)?
Does the first non-front-matter material in the book (often a "Preface" or "Introduction") seem like a damp hotel room towel that's matted with the author's self-congratulation? Is it primarily a sales tool for persons who will never read any further? Does the author seem more arrogant than confident?
Does the book's body or heading text suffer from careless or illegible typesetting? Does the book look like an unfinished government manual? Should the designer be horse-whipped for choosing a bold display face for body text?
Does the book suffer from the overlarge margins, giant type, two-paragraph pages, and "inspiring quotations" that often suggest a rushed, shoddy, or lazy manuscript?
Have you already found erors and misspelings?
Does the book's index seem weak or does it not contain entries for the topic or person whom you most associate with the book's theme or title?
Does page 69 bore, vex, or annoy you?
Can you imagine a future in which closing this book on the last page will make you angry that you didn't just go back and re-read A Confederacy of Dunces instead?
Now that you know about this book and have thought about all these horribly petty little things, can you imagine not reading it this week?

No on all counts? Good! You've found your book. Happy reading.

And, a propos of nothing, here's my current non-fiction pile. If you wanted your book to earn a spot, you'd need to beat this competition (some of which do break at least one of these rules, but all trump on quality and great writing).

The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
- This is the second-best non-fiction book I've read this year, after the amazing On Writing
Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert Mckee
When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Richard Lannon, and Fari Amini
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

Noted in passing: all the books on the list were purchased by me with actual money. One data point on how many freebies currently make my cut.

”Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive Heuristics” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 27, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Free Books for your Amazon Kindle

Merlin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 15:45:05 -0400

My pick of the week on the latest episode of MacBreak Weekly wasn't so much my new Kindle (which I do like a lot), but rather a few services that make it easier to find and download free books you can read on the Kindle. These picks included Project Gutenberg, Manybooks.net, and the wonderful Feedbooks.

Feedbooks is the service I highlighted as being the most interesting of the three to me since you can download one Kindle/Mobi book (more info) containing clickable links to hundreds (thousands?) of free and Creative Commons-licensed books that can be downloaded directly to your Kindle, usually in less than a minute or so. Zesty. Hello, 1984 and A Princess of Mars.

In addition to all the great stuff Andy has enumerated, these free book services have made me see the Kindle as a flawed but fascinating game-changer. More tips and buying advice coming soon (short version: it ain't for everybody, by a long shot, but it's surprisingly great for commuters and travelers who devour novels in particular).

And, if you're still hungry for more Kindle-friendly book sites, check out Free Kindle Books and Free Ebooks Online. The post contains a large collection of links that can help fill your reader in no time.

”Free Books for your Amazon Kindle” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 06, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Ask MeFi on sane solutions for book clutter

Merlin — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 11:25:12 -0500

Advice for clearing literary clutter | Ask MetaFilter

There's a thread on Ask Metafilter about book-centric clutter that's getting lots of good comments right now. It started when matildaben asked for "practical and creative systems for reducing the number of books I own," saying:

The vast majority of my possessions by weight and volume consists of books. I would like to develop a system for getting rid of them that will have a very practical, behavioral, methodical approach to the emotions that compel me to keep them...

The solutions people offer are thoughtful and suggest that many of the better ideas are coming from fellow bibliophiles who've struggled with The Book Problem.

Like several folks in the thread, I think this comment from occhiblu gets to the heart of what makes clutter such an emotionally complex problem:

On kind of a meta note: To some extent, I think de-cluttering involves recognizing that regret is part of life, and being OK with that. Yes, I've given away books that I now often wish I still owned. But I've also screwed up relationships, made iffy career choices, etc. -- you suck it up and move on. If you try to cling to every single thing (material, spiritual, or emotional) that you might need one day in the totally hypothetical future, you're going to end up bogged down in a lot of stuff.

Yep, that pretty much nails the problem and the cause for me.

Recap: Merlin's "War on Clutter"

As it happens, I'm about to begin the next phase of My War on Clutter. If you're in the same boat, here's links to my articles from that series.

Unclutterer talks with "Clean Sweep" host, Peter Walsh (Series inspiration)
My War on Clutter (Series introduction)
My War on Clutter: Never "organize" what you can discard
My War on Clutter: The Tools to Purge BIG
My War on Clutter: Inspiration for Independence Day
Vox Pop: Converting clutter from trash to treasure

”Ask MeFi on sane solutions for book clutter” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 27, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

The original 43 folders.

norbauer — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 03:52:19 -0400

I was recently skimming through my beloved old 1934 edition of Progressive Indexing and Filing, which I inherited at a young age from my grandmother—probably my first piece of productivity porn (the book, not my grandmother.) On page 85, I stumbled across a delightful little gem. Apparently, not only did the David not invent the tickler file (news to me), but it's been around since at least 1934.

