Project Work

Reviving a moribund project with Doodle

Merlin — Tue, 29 May 2007 10:23:22 -0400

Maybe this is the GTD-er in me, but I have to admit a frustration with projects that peter off because there’s no one person near the helm who’s dedicated to deﬁning and managing the group’s actions. It’s a Project Manager role, and if a group doesn’t choose and empower one person to take care of it, stuff simply won’t get done. Whether it’s deciding on a good night for dinner with friends or organizing the next board meeting, we all need a little help turning generic good ideas into real-world coordinates for action.

So, lately, I’ve found myself informally assuming this role, driving a surprising number of gone-fallow projects just by using Doodle to propose a simple check-in. The bottom line is that this process of getting a stupid 15-minute call on the calendar of several busy people will tell you so more than you can imagine about where you and your project stand. But where’s Doodle enter in to it?

As I’ve mentioned before, Michael Näf’s web application is an extremely simple tool for ﬁxing a seemingly simple problem: at what common time and date are multiple people available for a call or meeting? It accomplishes this by emailing participants and asking them to visit a web page where they can choose all their available times from any number of suggestions that the host has laid out. The results are tallied, the winning time emerges, and you’re ready to block the time on everyone’s calendars. Bob’s your uncle.

On the face of it, this task seems so idiotically simple that you could be forgiven for wondering why it requires a web tool to help accomplish it. You just send an email to 10 people asking their availability for a notional meeting at some point in the future, and they each respond with timely, thoughtful, and generous options for their time, right? Mmmm hmm. Sure.

Thing is – as anyone who has ever undertaken this seemingly modest job can tell you – scheduling a meeting can be fractally complex as you play whack-a-mole with participants’ multi-time-zone schedules.

First, even if a group of people all theoretically agree that a call or meeting is a good idea, it’s typical for all the various players to just mill around for days or weeks, tending to their lives and giving each other the thumbs up, until one member – usually the poor schmo who actually needs that call or meeting to happen – gets stuck with having to wrangle the scheduling. So, off goes the schmo to play half-time email secretary for a week. But, Doodle, above all else, can be a proactive way to put a stake in the ground. You propose a handful of different times when you are available, then ask people to identify which of those will work for them.

Do you get what’s happening there? You’re no longer talking about whether a meeting is a good idea or whether it should happen at some point: you’re putting speciﬁc dates and times in front of people, which renders all the ontological debates foregone. People just need to pick from a list or propose more times. In any case, you’ve put something out there.

Of course, as is often the case, you will still ﬁnd slow responders or people with zero availability (or, let’s be honest, zero interest), so you sometimes have to start over, working with the members of your group who are really there to play ball.

Either way, you are the one getting things in motion rather than gamely waiting for some hero to arrive and start your orange for you.¹ Only now, you can start making decisions with a better indication of whose attention you can count on to move your atrophied little project to completion.

Another thing I like is that Doodle is not a person. It just collects information and makes a logical decision. It’s a web page, so it has no agenda to discern or tone to misinterpret. It doesn’t have to pick through two dozen emails and cope with badly worded updates. Plus it never calls in sick or gets frustrated with people. Your task can be accomplished with a person, but why bother? This is why we have computers, yo.

Doodle is just a little robot who’s happy to work hard, stay up late, and, when necessary, take the heat for you. It not only gets the ball back in motion: it quickly gives you the feedback (or telling lack of feedback) needed to make smart decisions about who you can count on to help get things done.

Not bad for a Swiss robot with a funny name.

1. Metaphor credit to Janeane Garofolo, author of the statement, “I have a very ‘Can you start my orange?’ outlook on life.” (People asked)

”Reviving a moribund project with Doodle” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on May 29, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 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 — 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 ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

HOWTO generate a kGTD Project list for your weekly review

Merlin — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:01:22 -0500

While OmniFocus is under development (and yes, friends, I have seen it: it is actual software that does things), we Kinkless users will have to make do as we can for now. And while I still ﬁnd my own kGTD setup oddly stable given its byzantine under-the-hood workings (think: innards of Cylon Raider meets Brazil’s pneumatic tubes), there are deﬁnitely times when I crave just a bit more canonical GTD functionality.

