Tools for Thought

Since my last post, I’ve been testing some of the newer commands that the user community has been adding to Ubiquity at a furious rate. The first 15 I listed came from Ubiquity’s default installation. For a full list of the default commands, enter help in Ubiquity or type about:ubiquity in the Firefox address bar, then click on the “Your Commands” link in the resulting page’s navigation bar. If you’re feeling more adventurous, click on the “Find More Commands” link instead, which brings up the Ubiquity Herd page.

Most of the commands in this post are from the Herd. The herd is a list of updated commands or user favorites. For security reasons, the links in this list, as well as the list itself, are only accessible with you click the Firefox’s Subscribe button at the top of each page. Since new commands are relatively untested — and frankly, a lot of them don’t work as advertised — they’re not added to Ubiquity’s command base; instead, you subscribe (free) to the commands you want.

A few words of warning

You’ll see the security warnings anyway, but I’ll emphasize them again here. The JavaScript for these commands has full access to your browser. The warning page that comes up for you to approve your subscription displays the open source code, so you have the option of either reading it or accepting its integrity on faith. By Version 0.2, Mozilla plans to add a “social trust network,” allowing you to see if any of your friends have tried the command. Until then (and even after, really) caveat emptor.

Test each of these slowly. Some of the commands display their results inline — directly in the console window — while others display in the browser. If you type your query and hit Enter too quickly, you may miss the fact that the results were displayed inline. An example of this is one of my favorite commands, ccsearch-flickr, which displays the first series of thumbnails in the shell. The gimage command, on the other hand, shows them in a new browser tab.

As mentioned in the last post, Ubiquity treats queries not preceded by a recognized command as a generic Google search by default. There’s a snag in Ubiquity where just-added terms often don’t execute properly the first time, with queries treated as a Google search. This is another reason to test commands slowly. Look at the list of query options that display underneath what you type to make sure that Ubiquity recognizes the new command. If it doesn’t, don’t worry. Go ahead and enter the query as a search, then redo the query. The second time around, you’ll see from the option list that the new command has been added to Ubiquity’s dictionary.

15 (mostly) new commands

Click the links in each list heading for each command’s subscription page. The first item, remove-annotations, is a default command that doesn’t require subscription; the others do.

1. Remove-annotations. If you use the save command to lock in your edits to a web page (with commands like highlight, translate or delete), you’ll need to use remove-annotations to get rid of them. It’s also necessary if you annotate a dynamically generated home page, like a blog; otherwise you won’t be able to see new updates to the page, even if you refresh. If you want to keep your annotations on a particular post, make your edits to the post’s permalink (the posts unique page), not the home page. (Thanks to prester john for pointing out remove-annotations in the previous post’s comments).
2. Gdocs. Entering gdocs [query] will list your Google Documents containing the entered term.
3. Restart. This restarts Firefox. If you find that Ubiquity isn’t accepting your entries (which happens occasionally), you have to close and relaunch Firefox manually.
4. Delicious/delicious-find. Typing is delicious as a standalone word bookmarks the current page on your Delicious account, using the page title as the description; or you can add a manual description, as in, delicious this is a cool post. Add tags by following the description with the word tags, followed by your comma-separated tag list. So a bookmark complete with a description and tags would look like delicious this is a cool post tags first, second, third.
5. Add-on. Searches for Firefox add-ons using the add-on [query] syntax.
6. Yn. You can use Ubiquity as your shell for YubNub commands using the yn [YubNub command] syntax. If you love typing or loathe mnemonics, the full yubnub keyword is available from this separate subscription.
7. Lifehacker. Having to search for life hacks in Google using [query] site:lifehacker.com can get tedious. Instead, just put lifehacker [query] into Ubiquity.
8. Rottentomatoes. See what the consensus on a film is by entering rottentomatoes [film]. This subscription is bundled in the same link as the lifehacker command, if you’ve added either, you’ve added both.
9. Amazon-search-all. The default amazon-search command defaults to book searches. Using amazon-search-all [product] performs a search across all Amazon product categories.
10. CCsearch-flickr. Using ccsearch-flickr [term] returns images under the Create Commons license inline.
11. Gimage. Like YubNub’s gim command, gimage [term] runs an image search on Google.
12. Torrent. This is the least shady of the bittorrent search commands I’ve found, compared to, say, pirate. Unlike the latter, which is specific to The Pirate Bay, using torrent [query] performs a metasearch across services using vOrtex.
13. Stumble. Using stumble as a standalone term lets you StumbleUpon a random page, per your SU profile. stumble-thumbs-up and stumble-thumbs-down are your bookmarking commands, and stumble-view-reviews lets you see what other Stumblers have to say about the current page. If you need full StumbleUpon functionality, use stumble-toggle-toolbar.
14. Reddit-this. Isn’t it great to simply type the bookmarking service you want into Ubiquity, instead of navigating toolbars and links?
15. Gquote. Get a stock quote using the gquote [ticker] syntax.

(Photo credit: molecularck)

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Extensions, Mozilla, Ubiquity, Web, Internet

Yesterday Google released its new Chrome browser. I anxiously downloaded it, tried it, then uninstalled it after 15 minutes. I failed to come across anything that compensated for the lack of extension support. Firefox has too many extensions I’m simply not willing to give up. One of these is the previously discussed add-on for the YubNub command line tool. Last week, Mozilla Labs released another console extension along similar lines that’s become indispensible to me: Ubiquity.

Once you install the extension, you call up the console window by hitting Ctrl-Space. What’s especially nice about Ubquity’s interface is that it overlays the currently displayed web page as a translucent modal window, so queries can be performed without losing sight of the information that most likely provoked the lookup. In some cases, though not enough at the moment, query results are displayed inline — directly in the console window — instead of switching focus to a new page or tab.

15 commands in action

Ubiquity handles natural language command phrases, so you can theoretically enter a command the way you intuit it, without having to learn the formal syntax. Like all putative natural language processing by computer, your mileage may vary.

Many of the commands can be abbreviated to the minimum number of letters unique to their targets. While “m” will bring up the MSN search command as the first selection, you can use “ma” to evoke the map command directly. To avoid variations that might change as new commands are added, I’ll stick to either the full commands or abbreviations that might be further abbreviated.

