Personal Productivity

Four Years

Merlin Mann — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:25:39 -0400

Four years ago last Monday, I started 43 Folders with a TypePad account and no idea what I was doing.

The obsessions that brought me here struck me as fascinating and under-reported — if almost entirely unrelated, one to the other. And, talking about the stuff I was really bad at often made me feel less awful about it. Sometimes it even helped me to rehabilitate the triggering, sucky behavior. On a number of levels, this felt really good.

Even though I never really knew where I was heading, I tried to remain candid that the primary reason the site existed at all was because it helped me — a strident preacher, clutching the pulpit in one hand and a book about Next Actions in the other. But, by even a week in, I realized I was writing to a growing audience and found myself daring to hope for a little dough to come my way as a result. Someday.

But, to this day, almost everything I’m proud to have written on 43 Folders started as a letter to myself. No shit.

I also realized from the beginning that the real life hacks were about making your way from a place that’s chaotic and depressing toward someplace where you feel more competent, stable, and alive. A place where you eventually may not need the life hack any more. I wanted to figure out why this stuff did and didn’t work by living inside of it, and by filing real-time reports about what I learned — effectively operating on myself in public with a keyboard, a handful of index cards, and an infinite IV of French Roast coffee.

Some days, it helped me. I’d feel a real sense of purpose and focus that made my new job about writing about my new job seem less weird, fractal, and self-involved. But, on just as many days, it felt like I was allowing myself to be tossed around by a menacing Rube Goldberg device of my own design. On more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish. Some days, I thought I might be losing my mind. One blog post at a time.

Only on the web could a zero-budget, one-person project about such random shit hit the kind of hockey stick curve 43f rode in late 2004.

People I idolized were suddenly saying they enjoyed what I had to say. People like Andy Baio, Danny O’Brien, Dan Gillmor, and Ben Hammersley each said things about 43f that made me feel really good about what I was doing, making a case that I swear by to this day: producing something that’s enjoyed by the people you admire and respect is the greatest reward a writer can imagine.

But, in no small measure, it was Cory Doctorow’s surpassingly generous linking and encouragement that shot my crummy little site to its cruising altitude, where (for now at least) it remains. Some days, I’ll admit, Cory drives me crazy — and I’m far from the Boing Boing fanatic that I was at the beginning of this decade. But, until the day someone in a smock sets my corpse aflame and pours the remains into a big, red Folgers can, Cory will have my deepest gratitude for using his considerable whuffie to almost singlehandedly put 43 Folders on the map. Thanks, man.

Through 2005 — even as poor Danny and I struggled to finish an unfinishable book by employing a Kafka-esque process that redefined my notion of “irony” — 43 Folders continued to grow in traffic and in whatever passes for stature on the internet. People seemed excited that blogs were finding a sweet spot in which niche topics, passionate writers, and devoted readers could form a long-distance relationship that was satisfying to everyone in a way that print media increasingly was not.

At some point that year, 43f became the surreal and unexpected circus tent under which my family began drawing an increasing amount of its income. This was weird, but it was also exactly as gratifying as it sounds. Which is to say, “very.” But, my small measure of something like success did not go unnoticed. In fact, the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web’s glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, did these guys love to post and post and post.

Over the years, “productivity blogs” of unbelievably varying quality shot up like hothouse kudzu — many baldly hoping to capitalize on the low-cost, high-return business of theoretically useful self-help publishing — mostly without affecting even the vaguest patina of wanting to help another human being solve a real-world problem. Some of these folks continue to make a living (and draw a considerable crowd) by producing material that I personally find transparently dumb and useless.

Thus, in time, phrases like “life hacks” and “GTD” became associated with everything from printing your own graph paper, to taking a nap, to making a living by pinching off lists of links to lists of links to Firefox extensions that help you use Facebook to more efficiently pretend to like people whom you’ve never met.

Important Intermission

At this juncture, I wish to apologize and formally atone for any role 43 Folders or I have had in popularizing “hack” as the preferred nomenclature for unmedicated knowledge workers dicking around with their “productivity system” all day. 43 Folders regrets the error.