One of the most vexing shortcomings in kGTD (God bless it) is the lack of a formal Project list – one easy location to glance just all of the obligations and desirable outcomes that are on your horizon, without reference to the tasks that comprise them. David Allen has repeatedly said that the project list is critical (as I recall, his quote in our interviews was “…the Project list is king.”), and, honestly, lacking an all-in-one Project list for your weekly review is kind of like sitting down to the SATs without your two sharpened #2 pencils.

My solution for this has two components – one mostly behavioral and one mildly technical. Both are squirrely and loﬁ and your mileage may vary. As ever.

1. Brutal pruning

First, as part of my weekly review, I relentlessly weed from kGTD any Project that I know doesn’t belong there. This could include:

projects that died or have gotten cancelled or rescheduled
projects that have gone hopelessly and irretrievably fallow (functionally dead)
projects I have no real intention of working on (for at least the next month or two)
projects I’ve kept around because of sentimentality, affection, laziness, or just too much ambition

Bottom line: if the Project doesn’t have a legitimate next action that I intend to complete in the next couple weeks? Gone. Deleted or moved to “Someday/Maybe.” Next, please.

This, as David is fond of saying, clears the decks by removing any distractions or baseless claims on your attention. And while it’s not so novel a concept (everyone’s weekly review should include this step in some way), it’s critical for part 2 of my kGTD Project list hackination. (Plus, yeah, it just feels really good to do)

For our purposes, it also ensures that you’ve completed all the obvious pruning before creating your new Project list and delving further.

2. Copy and Paste

<background> As you add projects, actions, and contexts in kGTD, the AppleScripts that keep its lights on are populating the different parts of your document with multiple synced versions of your information. The ability to view, for example, just actions associated with a Project versus just actions associated with a context are arguably the coolest and most useful features of kGTD since it mirrors GTD’s ninja shifting between horizontal and vertical focus. </background>

But what it took me a fricking year to ﬁgure out is that I already have a project list – it’s just that it’s hiding in a dropdown menu.

Getting your Project List liberated

Backup your kGTD document, then do a Sync and Save
- Backup is good. Repeat, repeat.
From any Project or Context view, select the “Projects” column head
- Should be the third column after “Action” and “Context”
- After you do this you should see the column get highlighted (mine’s blue) with one of those pretty OmniGroup-y, rounded corner highlights
Reveal the “Column Type” Inspector window
- Either by hitting “COMMAND-3” or by selecting “Column Type” from the “Inspectors” window
- You should see two drop-down menus (“Type” and “Summary”) and then a big-ass bulleted list of all your Projects
Select the ﬁrst bulleted item in the Projects list
Scroll all the way to the last item in the list, then hold down “Shift” and select that last item
- This should highlight all of the projects
- Again, you should see lots of those pretty rounded selection highlight thingees
Hit “Copy” or “Command-C” to snatch the Projects to your clipboard
Open a new, blank text document in the text editor of your choice, and hit “Paste” (or Command-V)
- (I like TextMate but TextEdit will do ﬁne)

And that’s it.

“WOW, thank you: you’ve taught me to ‘copy and paste.’ So, now what, Admiral Obvious?”

The ﬁrst thing you might want to do – depending on your personal brand of anal-retentiveness – is to tidy up your new Project list document a bit. Personally I Search & Replace all “…”s into TABs, which provides a prettier outline. At a minimum, get the document to where it’s visually sensible for you. Then print ‘er out.

Cosmetics aside, you do what you need to do with a project list. You let it jog your memory. You use it to ﬁnd time sinks and attention holes. You scout for dead wood. You comb through it for missed actions, meetings you forgot to schedule, and reminders of things you said you’d do a week ago. This is your outcome-centric viewport into all the projects and actions that need to be added to or removed from your kGTD list. Be courageous.

“No, seriously. Why bother?”

I’ll just speak for myself here, but I think that once you’re out of the ad hoc procrastination mind set of the task list, you permit a more strategic part of your brain to take over for a while. Your mental CEO gets to take a crack at all the projects, deciding who gets the deep-six versus who’s not getting the attention or resources they deserve, and then you can return to your task list with a rejuvenated sense of do-ability, focus, and mission. I call it “Manager Mode,” and it’s something I really need.

Also, from a tactical perspective, I like to use the Project list as a way to identify my “focus projects” for the week. If you have more than a few dozen projects (and share my own dearth of non-computer contexts), you probably crave some way to narrow your focus. A weekly review of the list can give you the conﬁdence to call out the stuff that must see motion this week. You can even use to pull up what Gina calls your “MIT” (or, most important task of the day).