1. Map. If Ubiquity did nothing but look up maps and embed them into an email, it would still be worth the installation. Any any message you compose in a web-based mail program, you can highlight the term you want to search, hit Ctrl-Space, type map, and the results will show up inline. Click on the relevant result, hit Space, pan or zoom to refine the Google Map displayed, then click on the footer, Insert map into page. Voila! Your recepient sees a whole map in your message, not a link. I’ve wanted this feature in Google Maps for years.
2. Email. This Gmail-only command allows you to send a page, a selection on a page, or a unique message. As with all Ubiquity commands, bring up the console by hitting Ctrl-Space. If you want to send a link to your current page to a friend, type Email to [contact name], where the contact name can be anyone in your Gmail contacts, and hit Enter. Ubiquity will even recognize first names, so Email to Fred will work fine.

   If you want to send a snippet of the page to Fred, highlight the selection, call up the console and type Email this to Fred. Ubiquity will substitute “this” with your selection. If you want to send a new message to Fred, like “Thanks for sending that file!”, type Email Thanks for sending that file! to Fred. Unfortunately, these messages open in a Gmail compose window in a new page or tab, but all you have to do from that point is hit Send.

3. Google. You knew this was coming. Preceding any term with the letter “g” followed by a space performs a search on that term. Like the normal Google search box, you can use advanced search operators for queries like “chrome -google”. Typing any phrase that’s not preceded by something Ubiquity recognizes as a command will run as a Google search by default, so “getting a passport to spain” will — you guessed it — do a Google search on that phrase. If you highlight a word or phrase on a page, you can enter g this into Ubiquity, and Google will search the highlighted text that replaces “this.”
4. Wiki. Same principle, different service. You can search Wikipedia on a highlighted term by entering wiki this, or you can do the same with a new entry by hand (”w antonio gaudi”).
5. Add. This “add-to-calendar” command adds a new or highlighted selection to Google Calendar. Unlike Gmail, the event gets added in the background, and the entry is confirmed in a popup window. To reiterate, Ubiquity accepts natural language entries, so “Dinner with Melanie Thursday at 7pm” will get slated correctly.
6. Check. Entering check [day or date] into Ubiqity will display your GCal entries inline. Entering check by itself returns today’s calendar.
7. Weather. Entering we [city-state or zip code] into Ubiquity will display the current weather inline: the temperature, smog condition, wind velocity and humidity. I use this in conjunction with the email or twit command to tease my friends outside of California’s perpertually perfect climate.
8. Twit. As much as I love full-featured Twitter clients like TweetDeck, nothing beats the simplicity of hitting Ctrl-Space and typing twit [message] to so_and_so, or sending a selection of text using twit this to so_and_so. At the moment, there’s no way to receive tweets or ping Twitter for new messages.
9. Word count. As a student of copywriting, I’m frequently curious about an article’s word length. Highlighting the desired text and entering word count into Ubiquity will give you just that. There used to be a Firefox extension that did the same with a context menu, but it seems to have disappeared.
10. Translate. You can translate a new entry or selected text. For new entries, type translate [word or phrase] from [language] to [language], and the result is displayed inline. If you translate this to english for highlighted text on a page, Ubiquity will actually replace the text directly on the page. When it works, it’s amazing, but I’ve had mixed results with this command. It’s worth pointing out that Ubiquity is currently at version 0.1.1 — an alpha release.
11. Define. Being able to do a dictionary lookup without leaving your current page by typing define [term] or simply highlighting a word, then entering define into Ubquity, is a lot less annoying that having to look up the word in a new tab. With highlighted words, there’s no need to add “this” to define.
12. Highlight. To annotate a selection with persistent highlighting, drag the cursor over the selection and type highlight into Ubiquity. When you deselect it, the text is left with a yellow highlight.
13. Delete. You can actually delete images and text by highlighting (selecting) them and entering delete into Ubiquity.
14. Undo. If you get carried away with highlighting and deleting passages, enter undo.
15. Digg. Feel free to use this one for this article.

Technorati Tags: Technology, Productivity, Ubiquity, Mozilla, Firefox, Extensions, Add-ons

Work is a cycle of thinking and doing. When we want to bring about something new in the world, we spend some time thinking about what needs to be done, then spend some time doing it. Some ways of thinking and doing are more efficient and less stressful than others. One way is to batch thinking tasks apart from doing tasks.

The weekly review is one of the best approaches to streamlining the cycle of thinking and doing. Once each week, everything that needs to get done is collected, processed and reviewed as a batch process. During the rest of the week, we can focus on working off the results of the thinking we’ve already done. The question, “What do I need to do now?” is answered by simply looking at a calendar and a list, instead of having to rethink everything we possibly could be doing. Prioritizing is a simple matter of comparing line items, something that can be done in a few seconds.

Without having that thinking externalized, we would have to mentally reconstruct the list, then keep its contents in our head long enough to compare them against each other. Since short-term memory does a poor job of holding more the a half-dozen items, most people’s tendency is to leave most options unexamined, especially during a busy time, when the perceived need to examine all options is almost nonexistent.

Predefined work

There are three ways to spend your time in relation to work:

• You can do predefined work
• You can define your work
• You can respond to incoming work

The more predefined work you have to do, the easier it is to execute it. Employees at McDonald’s don’t have to spend their work day figuring out what to do; they just do it. All of their actions are explicitly spelled out in an operations manual: from what wording they use for greeting customers to how long to leave french fries in the deep fryer. Since their work is so explicitly defined, they get to experience completion more concretely and continuously than most knowledge workers. When they leave work, it’s no longer on their minds.

Having predefined work to execute requires defining work. The art of the weekly review is turning knowledge work into a McJob, relatively speaking. At the end of the review, you wind up with a list of calls to make, errands to run, emails to send, facts to look up, questions to ask coworkers, software tools to download, support material to file, and so on. In other words, you’ve turned an amorphous network of “stuff” into a concrete set tasks to check off, widgets to crank, between now and your next review.

That’s an oversimplification, of course. Knowledge work requires real thinking to be done during the week, but now the thinking tasks have been defined. New work, new information and new opportunities come in between weekly reviews. The new inputs have to be collected and processed as well, but it’s much easier to do so when they don’t sit on top of a backlog of unprocessed inputs. You begin the week from zero base, with relatively nothing in your collection buckets (your email inbox, in-basket, voice mail, etc.), motivating you to maintain that standard. Over time, you find that weekly reviews become easier, since you become more vigilant about collecting and processing incoming work — there’s less to clean up during the review.

Having as much of your work predefined as possible also elevates your perspective when evaluating incoming work. If most of the thinking about your work is behind you, then the importance of an interruption can be seen more objectively. Many time management books have the (sometimes implicit) premise that any work that isn’t predefined is necessarily of lower priority than the tasks on your calendar. On the contrary, having the bulk of your work predefined gives you the freedom to make a conscious priority choice in real time. If you choose to stick to your original task, it will be for a better reason than having thought of it first.

