I’ve just started a new job, working as the information manager for Krome Studios, and it’s providing me with much food for thought. Unlike previous jobs, it’s a challenge – a welcome one, but it’s unusual to have to turn my brain on when I go to work in the mornings. Mind you, I’m sure half the people here think I’m goofing off all day; I work on the same floor as a bunch of programmers, rather than admin people, so they doubtless see all the web browser windows open on my monitor [web-based task management, IA bookmarks list, usability standards, etc etc] and think I’m just slacking.

Still – it’s a great company, and it’s an interesting and challenging job. Possibly only short-term, but I’m hoping for more.

Technorati Tags: career, job, information+management

Worry no more – D*I*Y Planner has a range of free PDF templates so you can create your own planner inserts, sized to fit filofaxes, daytimers, bigger, smaller… there’s even a Hipster PDA variant.

If I’d had access to a resource like this when I was still using a Day-Timer – or if I’d thought of doing something similar – I’d probably never have ditched it. Now to see if I can find an old binder somewhere around here so I can try them out.

Technorati Tags: hipster+pda, productivity, pim

I’m really, really bad at actually crossing anything off them.

This is for a number of reasons to do with my psychology and personal issues that we don’t need to go into here, but what it boils down to is: I’m a really bad procrastinator. Or, to put it another way: I’m a really good procrastinator. I excel at it.

So I make my to-do list and feel all proud about how organised I’m being – but when it comes time to actually do any of the items? My mind skitters away from each task; it’s all too hard. Instead, I read another webpage, play another game of solitaire, watch another game of hockey.
And nothing ever gets done.

I’ve recently come up with a solution that I’m trying out, to fool my brain into getting stuff actually done, chunking down each task into mentally-manageable bits. It’s cheaper than therapy, and the results are a lot quicker.

The system is an adaptation of the ‘tickler file’ system, where you have a set of hanging files for keeping notes and upcoming action items – one for each day of the upcoming month, plus one for each month of the year. I’ve worked with this system a little bit, and I find it really good for organising my upcoming projects and work—the problem is then in actually turning all this organised stuff into achievement.

What I’ve started doing is making what I call a ‘double entry’ for each to-do item. Sometimes, in fact, it winds up as more than two entries – but whatever it takes to work around my potholed mental state and get the job done, right?

I get a 3”x5” index card and cut it in half up the middle, so I have two pieces that are 3” high and 2.5” wide. Each one of these pieces becomes the cardstock for an action item. (You can also use blank business-card stock if you like; they’re a good size. Or recycle a stack of business cards you don’t need any more, writing on the back of them – environmentally-friendly, and compact to boot.)

I take my blank card and I write the name of the task at the top of it. On the next line I write “Discover.”“Discover” is my shorthand for “finding out what this task actually involves”. If the task is ‘submit a job application’, the Discover step is ‘work out how much I have to write, and when it’s due by’. The Discover step tells me, in a nutshell, what the task is going to require, and when I’m going to need to start work on it.

For example, I just wrote one out tonight.

Task: Buy a new journal.
Discover: Call up favourite stationery store and ask if they stock the product I want.

In fact, I just wrote ‘Discover’ on the card, because I know what that step requires for this task; I don’t need to write it out as a reminder.

The results of the Discover step tell me what to do with the card next. If I call up the stationery store tomorrow and find out they stock the product, I’ll cross out ‘Discover’ and write a new line saying “Monday: Buy it” and drop it into Monday’s folder so I can buy it while I’m in the city on Monday. If they don’t stock the product, the new line will say “Order journal online” and I’ll drop it into Saturday’s pocket to prompt me to order one from an online store over the weekend.

Obviously, the system isn’t perfect. There are a lot of tasks where breaking them down into a ‘Discover’ stage and an action stage is pointless because there’s nothing to discover. If my task is ‘tidy my desk’, there’s nothing to find out – I just have to get on and actually do it.