The tickler file has been central to the GTD workflow since David Allen's first book was published, and I've used one (admittedly on and off, and with varying levels of success) for the last four years. The name of this venerable blog itself is an allusion to the 43 folders that comprise the tickler file (12 months + 31 days).

Here are a couple of tidbits from text:

As matters are continually coming up which require action on a certain future date, a follow-up system is necessary in any well-organized office. [...] The card tickler consists of a set of month guides and a set of 1-31 day guides placed in a card tray and provides a brief reminder of any matter which is to come up at some future time. It is not necessarily confined entirely to the matter in the file, since it may refer to a telephone call or some appointment.

For a good bid of historical life-hackery, check out this classic tome. If Amazon is sold out, you can also give Abebooks a try.

”The original 43 folders.” was written by Ryan Norbauer for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 26, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

DailyLit: 5-minute literature chunks, via email or RSS

Merlin — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 08:27:34 -0400

DailyLit: Read books by email and RSS.

To know me today, you'd never imagine how many hundreds of pages a week I read in college. Surprises me, anyhow. While I've devolved into an accomplished skimmer of Harper's and the The New York Times Magazine, I rarely find (or, make) the time to finish a whole book about anything that's not related to "work." That's why I'm intrigued by DailyLit, a service that leverages rather than battles the tendency to hang out online.

The idea is simple enough: select a "free" book that appeals to you, then, every day or two, via either email or RSS, the DailyLit robot sends you a section that's readable in about five minutes. If you want more at any time -- the digital equivalent of turning the page -- just click to have the next installment sent, then keep on a'reading.

The variety of available selections is handsome, including favorites like Tristram Shandy, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The Devil's Dictionary and over 400 more. Feeling ambitious? Try War and Peace (675 5-minute parts), The Count of Monte Cristo (581 parts), or Don Quixote (448 parts). Want something a little lighter? You can't go wrong with Candide (42 parts) or A Modest Proposal (4 [still hilarious] parts).

The site could benefit from a few additions -- there's no link to download a full version of the book or to directly request a dead-tree copy from the local library (ala) -- but the clean design and stripped-down approach generally suits the functionality; the action is all happening in email and your feed reader, so the site just acts to manage subscriptions and afford finding new books.

I don't thinks DailyLit's intended as a replacement for holding a real book in your hand, and it would be cynical to imply that it is. Seems to me it's basically a clever life hack for people who want to read more but who'd benefit from a short ramp and a timer. By sneaking the medicine into a mini-sized Oreo, we may just find ourselves getting back into a reading habit.

For myself, I'm not promising any college-style 1,000 pages per week, but I'm certainly game for giving T.S. Eliot five minutes of my time this morning. And then another five tomorrow...then another five....

[via: Cool Tools]

”DailyLit: 5-minute literature chunks, via email or RSS” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 01, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Guest Review: Fraser Speirs on "Time Management for System Administrators"

Merlin — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 05:40:19 -0400

Review by Fraser Speirs

Time Management
for System Administrators
by Thomas A.Limoncelli

At the end of 2004, Merlin blogged about possible extensions or specialisations of Getting Things Done for specific constituencies, such as programmers, students or parents. Thomas A. Limoncelli’s book Time Management for System Administrators is perhaps the first example I’ve seen of a book which advocates a GTD-style workflow with some modifications specific to the system administration “lifestyle”.

Book Structure

The book is laid out under the following thirteen chapter titles:

Time Management Principles
Focus Versus Interruptions
Routines
The Cycle System
The Cycle System: To Do Lists and Schedules
The Cycle System: Calendar Management
The Cycle System: Life Goals
Prioritisation
Stress Management
Email Management
Eliminating Time Wasters
Documentation
Automation

The core chapters for GTDers to think about are really chapters 4 through 8 and 13. The material about maintaining focus, handling email and managing stress will be familiar to regular readers of 43 Folders.

Although Time Management for System Administrators is not a simple modifier on GTD, in the sense that the author doesn’t explicitly reference GTD until the epilogue, much of the structure of Limoncelli’s suggested workflow will be recognisable to those familiar with David Allen’s book. Although Limoncelli doesn’t refer to GTD in the body of his work, it’s hard to avoid certain very obvious parallels such as the analogy of one’s memory as “RAM” (c.f. Allen’s “psychic RAM”) and the strategy of “Delegate, Record or Do” (which sounds much like Allen’s “Do, Defer or Delegate” in another order).

