Hopeful not optimistic

When I look at the state of the world I’m not optimistic. I think that things can go badly wrong in many areas. But I am hopeful.

For each looming disaster I see many possible solutions—almost all of them based on new technologies. Of course it’s possible that none of them will work or will come too late. But it’s also possible that one or more will work and something good will come of it all.

Many of the predicted disasters of the past have been solved when technology changed the ground rules, the options, or the possibilities.

The problem that bothers me most is not global warming or war or the rise of corporations or the deterioration of society or whatever you may worry about. It's the fact that all systems deteriorate over time.

But so far the productivity increases that technology keeps giving us seem to grow faster than all kinds of deteriorating forces seem to increase.

It's not clear that this can contine--but it is possible. So I'm hopeful. But not optimistic.

Living in the Library of Heaven

When I was a kid if I’d imagined Heaven it would have been this: a place with the world’s biggest library and I have a library card.

Now I’m in Heaven and it’s better than I imagined: the library has got books; it’s got music; its got videos; it’s always open; it keeps getting better; the research librarian is incredibly capable and I can eat while I read. It’s the Internet, of course.

One night I got up at three in the morning with a song in my head. I knew the name of the song—“Over the Rainbow” but didn’t know who sang—the version in my head. I just knew I loved it. Within a half hour (only because I was so lame in those days) I’d found the song, knew who sang it, downloaded it from iTunes, put it on my iPod and was able to listen to it endlessly for the next month. Let’s hear it for the Library.

When I thought of writing this Blog (sadly, many months before I wrote the first post) the name “What passes for wisdom” came to me. I thought it was cool. So many months later when I actually decided to write my first post (sadly, still many months before I actually wrote that first post) I Googled for the phrase to see if I could find something interesting to say about it. The second hit led me to a site that sold stickers that said: “What passes for wisdom may only be eloquent foolishness.” I thought that was pretty cool, but I didn’t want to have a sticker company as my reference.

So I Googled for the two phrases: “what passes for wisdom” and “eloquent foolishness” and got a Google Books citation for a book called “Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World” by David W. Orr published in 1992. The quote in the book said “be only” rather than “only be” but there it was.

Now this book might have sold only 20 copies, one of which would have been in the Library of Congress, one in the Library of Heaven, and the rest in the libraries of David Orr’s family, for all I know. But there was one in the 24x7 Internet Library, the one that’s right here on my computer or a few IP hops away.

I’m in Heaven.

For those interested in the details: here’s a link to the phrase in Orr’s book and here’s one of dozens of versions of Iz’s song on YouTube. Here’s another.

By the way: when I tried to reproduce the story of finding Orr’s book for this post, I couldn’t find it, because (unknown to me) on my second search I put in the whole phrase from the sticker, which did not match the book because of the reversal of words. So I went to my Google Search history, searched the search history, and found the original search string and original citation and was able to do the research needed to finish the story behind this post without pain.

Let’s hear it for Google Search. Let’s hear it for Google Search History. Let’s hear it for Google Search History Search. Let’s hear it for living in the Library of Heaven.

What I learned about being a writer

It took me long time to learn this.

It’s simple.

Sadly, I keep forgetting it.

1. There's no such thing as becoming a writer. There’s only being a writer and not being a writer. In a given moment you either are a writer or you are not.
2. Being a writer is easy. All you have to do is sit down to write. Not sit down and write. Just sit down to write. You don't have to write anything. That's called “doing writing.” And that’s different from being a writer.

Now if you do this one thing (sit down to write) often enough you will write.

And if you write enough you might even get good.

And if you get good or you get lucky, and if you want to, you might even get published. Or you can self-publish in a Blog.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that if you want to write, you’ve got to first be a writer. And if you want to be a writer you just have to sit. Just sit.

Sometimes sitting down is the hardest thing you (I) can do. Stupid, but sometimes it is.

And sometimes, like today, you (I) sit down and you (I) get an idea, and the words just flow off the ends of your (my) fingers and appear on the screen and you are (I am) writing.

If you’re being a writer, there’s nothing better than seeing those words appear.

Personal Productivity 101

What's freed up some of my time has been was a series of improvements in personal organization and productivity, the latest of which has been adopting David Allen's "Getting Things Done" approach to organizing work.

I first came on GTD reading some of the "life hacking" blogs. More on life hacking later. In any case, my interest was piqued; I read some more and decided to adopt his principles of organization.

"Get everything out of your head and into a trusted system." Lots of energy is wasted remembering all the things you have to do and want to do. Allen says all this stuff takes mental RAM. You spend so much RAM keeping your lists, and organizing inside your head that there's no RAM left over to run the more sophisticated programs needed to actually get stuff done.

So I decided to take the plunge and three weeks after adopting the method, my work email Inbox is empty. The in boxes for my several personal email aliases are all empty. Everything that I have even vaguely thought of doing--from 15 ideas for TWR posts to grand intentions like "practice piano" are all in one single system and now capable of being organized. And being organized bit by bit.

What I found was--as predicted by Allen--that as I freed my mind my productivity went up. I got more work done, faster. And the faster I got creative ideas (like TWR posts) out of my head, the faster new ones arrived.

So here's my current system for personal productivity.

