16
January
2006
For the last 2 months or so, I’ve been experimenting with my own version of the hipster PDA . Mine is rather flat, that is I keep no separation into projects. There are 2 stacks of cards one for todo lists and one for meeting summaries. The later doesn’t follow any conventions, I just take notes there (and the limited space forces me to be more concise; hurray to that).
With the todo list I did try to come up with some structure. Every line starts with a name of the person in charge1. The line is slightly indented so I can put one of 3 marks next to it:
- ‘v’ when its done
- ‘d’ when it is deferred
- ‘x’ when it is obsolete
Every “closed” line is marked by one of the above marks and is highlighted (I picked it up somewhere from 43folders). This way it is very easy to see what are the opened tasks.
A task becomes obsolete when I realize it was a stupid idea to begin with, and what-the-hell was I thinking when I jotted it in the first place. I love these tasks. A task is deferred when it stays too long as the only open one in its card. Put it differently it is the only non-highlighted one in its card. Since I can not make it obsolete (darn), I move it to the latest card. This sounds a bit tedious but practically it isn’t as your motivation to close those tasks which you keep dragging around increases.
I find my self scanning all the cards a couple of times a day, looking for open tasks and picking up those which seems to be more relevant or more annoying (depending on my productivity meter). Again it sounds tedious but it isn’t. This linear process makes it harder to neglect tasks and thus is pretty helpful. For me this life hack works which is more than I can say of any other trick I’ve tried.
1 Believe it or not they let me supervise programmers ;)
Posted: Life hacks
19
November
2005
Can it be that the mouse causes “context switching” (for humans)? Any emacs user (as any gamer) will testify that using those (seemingly frightening) key bindings doesn’t require any “brain cycles” and happens almost automatically. This is why emacs is so perfect for quickly jotting some thoughts without real distraction1.
Certainly there are applications with attractive GUIs and loads of features to manage lists of various kinds but are they really used? Not by me or anyone else I’m familiar with. What if the context switching cost is too high. And if so can it be the mouse? Actually there is another suspect—switching to a different window. I recently came to suspect that using the mouse to switch to another window/application causes simply de-focus the user. This might explain why all the application with rich GUIs and admittedly good features can’t convince users to use them for a long time. On the other hand plain textual lists with no sorting and filtering capabilities (not to mention archiving, outlining, sharing and publishing) are found much more useful2.
Interestingly, writing a note on a piece of paper does not set your mind wondering in other directions as writing a new Outlook task (or in an endless number of to-do lists, PIMs or project management application).
1 Check out John Wiegley’s planner mode for emacs.
2 As mentioned in Meet the Life Hackers .
Posted: Life hacks
22
October
2005
I’ve been struggeling with to-do lists of various kinds for years and I’m constently looking into ways of improving my productivity. Are Getting Things Done and various Life Hacks my saviours?
PigPogPDA – PigPog Creativity Wiki . This definitely looks promising and I’ve started following the methodology sketched there (actually something similar).
GTDTiddlyWiki – your simple client side wiki . Cool javascript implementation but I don’t think I’ll bother with it. I miss my emacs key bindings (surely not a problem of this cute tool)
Posted: Life hacks