Category Archives: Essays - Page 2

Getting It Done… Again?

Posted by on September 15, 2011 Comments Off

Okay, it was about a month ago that I got back on the GTD train. I’m not exactly sure what caused it, but I think was really starting to feel overwhelmed and I had a number of personal projects that were driving me crazy. Strangely I was being pretty productive with my coding projects, but stunningly ineffective with everything else and the stress was getting to me.

Now this is probably my third trip to the GTD dance. I first learned about it 6 years ago, and I thought it was the bees knees. But the incredible attention to detail usually overwhelmed me and I’d give up. But then life would completely overwhelm me and I would come back to it. So this time, instead of being completely doe-eyed that I’d convert everything I started small.

So I started in my personal life. And I started to go through all the todo apps I’d started to collect. I realized that perhaps some software had advanced since I’d last taken a tour through the world of todo apps.

What I needed (or wanted) was something that would let me enter tasks on my Mac, then take them with me on my iPhone. If there was an iPad version that was a bonus. But the goal was to be able to quickly capture information with a full sized keyboard, access to online resources, and then be able to take those lists of tasks with me where ever I went.

I knew the one important thing about Getting Things Done, was that I needed contexts. The ability to look at my tasks from a different point of view. In fact from a very specific point of view, the environment or context by which they would be executed. Having two points of view was critical to effective GTD for me.

The other thing I really wanted was the ability to set a start date for my tasks. One of the best, but hardest to implement ideas I found in GTD was the idea of the tickler file. You stick tasks you can’t act on yet into a future folder. That way you don’t have to think about it until the task comes into a time frame when you can actually do something about it.

For example, every two weeks I have to open the flood valve in our back yard to irrigate our lawn. I want to be reminded the day before but I don’t want to see that reminder in my to-do list every day. Or perhaps there a BluRay movie I want to buy. It won’t go on sale for a few weeks, and it doesn’t really matter which day I buy it, but I don’t want it to show up on my BestBuy shopping list until I can actually buy it. I love start dates. Very few systems seem to support them.

I think it’s important to point out that a start date is not a due date. A due date is something that REALLY has to be done by a certain day. Things like this probably really belong on a calendar, but if you have to complete a task by a certain date (like turn in a homework assignment) having it in your daily tasks is better than sticking it on a calendar in the future where you may forget about it.

The key difference is that a start date constrains WHEN you can act on a task (and when it takes up precious room in your brain) and a due date constrains when a task MUST be completed. After watching an excellent video series by David Sparks of Macsparky.com, I now rarely use due dates. I employ start dates religiously to help manage my mental load of what I’m going to get done and when.

So, where to start?

To Do Apps

I’m looking for todo apps with a Mac client, and an iPhone app. A web based client is okay, as long as it’s easy to use and quick. The apps I looked at were:

Things
Toodledo
Remember The Milk
ToDo
Get It Done

Initially, I completely discounted OmniFocus as being way too complex and expensive. Ironic, as in the end that is the tool I use daily. But I’ll get to that.

What worked what didn’t

Things – I love the look of things, it’s simplicity, and the power of tagging. What absolutely kills things is the lack of syncing. While I can sync between home and work – oh yeah, another critical requirement. Their syncing between iPhone and mac is atrocious. They really need a syncing solution and they don’t appear to be working on one. Plus it’s expensive. Boo Things.

Toodledo – Was absolutely one of the best solutions I looked at. While they don’t have a desktop client, their website in general is excellent and they supported all the features I wanted. Except, their syncing with the iPhone just didn’t work. If you created a project on the web, it didn’t show up on the iPhone and changes on the iPhone didn’t sync back to the web. It was crazy. What’s more, they had SO MANY options for each task, entering tasks on the web felt clumsy. Despite Toodledo’s great features, I can’t use something if it doesn’t work and the sync killed it for me. Rats Toodledo

ToDo and GetItDone Looked promising. I didn’t like GetItDone’s $40 a year subscription fee. I’ve had OmniFocus for 5 years. At $40 a year, would be like spending $200 for an app. Heck, I don’t like paying that for Office. I’m not paying that for a task manager. ToDo looked promising but was slow.

Remember The Milk The winner for me was Remember the Milk. Bar none it had absolutely the fastest mechanism for entering tasks (capture is important) and it was simple. There was an outstanding blog post by a user who explained how he used RTM for GTD and that gave me the handle I needed to start using it. The iPhone syncing worked flawlessly and once I got the idea down I could begin using it.