Plus, as the “Top n” style of shoveling context-free horseshit to an undemanding audience became the new way of “blogging,” I started to wonder where the hell all of this stuff was heading. And, more importantly, I wondered whom any of this stuff might actually be helping. Besides the bloggers, of course. Bloggers love that traffic. Even when it contravenes the basic goddamned tenet of every post their addict-readers are mainlining. But, then, nobody ever said gold mining was going to be good for the environment.

As I continued writing regularly for 43 Folders — and it was very hard to keep up with the pace I’d set in the first months of the site — I often had a gut sense of when I was doing well. I knew when the material was working, because I felt good about the results, less crummy about myself, plus I was still occasionally hearing thoughtful, non-ass-kissing feedback from people whom I respect and admire. Somedays, I fundamentally got it. Other days, I just typed and hit “Post.” Just like the gold miners I despised.

Along the way, I got dubbed “a productivity guru” and was repeatedly reminded by almost everybody that 43 Folders was “a site about Getting Things Done” — period. Which certainly came as a surprise to me. Still does.

By improbably (and I’ve often thought, mistakenly) landing a brief berth in the Technorati Top 100, 43 Folders was also “discovered” by an unspeakable black mildew of PR people who, on their clients’ behalf, “reach out” to bloggers with the gruesome goal of getting them to trade their credibility for access to free crap and “embargoed” press releases. Mm, pinch me. And, somewhere in there, I heard somebody say, “Marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable,” and I dreamed of having that phrase printed on a giant hammer.

As I experimented over the years with sundry ways to make money with my site, I tried (and mostly abandoned) a dozen different small trickles of income, before eventually settling on a relationship with a dependable ad company whom I still work with today. They’ve been good to me.

Of course, I occasionally still find myself on the receiving end of an astonishing array of paid promotional offers — a few of which have been the web equivalent of being asked to stand on a street corner, wearing a chicken suit, while spinning a giant red sign that promotes computers I’ve never used. I’m proud to have said “no” to all but a couple of these — I refuse all of them today — although I do regret not having purchased my own chicken suit. Because, that’s steady work that you can do anywhere, you know?

By 2007, an increasingly large number of mornings would find me staring, dead-eyed, at del.icio.us or Digg or reddit, feeling queasy as I wondered what possible role, how ever small, my stupid blog might have had in helping inspire 1,000 hucksters to try their hand at half-assing a living from pretending to help strangers — while providing their quarry an unapologetically infinite source of pointless procrastination in the bargain.

On those days, I rarely even bothered to type. I sulked and wondered what the hell “productivity” meant to anyone who wasn’t peddling some flavor of online addiction or, basically marketing a personality-based cargo cult.

One particularly gifted arrival on the productivity and self-help scene authored some of the most profoundly useful advice I’d ever heard about attention management — but, then followed it up by showing how those extra cycles could be used to game the system so efficiently that you can sit in a hammock for 164 hours a week while people in India write birthday cards to your friends. That one became a runaway bestseller and, perhaps unintentionally, formed the new template for how to market productivity as an extreme lifestyle. I also have to imagine that it singlehandedly revived our nation’s sagging hammock industry.

Finally, when I had the opportunity to really go off the grid last fall to be with my wife and our new daughter, I watched over the hill as my best-known site faded into an XML-enabled cacophony of voices that weren’t my own. Guest bloggers (albeit great friends and good writers); random forum posts; inane, self-linking comments; a wiki that greeted me with freshly replenished v14gRa spam each morning; my own sporadic non-content posts, containing more self-promotion and advertising than I liked; plus a handful of weird, legacy attempts to make an extra hundred bucks a month that, in retrospect, were frankly embarrassing.

My blog about making your life a little better suddenly had more chrome than a Chevy and more bullshit than a limo full of lifestreamers.

The brutal Catch-22? At about the point when I realized my site was no longer about what I really thought or really cared about, I also worried whether I had anything new and substantial to say. And, what I did have to say, I usually self-edited or watered-down, for fear of either adding to the noise, infuriating the dopamine-deprived “TL;DR” crowd, or provoking an exhausting internet feud with one of the web’s countless retardate man-children.

The ad money was still consistent, so I didn’t need to sweat niggling details like why the site still existed. But, by as recently as this past winter, I just wasn’t sure what to do with myself.

The site that had used to make me feel so good about my place on the web felt dry and brittle, and I started avoiding it like an oncologist’s waiting room. This feeling fundamentally sucked, and I had no idea what to do about it.

