Sometimes action is more important than direction

Jonathan Fields, Taking out the Trash

GTD implementations are far from single-app static systems. As I struggle to fine-tune my GTD focused methodology, my tools and processes keep evolving along with my ninja skills. In the last couple of years I’ve been taming my Mac based system, resulting in a three-fold workflow:  Project and task keeping with Things, meetings and hard commitments on iCal, and a set of text/brainstorm tools for gathering and reviewing, especially Freemind (brainstorm, mind maps, life organization), Evernote (for all types of lists, reference and bookkeeping) and TextMate (for almighty text files that track my high level focus) stand out. But keep in mind: these are only small cogs in the wheel.

Things

Projects and Areas in Things

Things is a GTD flavored task manager, where I keep track of my projects, next actions or scheduled/someday/maybe lists. Deciding what to do is crucial in GTD, but keeping it somewhere you can trust is essential, and for me that’s Things. The best thing about this tool is its simple yet powerful user interface, with dead easy tags quickly defining contexts at the reach of a keystroke. Recurring and future tasks are also a huge feature of this task manager because it builds your trust and confidence in the system. It’s easy to stay organize with Things, and that is possibly the best compliment I can make, specially with such an easy to use inbox for all sorts of collecting on-the-fly, tightly integrated with the Mac (ctrl+space).

Freemind

Freemind is a simple yet rewarding mind map tool. It’s my go-to tool for project and idea brainstorming. But more than that, I use it as a way to stay organized. Beyond the normal brainstorm activities, I keep two separate mind maps that allow me to keep track of my life and areas of influence, in an easy-to-review form, implementing my horizons of focus.  The Life mind map has a broad view of my current and future goals, making it the perfect place to retreat when I need to evaluate things and get perspective. This allows me to ask the hard questions, and make the tough decisions, whenever I need to. The second mind map contains my Areas of Focus. I keep this as a separate mind map because it plays a part in my weekly review process, to make sure nothing relevant slips through the cracks.

Life Mind Map

Evernote

Plenty of lists in evernote.

Any solid GTD system must contain something to hold notes, random thoughts, meeting minutes or even lists that you want to check later. Evernote sports a easy and powerful note mechanism, that can moonlight as a list holder, and as general filling system. Which is precisely how I use it: reference notes and lists. In Evernote I great lists such as loans, to buy, GTD lists, and several reference notes (making use of Evernote’s category system). I also use it as my main idea pool for work, hobbies, fun, etc. Evolved note-taking, small ideas, big ideas, future stuff, even brainstorm can go into Evernote. I even use it to capture some hard copy notes through iSight (the macbook’s camera) so I can capture jotted down ideas any other type of collectable information.

TextMate (Text Files)

Text File Brainstorm

What better place to write down high-level objectives than in free-flowed text files that harnesses an almost magical flexibility. I have a TextMate project, holding several files were I write down my goals without being bound by a list format. This is probably the best place to release some steam, and get back to basics. Even though I don’t review this often, I review it as often as I need, and when occasion arises because some hard decision crept up without notice. Beyond writing down my long-term objectives, the most important part is the reasoning behind them, which is all about being true. This is the “honest” bucket, and even though it’s hard to get going, once you get it done, it’s an eye opener, making you clearer and more focused. TextMate just gives me a nice project where I can plot my Mission Statement, Life Objectives, or any guiding document I need.

iCal (Calendar)

Last, but not least, comes iCal, which is my calendar of choice. This is where meetings, appointments and hard-deadlines go. A calendar is so vital that if you don’t have one, you should stop reading and go get it, quick! The nice thing about iCal is that I can sync everything to my phone, and get some nice on-the-go reminders and alarms, which really increase my confidence in the system (confidence is key)!

Wrap Up

To all of these tools, there is a physical counterpart, one in/out-basket at home and another at work, that keep in, out and current reference (it has three tiers) for paper based physical stuff. Paper based material is disappearing, but it still exists and must be handled.

And there it is, my current Mac OS X based GTD implementation. I’ve build up quite a few parts over the years, perfecting and adapting it to my liking and workflow. And this is what I recommend you do. Make your system work for you, build your trust in it and the just use it. Nothing else.