Next… How I started with RTM.

Game Cancelled Until Tomorrow

Posted by on August 3, 2011 No comments

The powers that be decided to cancel the Rangers game until tomorrow. It’s really strange. This experience has been much different than I imagined. It would be easy to be really negative
– this post should have been posted yesterday.
Communication around the rainouts was VERY poorly communicated stranding the team at the field for 5 hours.

I finally understand Twitter

Posted by on July 18, 2011 No comments

I have to confess that I never understood twitter. I knew it was SMS (short messaging system) based but why? All the buzz on blogs like lifehacker and gizmodo and engadget all talked about desktop applications, or apps for your iPhone or iPad. I tried it a couple of times, but there was nothing I could do with twitter that I could not do better with a blog, or email. Tumblr is simple and clean and effective. Facebook is way more popular to most of the people I know and easier to understand.

But I did see lots of celebs using twitter… Like their one personal PR channel, but I’m not famous and no one really cares what I have to say in 140 characters or less so what good is it?

Then I tried to send a group text to 24 people…the result? A big fat FAIL! That’s what. You can’t do it. Even more depressing, I got myself caught in tech no mans land. I use google apps for everything. Google supports Microsoft exchange format. iPhone supports Microsoft exchange format. So now I have google apps integrated with my iPhone and it rocks EXCEPT I can’t get my google groups to flow through to my iPhone. This means that creating texting groups on my iPhone means I’m buying an app. Sigh… Really?

And then.. AT&T won’t let you send a group text to more than 10 people. Seriously.

And then I learned something about twitter. You don’t need a computer. In fact you can sign up for twitter right from your phone. And it’s simple.

Now I know why 10947462786468618 people use twitter. It’s the network marketing (re pyramid scheme) of communication. If I create a twitter account with my phone. And my friends create a twitter account with their phone and FOLLOW me. Every time I send a text message to 40404 – everyone who follows me gets that “tweet”.

In short, I can create a text distribution network using twitter that is almost limitless. Forget the PC and the apps, once you connect your phone to a twitter account, you and your friends can use it as a sort of public broadcast system. If everyone in the group follows everyone else then it becomes like a public Internet chat room.

That’s some powerful stuff.

I started using it to keep my baseball team up to speed with important information while on a travel tournament and 90% of the parents signed up. So far everyone has gotten my texts and using retweets I can take messages sent to me and I can share them with everyone else. The only thing I don’t like about it, is that twitter is not private like email. At least I haven’t figured out how to do that yet.

But for me, I can now see how twitter can be used as an awesome group communication tool. Just don’t tweet and drive.

Eleven Disciples

Posted by on May 2, 2011 Comments Off

Eleven Disciples

I was at bible study last Friday, and we were going over Hebrews Chapters 10 and 11. Chapter 11 is somewhat famous because of it’s roll call of Faith. Even people who don’t read the bible have probably heard some of the verses from Hebrews 11. But in studying the Chapter one of the core problems I have personally struggled with is the idea of forgiveness.

You see, if you accept Christ as your savior, your salvation is secured. It’s paid for. Done. But what does that mean as you keep living? What happens if you sin again? Did you undo it?

Chapter 10 verse 26:27 sounds pretty awful.

If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.

Wow. Not good. But consider this. Just a few versus before in 23 through 25:

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

The key phrase here for us was consider how we may spur one another toward love and good deeds.

We all fall short, we are all sinners. But that does not mean we are lost. Our purpose, our mission is to live and meet together and encourage each other.

Ministry on the Ball Field

Suddenly it occurred to me that I had an example right before my eyes. Baseball. I have often said that baseball is great game because it teaches us to handle failure and overcome, to persevere. No one is perfect in baseball. No pitcher strikes out every batter. No hitter bats 1000. Even at the pro level they make mistakes (errors) in the field. Yet… we all still play. We all still press on.

Suddenly, I could see a model that reflects God’s vision for us, once again painted in the world around me if only I was open and willing to see it. On every team I have coached, with every group of young men I have worked with, there exists the spectrum of believers. We have boys who act with complete faith. They go all out, putting their very best into their efforts. Whether it is practice, or a game or a tournament. Whether they know it or not, their play is an act of faithful living. They are putting their best effort forward toward and uncertain outcome, but they are undeterred. Regardless of failure, they know the only way to “win”, to achieve their goals is to commit totally and play with confidence.

