Productivity Pr0n

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now)

Merlin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 17:17:46 -0400

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now) - Vimeo [NSFW]

Here’s a video I made about a video I made. Consequently, it’s also about writing a book, fake self-help, the long road to developing expertise, and the ups and downs of repeatedly asking the world to tell you who you are.

The video is long. As usual. This is how it works.

I’d had this fancy idea that I’d do a DFW-style dump of annotations about what I talk about over these 40 minutes, and I might add that later, but for now here’s all you need to know:

Dish soap cleans dishes; Stuart Brown says everybody needs Play; Rands has a cave where he doesn’t multitask; The Dreyfus Model has ﬁve stages; Andy Hunt wants you to Think & Learn Pragmatically; my pal, Sean Hussey helped me ﬁgure some of this stuff out.

And, oh, what the heck. Here’s how to supercharge your zen turbocharger with “5 Surprising House Hacks!” [even more NSFW]

[Index Card Photo: Inbox Zero Tumblr]

”Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 22, 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Active Voice's free Hipster PDA templates

Merlin — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:11:12 -0500

Active Voice Writing & Editorial Services in Baltimore – Downloads

Cool-looking collection of CC-licensed Hipster PDA templates include iconic “capture notes,” research notes, and (here’s a new one for me) a “yarn sorting card.” Neat stuff.

Simply drag and drop them to your desktop, or right-click and “save as.” Templates are formatted as .png graphics and can be printed as-is or inserted into a formatted document. They can be resized to ﬁt everything from a 3x5 card to a daily organizer to an 8.5x11 sheet.

Kvet.ch features an excellent article on how to print D*I*Y Planner HPDA cards (see the end of this page) directly to 3x5 cards for Mac users. The technique should also work nicely with the templates offered here.

”Active Voice's free Hipster PDA templates” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 20, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43f Podcast: Kung Fu, Meditation, and Sexual Intercourse

Merlin — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 05:10:15 -0500

Kung Fu, Meditation, and Sexual Intercourse

There’s as rich a body of literature about (and tools for) Productivity as most any subject you can imagine.

To avoid becoming an unproductive dilettante, make sure your practice of Productivity always takes precedence over your talmudic scholarship on the subject.

AKA: All the reading in the world won’t teach you as much as your ﬁrst french kiss.

(Running Time: 03:47)

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

”43f Podcast: Kung Fu, Meditation, and Sexual Intercourse” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 15, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

David Seah on wall-based productivity pr0n

Merlin — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 06:30:18 -0500

David Seah : Gifts for Hardcore Productivity Nuts: Magnatag Visible Systems

David Seah explores a treasure trove of lo-ﬁ productivity pr0n, as provided by the vertical-surface-loving folks at Magnatag. A couple of the items he covers:

I like the name of the Do-Done StepTracker, and I love the idea of “ﬂip the magnetic button over to switch from to-do to done” functionality. Elegant and effective!

Ok, I listed this one before, but now there’s a video showing just how the RotoGraph® Long Range Daily Line Item Planner actually works. It’s one continuous scrolling surface that you can write your schedule on, kind of like a real-world version of Excel with locked sheet cells.

Very sexy. I wish I had more walls.

I’ve been having my own one-man whiteboard renaissance lately with my new Pinnacle II Magnetic Dry-Erase Communication Board. I picked up a couple of these at Costco for only 20 bucks each (which is about half what these kinds of things usually cost). Combined with some ﬁne-tipped dry erase markers and a stack of Post-it Index Cards, you have a powerful brainstorming tool at your disposal.

Got some lo-ﬁ productivity pr0n you’ve been loving lately?

”David Seah on wall-based productivity pr0n” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 28, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

David Allen on GTD's future (and why it just works, as is)

Merlin — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 09:27:21 -0500

Productive Talk #08: GTD 2.0?

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

Summary

In this episode, Merlin asks David one of the most popular questions about GTD; if he could write the book all over again today, what would he do differently? David addresses how people’s understanding of GTD evolves on repeated exposures, as well hinting at future plans for making GTD easier for people to start and maintain. He makes some great points on learning to pay attention to your “higher altitudes,” and wraps up by underscoring the importance of not having to rethink every task throughout the day. (13:11)

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen here (after the cut).