(Photo credit: Vince Chan)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

At least a couple of times a month, some new publication or productivity blog will critique multitasking, usually as though the case against multitasking is a new idea. In fact, virtually no one recommends multitasking as a best practice, except for occasional tips like listening to spoken word audios while jogging. It’s almost always discouraged rather then encouraged.

But that hasn’t always been the case. Multitasking first became fashionable in the eighties, when some PCs first became capable of running more than one program at the same time — something we take for granted today. The word became an ideal and metaphor for human performance, and by the nineties, “multitask” started appearing on classified ads and resumes as a desirable trait, rather than a tic.

As is frequently pointed out, multitasking as a metaphor has serious limits. A computer that seems to run several applications simultaneously is actually switching between them by an order of milliseconds. Humans take much longer to switch between tasks. More importantly, a computer resumes each task exactly where it left off. Humans have to resume each task by spending at least some of their time regaining their focus. It’s much more inefficient for a human to switch between tasks than it is for a computer.

Why people multitask

When people start a task without finishing it, they naturally feel unproductive. The longer a task remains unfinished, the more boredom and anxiety it generates. The sooner a task is completed, the better. With physical tasks, that’s not a problem, since it’s almost always possible to work faster. But knowledge work is fundamentally different. Very few people believe what should be a truism: It’s impossible to think faster.

No matter how much we’d like to believe otherwise, we have absolutely no control over the rate of our thinking. We can crank widgets faster, but not design them faster. All we can do is allocate the amount of time that experience teaches us we need to create a certain amount of creation.

What does this have to do with multitasking? It has to do with the difference between being productive and feeling productive. If I’m feeling anxious about my lack of progress on completing this blog post, I can toggle to Gmail. Then I can be “working on” two things instead of finishing one, and only experience half the incompletion. The more tasks we perform simultaneously, the less responsible we feel for any single one.

We perceive workload by the number of tasks that consume our attention, not their inherent significance. When people complain about their workload, they use phrases like “I’ve got so many things to do,” rather than pointing out an individual task whose significance is a bottleneck or attention sink. Focusing on quantity reduces the perceived need to prioritize. If everything matters, nothing matters.

Developing deep focus

Rather than create a list of tips to reverse the multitasking impulse, I want to recommend just one discipline to develop: deep focus. While we can’t control the rate of our thinking, we can minimize the number of internal and external distractions that impede that rate. I’m deliberately avoiding the transcendental language of “flow” to keep things actionable.

The exercise is simple. Get a timer and a notepad, and pick a single task. Starting with a relatively short interval of time, like 10 minutes, set the timer for your designated interval. During this time, you’re only allowed to do one of three things:

• Do the single task you’ve assigned for yourself
• Write down any unrelated ideas that come to mind during this time
• Absolutely nothing

If your task is to write a journal entry, and you suddenly remember that you need to pick up some lettuce at the store, put that down on the notepad, then return to your journal. Don’t keep stray thoughts in your head. If you find while attempting to write that no words are coming, do absolutely nothing until you either start writing, or the timer goes off. In this context, doing “nothing” for the set time is endurance training, not idleness.

10 minutes may not sound like much, but you may find that it seems like an eternity if you follow the three rules literally. No drinking beverages, no music (calm or otherwise), no TV running in the background, no looking at things other than your task, no interruptions allowed. Using a timer prevents you from periodically looking at the clock to distract yourself your task. You keep working until you hear the alarm.

If you’re in an environment that’s not conducive to following the rules, change the environment beforehand to avoid using it as an pretext for allowing distractions. Turn off cell phones and message notifiers. Work in isolation, even if — especially if — you like having other people around. That’s one of the reasons for starting with short times. It’s hard for many people to work this way for two hours, but anyone can step in the virtual isolation tank for 10 minutes. The process is similar to the Ten Minute Dash, but instead of using an uninterrupted frame just to get started, the goal here is increase the ratio of uninterrupted work until the entire task can be performed from start to finish with no interruptions.

Once you can handle 10-minute sessions of deep focus each day for a full week, increase the session time to 30 minutes. Most think-intensive tasks require somewhere between five and 15 minutes of immersion time, and it’s a good idea to plan your production time by factoring in your running start. I personally count 30 minutes of scheduled writing as 20 minutes of actual writing at peak concentration. One hour would be 50 minutes.

After a week of 30-minute sessions, increase the length to one hour. Double this the following week; rinse and repeat as desired.

Separating working from training

If you want to apply the deep focus process to your current work, that’s fine, but don’t sort of do it. Unless the nature of your work is compatible with the level of firewalled attention required, then don’t count it as part of your training sessions. For instance, if you have a task that requires input from coworkers, pick another task that doesn’t, for training purposes. There’s a reason that pianists practice scales rather than Beethoven when they’re just getting started.

The immediate goal of deep focus training isn’t necessarily to get work done, but to increase endurance of boredom and anxiety. Once you’ve gained some momentum in working interrupted for two or more consecutive hours, feel free to shift that training time to actual production time.

(Photo credit: cackhanded)

Technorati Tags: Productivity

Any labor-saving technology offers two potentials, depending on the mindset of the user:

• Reducing the amount of time needed to achieve a desired output
• Increasing the amount of output within the previously required length of time

Since the average employed American works a 46-hour workweek, with 38 percent claiming to work more than 50 hours per week — despite enormous advances in technology — it’s pretty obvious that reducing the amount of time we spend at work isn’t the socially approved option.

We could dismiss fixed or increasing workweeks as a business conspiracy, with employees producing more for the same pay. But the bias toward more output isn’t limited to employers. The average workweek for entrepreneurs — those without bosses — is 70 hours. Even outside of the workplace, the same impulse prevails. Here’s a passage from Digital History on the evolution of housework:

Yet despite the introduction of electricity, running water, and “labor-saving” household appliances, time spent on housework did not decline. Indeed, the typical full-time housewife today spends just as much time on housework as her grandmother or great-grandmother. In 1924, a typical housewife spent about 52 hours a week in housework. Half a century later, the average full-time housewife devoted 55 hours to housework.

What happened?

As washing machines and dishwashers were introduced, the socially accepted standards for cleanliness were raised. Instead of spending less time on a load of laundry, housewives simply ran more loads of laundry to fill the void. The same pattern can be seen with any enabling technology. The average American walks almost the same number of miles in his lifetime as he did a century ago, despite the proliferation of cars. Urban sprawl metastasized in response to faster transport.

Notice that for increased output to be warranted, it has to be wanted. The more-is-better mindset actually increases the desire for the increased output, creating a mutually reinforcing escalation in production and consumption.