Then there are the group of boys who want to be good, who want to believe, but they’re not sure. They are uncertain. Their hesitation and uncertainty slows them down, just a step. A late swing, a pause before attacking a ground ball and suddenly failure looms large and heavy upon them and they think, “see I’m not good enough.” And the cycle is repeated.

Then there are the boys who are happy to be there. This is a fun activity. They are hanging out with their friends. Life is good. All of this commitment and effort is about the team, not them personally right? They’ve done everything that’s been asked of them. They’ve gone to the practices, they’ve done the drills. That’s good enough right? Just let me hang here and enjoy the atmosphere. Winning is fun. It’s difficult for this group ever to make the connection between the activity, and themselves personally. To see this as an opportunity to grow and develop.

Then you might have the super talented kid, the one who has all the potential in the world, but it’s wrapped up in fear of failure. He can’t put himself out there. It’s not a hesitation. It’s a rejection… of baseball. He thinks, I can come to baseball on my own terms, my own way. I can dictate how this will work. And we all see the potential of that athlete, how rich and rewarding his experience could be, if he would just submit to the idea that he’s not in control. He can’t be. That’s not what this is about.

And while the Bible might say some scary things about rejecting Christ, it’s also very clear that he put significant efforts into recruiting everyone, into reaching out to non-believers. Many parables indicate that forgiveness, enrollment is open to all. Even until the last hour.

And then it occurs to me that despite the errors, despite the mistakes, despite all the different approaches everyone of these players belongs. They are all part of this team. They are all part of my team. And I have a responsibility to them. To help them not only improve, but to help them on their journey to live a life of faith and confidence, to believe. I don’t know what God’s plan is. I don’t know what is going to happen when the ball leaves the bat. But I know what my role is. As a player I must act with faith and confidence and every ounce of ability I have to try and use the talents bestowed me, the skills taught to me, to try and achieve a positive outcome. I must give my best. That’s all I can do. And when I do that, I am a light on a stand serving as a beacon to others that it is possible.

And when you achieve that, when you can play that way, we don’t want players who Lord their excellence over others. We want people who can serve as a guide, an inspiration. People who “spur others on” to say, “I’m not so different from you. I have done it. You can do it too!”

As a mentor, as a coach, as a shepherd. My role is to encourage, instruct and guide. I must teach them the skills, but more importantly try to cultivate the attitude of effort. This is my flock, my responsibility. And like the players I must use all of my talent, skill and effort to help these young men understand what they are capable of becoming. And just like I don’t want to lose a single player, I believe the Lord does not want to lose a single one of us.

We will all be at different points along our journey of faith, and sometimes, like a player in a slump we may fall back and need help and encouragement to regain our confidence, but that is the mission, the job. To meet, to gather, and push, cajole and encourage each other to live lives of faith and confidence, to give everything we have and know that it is all we can do.

I am no theologian. I am not a minister. I am Christian man trying to live a life of faith and make difference in the lives of the people I love, in the community around me, and in the world as a whole. A long time ago St Frances of Assisi said,

It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching

I first heard that quote in DeWit Jones inspirational video, “Celebrate What’s Right With the World”. I am always encouraged and amazed when I find something like that in my own personal life, right under my nose.

So as I go through my season, teaching, instructing, learning. I now see this same Wisdom in the writings of the Late John Wooden when he said, “My goal was to help players become the best they are capable of becoming.” And The Capstone of his pyramid of success.

Competitive Greatness is being your best when your best is most needed.

Wooden actually never mentions winning. In fact, he talks almost dismissively about how important it is. As once you start winning, that will not be enough to satisfy your critics. He talks about development, potential and playing with grace and confidence to do your best.

When I read the bible, I see that Christ wants no less from us, and for us. That’s what makes Christ my role model for a coach. I just wish I could be better at it, but I see that as long as I’m striving, putting my best effort forward and living with faith and confidence. Even my errors will be forgiven. I will still belong.

Using Scrivener + TextMate + WordPress

Posted by on April 30, 2011 2 comments

I’m pretty impressed with the simplicity of using Markdown as a writing format. It’s concise, simple and powerful. However there are a few features about using a workflow like this.

First, why not the browser?