Regardless of your approach and preferences, if you’re attempting some ﬂavor of GTD, it’s well worth your time to generate a task-less Project list and review the crap out of it as often as you need to. Because, if you aren’t occasionally alternating between the tasks “on the runway” and the larger outcomes of higher altitudes, you’re not only not doing GTD; you’re probably wasting a lot of time and missing out on some cool opportunities.

Addition, 2006-12-20 10:08:27

Based on comments, I should clarify why a plaintext list of your current projects (without tasks?!?) has value in a GTD review (although David covers the concept nicely in the book, if memory serves). Thus, I will embrace vanity and quote myself at length:

The Project list – in David’s canonical description – represents the “10,000 foot” view. It should exist as a list unattached to child tasks someplace and then be reviewed and updated as a thing-in-itself on a regular basis. It’s not about the tasks per se; it’s very much about evaluating how your Projects map to what you want to be doing at 20k [feet] and higher.

My gut sense is that a lot of the folks using kGTD use it as a fancy to-do list. Which is in a sense, what it is. But you mustn’t just stop there. It’s critical to not spend your whole life shoveling tasks and vaguely hoping that they map to some kind of outcome. That’s the Bad Old Days simply relived with updated software.

IMHO, GTD works best (and only) when you periodically take a formal step up and off of the runway to ensure the projects themselves are worth doing (and have a place in your bigger plan).

I love that the weekly Project review also generates new tasks at the runway level; but that’s mostly happening speciﬁcally because you set aside the time to not focus just on the stuff that’s already in front of your nose.

”HOWTO generate a kGTD Project list for your weekly review” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 20, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Populi: Best practices for file naming

Merlin — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:26:23 -0400

If it wasn’t apparent from my pathetic cry for help the other day, even I – one of your more theoretically productive persons in North America – struggle with what to call things.

Tags, ﬁles, and – dear Lord – the innumerable assets associated with making web sites, graphics, audio, and video projects; it’s all a hopeless jumble unless you have some kind of mature system in place for what you call your stuff and its various iterations. Of course, if you’re like me – and I hope that you are not – you still have lots of things on your desktop with names like “thing-2 finalFinal! v3 (with new changes) 05b.psd”.

For prior art, I still treasure this Jurassic thread on What Do I Know where people share their thoughts on this age-old problem, but, frankly I haven’t seen many good resources out there on best practices for naming.

Anyhow, during a recent MacBreak shoot, I noticed that Alex and his team seem to have a pretty ﬂy system for naming the video ﬁles that eventually get turned into their big-time IPTV shows. Thus, I turned to Pixel Corps’ Research Division Lead, Ben Durbin (co-star of Phone Guy #5) for insight and sane help. And, brother, did he ever give it to me (see below the cut for Ben’s detailed awesomeness).

But, just so I don’t lose you, do give me your best tips in comments: What are your favorite current conventions for naming ﬁles? How does your team show iterations and versions? Do you rely more on Folder organization than ﬁle names in your work? How have Spotlight, Quicksilver, and the like changed the way you think about this stuff?

Ben shares how Pixel Corps does it, video style:

We’re still settling into best practices that are shared amongst all the teams, but here are some themes:

File names are a set of ﬁelds separated by underscores. We share ﬁles on linux servers, so while manageable, we consider spaces in ﬁlenames to be lowercase b bad.

If it’s an established or long-term project, we try to keep the codes for the various ﬁelds to three letters. This allows for more ﬁelds without having the ﬁle names get too long.

If it’s not an established project, we favor readability (longer ﬁeld names) and consistency. Even if your ﬁeld data are arbitrarily chosen, as long as you’re naming things consistently, you can always use batch renaming to convert a given ﬁeld into a code later.

When possible, the ﬁelds are arranged left to right from general to speciﬁc.

Files that may have iterations get a three-digit, padded iteration number as their ﬁnal ﬁeld.

Even when we use folder structures with multiple subfolders, the project code ﬁelds stays as a preﬁx of all ﬁles, so that if ﬁles get misplaced, they’re still easily ﬁndable (example: all post ﬁles for a MacBreak episode will start with “mbk_eps_episodeNumber_” regardless of where they sit in the folder structure).