Valuing discretionary time like discretionary income

Most of us have specific income goals, either a target number or a general increase. The same aspiration can and should apply to time.

In a special for Danish television (embedded in this post), Tim Ferriss consulted with a pair of entrepreneurs and an employee to reduce their workweek. Most of the advice he gave were the usual hacks — batch email, shorten meetings, conduct an 80/20 time audit — but one of the most noteworthy points was a simple question he asked them: “So, how many hours, ideally, would you like to work each week?” It’s a question that most employees wouldn’t consider asking, either out of social taboo or a singular focus on income.

When discretionary time isn’t valued (or culturally devalued), employees compete on other playing fields, putting in more hours to impress employers (conspicuous production) or pursuing promotions that ultimately result in more hours at the office and a drop in income-per-hour. No employee feels safe arriving last or leaving first.

Diminishing returns vs. diminishing hours

Forbes, Lifehacker, and Signals vs. Noise have all recently discussed the most popular alternative to the standard five-day workweek of eight-hour days: the four-day workweek of 10-hour days. Signals vs. Noise took issue with Forbes’ critique of the four-and-ten workweek, insisting that Forbes “misses the point” of a real four-day workweek.

The point of the 4-day work week is about doing less work. It’s not about 4 10-hour days for the magical 40-hour work week. It’s about 4 normalish 8-hour days for the new and improved 32-hour work week. The numbers are just used to illustrate a point. Results, not hours, are what matter, but working longer hours doesn’t translate to better results. The law of diminishing returns kicks in quick when you’re overworked.

Which leads to one of the more progressive alternatives on the horizon: the results-only work environment (ROWE). Under ROWE, employees are free to work anywhere, not excluding the office, as long as they hit their assigned performance goals. Since results are the only standard of performance, the number of hours required to achieve them is entirely up to the employee. At Best Buy and Netflix, the first case studies of ROWE in action, employees typically find that 32 hours is the sweet spot for getting their assigned tasks done.

It’s possible that a standard like ROWE could come to replace the eight-hour workday fought for and won by trade unions, but the desire to spend less time for the same output has to come first. There’s no hack to bring about a different mindset, only continuous self-examination.

In the meantime, consider this: the next time you come across a great tool or tip to save time, ask yourself, “What will I do with the time I save?”

Technorati Tags: Productivity, Lifestyle Design

For the last few months, mainly to challenge my thinking, I’ve been reading material on “the cloud” to understand the appeal of web-based applications and supply-side computing. Much of what I’ve seen seemed like a solution in search of a problem, considering that I’ve been running apps of my hard drive since the Mac SE (yes, I’m that old). Most of discussions of cloud-based computing never seem to make a clear case for its advantages, beyond being “cooler” in some way that’s as amorphous as the metaphor itself.

Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch distinguishes itself by shedding light on the economies of scale that undergird the transition from individual machines and IT facilities to remote sites and distributed systems. The author parallels the new paradigm switch with an historical one: the switch from private electrical generation to a utility — hence the subtitle, Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

Prologue. We enter the new world through a tour of VeriCenter’s facilites. Carr was invited by the company’s founder to have a look at the epic IT warehouse in response to a previous publication, Does IT Matter? In the future, companies would forgo investing in their own IT infrastructures, and simply plug into VeriCenter’s mammoth computing resources over the internet. VeriCenter’s facility is the size of a city block, a farm of thousands of computers clustered together.

Chapter 1: Burden’s Wheel. In 1851, Henry Burden built the largest waterwheel of its time to electrically power his farm tool manufacturing operation. A half-century later, his local generator was rendered obsolete by large-scale electrical utilities with far more generating capacity and far greater transmitting distance. The scale economies of these electric utilities could no longer be matched by private factories, and the new plants could generate enough capacity to power households and businesses alike.

The World Wide Web started as a collection of static hypertext pages and links to multimedia files. Surfing the internet was essentially a reading experience. When we wanted to do actual work, we would open up applications that resided on our individual computers, like Microsoft Word or Photoshop. As utility computing gains traction, it can leverage relatively new communication protocols to interact with multiple remote databases in real time, enabling web-based applications like Google Documents, or the photo editing tool, Picnik. Economies of scale will eventually make online applications more robust than their counterparts on our hard drives.

Chapter 2: The Inventor and His Clerk. Thomas Edison’s plans to monopolize electricity were doomed by limitations in his business model, and the technology behind it. His idea was to license his patented system and sell its components to businesses in the market for local power plants — a project that was successful, but short-lived. It took a former employee of Edison’s, Samuel Insull, to conceive of and build an infrastructure of centralized systems based on alternating current, rather than his rival’s direct current, to extend electricity’s reach into the farthest corners of homes and businesses. The utility’s success fed on itself, with increased revenues enabling increased generating capacity at decreased prices, increasing demand.

Chapter 3: Digital Millwork. Like electricity, data processing had a roots at the local level, starting with Herman Hollerith’s punch-card tabulator. His Tabulating Machines Company evolved into International Business Machines under the management of Thomas J. Watson. Tabulators first attracted the attention of insurance agencies, banks, and other institutions after their deployment in the 1890 census. As tabulators, or “computers” progressed into UNIVACs and later mainframes, companies gradually increased their data processing budgets. IT expenditures went from less than 10 percent of the average American company’s equipment budget in the late 1960’s to 45 percent by 2000.

As investment in IT facilities grew, so did their excess capacity. Studies have shown that since the introduction of PCs as “clients” for companies data centers, capacity utilization averages between 25 and 50 percent. Across industries, most firms are using the same hardware and software as their rivals. The redundancy, overbuilding and overstaffing of IT assets is precisely the waste that supply-side solutions like VeriCenter, Google and Amazon Web Services hope to consolidate. As the author asserts, “The PC age is giving way to a new era: the utility age.” The advent of the fiber-optic internet has removed the bandwidth bottleneck that previously prevented distributed computing from becoming economical.

Chapter 4: Goodbye, Mr. Gates. None of this transition is lost on the player who stands to lose the most from it: Microsoft. In 2005, Bill Gates wrote an internal memo warning of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) threat to his company’s revenue stream from desktop and local network applications. Google tiptoed around Microsoft by surreptitiously purchasing land in northern Oregon under the DBA “Design LLC,” and building what’s believed to be the worlds largest data processing plant. By contrast, Amazon Web Services simply exploits the excess capacity it already has, selling cheap data storage and “virtualization” services.