Merlin’s comments

If you bend David Allen’s ear for more than 30 seconds about GTD, you’ll hear some variation of a phrase that I heard a lot over the couple days we hung out in Ojai: “It’s all in the book!”

Say what you will about The David, but he is not a man who suffers from The George Lucas Complex. Much to the consternation of his publishers, his fans, and – one suspects – even some of his colleagues, David feels like he has already written the complete and deﬁnitive work on the Getting Things Done system. And he very clearly has no desire to futz with that basic system without a good reason; it’s sound and complete, as is, and there you go. Next subject.

And, I have to say, in a lot of ways, I’ve come to really admire this.

For one thing, it was immediately clear to me that, although David heads up a smart and growing company that enjoys a ravenous fanbase, his interest in the strictly pecuniary aspects of his work sometimes seems hilariously modest. While he long ago could have ﬂipped DavidCo into a Shake-and-Bake franchise of ghost-written paperbacks (an idea I apparently once thought was a pretty great idea myself), David and his staff usually have more interesting things in mind. And while I can’t say that I think every idea is a guaranteed winner from my own perspective, I really respect the fact that DavidCo seems unwilling to sacriﬁce the quality of their product and their message for a fast buck. Not something you see every day.

I’ll admit that there’s still a part of me that thinks both David, the fans, and the system itself could beneﬁt greatly from more examples of and options for sane GTD implementation and maintenance (and how to narrow the options to what’s best for my particular hang-up). Funny thing, though: in talking to David, it became clear to me that, on some level, that dearth of “ofﬁcial” material on implementation options was an undeniable factor in the early success of 43 Folders. So, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t complain too much.

In many ways, though, David’s right; it is all in the book, even if you aren’t yet at a place to understand how it potentially ﬁts together in your world. So, in this episode, I really like how he highlights the way repeated readings and exposures to GTD inevitably lead to “getting” some part of the system that used to seem corny, pointless, or hand-wavey (God knows that’s been true for me). So, I guess I do see part of the challenge from David’s point of view; how do you get somebody quickly ramped-up into a system that may not reveal its best stuff to you for two or more years? Deﬁnitely tricky business.

But for those of you out there already doing GTD and feeling like you sometimes miss the “there,” I think this particular ep provides some very sound insight into how these pieces down on “the runway” are inextricably and necessarily tied to “the higher altitudes.”

Last planned episode….but wait…

Although this eighth episode of Productive Talk is our last in this series (yep, we’re already talking about doing it again), I do encourage you to stop back by next week.

In addition to offering my own thoughts on the series and what I learned from it (hint: a lot), I’ll also be sharing the (very very highly requested) single ﬁle download of all 8 episodes. Yes, it will have iTunes chapters. No, it won’t have bonus footage or director’s commentary. But it will make it a bit easier to take Productive Talk with you and listen to the whole series at a sitting. Subscribe via iTunes to receive the last last episode as soon as it goes live.

Listen to Episode #08 of Productive Talk

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

powered by ODEO

”David Allen on GTD's future (and why it just works, as is)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 21, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Pop: Sell me on manual email filing

Merlin — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 08:25:42 -0500

tow.com » MsgFiler

Lots of the kids are excited about the arrival of MsgFiler, which is a neat litte app for helping you ﬁle away your messages in Mail.app:

MsgFiler is a plug-in for Apple Mail which quickly ﬁles emails into existing mailbox folders. MsgFiler’s fast searching means you just have to type a few characters to ﬁnd the right mailbox. Move selected messages with a click or open a mailbox without having to navigate the mailbox folder pane. MsgFiler is optimized for keyboard-only usage, perfect for Apple Mail power users.

Zesty.

But I’ll just play devil’s advocate on this one: if you ﬁnd yourself inordinately excited about the arrival of this (admittedly clever) application, there’s an excellent chance that your email archiving system is unnecessarily complex and, in fact, is in need of a major streamlining. Discuss.

Me? Here’s my own folder hierarchy (and the Mail Act-on key I use to send selected messages there.):

INBOX

To Respond (CTRL-R)

Archived (CTRL-A)

Receipts and things I Bought (CTRL-B)

Passwords and account info (CTRL-P)

That’s it. Personally, I abandoned the byzantine ﬁling system quite a while ago, and so far – given a mindful combination of Smart Folders and Spotlight – I’ve yet to ﬁnd a compelling case for manually ﬁling beyond a depth of more than one folder.