Of course it's mainly computer based. The main tools are Google Desktop Search, Outlook, and my Browser.

Here's an overview.

Desktop Search
I've been bouncing back and forth between Google and Microsoft desktop search products for a few years and for the forseeable future I've settled on and I'm going to stay with Google. They both take days to index your disk, but once you've done it, the search is blindingly fast. Google's is just nicer and so fast and easy to access that I'm not likely to change.

GDS has a search dialog that pops up if you press Cntrl twice; it starts searching incrementally as you type; and if you don't see what you're looking for right away, you can hit return and a browser comes up with everything that matches. From that point you can change criteria, winnow things down, and ultimately find what you want. There are some tricks to configuring it, I'll talk about later.

GDS changed both my document and email filing strategies because it's much easier to grab a document out of a bucket using GDS, than to waste the time coming up with an appropriate filing system and then trying to navigate to the document you want. For example, I have a few Word documents that use frequently. One is the running status document in which I keep notes in for my job. Instead of opening word and navigating to it, I double-Ctrl, pop up GDS, and by the time I've typed "ru" GDS has found the document at put it at the top of th e list. A mouse click and it's open. Or a right click and I can open the folder.

GDS not only indexes all my documents (.doc, pdf, txt, etc) it also indexes all my email and can get me rapidly to the one I want--so rapidly that putting emails in folders also became a waste of time, and I stopped doing it.

Email
My email world has changed in two ways. First, I've nuked almost all the email folders in which I had tediously and carefully filed things, only to occasionally fail to find them. I also used to keep stuff in my Inbox as a kind of todo list/reminder list. Then my Inbox started getting bloated and became useless for that purpose. Now my Inbox is empty.

I used to keep things in deleted mail when I either really wanted them gone or when I wanted them out of the way. GDS could find them quickly, even if deleted (and even in some cases if the trash was emptied.) Now the only things that go in Deleted are things I really want GONE. The rest go a reference folder. And to first order (not completely) that's the end of my folders.

But my email world has changed even more dramatically after installing an addin called Jello.Dashboard, which uses the Outlook API and puts a GTD-friendly layer on top of Outlook. I'll go through Jello in detail in another post.

Browser
My usual browser is Firefox. A. got me hooked on its tabbed browsing feature; I switched and have never let go. I use Explorer when Firefox does not work properly and in some other special cases that I'll talk about.

Now one of the problems with browser-based tools is that they often use cookies to retain your identity. For example, all Google services require a Google-validated identity--which is either a Google email account or some other email account that you can prove you have access to. I've got a Google identity based on my employment email account; I've also got a personal Google account, which I don't use very much, and for various reasons I'll talk about later, have several other Google aliases which I use. For historical reasons I also have one Yahoo account. As a result I've had to find a way to keep several Firefox browsers open at once, each with its own environment, history, cookie list and so on. Again I'll talk about how to do that in another post.

How work works
So given all of this, here's how my system works. Steady state is: nothing in my inbox, everything in a bunch of lists kept in Outlook and I work off the lists.

Of course mail keeps flying in at night and through the day. So first thing in the morning and periodically during the day I check my work Inbox; and at last once a day I check my others. I process each Inbox to zero, in good GTD style. Meaning: I look at each entry and either handle it on the spot, or put it in a known place, according to its kind, for handling later.

Then I cycle through the known places. Emails that require more than 2 minutes (the GTD approved cutoff) go in the place (the Context in GTD-speak) called @Emails. Phone calls go in @Calls. And so on. A place for everything an everything in its place. I can usually blast my emails and calls down to zero, then go to @Meetings, where I've kept notes for the people that I talk to periodically in more depth, decide if it's time to call one of them or set up a call, and then rocket through that list. I've got other lists as well for other kinds of activities, which are done in batches--all of a kind--based on where I am at the time. There's even a list called @Home with all the honey-do items that I've spent my life ducking to the detriment of my marital relationship. Now they seem to be getting done. For once in my life I'm more aware of "stuff to be done" than she is.

There are also projects and someday lists, which I'll also talk about later.

In my pocket I keep a spiral bound notebook and when something comes up that I want to do--even someday--it goes in the notebook and later into my system. If I don't happen to have the notebook with me, then it gets written down somewhere else and stuck somewhere that I won't lose it and be sure to see it--for example in my wallet wrapped around whatever money I happen to have.

So everything gets out of my head; either gets directly into the Outlook-based system on my computer, or gets there indirectly through a piece of paper, or an email I ask someone else to write me. But it gets there.

And that points out a flaw in my current system: backups. I need to find a way to back up my system more often then I currently back up my computer which is about once a week. Given the importance of my system that's a task that I need to carry out and so (just a minute, please while I put that into my system) I'll attend to that later, but for now this is the end of this post.

Purpose

Having lived either 2³ or 8² years so far, depending on how you like to form the expression, I decided to write down some of what I've learned, both to get it clearer in my own mind and for the benefit of those who might benefit, particularly my Zygotes and Zygotes-in-law and Grand Zygotes.

After about a year or two's dithering and emboldened by the success of The Wolf Report, I registered this blog. Dithered some more, and dithered some more finally, tonight decided to get off my ass and start writing this.

We'll see how it goes.