Caveats:

As you’ve probably noticed, the problem with ﬁle names in general is that they only give you a single “view” and aren’t applicable to other ways in which you might want to see/sort the ﬁles in other contexts. Advanced users can get all grep-daddy with it, but they’re in the minority. At best, ﬁle naming structures are a “good enough” solution that works well most of the time if you don’t have a more robust metadata system in place.

The problem with metadata systems, of course is that they tend to either be proprietary or only applicable to certain ﬁle types. Are we going to use annotations on all of our Quicktime movies? Create some custom xml format that gets parsed by a proprietary app? Structured Spotlight comments? The check-in comments of a versioning system like Subversion? The lack of a good, widely-accepted metadata framework that is spoken by all OSes and/or that can be embedded into most ﬁle types lead many people to resort to ﬁle naming structures and leave it at that.

Dang. Thanks for that, Ben!

To repeat:

What are your favorite current conventions for naming ﬁles? How does your team show iterations and versions? Do you rely more on Folder organization than ﬁle names in your work? How have Spotlight, Quicksilver, and the like changed the way you think about this stuff?

”Vox Populi: Best practices for file naming” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 23, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43f interview: David Allen on Getting Things Done with your team

Merlin — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 10:00:33 -0400

Productive Talk #04: Teams

43 Folders and The David Allen Company present the fourth in a series of conversations that David and Merlin recently had about Getting Things Done.

In this episode, David and Merlin talk about the role of GTD in teams and how to lead by example.

(Running time: 08:46)

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen from here:

”43f interview: David Allen on Getting Things Done with your team” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 23, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Open Thread: Doodle & your favorite simple web tools

Merlin — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 13:50:12 -0400

Doodle: Scheduling meetings

This has been mentioned here before (just in comments, I think), but I have to repeat: I can’t say enough good things about Doodle. It takes the idiotically over-complicated problem of ﬁguring out when all of n people are available to do something, and in the simplest way conceivable, polls all the participants to ﬁnd the optimal time and date.

I’m always thrilled when colleagues send a meeting invite in the form of a Doodle email; it requires zero ﬁddling on my part and pleasantly skirts the need for the endless email threads that most people rely on to get a group of people extant in one time-space unit.

I’m risking the indignity of a double-post on an “old” link for a good reason: with all the foam and fuss over “Web 2.0,” and the ever higher (Ever! Higher!) technology we shovel to solve stupid human problems, it’s refreshing to see adoption of a tool that ends up being no more complicated than a white board with electrical-tape columns.

I wish stuff like Doodle would inspire more developers to start with the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work. No Arial Rounded, no whizzy AJAX, and no angel-round-attracting gradients. Just a modest solution to a single dumb problem. That is a life hack, deﬁned.

What’s your favorite idiotically simple web tool right now?

”Open Thread: Doodle & your favorite simple web tools” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 13, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43f Podcast: First-time Sex & the Beauty of 1.0

Merlin — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 06:12:58 -0400

43F Podcast: First-time Sex & the Beauty of 1.0

43folders.com - Just get through it the ﬁrst time. You can try that stuff you read about in magazines later. (2:35)

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen from here:

& the Beauty of 1.0">& the Beauty" border="0" />

More podcast episodes!

Ready for some more? In the list below, just click the name of a previous episode to listen from the convenience of this page.

”43f Podcast: First-time Sex & the Beauty of 1.0” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 18, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Make vol. 07, new Life Hacks column

Merlin — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 07:35:59 -0400

makezine.com: The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work

Danny and my latest column, for vol. 07 of Make, is about “The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.” While the concept is nothing new to agile developers, we wanted to talk about how it relates to the lives of garden-variety makers and life hackers:

When choosing an approach to building code that will pass their unit test, XP programmers are always encouraged by their beardy masters to “try the simplest thing that could possibly work.” Note that this is not the most comprehensive thing that could work, nor the most impressive thing that could work, nor even a particularly enjoyable thing that would just be really fun to build…

[In Danny’s Life Hacks research,] geeks weren’t developing world-beating frameworks that could “scale across the enterprise” or cook a plate of french toast every morning – most of the scripts were hastily coded with the single-minded purpose of ﬁxing exactly one problem.

The geeks’ consequent leaps in productivity seemed to come not simply from automating repetitive tasks, but, one imagines, from not blowing two weeks engineering a bloaty system meant to solve every conceivable problem in their lives.