So, my larger question for you guys with more than, say, ﬁve or so archive sub-folders:

How often are you using your archiving hierarchy to retrieve old mail? In other words, give me your success stories and best practices by which the time spent on meticulous manual ﬁling has paid outsize rewards in ﬁnding stuff later. Or, perhaps better put: what are the limitations of Smart Folders, and what would need to change about them to get you out of the manual ﬁling routine?

Because, I gotta tell you, it kinda seems like a lot of busy work given what seems like modest functional pay-off. But you school me…

”Vox Pop: Sell me on manual email filing” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 17, 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?"

Merlin on David Allen TechGTD Panel

Merlin — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 05:10:36 -0400

GTD Connect [TechGTD]

Members of David Allen’s GTD Connect membership program can login to hear a technology panel that David conducted with tech über-geek Eric Mack, DavidCo CTO Robert Peake, and myself down in Ojai a few weeks back.

We talk about all kinds of stuff related to tech in general, and how we use GTD and technology in particular. One nice thing you learn: Robert, who is the wildly gifted tech stud at DavidCo, is a big Mac user. Pretty cool.

Note that this is made available as part of the GTD Connect for-pay service, so I don’t have a way to preview this for folks who aren’t a member. But for Connectors who are joined up, I think you’ll enjoy the conversation. It was a lot of fun to do.

”Merlin on David Allen TechGTD Panel” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 29, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Sloan get organized for new record

Merlin — Wed, 27 Sep 2006 09:20:19 -0400

One of my favorite bands, Sloan, has a new record called Never Hear the End of It that just came out last week in Canada (currently only purchasable via import in the US; in Canada, you can buy it on MapleMusic).

While recording the CD, Sloan also shot a bunch of short in-studio videos, including a couple that reveal their innately organizational side.

In “Shades ‘o’ Sloan”, Murph shares the color-coded card system they used to track each band members’ song status. “I’m red, and Jay’s yellow, Patrick’s green, and Andrew’s blue…”

In “Sneak Peek,” the color system returns, vaguely Mondrian-like, plus you get to hear samples from a few of the songs. I’m a big fan of “Set in Motion” (which you’ll see is Chris Murphy Red).

The tracks I’ve heard from the record are really good – probably their best since Between the Bridges.

Also, if you ever get the chance, do catch Sloan on tour when they come to your town. Always a really fun show.

[ via Mrs. Mann ]

”Sloan get organized for new record” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 27, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Patrick Rhone: Excellent productivity whitepaper

Merlin — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 09:41:42 -0400

patrickrhone.com: Org-Fu Überpost - Productivity Whitepaper

I’m a little late to the party on this one, but if you also hadn’t spent much time with it yet, I suggest you check out Patrick Rhone’s whitepaper on his version of a GTD system.

Some high points:

paper-based capture and task tracking via a Moleskine notebook

sexy “dash/plus” notation system for identifying item status (scroll way down for an image showing all the characters he uses)

Backpack for tracking projects and tasks

OmniOutliner Pro for “vertical mapping” of higher-level outcomes (20,000-foot view and up)

inbox kept at zero in Mail.app

further details on physical note-taking using notebooks

Great and thorough post – and, for what it’s worth, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m hoping people will post to the new “Projects” forum on the 43f board – in my experience, people really enjoy hearing about implementation systems and love discussing how they can be improved and tweaked.

Good work, Patrick.

”Patrick Rhone: Excellent productivity whitepaper” 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?"

Productivity Pr0n

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now)

Active Voice's free Hipster PDA templates

43f Podcast: Kung Fu, Meditation, and Sexual Intercourse

David Seah on wall-based productivity pr0n

David Allen on GTD's future (and why it just works, as is)

Summary

Merlin’s comments

Last planned episode….but wait…

Listen to Episode #08 of Productive Talk

Vox Pop: Sell me on manual email filing

Vox Populi: Best practices for file naming

Merlin on David Allen TechGTD Panel

Sloan get organized for new record

Patrick Rhone: Excellent productivity whitepaper