But the big proof-of-concept for SaaS came in 1999 from Salesforce.com, which rented its cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software to companies at a mere $50 per user per month, including a free trial, instead of selling it to companies for tens of thousands of dollars. Reliability and response time were demonstrably similar to local installations, and the software allowed some data to be saved for users to work offline. Moreover, Salesforce’s software was extensible — customers could write customized code to run on Salesforce’s systems. Sales skyrocketed from $50 million in 2002 to $500 million in 2007.

Chapter 5: The White City. The 1893 Columbian Expedition was the first World’s Fair to demonstrate what an electrified city, a “White City,” would look like. While most of the utopian rhetoric that followed was just that, the social transformations that actually did come to pass were real enough. Mass production under Henry Ford’s electrified factories, and subsequently those of his rivals, created a vast American middle class of unskilled workers who were paid higher wages to consent to tediously repetitive work. As this labor force grew, so did the need for personnel required to supervise and coordinate them, leading to an increase in skilled employment, and therefore for higher education. Prior to the 20th Century, the idea that those who failed to attend college were “deprived” was nonexistent. High school enrollment at the turn or the century was under 30 percent.

On the domestic front, electrification transformed housework without actually reducing it. In every decade from the 1910s through the 1960s, “women’s work” has steadily remained between 51 and 56 hours, despite the introduction of electric irons, vacuum cleaners and other paraphernia. These “labor saving” devices mainly resulted in raising the standard of cleanliness expected — an illuminating case study for analyzing the benefit of any technology.

Chapter 6: World Wide Computer. Computing differs from electricity in a key aspect. At the end-user level, the resources of a power tool cannot be shared with remote users. With information tools, resources are inherently sharable. Songs and movies can be exhanged by peer-to-peer systems like Bittorrent. Once the entire collection of systems and services become programmable, they form one giant World Wide Computer. A “mash-up,” for instance, can allow a sales representative to identify a customer stored in Salesforce’s system on a Google Map, and call the customer via Skype. A modern blogger can build a successful site exclusively with web-based tools for writing, image editing, video hosting, syndication and ad serving — essentially for free.

Chapter 7: From the Many to the Few. Between early 2005 and late 2006, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen went from tossing around an idea for an easy-to-use video sharing service to selling the result, YouTube, to Google for $1.65 billion. At the time of acquisition, YouTube had 60 employees. As late as 2006, Craigslist had 22 employees. When eBay purchased Skype for $2.1 billion, the internet telephone company had just 200 employees, with twice the number of subscribers as the 90,000-employee British Telecom.

On the internet, the means of production reduces the need for employment more radically than any previous technological advance. Electrified manufacturing, for instance, increased the need for managers, accountants and engineers. Much of the wealth now being created online is “user generated content,” from videos uploaded to YouTube and reference material submitted on Wikipedia to codebases contributed by open source programmers, shrewdly leveraged by entrepreneurs and investors. These online services provide the means of production for communal work, while keeping the fruits of such labor in the private sector.

Chapter 8: The Great Unbundling. Print journalism is fast becoming a casualty of user generated content, testing the social fabric of the free market. While blogs and online news services greatly expand the variety of perspectives available, their integrity is even more vulnerable to the whims of advertisers than their print counterparts. Since newpapers bundle serious news with more frivolous fare, all of it was equally underwritten by the same ad dollars.

Not so as papers move online. Online ads typically pay out on a click-through or page view basis, meaning that the cost of maintaining a bureau in Sierra Leone is unsustainable if the resulting articles get low page views, especially compared to the latest celebrity faux pas. Social imperatives collide with market norms. Readers who get their national and international news from aggregators like Digg and Reddit may soon find themselves with nothing of substance to aggregate.

The unbundling of news and discourse has other implications. When users can design and filter their own “programming” to suit their preferences, they experience less to challenge their biases. A liberal reader of The Wall Street Journal will inevitably rub against conservative opinion. A conservative reader of The New York Times will encounter liberal perspectives. Customized content threatens to undermine critical thinking by reinforcing presuppositions — “ideological amplification,” as researchers call it.

Chapter 9: Fighting the Net. Like many tools, amoral by nature, the internet can easily be used as a weapon. British forces in Basra found themselves under attack by insurgents armed with intelligence of the troops’ whereabouts from Google Earth. Sometimes, the internet itself is the target of attacks, with so-called “botnets” distributing torrents spam and “denial of service” attacks.

As critical institutions rely more heavily on the internet, the implications of online attacks — or disruptions stemming from natural disasters — cannot be underestimated. Airports, financial markets, and other commercial services in Hong Kong ground to a halt in late 2006 due to an earthquake off the coast of Taiwan. The only physical solution to single points of failure is further distribution of network hubs, which creates the political complication of foreign jurisdictions. Since most of the internet’s “root servers” belong to US agencies, the international community has mounted increasing pressure to democratize (or at least, internationalize) the network.

Chapter 10: A Spider’s Web. In theory, internet users are as anonymous as they want to be. In reality, it’s often possible to infer a user’s identity by correlating usernames, search terms, IP address prefixes, and public map information. Scripting a piece of software to “spider” and download thousands of Amazon wish lists, writer Tom Owad was able to correlate list authors with contact information from Yahoo People Search.

Even when name-level anonymity is preserved, the demographic profiling from large-scale, automated data mining exploits our increasing openness with each other online. “Computer systems are not at their core technologies of emancipation,” writes Carr. “They are technologies of control. They were designed as tools for monitoring and influencing human behavior, for controlling what people do and how they do it.” The author cites companies who are building mathematical models of their workforces based on their collected employee data. Google, for instance, asked its employees to fill out a 300-question survey whose questions ranged from the programming languages they know to the pets they keep.

Chapter 11: iGod. When Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin lets his hair down in an interview, he often talks about the search engine’s teleological development into an artificial intelligence Leviathan. Brin has mused that in the future, a person would be able to plug a “little version of Google” into his brain to “improve” it.

Using Google as a proxy for similar sentiments expressed by the technocracy, Carr’s final chapter foreshadows his recent, controversial essay for The Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stupid?. He asserts that on the internet, “we seem impelled to glide across the slick surface of data as we make our rushed passage from link to link.”

Epilogue. In one generation, one of civilization’s most fundamental inventions — the wick — ceased to be the primary source of artificial light, replaced by the metal filament. Citing an entry from a German diairist in wartime who was forced to live on candlelight during nightly air raids, he notes that electric light brightness imparts a paleness to everything it shines on. Hence our need to keep candles for more emotional interludes.

We tend to focus on what we gain by technological change, not what we lose. With generational change, the memory of what gets lost maintains the illusion that progress is an unalloyed benefit.