However, it would be unfair to dismiss Time Management for System Administrators as a GTD knockoff. It’s certainly not. One area in which I have personally found GTD to be weak is that of helping me decide ‘what to do next’. Certainly, David Allen does have some advice on that matter, but I always found it a little difficult to relate to my workplace. Limoncelli’s Cycle System is, I believe, a very strong contribution to filling that gap in GTD.

The Cycle System

Limoncelli’s Cycle system has seven steps:

Create your day’s schedule
Create your day’s to-do list
Prioritise and reschedule
Actually do the work
Finish the day
Leave the office
Repeat

Let’s break that down a little.

Create Your Schedule

Creating your schedule is as simple as taking your appointments calendar and blocking out the times in which you are committed to be somewhere or do something. For most people in Systems Administration this means meetings or presentations but, for example for teachers, it might be class times. Having created the schedule, you now have a rough idea of the remaining hours left to progress your projects.

In GTD parlance, this is your hard landscape.

Create your To-Do List

Many systems administrators use a ticketing system to track user requests (and those who don’t ought to!), so that can be considered a master list of to-dos. In a Sysadmin’s workflow, it’s not unreasonable to use the request tracker as the canonical list of everything that needs done.

The Cycle System suggests that you take a number of items from the master list (and from your email, voicemail, etc.) and write them down for today. Beside each item, estimate the duration of the task. You now have some idea of the time you need to complete these tasks. It is unlikely that this time will be shorter than the time available, so this leads us to prioritisation and rescheduling.

David Allen warns against creating daily to-do lists as their incompletion can be demoralising. Limoncelli argues that interruptions and associated slippage is inevitable for the busy System Administrator and should not be considered representative of failure.

Prioritise and reschedule

The Cycle System provides for three priorities, defined very pragmatically:

A: “The deadline is today”
B: “The deadline is soon”
C: “Everything else”

When you find yourself overflowing the available time for today’s schedule there is a simple rule for rescheduling:

Move all “C” tasks to tomorrow.
Use one of several suggested strategies to make the rest fit.

The suggested strategies include:

Decompose tasks into smaller chunks and schedule them individually. For example, unpack a server one day and check that all the parts are there. Next day, rack it up. Next day, assign IP addresses and install it. This is very next action-ish to the seasoned GTDer.
Find a way to narrow the scope of a large, high-priority task. The example given is installing a user’s new machine. Instead of building it to perfection, install the OS and create user accounts, then leave the user to polish it up to their liking. This only works with certain classes of user!
Delegate - a principle familiar to GTD fans.
Ask your boss. This can sometimes help make your boss aware of cross-department support issues that can be resolved at a level higher than the individual System Administrator.
Delay an appointment or meeting. If you have a large task that requires real ‘in-the-zone’ focus, it might be appropriate to re-jig your hard landscape to allow time for that task.

Do The Work

Most 43 Folders readers will have their own strategies for avoiding interruption and distraction, but Limoncelli provides two tactics for the Systems Administrator that I found novel:

Create a “Mutual Interruption Shield” - if you share an office, have one person take all the interruptions in the morning and have the other take the afternoon shift.<
Structure your office or group seating arrangement such that the junior or tier-1 support people are the first people that a visitor will see or walk by on entering. This enables those people to protect the more senior people from interruption by visitors.

Finish The Day

Come the end of the day, if you haven’t finished your tasks, it’s necessary to manage that situation. This feels a little like a GTD weekly review in miniature. The recommendation is to take 30 minutes and the end of the day. The hard but important part is handling the unfinished Priority-A (“The deadline is today”) tasks - Limoncelli suggests a phone call to the user and the development of a contingency plan.

For other tasks, the Cycle System suggests that they’re simply pushed to the next day’s cycle. Presumably, although it isn’t stated in the book, tasks which are blocked should go into some kind of ‘waiting’ state. GTD has this made explicit in that some projects or actions are “waiting for” some external event or input.

Other Parts

Chapters 9, 10 and 12 talk about Stress Management, Email Management and Documentation. All of this material will be more than familiar to GTDers and general life-hackers.

Automation

Chapter 13 deals with the question of when to automate processes. Automation, when correctly applied, is a huge win for System Administrators. Limoncelli decomposes the decision about when to automate by dividing tasks into ‘simple’ and ‘hard’, and their frequency into ‘once’ and ‘often’.

The argument is that tasks which are either frequent but simple or one-off but hard should be automated. One-off simple tasks should be done manually and frequent hard tasks are often best served by some off-the-shelf or bespoke software package.