Then things got better. A lot better.

Tune in later this week for the next thrilling chapter in Merlin’s weird-ass bildungsroman, which series is explained in concept here.

Now available: 43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work

”Four Years” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 08, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Quote of the Week: On Multitasking

Merlin Mann — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:33:05 -0400

My quote of the week comes from a comment by Eideteker in this Metafilter thread on multitasking:

Multitasking is the art of distracting yourself from two things you’d rather not be doing by doing them simultaneously.

And, for what it’s worth, here’s what I had to say about the myth of multitasking a few years back:

”Quote of the Week: On Multitasking” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 22, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking

Merlin Mann — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:47:32 -0400

The other day, I was talking with someone who is trying to encourage a Getting Things Done-like work approach amongst the people on his team. We started talking about which parts of David Allen’s GTD system appear to have the greatest long-term impact on the people who have adopted it and who ultimately stick with it for years.

When asked to distill everything down to its most powerful concepts, I came up with three, and here’s how I’d summarize each:

Outcome-Based Thinking. Articulating in the most specific terms possible what a successful outcome looks like for any given use of your time. Or as I like to put it, “How will I know when I’m done with this?”
The Next Action. Knowing that you don’t need to track everything you could conceivably do about a Project; you just need to know the next physical action that would get you closer to completion.
The Review. Accepting that the heart of the Trusted System that lets you move through a day with a high tolerance for ambiguity is the knowledge that eventually everything you’re doing gets looked at once a week without fail.

While I think stuff like ubiquitous capture, the Natural Planning Model, the Two-Minute Rule, and many other bits are arguably as important, these are the three things that I feel have the biggest impact on how people’s results change over time.

If you focus on trying to master these three things in the service of stuff you think is valuable, you’re going to accomplish some grand work.

Slightly related, I wanted to share a modest, GTD-esque idea for a fast way to identify the actual Project and Next Action from within a big bunch of “stuff.”

Think about the thing that’s most on your mind right now. It’s probably not the thing you think is most on your mind; the stuff that’s really getting our attention likes to run behind the refrigerator whenever we turn the lights on. But, anyway. Got it? Okay.

Let’s say you now have in your mind something that needs to be different than how it currently is. For me it’s:

Slides for talk in Arizona

If I re-articulate that in the following format:

I need to $FOO because I want to $BAR

I get something like this:

I need to spend an hour cleaning up my Keynote slides because I want to give a great talk on Inbox Zero next Friday.

Now I’ve said something I can use; I have a Next Action (reviewing and editing my slides for 60 minutes) and a Project (presenting a kickass talk in Scottsdale).

This is Outcome-Based Thinking 101, but I think it can be a powerful way to focus when you’re feeling adrift about what to do with a something.

Give it a try, forcing yourself to sketch more than the shadows of anxiety, priority, or resignation. Envision what this would look like if you really kicked ass, then figure out the next physical action that gets your kicking foot into motion.

”Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 08, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Carrots, Sticks, and the Paradoxes of Motivation

Merlin Mann — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:27:14 -0400

Shankar Vedantam - When Play Becomes Work - washingtonpost.com

Shankar Vedantam discusses research on motivation which points to the schizophrenic role that rewards can play in our perception of a task.

A host of experiments have shown that when threats and rewards enter the picture, they tend to destroy the inner drives. Paychecks and pink slips might be powerful reasons to get out of bed each day, but they turn out to be surprisingly ineffective — and even counterproductive — in getting people to perform at their best.

Add the right incentive, and you can encourage better output; add the wrong incentive and you risk removing the natural motivation people feel to do something for the intrinsic value they get out of it.

External rewards and punishments are counterproductive when it comes to activities that are meaningful — tasks that telegraph something about a person’s intellectual abilities, generosity, courage or values. People will voluntarily perform intellectually arduous work, for example, because it gives them pleasure to solve a puzzle or win a game of wits.

“If I pay my kids to do their homework, I am saying, ‘You will get this if you do your homework,’ but I am also saying, ‘Homework is not likely to have intrinsic rewards,’ ” Benabou said.

One wild card I see in this deck is the role of leadership — or better put: charisma. I’ve done ridiculous things for people I love and respect but can’t be bothered to even feign attention for people who don’t inspire me (it’s why you don’t want me as an employee unless you’re crazy-smart). Something about a good leader motivates people to do things they never would have thought possible (even when it’s not always in their best interest).