Conclusion

Carr has gone far beyond outlining the technological imperative that drives the migration to supply-side computing. He review it from within historical, social, economic, moral, and political contexts that lesser authors blithely disregard as a matter of geek utopianism. This is one of the best books I’ve read this year, and would recommend it to anyone curious about the shift to the cloud, or the consolidation of economic forces the shift portends. If that seems a bit much, at least sample some of Carr’s writing his persistently thought provoking blog, Rough Type.

Technorati Tags: Books, Review, Technology, Internet

GTD is more of an internal, cognitive process of clarification than a regimen of making lists to create gratuitous obligations. If an action list doesn’t accurately reflect the user’s intentionality, it needs to be pared down or built up until it does. If the written list is incomplete, some potentially important items are left in the mind to manage, reducing the motivation to consult the list when reflecting on what to do next, or determining what can wait.

A bigger problem with users of more thorough tasks management systems is dealing with overpopulated lists. The simplest strategy for dealing with a crowded list is to simply cancel some of the items on it. Sometimes that’s the best choice, but it doesn’t always lead to permanent relief. A recurring thought, acted on or not, is mental pollution.

That’s where the Someday/Maybe list comes in. The Someday/Maybe list contains all projects that the user has decided not to commit to at present. Just because something is a good idea doesn’t mean it needs to be followed through on with action.

Why track things that aren’t being acted on?

As I stated originally, GTD is really designed to track and clarify a person’s internal process. There are plenty of things that don’t need to be tracked, simply because they don’t consume any attention. I’d like to visit Paraguay, but it’s not something that’s on my mind regularly, or even infrequently. I certainly won’t be thinking about a missed vacation to Paraguay on my deathbed. So I don’t have “Visit Paraguay” on my Someday/Maybe list.

On the other hand, there might be a class that I want to take that I don’t have the budget for at the moment. Or I have a time consuming project (or a different class) that, when completed, will free up enough hours to consider taking the class. These desires sit in the background of our mind, and occasionally seep into the foreground while we’re trying to focus on something more relevant. By writing them down on a list that gets reviewed once a week, the brain can stop holding it in a virtual list.

Someday/Maybe problems

I’m a big fan of the Someday/Maybe list, and I’m always surprised at how often people express reservations about using one. Let’s look at some of the problems people have with the Someday/Maybe list, or the reasons the might resist implementing one in the first place.

1. It’s a procrastination list. A myth. Anyone in the 21st Century will be exposed to more compelling opportunities than he or she could possibly fulfill in three lifetimes. Hence the need to prioritize. Some projects will have more personal impact if done now, others won’t. Even if you eliminate every unworthy project you can think of (which should be done anyway), you’ll still have more to do than you can do now. So instead of constantly thinking about the things you defer, track them externally, giving them a brief review each week to see if they’re still relevant. It only takes one or two minutes. Recover your thinking time for things you’re actually working on.

2. It’s too long. If your Someday/Maybe list has 90 items, there’s a good chance that you’ll resist reviewing it. It’s definitely worth reviewing the list carefully enough each week to see what can be deleted from it. If I don’t get rid of at least one or two items during a weekly review, I’m probably glossing over the list rather than reading it. That’s keeping a system for the sake of keeping a system.

A good trick in reviewing the list is to scan it with the question in mind, “What can I get rid of?” Even if you don’t get rid of anything some weeks, you’ll find that you pay more attention to the process. You might want to create a next action to edit the list as thoroughly as possible. Consider putting some items that you’ll still think about occasionally but not every week in a less frequent queue, either on your calendar or your tickler file.

3. It’s teeming with fantasies. Possibly against the GTD canon, I do not put fantasies on my Someday/Maybe list; otherwise I wouldn’t take it seriously. If I know my chances of climbing Mount Everest are close to zero, it becomes an additional thing to wade through or winnow out on my list. Unless the fantasy is galvanizing enough for me to exert significant effort to accomplish against the odds, it stays off my list. I think of the Someday/Maybe list as a “temp file” for projects in the pipeline, but left in reserve as a matter of good triage.

4. It’s not used for practical issues. This is really an extension, or the flip side, of the previous problem. The Someday/Maybe list can and should be used for very earthbound projects that have dependencies that need to be reconciled first. Someone might be anxious to buy a home, but realizes that it’s not the fiscally responsible thing to do at this stage. So she puts, “Buy home” on her Someday/Maybe list, and decides to make “Build emergency fund” or “Eliminate consumer debt” an active project.

Some things on my list will become active projects in a week or two. If a resolved dependency makes a potential project actionable before my next weekly review, I set a reminder for the appropriate date on my calendar.

5. It’s filled with many things in a few categories. Consumer products are typical examples. As great as the Someday/Maybe list is for avoiding impulse purchases, having every book you want to read or DVD you want to watch on it would get out of hand. Turn these into checklists. Pretty much collection of items that begins with the same phrase (”Travel to . . .”) should be kept on a separate list. If there’s something that falls into one of these categories that you sense you’ll act on sooner than later (you’re a paycheck away from the DVD you plan to get next week), go ahead and keep it on Someday/Maybe.

6. It sounds noncommittal. A number of people simply don’t like the wording of the “Someday/Maybe” list, another reservation that makes the list seem geared for procrastination. So change the wording to something that makes internal sense. Some people use just “Someday” or “Maybe,” but not both; or they may use both words individually, but as separate categories with different connotations. “Deferred” and “Incubate” are other options. Be creative.

7. It contains unresearched projects. As I pointed out in Somedays, Research and Edgework, we sometimes avoid deciding to commit to a project because we lack sufficient information. For items that are important it’s more effective to initiate a research project to get the information than let it the decision sit indefinitely.

Instead of putting “Start a home based messenger service” on a Someday/Maybe list, you might recognize that what’s holding you back is not knowing the startup cost. So you can put “Determine start-up cost of messenger service” on your active project list, then put “Call owner of ACME messenger service to request interview” on your next action list. Once you’ve gotten the information you needed, you can still put the business idea on Someday/Maybe, but at least you’ll be making an informed decision.

(Photo credit: Alex-S)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity

(Play Video)

Most people who think they lack ideas might very well have the opposite problem. They may have so many ideas that they obscure each other. It’s not a problem of having ideas, but of seeing them. Once they’re visible, it becomes easier to see their relationships to each other, prioritize them if necessary, identify their central theme, find related details and resources, and eliminate the ones that aren’t critical to the project at hand. To paraphrase a business cliche, we need to work on our ideas rather than in them.

MindManager is the best known software for mind mapping — the art of diagramming networks of discrete thoughts around a central topic. Some people still prefer mind mapping by hand, since it’s faster and more intimate. But software based mind mapping has a number of advantages.