Just exactly right now I wanted to change this into a header and in the browser instead of writing, I’m thinking about clicks and menus and markup to make that happen. Even with a great tool like TextExpander for the Mac it’s a distraction. With Markup it’s a few key strokes. That’s why I use Tiddlywiki as my development notebook instead of WordPress. I can simply write FASTER. I probably should take a stab at putting Tiddlywiki’s parser into a wordpress plugin, but who has time right?

Another problem with the browser is speed. Saving, updating, waiting, sometimes on my host can be slooooowww. With TextMate I can get instant previews. So writing on a native app is quicker and more responsive.

But what could go wrong?

The main problem I have with Scrivener + TextMate + WordPress is that invariably as I move through the pipeline I want to make changes. I discover formatting anomolies. Places were I needed to add an extra return, or a spelling mistake I didn’t catch in Scrivener. Then as I read it, I want to make minor tweaks in the text to polish the prose.

The real issue

Is that these changes are not easily transported backward through the pipeline. That means my long term record needs to be handled in the final target, and the first couple of steps are only about initial production.

I suppose I could just use TextMate, but it does not organize nor archive information the way Scrivener does (it’s real strength). So there you have it.

Pros:

  • Scrivener is powerful for organizing text and references
  • Textmate is responsive and quick with formatting and previews

Cons:

  • Changes in the later stages are not easily converted back through the pipeline.

Workflow Scrivener to TextMate to WordPress

Posted by on April 30, 2011 No comments

Markdown Test

I’m writing this in scrivener to then test converting it with TextMate for posting in wordpress.

The general idea here is to use a very simple markdown language that makes writing simpler and easier to read without having to go through all the problems of html conversion. The other idea is that if you only have the plain text, the document is still extremely readable. They use a new acronym called WYSIWYM – What You See Is What You Mean.

I agree that one problem with HTML is that the source is often very, very difficult to read. The interjection of tags and elements can make a document difficult to decipher. Even Scrivener suffers from the over complication syndrome. Literally they create a span for an apple space. Really?
Is that necessary?

References

Here are a few of the websites I found that lead me to try this workflow.
1. Practically Efficient.
2. Ice To the Brim.

The author of Ice To the Brim also uses a really nice piece of screencasting software called: ScreenFlow by Telestream. Looks really impressive.

iPad Apps Starting To Show Promise

Posted by on June 12, 2010 No comments

When I first got my iPad, I was very impressed with the media capabilities. Watching Videos with NetFlix, Reading the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today and Epicurious is just gorgeous. It replaced my kindle the day I got it. And the games are decent, but there are still limits to what you can do with a touch screen (compared to a controller ) but the visual quality is outstanding.

Still, the one big draw back was creating content. Keyboard support is spotty, and there’s no easy way to flip between apps when you want to clip something from a website to put into a Pages document. Even creating emails felt like an iPhone app and not something you would expect to find on a useful computer with a screen this big. And don’t get me started about pen based input. It’s still a joke.

So I figured that the iPad would be mostly a reader or browser, until I saw Photosplash.

The first real program I used to create anything meaningful on my iPad was MaxJournal. During our vacation I kept a daily journal of what we did and attaching photos to it was cool. The iPad is still a nightmare to get photos on for me because I tied it to the iPhoto library on my home machine. Once you’re out on the road, getting photos onto it was not trivial. I had to upload them to a web page with another computer and copy them down. I know why Apple didn’t put an SD card reader on the iPad. There’s open, and then there’s open. Apple believes in open with their permission. But like Jobs wrote in multiple emails, if you don’t like it buy something else.

However, back to Photosplash. This is a very, very clever application that allows you to selectively color photographs. And for the first time, it’s a creative program that feels way more natural on the iPad than any other platform I could image. The gist of it, is that they made coloring with the tip of your finger feel intuitive, and natural. Like coloring with charcoal, or finger paints. The ability to zoom in – even beyond pixel depth, to smoothly trace a region or a line is just amazing.

In just a few minutes I was able to create these images, photos that would have taken me hours to do in Photoshop, mostly because I’d still have to figure out how to do it.

And for the cost of the program? It was well worth it. Now that I’ve seen it, it seems like it is possible – I can’t wait to see what else they come up with.

iPalm – Old Palm Keyboard works with iPad

Posted by on June 7, 2010 No comments

I have been using PDA’s forever. Going all the way back to the original Palm. Along the way, I was always obsessed with having a real keyboard. So I have a bizarre collection of foldable portable keyboards. Perhaps even more bizarre is that I kept them all. Well one of those turns out to be a Bluetooth keyboard manufactured by Think Outside (now iGo.com).   After a little googling, I found the PDF guide for the keyboard and learned that

<Ctrl> <Left Fn> <Right Fn>

When held together will put the keyboard in discovery mode and low and behold the iPad will actually work with this keyboard!  In fact, it works quite well.  The Windows key acts like the Mac Command button, and the arrow keys and all the other function keys seem to work normally.