I also wonder about how this differs with personality types and class. I’ve known of some unbelievably wealthy people who have no financial need to ever work another day in their life. But, they’re also some of the most motivated, productive, and sometimes, voraciously workaholic people I’ve ever heard of. Whether or not it’s healthy or sustainable, something clearly drives them to keep building and growing.

”Carrots, Sticks, and the Paradoxes of Motivation” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 28, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Obama on Firewalling Time to Think

Merlin Mann — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:01:49 -0400

Obama on Vacationing and Time to Think - NYTimes.com

I like this snippet of accidentally-captured conversation between Barack Obama and British MP, David Cameron. Cameron asks Obama if he will be taking any time off for a vacation this summer:

Mr. Cameron: Do you have a break at all?

Mr. Obama: I have not. I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who — not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process — said that should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be …

Mr. Cameron: These guys just chalk your diary up.

Mr. Obama: Right. … In 15 minute increments and …

Mr. Cameron: We call it the dentist waiting room. You have to scrap that because you’ve got to have time.

This encourages and inspires me. If people as busy as these two guys (or Bill Gates, for that matter) can make time to rise above the noise, it’s hard to imagine why each of us wouldn’t want to occasionally unchalk our diary enough to try something similar.

[via Mrs. Mann]

”Obama on Firewalling Time to Think” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 28, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

First Look: Evernote for the iPhone

Merlin Mann — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:31:14 -0400

(Oh, man. I’ve got a crazy busy day today, but it just got a lot busier thanks to an intoxicating morning with the iPhone 2.0 update and the iTunes App Store. I’ll try and sneak in a few little posts today on the amazing new apps as time permits)

Evernote (iTunes App Store Link)

Free
works with Evernote web and desktop apps

I need to do a full post on Evernote here some time soon, because it really is a nifty little application for collecting, storing, and organizing practically any kind of information you can throw at it. The iPhone version is a stripped-down, all-business version of the app that will scratch an itch for Evernote fans who are fatigued by having to email everything to the mothership.

More after the jump, including how to take screengrabs like this on your iPhone 2.0…

The Evernote iPhone app is crazy-simple to use, and rightfully focuses on mobile capture. Photos, voice, and text can be sent directly into your Big Evernote Database — including the handy inclusion of location data which will show up in Evernote as Lat/Long, all thanks to iPhone’s 2.0 location magic (and yes: the location stuff works fine without GPS; I do wonder how that will affect sales of what’s starting to look like a costly 3G iPhone I can personally do without).

You can also access your existing stuff in browsable list form, or by searching, And, yes, once the photo you take in Evernote has synced with the EN site, the OCR makes any readable text in the image searchable from the iPhone app. Very nicely done.

Cool New iPhone Feature: Built-in Screen Capture

Nota frickin’ bene: How did I get screengrabs on an uncracked 2.0 iPhone? Easy. Click the Home button and the top (Power) button at the same time to capture a PNG of the current screen to the Photo Viewer (grabbable later via iPhoto). Hat tip to Jason Snell for this awesome little bit of magic.

”First Look: Evernote for the iPhone” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 10, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Beeswax: Free Productivity App in the Spirit of Lotus Agenda

Merlin Mann — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 16:34:22 -0400

Beeswax - Mind Your Own Beeswax

Wow, this looks like a really interesting project to watch — a GNU-licensed, command line productivity app that finds inspiration in a bona fide classic:

Beeswax is an information management system inspired by Lotus Agenda. It aims to recreate Agenda’s flexibility and efficiency in a clutter-free, text-based (ncursesw) user interface with vi key bindings. Beeswax views & reports will have specifications for sections, columns, filtering, and sorting…

The relationships between items of information are highly flexible. An item can be easily assigned to several different categories and the view immediately displays the new relationships. An item can just as easily be detached from categories. As you move items through Beeswax, their relationship to each other remains highly flexible.

You still hear a lot of people saying Agenda is the closest they ever got to their dream productivity app. And, depending on who you ask, Agenda’s endless flexibility was either incredibly powerful or infinitely fiddly.