In a similar vein, this system is needlessly granular for high achievers who don’t need to trick their brain into performing in spite of itself. If you’re the kind of person who can go through their to-do list and actually get most of the stuff done without getting stuck in the endless loop of Just One More Round Of Solitaire, you don’t need this system.

But for folks like me—I can be, and usually am, my own worst enemy when it comes to turning ability into achievement—this is a really good way of breaking down a task into pieces so bite-size you can do them without realising. Using the Discover system, I find that tasks that previously looked imposing, too hard, or just too much suddenly become very achievable because I’m breaking them into bite-sized pieces and I’m allowing myself to procrastinate.

Procrastination’s part of the system. The whole point of the Discover mechanism is in saying “okay, here’s what I need to do. When do I have to do it by?” and then allowing myself to delay it an appropriate amount of time. Not too much delay, so that it’s late or I’m rushing; not too little, so that I feel pressured.

I find I get much better results with this strategy than in trying to force myself to participate in up-front achievement. When I try and do that, my brain just sits in a corner of my skull, sulking and eating icecream. This way, I’m giving myself a mechanism to let things percolate and come at them when I’m ready. No nasty surprises, just actual achievement.

So far it seems to be working okay. We’ll see how long it lasts!

Technorati Tags: gtd, tickler+file, productivity, lifehacks

I’m not entirely sure, yet, what links the two, but: the bloggers talking about GTD also talk about something that immediately struck a chord with me: life hacks. That’s the term for all those little life-managing strategies we’ve all developed for ourselves over the years; it originally started as a term for the scripts, hacks and workarounds that programmers developed as tools for themselves, but the phrase has since been expanded to apply to any productivity-enhancing strategy. Life hacks are really just ‘tips and tricks for managing one or more facets of your life’, and range from the really trivial to the brilliantly insightful.

The Baltimore Sun recently featured a somewhat patronising article on “Lifestyle Tips“, referring to the phenomenon. It does have a few links to the major sites; here are my favourites:

• Lifehacker and Lifehack, both of which feature hacks from the technological to the really, really simple. For my money I prefer the former, since it has a bunch of decently indepth articles and features.
  
• 43 Folders has a Life Hacks category, which often features the most innovative, impressive or useful hacks from the world of lifehacking. (My favourite recent hack is the Travel Tinker Trouble Kit, an Altoids tin packed with an impressive selection of tools and supplies.)
  
• For the latest developments, there’s always the del.icio.us ‘lifehacks’ tag page, and the relevant Technorati tags (‘lifehacks’ is the most popular, but there are some entries under ‘lifehacking’ and ‘LifeHack’ as well).

Now I’m trying to answer the question: what life hacks am I using? I know there are strategies and customised processes I’ve developed to deal with all kinds of little life challenges, but I can’t for the life of me think of any specifics at the moment.

Watch this space.

Technorati Tags: gtd, productivity, lifehacks

Speaking of RSS (or Atom), I note Google has just jumped on the bandwagon with Google Reader, news aggregation for the masses. I have some issues with this – like the fact that the Tour doesn’t even mention that it’s an aggregator. I understand the idea of not wanting to scare the layperson, and I can understand that Google may have wanted to avoid mentioning the specific technology so as not to validate their competition, but really. All they had to do was say something like “Google Reader subscriptions are powered by syndicated feeds, so every time you see an RSS or Atom link on one of your favourite news sites, you can read that news feed through Google Reader!” and that neatly turns a threat into an opportunity, to use modern business parlance.

One thing where I think Google dropped the ball? Google Talk is all wrong. Sure, it’s nice that it’s Jabber-compliant, but really – who needs yet another IM account (and, in the case of Windows users, probably another IM client)? I think the thrust of Google Talk’s efforts should have been in making a web-based IM client (plus allowing standalone client access for those as want to, of course). That’s where Gmail’s strength lies – it’s not that it’s another free email service, it’s that it’s got a really good fast web interface. If that had been the Cool Thing about Google Talk, it would have been much more exciting – and successful. As it is now, is anyone even using Google Talk much?