With the rise of social media, we see the Internet burst with communities in sites like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube. New communities are built every day, over everything and nothing. And how do people do it? They start a blog, follow someone on twitter or like something on Facebook. How easy is it to create a Facebook group? And how often are people joining ? (Answer: all the time) That’s a very dynamic environment for communities. And let me ask you this: Did you ever pay to read a blog entry? Did you ever pay to join a Facebook group?

But lets focus on science. The scientific community still relies on a presence model, that requires writing very complex papers that can take months or even years to write. Writing a paper is a hard and long investment that either gets published or tossed in the trash. To get published it’s fed into the conference system: First comes peer review (usually the same people because the research world is not that big), and if you’re lucky it gets accepted into a conference. Now you get to present it at a conference (for which you have to pay at least 800 to 1000 dollars/euros to attend, plus travel and hotel). And finally you get an audience of 5 or less (you and the other presenters, plus a session chair). This is how it usually goes, after which it gets published into the proceedings, which almost no one will see, and into a closed digital library, which are usually pretty darn hard to search and get anything relevant (lets face it, it’s not Google).

Now, lets compare this to a blog post.

Blog posts take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours to write, and costs zero dollars to publish. It by no means requires the investment of a research paper. Yet, the information flow it generates is several orders of magnitude above any conference or journal paper published today. On my last journal paper I got zero comments (for almost a year’s effort), and an unknown amount of views (the quirky closed digital libraries don’t tell you this). However, on one of my latest blog posts I got over 4000 views, and 20 comments, all in a couple of days.

Lets dig deeper. On my webpage, I can post interactive graphs, movies, full scale images, rich content. When did you see a movie embedded into a paper? Why can’t I zoom in on the graph in a journal paper, when I just did on an interactive graph over at cnn.com? Why don’t I get notified when a fellow researcher publishes a paper? And why should I pay for his paper, when I don’t pay for his posts? (Bruce Schneier comes to mind).

Why are we trying to invent the future, and rely solely on such a poor, centuries old, publication method, that is neither interactive, nor attractive? The great evolution of last hundred years is that now you can send papers in pdf via email, instead of a hard copy by snail mail. Other than that, we are pretty much in the same place, except for now conferences are all over the world, and cost more money to attend.

So, the question is simple: What is the point of scientific papers?

If you want feedback on your research, they don’t work very well – blog posts do and are not limited to a selected few. If you want to share information, conferences cost thousands of dollars and magazine subscriptions also – blogs are free and open to anyone.

Academic papers were well suited for the 1800′s and the 1900′s. They face extinction in the 2000′s. If you want to share knowledge, ideas, get feedback, and interact maybe there is another way, and we need to start thinking about it. There must be a better way.

What if, instead of publishing just on a journal or conference, authors would start a blog, where a short version (4000 words?) of it would be freely available to the community, so everyone could follow, discuss, engaged, challenge, without having to spend thousands of dollars? Pretty much like we do today, for everything else… And this is just idea #1. Feel free to challenge, dispute, prove me wrong. Leave a comment. Because you can, and we won’t charge you 1000$ to read the comments.

In a knowledge work economy, ideas are what drive progress. They are the money makers and the purple cows. All too often they distinguish failure from success, good from great, average from extraordinary. This is especially true in research (computer science, networking or any other field). Research is the purest form of knowledge work. We create knowledge, fabricate ideas, and try to imagine what doesn’t exist yet. This is also what business is turning into. It’s becoming imagining what can be before everyone else gets there. Making value where there was nothing, especially in the Internet economy.

There is a common parallel between these two worlds. Ideas are the main driver. But, with the constant information overflow we are running out of time to have ideas. Simply put, there is far too much on our minds. We can take steps to become offline and play dodge with a world of interruptions, but even then our brain is tied up with a million different things.

Quoting David Allen in Getting Things Done (GTD), “Brain is RAM“. And as computer RAM, it’s random and it disappears when you reboot it. Ideas slip out of our mind. We forget things. We wonder off with our creative self. It’s not hard to imagine that as ideas crawl up inside our head, we become cluttered. We don’t have enough space for all our ideas, preventing new ones from popping up.

An empty mind is full of space for new ideas.