Among many other cool things, this issue also has a proﬁle on Mark Pauline, instructions on building a weatherproof wi-ﬁ access point, plus – my favorite – three methods for silencing a child’s beeping toy.

Vol. 7 of Make is available at your geekier magazine stands, or you can buy it now on Amazon.com.

”Make vol. 07, new Life Hacks column” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 24, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Bokardo: Apple moving deeper into social software?

Merlin — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 11:52:51 -0400

Bokardo » Apple Making Huge Social Software Push?

Via Andy, here’s a thought-provoking post that draws from a mosaic of current and forthcoming features (including Wiki Server, iCal Calendar Sharing and the nifty-sounding Teams) to suggest that Apple’s moving toward some interesting directions in social software and enhanced functionality for teams.

Joshua writes:

Notice that all of these features are about enabling communication as much as they are about creating content. It’s about getting the right information to the right person at the right time through interaction with their friends and associates. That’s how we do things out here in meatspace, so that’s how we’ll do things in cyberspace as well.

I think this is good news for Apple. As the proliferation of telephones, cellphones, chat software, blogs, and social networking sites have shown, there seems to be a market for this social software stuff…

”Bokardo: Apple moving deeper into social software?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 15, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Back to GTD: Simplify your contexts

Merlin — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 05:24:49 -0400

This post is part of the periodic “Back to GTD” series, designed to help you improve your implementation of David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

As we’ve noted before, GTD contexts lose a lot of their focusing power when either a) most of your work takes place at one context (e.g. “@computer”), or b) you start using contexts more for taxonomical labeling than to reﬂect functional limitations and opportunities. As you may have discovered, these problems can collide catastrophically for many knowledge workers, artists, and geeks.

Part of what makes the Natural Planning Model so attractive are the decisions that can be guided by contextual limitations (“I’m near a phone” vs. “I’m at the grocery store” vs. “I’m at my computer”). While it’s deﬁnitely a kind of “ﬁrst world problem” to have, facing the unlimited freedom to chose from any of a bajillion similar tasks from similar projects with similar outcomes is not nearly as fun as it ﬁrst sounds. Consider the contextual hairballs of certain jobs and tasks:

Developer - Much of the work is writing new code, ﬁxing old code, or testing code. All of these require essentially the same tools and environment, so how do you apply real contexts?
Writer - Needs to research, draft, revise, and edit manuscripts. While the “Write book” project will break down nicely into multiple sub-projects and tasks, how do you satisfactorily “context-ize” this physically identical work?
Designer - Whether coming up with a print layout, web design, or what will become a physical artifact, how do you segment the work further than “@photoshop” and ”@illustrator”?

This causes many of us to fashion more or less phoney-baloney “sub-contexts” that reﬂect some facet of the parent (e.g. “@computer” might contain “@email,” “@web,” “@code,” “@print,” and so on). While this makes terriﬁc sense from a logical standpoint (and it can certainly have its uses), it doesn’t reﬂect the true meaning of a context, at least in my own mind: “what tools, resources, opportunities, and limitations are unique to this situation?” or put slightly differently from the perspective of choosing tasks at a given time, “what are the things I can’t work on now given where I am and the tools to which I have access?”

More and more, I think the solution may be to toss out or consolidate any contexts that don’t have unique functional attributes. I mean, by all means, keep them if they’re working for you, but if you ﬁnd yourself spending more time deciding where to ﬁle tasks than actually completing them, you might consider dialing your contexts back as far as you can stand. For the geeks in particular, consider having two and only two computer-related contexts: “@online” and “@computer-anywhere.” If you have other contextual needs, add them in with care, then periodically revisit to make sure you aren’t maintaining superﬂuous parts.

If you feel a gnaw about the loss of your old contexts, try to shunt some of the mental load into sub-projects and better verb choices in your tasks. Where you once had (as I did) an “@print” context, consider whether an “@computer” task of “Print Jim’s email” might be sufﬁcient for the job. Remember, maintaining fewer buckets is always a good thing.

As you doubtless have learned, this is ultimately all about choosing valuable work and then tracking it as simply as possible via carefully-worded task reminders. No amount of meta-crap can magically transform junk tasks into stuff you really want or need to do. Contexts can help shape your day, but they’re less than useful if they don’t track realistically to the demands of your work.

”Back to GTD: Simplify your contexts” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 31, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"