• The resulting mind maps look more professional
• They can be shared in several file and image formats
• Files and web links can be attached to topic nodes
• The user can rapidly convert maps into lists and back
• Its possible to collaborate in real time with other users

I last used MindManager 6 about two years ago, when I sold my laptop without realizing I had no backup copy of the software on it. Before long, I was actually relieved at not having it on my newer laptop, since mind mapping had become an addictive time sink. While many long time users insist that MindManager 2002 remains the best version ever, I’ve always thought that MindManager 6 had the best user interface of any piece of commercial software on Windows. Let’s see if things have evolved with Version 7.

Interface design

The first change that any veteran user will notice is the Office 2007 style ribbon interface. At first glance, it’s a love-or-hate innovation. Most users will find that it’s an acquired taste.  MindManager has plenty of features that I would be unaware of if they weren’t persistently visible on the ribbon, neatly arranged in grouped tabs.

One example of this was the Focus on Topic feature I don’t recall seeing in the previous version. If you have a node selected (what MindJet calls a topic), clicking on Focus on Topic will move the entire map to position the focused topic in the center of the document window. It may seem like a minor adjustment on paper, but I found myself using this feature constantly, since it made it easier to develop child items into more complete maps. Another happy discovery was the Balance Map feature, which arranges an equal number of topics to be displayed on either side of the central topic.

The ribbon does gobble up precious real estate. Fortunately it can be collapsed or restored by double-clicking any menu heading. For newcomers, the improved tooltips are a good way to get familiarized with the app. These tooltips typically have two or three lines of description, and they’re almost better for touring MindManager than the installed or linked guides.

Office integration

Mind mapping isn’t reserved for free thinking romantics, and MindManager demonstrates this by buddying up to MS Office in every conceivable way. Outlook tasks, appointments, contacts and notes can be inserted into mind maps, as well as ranges and full spreadsheets from Excel. From MindManager, you can export tasks into Outlook, or entire maps as PowerPoint or Word documents.

Other import and export functions

MindManager has other options for sharing maps. Maps can be exported as PDFs, as images (including GIF, JPEG and other formats), HTML pages, and even OPML files (collections of feed subscription links). Slightly more relevant than exporting OPML files is the ability to import them, so you can theoretical have a research project that gets updated with related RSS feeds.

Views

Not every collaborator will want to see your ideas in the form of a mind map. MindManager now allows you to toggle between Map View and Outline View. Outline View is also useful for exporting to MS Word or any text editor. In Map View, you have the ability to globally expand or collapse the map by one or two levels of hierarchy. One of my favorite commands is Show Branch Alone, which displays the selected topic and its children without showing the rest of the map.

The zoom level can be adjusted dynamically with a slider, but I mainly used the Fit Map button whenever my maps grew beyond the document window.

One feature that I never use, but seems to be popular with other MindManager users, is the Select by Rule tool. Topics can be selected by queries (that can be saved), map markers, task information and other criteria. This probably comes in handy for delegating parts of a project to a someone.

The notes window in Version 6 was justified to the right exclusively, which bothered some users. Now the notes windows can be positioned below the document as well.

The print options have been expanded to include headers and footers, so you’re not stuck with having the map’s central topic as the title, which could get annoying. You can also choose to print a map on a single page, or across several pages.

Formatting

You can control the growth direction of your mind map from the menu. These can be omnidirectional maps, concept fans sprawling left or right, or pyramidal org charts. You can even change the map style of your current work in real time. For instance, a standard org chart layout can be transformed into to a split tree format. If your map is asymmetrical, with more topics on one side then the other, you can select Balance Map to even things out.

One thing I keep hoping to see in MindManager is an easy way to access line patterns with directional arrows for informal flowcharting. I frequently need connections between topic nodes to express a transition of some kind, and the only software I’ve that lets me to this easily is CmapTools (which has other problems). You can do this in MindManager if you select a “Relationship Shape” — a dotted line that can be straight, curved or angled, but dotted lines have different connotations than solid ones.

Some users, usually adherents of Tony Buzan’s canon of mind mapping, are increasingly critical of the “corporate” look of MindManager’s included map styles. They might want to take a look at some of the style templates in the Miscellaneous folder (like “Circles”), and modify them with additional colors and images. It is possible to create organic looking maps with the app; it’s just not the default.

The timer

If you’re like me, and find mind mapping too good for your own good, you’ll appreciate the countdown timer tool to reign in your brainstorming sessions. It would’ve been nice to see this feature incorporated in Presentation Mode as well.

Map Markers

You can add various “map markers” to topics to denote priority levels, highlights, completion status, discussion points, decisions, and emotional values (like smileys for agreeable items). These would be great in conjunction with the Select by Rule and Show/Hide filtering tools.

Mindjet Connect

Mindmapping in the cloud with a tool like MindMeister is nice, but I prefer having any critical authoring software on my own computer, with web-based functionality as a supplement. Mindjet Connect is the company’s service for real-time collaborative mind mapping with MindManager clients, featuring instant meeting (for Windows clients), chat and email integration. Like a couple of other value-adds to MindManager, I chose to forgo testing this service to get this review finalized, but I will be review it separately in the future.

Is MindManager worth buying?

If you’re a power user of Version 6, then probably not. By power user, I mean someone who knows the vast majority of features in the software, and can access them with the shortcut keys or without much effort.

If you’re new to software-based mind mapping, and you’ve tried out some of the free alternatives (like FreeMind or Compendium), you’ll probably end up graduating to MindManager 7. It has an incredibly intuitive interface, a ton of features now made visible with the ribbon, and very tight MS Office integration. For project managers, there are a couple of useful add-ons, like Mindjet’s own JCVGantt and Gyronix’ ResultsManager.

But definitely try before you buy — it’s pricey. After the 30-day free trial, a single-user license of the Pro version is $349, and $174 for the upgrade version. Mac users, rejoice! The Pro version is $129, and the upgrade is $69.

Technorati Tags: MindManager, Mind Mapping, Mindmapping, Brainstorming

There’s a reason why so many books and blog posts warn readers about the dangers of checking email, but they usually reach the right conclusions for the wrong reasons. Instead of recommending that you never check email in the morning, or to avoid checking email between scheduled intervals, I have a better suggestion.

Never check email. Ever.

Treading water

From the receiver’s perspective, the goal of any message is to understand its content. Some messages are more or less content free, and fit for passive consumption. No one has to struggle with cat pictures forwarded from bored coworkers. It’s obvious enough to delete or archive these, unless the recipient retains the habit of leaving all messages in his or her inbox. Spam may be annoying, but dealing with it is a no-brainer. A “real” message, on the other hand, requires conscious decision making.