We need to make space for ideas. Having a serene, clear and sharp mind is one of the single most important assets for creativity and readiness. A clear mind is able to react. An undisturbed thought is more valuable that ten contending interruptions. It’s by freeing ourselves of the mundane that we can focus on that which is truly important, like great ideas.

And this is where GTD helps out. We need to clear our mind of the little things, of the bigs things, of all things. And GTD gives as a formula for it: Write it down.

Write your ideas down. Take notice. Focus on what’s poking your mind. How are you going to get to the great idea if you are stuck with  the bad ones clogging your precious RAM? Write it down. Good, bad, simple, complicated, ingenious , stupid – it doesn’t matter. It’s OK if they look silly on paper. Just. Write. It. Down. And this is especially important in truly creative environments, like research demands.

Why have one when you can have many?

What happens when you do that? Bad ideas are weeded out,  labeled and their space freed. One idea becomes many,  leading to even more ideas. Eventually a great idea comes along, and you are ready for it: you write it down! And your  life picks ups new steam. Before you know it, you’ll be a brainstorm tycoon, transpiring ideas out of every creative pore in you mind. And that’s not only rewarding but good clean fun. So what are you waiting for? Grab a pen, a blank sheet of paper and write those ideas down. You never know when you’ll stumble upon a greatness.

With all the possible interrupts, judging by the amount of friends you have, on different time zones, it’s safe to assume that you can’t go more than a few minutes without one of these apps (especially twitter and IM) firing up a notification: “You have 3 new messages”. Have you tried not clicking that little bouncing icon with an attractive red number? Try it, it’s really hard! And what happens? After 30 minutes of trying to focus you get into “the zone”, feeling like a productivity tycoon, and all of the sudden the little twittie bird starts bouncing. There goes “the zone” and there you go off to check the latest tweets. And your feeds. And your mail. What just happened? 30 minutes lost, that you won’t get back. This happens all to many times. And we need an answer. Welcome to my offline project.

The offline project

So, to be productive, and have time to check twitter, feeds, IM and the sorts, I’m getting offline and you should too.

The idea: maximize my online time by spending most of my time offline, specially at work.
The trick: Disconnect your network cable/wifi card at pre-determined times.

Time Slots

9h-9h30: Online. Mail, news, twitter check.
9h30-11h30: Offline! Focus! Work!
11h30: Online. Mail check. Available for instant messaging annoyance, lunch arrangements, social connecting.

Rinse and repeat in the afternoon, after you had lunch.

13h00-13h30: Online Stuff.
13h30-17h30: Offline!
18h00-18h30: Online Stuff and Home.

Fit this to your schedule, and there you go. No more time lost on Youtube or random chat on Facebook. This also educates your colleagues co-workers so that they know what to expect from you: you don’t have to constantly be hitting the “Send and Receive” button on your mail client to answer that one important mail that is coming down the pipe. People will get used to you replying at specifc times and thank you for it. If something truly important comes up, someone will call (this can also help you sort out what is important or not).

The importance of focus

The offline project was motivated by a need to focus, because focus is becoming more important than ever. Especially if you open many direct channels to you. And Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and mnmlist has nailed this on the head by publishing an online (free) ebook called the Focus Manifesto. This manifesto discusses the benefits of disconnection, which makes up for 95% of the inspiration for the offline project. Quoting some wisdom straight from the source:

“The Benefits of Disconnection: Why should we even consider disconnecting from the grid of information and communication? Let’s look at just a few reasons:

• You shut off the interruptions and distractions of email, Twitter, IM, blogs, news, and more.
• You give yourself space to focus and work.
• You allow yourself space to create.
• You can connect with real people without distractions.
• You can read, you know, books.
• You can accomplish a lot more.
• You allow yourself a break from the stress of overload.
• You can find quiet and peace of mind.
• You can reflect and contemplate.”

But the question still stands: Is GA a privacy violation or not?

GA has a sane Privacy Agreement, along with some reasonable Terms of Service. As one could hope, the data you upload to GA is your use of the service, and belongs only to you. But if you believe in Big Brother theories or just like your privacy, the estimate is that more than 50% of the web is using GA, and that Google can track everything about you: clicks, time on page, referrers, sites visited, the works. And if you consider the not-so-nice cookies that google uploads into your browser, which is neither explained nor understandable, some evil thoughts come to mind.