That has to be the first time ever that holding onto something for 10 years proved to be useful!

And the included Stand holds the iPad pretty well.

– Scott

Great iTunes Hack

Posted by on April 26, 2010 No comments

There’s so many things to learn, it’s hard to keep track of them all.  I found this one on Lifehacker.

I think like most people, I just don’t have the time to go through all my stuff.  I often wonder who does have the time to tag every picture with faces, or to correctly label all your music.  I’m sure it’s a wonderful thing if you do it, but my music collection has been a mess for… oh… 10 years?  When did I go digital?  Heck I don’t even remember.  I do remember seeing my first iPod way back in 99.  So it had to be shortly after that.

So I got a decade of crud built up in my collection and no amount of purging, murging or (what rhymes with *ging?) crying?  pounding?  well you get the idea.  Nothing has really made it better.  So we live in an uneasy truce.  My iTunes library holds yet another project I will never get to.

But today I found a very clever hack with smart playlists that lets me enjoy my music without cleaning it up.  Here’s the gist of it.  A lot like using SQL queries to get lists of information that you then run new queries against (called sub-queries or views) you can create a smart playlist, then use ANOTHER smart play list to filter it.  Essentially, you create 3 playlists, each that filters your music by quality and how recently it was played.  Then you create a master list that combines those three.  Songs you like a lot get mixed in more often.  Using shuffle, it’s every bit as good as Pandora.

For mine, I had to weed out Spoken Word, Children’s, and about a dozen other non-music related genres.  Then I created a list called “Banned” and anything that gets dumped in there gets excluded from my smart play list.  Over time I can go back and decide if I want to keep any of that junk.

Give it a whirl.  The only thing that confused me is that iTunes will change what options you have available depending upon what you are filtering against.  For example, select “Author” and you get one set of options.  Select Last Played and you get a different set of options.  Just play around to see which song attributes have which options.  Ultimately by combining different lists (rather than creating one UBER list) you can make some very powerful song combinations.  I’ve been listening to mine all afternoon and nearly all the things it’s playing are awesome, including some music I haven’t heard for a long time.

So give it a whirl.  It’s cool.

LastPass – and Password Card

Posted by on April 26, 2010 No comments

For quite a while I’ve used 1Password on my Mac to keep the 10,000 passwords I have to manage across all my accounts. This week I came across two tools that I’m very impressed with. The one problem with 1Password is that it doesn’t support google chrome (yet). And there’s no PC or Linux equivalent.

Well, Last Password (http://lastpass.com) is an amazing application that supports EVERY SINGLE browser I use. It stores all the information with one master password and early on I’ve been very impressed with it’s integration and utility.

The other nifty little tool I found via lifehacker.com. It’s a site called Password Card. (http://passwordcard.org). A Password card is quite clever. It’s basically a simple index card you carry in your wallet that allows you to create strong passwords and not have to remember them. How does that work?

Simple, you remember an index into the card, like square blue, or diamond green. Right now I’m playing with a triplet to recall like square white h9 or solidcircle purple v8. What does all that mean? You go to the solid circle symbol, then scan down to the purple row, and start reading off 8 characters vertically.

The reason for the 3rd option is that not all sites agree what makes a “strong” password. Some love the 8 random characters, symboles and digits, others need to see 9 before they thing a password is strong.

The genious of this system is that all you have to remember are simple things like a symbol name and a color, but the password itself is really difficult. You print the card, laminate it, and stick it in your wallet. Even if someone gets your wallet they won’t know what indexes to use to get your passwords. I’ve been using it for a few days, and so far I’ve been slowly upgrading all my passwords to “strong” passwords. It seems to work pretty well, especially with a tool like lastpass to help.

—

Update:  It’s harder than I thought it would be to remember things like color, symbol, direction count for each website.  And as good as last pass is, it can’t cover every situation.  Like desktop apps that need to login.  For example evernote, or iCal, or Mail.  Keeping track of the symbol / colors is trickier than I thought.