Technorati Tags: rss, blogging, aggregators, syndication, google, google+talk

One thing it does still bj0rk up, however, is my stats tracking. I’m getting so many hits a day from the comment spams that actual site readers get lost in the high noise-to-signal ratio. So – if you’re still out there, still reading? Hi. :)

Technorati Tags: blogging, spam, wordpress, stattraq

So here’s Athena, my lovely shiny iMac, sitting on my desk. It’s been a long time since I’ve been so happy with a computer purchase; she’s a pleasure to use.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of my iPod. It ceased functioning a couple of months ago, and I shipped it off to Apple for a replacement. (Thank heaven for warranties.) I got the replacement back very promptly – I must say, I am impressed with Apple’s replacement process – and filled it up with MP3s. Several days later, my music hard drive crashed in a fatal way (bye-bye 90 GB of music!) and several days after that, my iPod stopped working again. So it’s time to send it off for replacement again. I’m thinking seriously about an iPod Nano at this stage; 4GB of music is plenty for a portable player, and I’m thinking solid-state storage might be a wee bit more reliable.

Technorati Tags: apple, ipod, nano, imac

All of this has conspired to rather disconnect me from the world. It’s surprisingly hard to operate when you can’t see far or clearly, and as a result I’ve been moderately depressed and inactive. I certainly haven’t achieved much in the last three months. I’m studying – currently enrolled in the Graduate Certificate of Information Management at QUT. My grades are good. I finished the Graduate Certificate in Business Administration last semester, with similarly good results – one pass, disappointingly enough, but the rest of my grades ranged from Credits to High Distinctions, for a final GPA of 5.65. I’m still hoping to go into information architecture as a career when I’m done; my goal at the moment (other than ‘getting better’) is to find an internship or work experience project of some kind. Better yet, a proper job over the summer break would be nice. The layabout student lifestyle is all very well, but my work ethic is starting to itch.

In the meantime, I’m going to be tweaking this blog a bit, and finally getting the rest of the site up and running. Things may go a bit wonky over the next few days; I’m hoping to upgrade to WP1.5, since I’m currently being deluged with comment spam. My WP plugins are stopping it for moderation, but I still have to delete hundreds of comments from the moderation queue every day, which is a bit excessive.

Technorati Tags: injuries, ia, information+architecture, education, careers

Apparently I’m better enough, now, to injure myself again. Tonight at Marty’s I tripped on the inch-high step into the bathroom (gimme a break; it was dark and I’m not familiar with his flat) and cannoned into the room. I put out a hand to break my stumble and smashed it into the countertop.

I don’t think it’s broken, but oy, it hurts to type.

Technorati Tags: injuries, pain

Now, however, there’s something of a dilemma. Using LiveJournal tags provides one with the fundamental functionality of tagging, and it will provide a quick-n-dirty way of categorising posts – a feature that’s integral to most blogging software, but sadly lacking from LiveJournal.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t directly integrate with Technorati’s tagging system, arguably the most useful public tagging protocol. Without this integration, LiveJournal’s tags are largely irrelevant in the scope of the wider web; it prevents Technorati – and other indexes using Technorati’s data – from using the massive content resources of LiveJournal in any fashion less haphazard than just ‘scrape and pray’.

What I would like to see is a LiveJournal “blogging extension”. It would be a set of customisations and tools that you’d have to switch on manually (saving the rest of the web from the vast majority of LJers who are distinctly journallers, rather than bloggers); once activated, it would allow you to send Technorati or Pingomatic pings for each journal entry, and would convert your LJ tags over to Technorati tags instead. (Or, better yet, they’d work as both.)

In the meantime, I’ll start using LiveJournal’s tags, for the categorisation if nothing else. And I’ll keep putting Technorati Tags in appropriate posts; I’ll just have to crank the font size a little lower to avoid spamming my readers with excess tags.

Hardly ideal, though. But it’s a step in the right direction, on LiveJournal’s part.

Technorati Tags: tags, blogging, livejournal, technorati