However, for me it is a matter of choice. And when you enter my website, I’ve made that decision for you. By using GA on my website I was uploading your browsing habits as part of my statistics collection. I did not offer an opt-out/in choice to allow a 3rd party service to be the resting place of the gathered information. Even though the details about statistics gathering and storage concerns mostly me (as the service) and will not be available (in principle) to anyone else, it is my job to tell you if information gets sent to another service and make it your choice to allow that.

Right now, you can disable GA manually by blocking their javascript, or use Adblock Plus for Firefox. You’ll also be able to block it with the google plugin when it comes. This if fine for users who are aware of this. However, most of us don’t even know what that means, let alone use it.

Google is already taking a few steps these issues and avoid the “evil” rep. But more could and should be made. An opt-out should be in place. There should be informed consent when you land on a website that uses GA (and uploads to Google). There should be a button or banner alerting the user that “This website uses Google Analytics”, like we serve those pretty banners stating that our sites are XHTML compliant. And there should be cookies on the browser that services respects, opting out , deterring the website from serving the the javascript – the “tracking: disabled;” cookie.

Given all of the above, the solution is to keep the gathered information local. I’ve moved away from Google Analytics to Piwik. Statistics are now only gathered and stored locally, properly anonymized, where the information belongs and is available, with open source technology. Installing Piwik is just a matter of uploading it to a folder on the server, and skimming through the setup (requires a MySQL database). Then it works pretty much like Google Analytics, but without uploading your visitor’s information to Google.

Still, there should be a negotiation to which information you want to provide. One thing is to track HTTP requests on the serve, whilst another is providing the user with a javascript file that gathers large amounts of information. Opt-in and negotiate, that’s what I say.

2010 will be the power year for social media, so I’ll be devoting a lot more time and attention to content creation for the new decade. As part of my resolutions, I’ll be updating my twitter feed, my Facebook page, and other social networks I care about.

So, friend me up if you haven’t already, get ready and hold on, cuz 2010 will be a busy year.

This is the first public release, under GPLv3. The software is now in a state where I can use it every day to maintain chroots. To download the source code, use the link below. There is also a git repository available for cloning. Chroots is developed under Ubuntu, and can build debian and Ubuntu chroots through deboostrap.

Source Code: chroots-0.2.tar.gz
Git Repository: http://git.digitalself.org/?p=chroots.git

If anyone finds this useful, don’t hesitate to drop a comment with suggestions or feedback. I’m looking forward to it. Bug reports are nice, and will be handled. More information about chroots below, and inside the source package. In time, I might put up a page for the project. In the meantime, enjoy this release.

About Chroots

Chroots is a set of wrapper scripts around  debootstrap. debootstrap is an effective way of create a general purpose build environment. While it is fairly simple to setup a working environment, it’s always necessary to perform several steps to actually login into a deboostrapped environment using chroot. It can be a cumbersome task, hence chroots.

For test building packages there is already pbuilder. What pbuilder does is build a debian package in a freshly created chroot environment. This allows detecting build and dependency errors quite effectively. Nevertheless, to use pbuilder, an environment is setup every time and out of the user’s reach, and it is quite a difficult tool to use for the occasional packaging experiment.

This is where chroots comes in. It allows to easily configure setup and deploy a chroot environment, enabling everything from package tests to dependency check, or manual tarball compilation, keeping your production environment ‘clean’. It allows to maintain several chroot environments at the same time, so that it can be easy to test multiple systems.

You should have the medibuntu repository enabled for this to work.

Get some tools to build tje package along with the ffmpeg source in Ubuntu Intrepid. Then get the appropriate packages to build ffmpeg, and satisfy the evil codec dependencies:

apt-get install dpkg-dev devscripts
apt-get source ffmpeg
apt-get build-dep ffmpeg
apt-get install libmp3lame-dev libfaac-dev libxvidcore4-dev libx264-dev

To finished up, go into the sources directory, build the package with the external codecs and install everything after it finishes building the debian package. Note that the first command is optional, and is just to bump the package version so that is “newer” that the original repositories:

dch -i
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=externalcodecs dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -us -uc

dpkg -i *.deb

And that is it. Look for scripts that use ffmpeg to encode stuff for the PSP or iPod. There are plenty around. I’ll post my favourite at a later time.