Beeswax is a very young application, but I’ll definitely be giving it a spin. There’s certainly a long-standing itch for Agenda that lot of folks would love to have scratched.

The Question to You

Any of the old hardcore Agenda folks tried out Beeswax yet?

[via Anarchaia]

”Beeswax: Free Productivity App in the Spirit of Lotus Agenda” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 28, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Email Insanity & the 0.001 Challenge

Merlin Mann — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:11:46 -0400

Via a Toot by Jeff Atwood comes this thoughtful post by Tantek Çelik on how email is no longer working for him. His first reason is a biggie:

1. Point to point communications do not scale.

All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of “To” in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather than actually “working” on any thing in particular (next-actions or projects, e.g. coding, authoring, drawing, enjoying your life etc.)

This is one reason I’m getting attracted to using Get Satisfaction as a way to expose help issues to a large group of helpers and helpees (BTW, we’re just getting started on GS — FAQs and more will be coming soon). I’m also realizing that this is why I (and Jonathan Coulton and probably you) struggle with holding up dozens of one-on-one conversations — it locks up your attention and its fruits in thousands of inaccessible alcoves. And truly, that does not and will not scale.

But, y’know, as I read Tantek’s post, alongside his “Communication Protocols” notes, I found myself returning to a pet theory that I’ve been too embarrassed to lay out in a real post. But what the heck, I’ll capture some notes and you can tell me what you think:

I suspect that email encourages people to act insane.

Right this minute, you can create an email of unlimited length covering topics of unlimited scope and then send it to unlimited numbers of people — whom you may or may not even know — all at absolutely no cost to you. There is also no prohibition or boundary of any kind on how you phrase that email. There’s no formal penalty or even feedback for when you’re using email inappropriately (e.g. the dirty look that you’d get if you said something this weird to someone’s face). Plus, of course, YOU get to decide (at least in your own head) exactly how quickly all those people should be getting back to you about whatever it is you emailed them about. And you can do this pretty much any time you want and as many times a day as it suits you. No Limits.

An optimist would say this indicates what a wonderfully flexible tool email is. But, a pessimist with 1500 unread emails will point out that this Wild West of Communication seems to bring out the nut in people.

As I say, there must be something about email’s unusual combination of intimacy and distance that can get people very emotionally engaged in hammering out demands in an email message. And not just flames — I’m talking about people whose de facto style is borne out of an uninhibited conduit between thoughts, emotions, or desires and the email medium that helps them convert that into some kind of request.

How and why this is related to Tantek’s post, I’m not entirely sure. But I think there’s some common ground here. Especially as this relates to that one-on-one idea and why it doesn’t scale.

Email culture and etiquette — if there is such a thing — occurs when people have a sense of how their behavior will be seen and evaluated by anyone who is not themselves. The reason most of us wear pants to the grocery store is the same reason that some people think very hard about every word that goes into their email messages and what it will mean when people read them. They understand that the message should be more about the recipient than themselves. And the Great Ones will take the time to get the tone right too — to phrase things so that misunderstandings and unintentional emotional provocations don’t occur.

But if — even without realizing it — you see email primarily as a one-on-one medium for venting some…thing that’s on your mind, you’re going to produce a lot of electronic madness. Especially if you think no one is watching.

I’m going to think on this some more, but I’ll close with a related thought on why this all goes straight back to Time & Attention 101.

Any system without scarcity or limitation will eventually suffer at the hands of people who aren’t overtly aware of boundaries — or who actively choose to break those boundaries because they can. Limitations in a communication medium not only make you think a little harder about what you have to say, they also encourage you to focus on what you and your recipient really need out of the exchange.

While I’m not suggesting anything as extreme as the five-sentence email, I wonder if this might be a fun exercise to try for a day:

The 0.001 Challenge

Imagine that the person receiving the email you’re composing receives 1,000 other message each day more or less identical to yours. What would you do to distinguish yours from the others? What change would make your email amazingly easy to deal with and not insane? Does the content of your email belong someplace else? Like an SMS, a face-to-face meeting — or maybe even in an angry, venting screed that you never send.

