I am trying to cleanup an number of my gmail filters and labels this morning. (Let me know if I should dive into the details of my system in the comments, I’ll skip them for now.) And, I am spending way too much time waiting for the ‘loading’ notification to go away.
I don’t understand why I should be waiting for gmail to finish processing the changes to labels on the front-end. Why can’t they do that in the background on the server side?
I don’t believe in multi-tasking. I feel like the more things we try to do at the same time, the worse of a job we do on all of them. Besides, we really only ever actually do one thing at a time, the other things simply distract us from giving our full attention and intention to the main task at hand.
So, how do we juggle everything we need to do and manage all the ideas for new tasks that are in our face at any given moment? Good question. If you know the answer, please tell me. Meanwhile, I’m trying to practice rapid serialization. I still do too many things in a short amount of time, but I’m try to at least change my mindset: “I’m not doing all of this at once. I’m only doing one of these at once. Those other things are waiting right there for me to do next.” The hard part is trust those other things are going to be right there, and that I wont lose them simply because I don’t have them loaded up into my memory.
Project management tools are way too heavy for this part. A full-on GTD system is too distracting for this part. (Though I use both.) I just need a simple list that is always there that makes it easy for me to track everything going on right now, and lets me set down the new ideas that come to mind. And, most importantly, anything still on the list at the end of a productive burst is processed out into my real GTD system.
If I spent most of my time with a pen or pencil in my hand, my solution would be a 3×5 notecard on the desk beside me. Since I spend most of my time with a keyboard in my hand (and rarely even sit at a desk) I need the equivalent on my computer. No heavy apps, tagging, categories, attachments or blah blah blah, just a place to scratch down the stuff I’m trying to get done right now, or need to remember later because I’m getting things done right now.
For those of you who are more interested in the tech than the theory, here’s the punch-line: I’m using google tasks as fluid app.
When I sit down to get into the flow, I do a brain dump of the stuff I need to do right now. When I recognize I’m trying to do two things at once I either dump one to the list, or remind myself they both are already on there and refocus on what I was already doing. Unless it TRULY is an emergency, there is no reason to switch contexts. They are both going to get done, so I’m exercising my “focus intently on what I’m doing” muscle.
I truly believe we need to assign more value to our attention and intention. Rapid serialization is one experiment to practice this belief.
Photo credit: Elizabeth Potts Weinstein
I got tired of messing with seesmic ‘stand alone’ videos, so I wrote a little greasemonkey script to redirect standalone videos to their in-dashboard-counterpart. This allows quicker access to “reply” and “follow”!!
Link is here.
Post about it is here:
I’ve started using specialized search feeds and a secondary account to keep up with valued information.
For those who don’t know, I use twitter to tell other people what I up to, and to track what my friends are up to. Lately, the scope of people who I am interested in following has grown very large, to the point that twitter has become like an IRC channel. Needless to say (at least it seems needless to me) I don’t keep up with everything everyone says.
But I do utilize a few hacks to make sure I don’t miss anything I really want to see.
Twitter automatically tracks anytime someone begins a tweet [message/post/update] with “@dydimustk”, but will ignore “@dydimustk” anywhere else in the tweet, and it doesn’t even try to track “dydimustk”. So I went to terraminds.com, searched for dydimustk (note the lack of an @), and subscribed to the RSS feed.
I’ve also done this for a few other words or phrases that I want to keep track of: olpc, xo, emacs, benedictine, eln, TwinCities, weknow, lifecamp. Since terraminds is a little generous in it’s search algorithm, I search for some other words using tweet scan, which is more literal. I track “coworking” in tweet scan, because terraminds will include co-working, coworkers, and coworker in its results.
I follow many people in twitter who I do not know personally, or have had very few interactions with. But I still consider them friends because they share common interests with me, and teach me new things everyday. I also use twitter to stay in touch with close friends and family (who, of course, teach me new things everyday as well), but can quickly get lost in all the noise. So I created a secondary twitter account to follow only my close personal friends, and a few people who I want to follow closely (and would hope to call a close personal friend someday). Twitter gives you two rss feeds for your account: your posts, and your posts with friends. I subscribe to the “[user] and friends” feed from that account, which gives me peace of mind that I’m not missing any of my friends tweets.
Twitter already allows me to have direct messages sent to my mobile phone. And while it also allows me to track my own name, I can’t get those w/out turning on messages from everyone I’m following and everything I’m tracking. There are times that I want to turn on updates to my cell phone, but they are usually brief; I’ll turn them on when I’m going to be away from the computer for a while, but still want to follow through on a conversation that was started.
So, I’ve had to hack my own solution. I use Aaron Swartz’ rss2email to pipe a feed of a terraminds search for “dydimustk” to my cell phone’s email address. Now, anytime someone mentions my username anywhere in a tweet, with or without an @, I’ll be notified.
Do you have any twitter hacks that help you keep track of conversations you don’t want to miss?
My comment on Dave’s post about his new experiment called hoosgot.com. You can read their about page to learn more about the service, but basically it makes it really easy to ask a whole ton of people (the whole intarnets essentially) a question you are too lazy to answer yourself. Great idea. Great implementation of asking the question. We have yet to see how effective it will be at actually getting your question answered.
This was my comment to Dave:
I ran across doc’s post first, and posted this same thought there:
“The problem with the lazyweb is, well, it’s lazy. I’m inclined to believe that people need a champion or a deeply-seeded cause to invest enough into a technology to fuel its survival.”
I think hoosgot is a great idea, and I hope it succeeds. And your desire to “see how the data flows” leaves an impression on me. I do think, that there are several features that will need to be added to the service to overcome the ‘lazy’ aspect.
It’s easy to ask the questions. This services makes it easier to ask the question than any other service out there. But, currently, there is no motivation to answer.
What I’m looking for in my next Twitter Client:
What do you want from a twitter client?
Originally by Jeff Pulver, adapted by me. This is specifically for facebook, but has similar implications for most social networks.
Suggestions?
I am now checking email only once an hour.
I really want to read my email in emacs via gnus since that would make it much easier to make email based tasks. Now that gmail has given us access to our email via IMAP, this *should* be easier now. But I’m still having trouble getting things setup correctly. I may need to sit down with it for a few hours to get everything up and running. (But I have way too many projects I need to “sit with” for a few hours. So I need to put this project on the calendar for Christmas break.