“Checking” email is a mindset of monitoring the inbox for messages that look important or interesting, rather than systematically reviewing all messages to identify the nature of each.

We scan the From and Subject lines, skipping on if they don’t catch our attention. Out of 80 messages, 20 might be worth actually opening. We open one of these, glance at the body, and intone the “Hmmm” to ourselves that translates as, “This one can probably wait.” Then we repeat the process with the other 19, occasionally distracted by new messages trickling into the inbox the interim. When we finally hit on one that merits our full attention, it becomes all consuming. We spend the next 15 minutes handling whatever crisis is contained in the email. The other messages have to wait.

Deep diving

The alternative to checking email is processing. Processing means sequentially deleting or opening each message in the inbox, and making a decision about what needs to be done about it.

1. We start at the first email header. If the header makes it obvious that the message can be deleted, it gets deleted on the spot.
2. If it’s not instantly deletable, we open the message and ask, “What is this?”
3. We ask ourselves if the content of the message has an actionable item embedded it in.
4. If so, and the action can be done in less than two minutes, we do it right then, even if it’s a low priority item. Then we delete the message (or archive if that’s your preference). It’s inefficient to reread it later, or put the action on a list, if the action is short enough to be done now.
5. If the action takes longer than two minutes, we deliberately avoid taking immediate action on it. Instead, we tag the email or move it to a folder called “@Action” (see post on context lists if this doesn’t make sense) and write down any projects, actions or calendar items in the appropriate areas. Other possible tag or folder names would be “Reply” or “Follow Up.” Whatever it’s called, the point is to get it out of the inbox. This makes it clear which items in the inbox have been processed — the ones that aren’t there.
6. If the message requires further input from the sender before further action on our part can be taken, we tag the email or move it to a folder called “@Waiting For.” Optionally, we write this into an “@Waiting For” list apart from the email client, with the date name of the sender and the date the Waiting For was created.
7. We determine that someone else needs to handle the action, or is better qualified (like customer service or tech support), we forward or CC the email to the appropriate party, with a line or two indicating what needs to be done with it.
8. If the message doesn’t contain any actionable items, we determine whether it needs to be archived or deleted. Some people archive all email, which is fine, as long as the archive is somewhere other that the inbox. Reserve the inbox for incoming messages.
9. We repeat this process for each message, one by one, until the inbox is empty.

We’ve separated the wheat from the chaff. Non-actionable items have been deleted or archived, and items requiring only short actions have been completed. What’s left is an @Action folder comprised of messages that require more time and attention for action.

Processing time

Processing seems long in description, but it goes much faster in practice.

Let’s look at the highly unlikely worst-case scenario. Batch processing an inbox of 100 messages, if the Two Minute Rule is strictly followed, would take a maximum of 50 minutes. Each email gets one-touch handling if it’s less than two minutes; otherwise it’s deleted, delegated or deferred (hence the instruction to “deliberately avoid taking immediate action” on longer items).

Realistically, processing 100 messages takes far less time. Some messages will be instantly recognized as deletable. Some messages will take a few seconds to determine whether or not they’re actionable, and if so, what action needs to be taken on it. Some quick-action messages will take all of two minutes, but others will take a fraction of that time (30 seconds is a long time for some replies). If, after two minutes, the point of the email is still vague but seems actionable, file it in @Action write make reading the email a next action on your @Computer list.

The Two Minute Rule: in dogma and principle

The two-minute length for immediate action is a dogma designed for convenience. The principle is that if an action is sufficiently short, it’s more efficient to do it in the moment than to write it down, review, then do it later. The heavier the workload, the shorter the length should be. If you regularly get 300 email a day, you’re probably better off making it a one-minute rule. If you get 30 email a day, you can probably get away with five minutes per message.

Whatever length you decide, make the decision up front before attacking your inbox. Having a set maximum length prevents you from getting lost in the content of the current message. What often happens when “checking” email is that someone allows the perceived urgency of a new message to consume his or her attention exclusively, resulting in a string of serial digressions that leave the remaining messages unattended.

Email doesn’t land in our inbox in order of priority. Spending 15 minutes on an important email might be a poor use of time if the next email is even more important. The only way to prioritize email is to process every message in the inbox first. The Two Minute Rule is designed to ensure that you get through all messages before spending excessive time on any one of them.

The dreaded @Action folder

You’ve gotten all the minutiae out of the way, and now you’re left with the items that represent real work. Welcome to life. There’s no trick to dealing with it, unless you’re prepared to outsource your life. Whether you processed your email or checked it, you would have had to get to these items anyway. But now, instead of wondering what needs to be done, you know what needs to be done.

What’s the advantage of processing?

Processing seems to take longer than haphazardly checking email because the time spend isn’t scattered. You’re not revisiting the same messages several times. You’re not “sort of” deciding on what to do about an email; you’re finishing the loop. And to repeat: everything in your inbox needs to be handled anyway. So handle it once instead of checking it a dozen times by the afternoon.

When you’ve processed your inbox, you have a list of precisely what to do about any outstanding work. Because people who check email leave some or many items undecided, even when they’re away from the computer, their minds are still in their inbox. With processing, you recognize that the only way out of the inbox is through it.

(Photo credit: Somewhat Frank)

I’ve written several times in passing about inherent flaws in what’s usually called “time management,” particularly about the central assumption that controlling time is synonymous with increasing productivity. The time-and-motion model of productivity is an Industrial Age artifact that springs from the need for lockstep coordination of tasks on the assembly line. When cranking widgets requires a fixed-rate throughput, the need for doing most things at set times is absolute.

This model breaks down in knowledge work, where new inputs are typically experienced as interruptions. Without the ability to capture incoming work, or to suspend current work in a way that allows it to be resumed without woolgathering, only predefined work is deemed important. To reinforce the emotional investment in each predefined task, the time management adherent assigns arbitrary start and end times. This does two of three things:

• It defers the task, even if there’s no reason it couldn’t be done sooner
• If too little time is allocated, the person experiences resistance to the unrealistic demand and procrastinates
• If too much time is allocated, the person paces the task to fill the excess

None of these problems are fatal. On the contrary, there are times when the liabilities are outweighed by the benefits. For tasks requiring sustained periods of deep concentration, blocking out one or more hours makes more sense than chipping away at them in smaller increments.

The real problem with scheduling happens when a calendar is used as a to do list. I recently wrote about this in the post, Reclaim Time by Unscheduling Arbitrary Tasks. Unlike most home-based workers, office workers have to deal with frequent but irregular inputs. There are only so many calls someone can allow to go to voice mail, so many requests from bosses, customers and coworkers that c