”Email Insanity & the 0.001 Challenge” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on April 24, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Video: Merlin's New Time & Attention Talk

Merlin Mann — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 11:39:27 -0500

Macworld ‘08: Merlin Mann / “Living with Data”

Last month, I premiered a new presentation at Macworld San Francisco 2008 called “Living with Data” (previously). Since this talk was part of the “Vision” track, I used the opportunity to start gathering some threads around the idea of time and attention that had been floating around my head for a while (I think you can see the genesis of some of this stuff in my IDEO visit).

The IDG folks were kind enough to post a movie of my slides + the audio. Unfortunately a lot of folks were having trouble getting to the page (it doesn’t appear to have a permalink), so here’s a Flash version you can watch from right here:

N.B.: The first slide is white; the video is fine, and you are not tripping. Presumably.

As I say, this was the first edition of a talk that’s already starting to evolve rather quickly. The slides are available at Slideshare, and you can yoink yourself an embeddable version right here:

Thanks to Paul Kent and Kathy Moran at IDG for being such wonderful hosts. And very special thanks to Mike Monteiro (and his now-famous meeting tokens) for inspiring the talk in the first place.

Addendum: Related links (to stuff mentioned in this talk)

Meeting Tokens & “The Red Merlin” by Mike Monteiro
Mule Design’s “Feed Store” - Those awesome shirts (and, eventually, where you can buy your own meeting tokens)
Evidence Based Scheduling - Joel on Software - “A schedule is a box of wood blocks.”
New College of Florida - Merlin’s alma mater [which would never in a million years admit him today], where you don’t actually get credit for doing macramé. As far as I know.
Inbox Zero posts and free video - Merlin’s popular posts and talk on dealing with high-volume email
Merlin’s IDEO visit - Popular video from my talk with Scott Underwood at the storied design firm’s Palo Alto HQ
The Now Habit - Excellent book on procrastination
Getting Things Done - Merlin’s favorite book on personal productivity
The Sullivan Nod - Would you like some cheesecake? Yeessssss…
Opportunity Cost - If you do this, then you can’t do that.
Defensive driving - “Its aim is to reduce the risk of driving by anticipating dangerous situations, despite adverse conditions or the mistakes of others.”
Peter Drucker - “Peter Ferdinand Drucker (November 19, 1909–November 11, 2005) was a writer, management consultant and university professor.”
Neckbeard - “Also known as a Scarf, Trevor or Throatee. Pejoratively, a beard grown to hide a double chin.”
Andrea Bocelli - “Andrea Bocelli (born 22 September 1958) is an Italian operatic pop tenor and a classical crossover singer who has also performed in operas.”
Walter Sobchak and entering a world of pain. - “Smokey, this is not ‘Nam. This is bowling. There are rules. “
Merlin Mann: Speaking - Sure, you can hire Merlin to speak to your group. Here’s how.

”Video: Merlin's New Time & Attention Talk” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 14, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Provide context for better ubiquitous capture

Merlin Mann — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:01:55 -0500

Although the first priority in ubiquitous capture is getting it down, the red-headed stepchild trailing in at number two is providing context. And I don’t mean the GTD kind of contexts, but the kind of context that minimally explains what this information means, where and when you collected it, why it matters, or anything else that will help you find a meaningful place for it in your life later on.

Example? Sure. Here’s one from my real and recent world. Index card with one word on it:

Once

Okay, there you go! “Once.” Good night, everybody!

Just a tiny bit more information would have made that note a lot more useful to me. How about:

“Once”
- movie KK likes
- Irish band “The Frames”
- DVD -> 12/18

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Now I know that this is that movie my friend Kristine likes with music from that band she told me about. Without that bit of context, the word “Once” will mean nothing to me later on.

Think you’re immune to the need for this kind of frippery? Try this handy home test.

Ever find a scrap of paper in your life that looked something like this?

408
996
1010

Ah, the classic 10 digit problem.

While a nutritious breakfast and a sound public school education can help me to deduce that this is very likely a phone number, the paucity of contextual data on whose number it is or why I wrote it down leaves me with a problem. It also suggests that my current system for capturing information ubiquitously is either incomplete or badly implemented. And, I have about 30 years of 10-digit scraps to prove it.

You don’t need to go nuts with extra data, but just remember: you may really need this information later on to take some kind of action or just to decide whether and where it fits in your world.

If it’s worth capturing, it’s worth capturing well, so take the extra couple seconds to remind yourself what the hell you were thinking about.

”Provide context for better ubiquitous capture” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 17, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"