In general time-management processes, automation can be powerful. Imagine, for example, going back to the days when you couldn’t sync your phone’s address book with your computer’s. Automation allows you to:

Do something frequently and consistently (e.g. check that your phone matches your computer)
Reduce the need to remember those rare-but-complex steps of operations (e.g. remember how to add a contact in your computer and your phone)
Scale to a much higher level (e.g. tapping in 10 phone numbers is OK, 200 much less so)
Avoid errors

Whilst the automation examples in the book are probably not broadly applicable outside the world of System Administrators, I found the ‘when to automate’ decision matrix to be a simple but enlightening tool for clarifying my thinking on the matter.

Summary

Although Time Management for System Administrators is intended to stand on its own, anyone familiar with GTD will immediately see parallels and wonder if the Cycle System is intended as a replacement for GTD. I don’t think it’s complete enough to do so. I do think that, for some work situations (and certainly for the System Administration ‘lifestyle’), the Cycle System is almost a drop-in replacement for David Allen’s advice on ‘what to do next’.

I work as a Systems Administrator, and one of the difficulties I often faced, despite implementing GTD, was trying to decide which project was important enough to do next. Limoncelli’s Cycle System nicely plugs that gap in GTD for this particular audience.

David Allen’s idea of the Next Action is powerful, but can often lead to an approach which is more tactical than strategic. The Cycle System is similarly tactical. If there’s a criticism to be made of the workflow described in Time Management for System Administrators, it is this: sometimes in your decision making, you need to give weight to the question of the long-term tactical advantage that a project will deliver. For example, if you’re getting a lot of calls about a small but niggling problem, it’s probably worth promoting that to a higher priority, even if it’s not immediately deadline-driven.

Time Management for System Administrators is an easy and quick read, particularly for those already sensitive to the issues involved in productivity and time management. It’s certainly recommended for System Administrators; others may find it useful too.

Buy Time Management for System Administrators at Amazon.com »

About the Author

Fraser Speirs is a Software Engineer and Educator. He runs Connected Flow a shareware producing apps for Mac OS X, including the popular iPhoto plugin, FlickrExport. Fraser also teaches Computing Studies and was formerly involved in setting up one of the first production Computing Grids in Scotland, as part of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid project at CERN.

”Guest Review: Fraser Speirs on "Time Management for System Administrators"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 28, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

456 Berea Street reviews _GTD_

Merlin — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 14:01:56 -0400

Getting Things Done (Book review) | 456 Berea Street

Roger Johansson at 456 Berea Street has a short review of Getting Things Done that nicely captures the book's tactical practicality and the subsequent stress relief it can bring (which happen to be a couple of my favorite bits, too):

One technique that I feel works well for me is the two-minute rule. Whenever something shows up in your “inbox” (be it in your email application, your snail mail or through a phone call), figure out if you can do it in two minutes or less, and if you can, do it right away. That, and making better use of the delete key, has helped me regain reasonable control of my email inbox...

Getting Things Done may not change your life, but by teaching you how to get things out of your brain and into a trustworthy system of folders and lists it should help you make the life you have less stressful.

Right on, Roger.

”456 Berea Street reviews _GTD_” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 06, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43F Podcast: The Perfect Apostrophe

Merlin — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 10:53:55 -0400

The Perfect Apostrophe

In which I undertake writing a book on productivity. (10:50)

Download MP3 of "The Perfect Apostrophe"

”43F Podcast: The Perfect Apostrophe” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 11, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Self-help addiction a $8.5B/year business

Merlin — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 06:53:35 -0400

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: SHAM Scam -- The Self-Help and Actualization Movement has become an $8.5-billion-a-year business. Does it work?

I remember thinking a lot of these same thoughts during the self-help mini-bubble of the late 80s/early 90s.

The "over and over" part is the key to understanding the "why" of what investigative journalist Steve Salerno calls the Self-Help and Actualization Movement (SHAM). In his recent book Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (Crown Publishing Group, 2005), he explains how the talks and tapes offer a momentary boost of inspiration that fades after a few weeks, turning buyers into repeat customers. While Salerno was a self-help book editor for Rodale Press...extensive market surveys revealed that "the most likely customer for a book on any given topic was someone who had bought a similar book within the preceding eighteen months." The irony of "the eighteen-month rule" for this genre, Salerno says, is this: "If what we sold worked, one would expect lives to improve. One would not expect people to need further help from us--at least not in that same problem area, and certainly not time and time again."

Surrounding SHAM is a bulletproof shield: if your life does not get better, it is your fault--your thoughts were not positive enough. The solution? More of the same self-help--or at least the same message repackaged into new products. Consider the multiple permutations of John Gray's Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus -- Mars and Venus Together Forever, Mars and Venus in the Bedroom, The Mars and Venus Diet and Exercise Solution -- not to mention the Mars and Venus board game, Broadway play and Club Med getaway.

”Self-help addiction a $8.5B/year business” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 05, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"