9/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
I cycled up to the inaugural Canberra CBR Small Business Expo today.1 Here is my report.
I got lucky: crystal show!
Who doesn’t love sharing a conference centre with a bunch of pseudo-scientific woo.
And it turns out that the ‘Canberra Crystal Show’ was just a guy selling a bunch of crystals. So, a shop.
It’s a shame that the people who think crystals “…can help one attain ‘Lemurian awareness’ — the balancing, nurturing, loving, spiritual and sensuous consciousness…” have ruined what would otherwise be a perfectly lovely rock.
It’s all pretty ‘regional’
Lucy and I have this term for things that are a bit, well … regional. You know. Not quite big-city-lights. Like, you’re not going to stumble across David Letterman at this thing.
We find ‘regional’ things tremendously endearing. The whole of Canberra — the capital of Australia, I will remind you — is pretty regional. This expo was super regional.
I met the Minister for Something
May I present Mick Gentleman, Minister for something to do with business, they said. It’s not really clear what?
Anyway, he was available, so he gave a little welcome speech and I asked him for a selfie. He was very obliging.
That’s the Grease Monkey chicken van over my shoulder. When I first started travelling to Canberra (as a weekly FIFO from Melbourne) we’d go to Grease Monkey every week.
Every subsequent week we’d say, shall we try somewhere else tonight? And we’d say, yeah. Then we’d finish work and go to Grease Monkey.
I got sushi today because if I got Grease Monkey for lunch Lucy would have given me the stink-eye when I got home.2
Conflicting advice
I saw a talk given by Emily of Ivy Social. I went in to the session thinking, I’d already cancelled my Facebook account by the time Emily started high school, there’s nothing Emily can teach me about social media.
I was wrong. It was a great session and I wrote a bunch of stuff down.
One of her key messages was: be authentic. I really liked Emily.
The next guy’s talk was about how small business can use AI tools. He explained how you could just give Meta AI a web page and ask it to write you a month’s worth of blog posts and social media.
I wasn’t sure how authentic that was. I wanted to shout “nobody will read this turgid dross!” from the back of the room but I was eating a fried chicken burger my sushi.
He was one of these older blokes who can’t actually explain anything very well. “Yeah then we just load up AI and tell her what we want”, he said, and yes he called the AI “her”.
I don’t know who invited him. Maybe I’ll have a word with Mick.
He said that ‘prompt engineers’ get paid $300k. I really don’t think they do.
Anyway. I really liked Emily.
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8/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
The workbook received a one-star review today. One star means that you couldn’t like a thing less. You couldn’t imagine it being worse.
The review?
Your templates won’t download with Mac Safari
Our reviewer — let’s call him Robert1 — purchased the 130-page book at 11:09 and had one-starred it by 11:20 because he couldn’t download the templates. Which are at the back of the book.
He hasn’t even read it.
A better ratings system
Years ago, eBay removed the ability to negatively review a purchase. Then YouTube removed the display of ‘thumbs-downs’ on a video. (You can still mash the thumbs-down button if it makes you feel better. I hope it doesn’t.)
I propose the abolition of the simple 1-5 star system. It serves nobody well.
Instead, you should have to click a link that describes, in words, how you feel. Here’s how they translate.
⭐️
I could not imagine how this product could possibly be worse. Everything about it is pure crap. It has no redeeming qualities.
I wish a pox on the creator and their family. If I ever meet them I’ll spit on their shoe. I hate myself for spending money on it.
⭐️⭐
This product is pretty bad, but is nevertheless serviceably useful. I’ll use it begrudgingly if I need to, until it breaks, at which point I’ll find a better model to replace it.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
This product does what I expected it to do. Not much more, not much less.
If every product was like this life would be like living in Zürich: banal, but tolerable.
⭐⭐️⭐️⭐️️
This product is pretty good! It’s about how I expect most products to be.
If I made a product and it was like this I’d be pretty happy with myself, but I’d strive to do better next time.
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The phone rings
“Hello?”
“Hey Alex, it’s Johnny. You need to come over here and see this thing. Now.”
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7/31 daily posts as part of WebvlogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
User PMunch
asks on Discord:1
Basically I’m worried about space
There’s more, but you can read it in the Discord thread. In summary: we have more than 100 customers. How does that work?
I never pretend that Johnny.Decimal is perfect, and one of the ways that the standard implementation ‘fails’ is when you have more than n number of something. More than 10 categories of thing, for example.
Or more than 100 of pretty much anything. One of my design principles is that you don’t have more than 100 of anything.
So, we need to adapt. What I’ll do eventually is document these patterns formally, so I can give them names and refer to them.
I’ve done that for the first pattern I talk about: multiple systems [13.01].
Until then, here’s me thinking out loud. I’d like to do more of these: maybe one a week? Send me your questions.
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6/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
On this week’s Hemispheric Views the gents once again cause the community to respond. This time: what’s the perfect album?
I’ll submit two.
Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms (1985)
Links to listen on all the services.
This album arguably got me in to music. I heard Walk of Life on Newcastle’s Metro 97.1FM1 somewhere in the late 80s. I would have been about 14.
I didn’t know what it was — sacrilege! Dire Straits are from Newcastle, total local heroes — so I called the station. The lady told me, and that was it. Now 14-year-old me likes music.
Yeah yeah so this is dad rock. It’s an absolute classic though, nothing wrong from start to end. And it’s stood the test of time. We still listen to it, often.
Fun fact: this was the first ever CD with the DDD
mastering symbol on the back. The three letters were either A
or D
for analog & digital and they indicated how the album had been recorded, mixed, and mastered.
Most CDs were AAD
, very few were ADD
, and this was the first DDD
.
If I only listen to one track it should be…
The title track, #9 Brothers in Arms. If it doesn’t melt your heart you might not have one.
Destroyer’s Kaputt (2011)
Cookie rooftop, Melbourne. 2011 or thereabouts. A sunny afternoon with friends. The DJ plays the track Kaputt, I am instantly in love, I ask them what it is, my life is changed.
And I really mean changed. This album set my musical taste on a whole new trajectory. I discovered a love for, what? Shoegazey-lofi-jazzy-soundscapey-lushness? I dunno, this isn’t a Pitchfork review.
Just listen to the album. And if you like it, you should immediately then listen to The Radio Dept.’s Clinging to a Scheme, which could easily be on this page but I have actual work to do so a link’s all you’re getting.
But really, listen to that as well. The two are partners in my mind. One always follows the other.
If I only listen to one track it should be…
The title track, #6 Kaputt. I am in awe of talent like this.
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5/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
On Sunday 7th May 2023 I went to bed. Lucy was already there. I remember lying silently for a few minutes. Then I asked her a question.
“Can I quit my job tomorrow?”
I Was An IT Consultant
That felt like a confession worthy of title case. All my life I’ve been an IT Consultant. Not a bad way to make a living, and like Cal Newport says: do what you’re good at. I was good at it.
And some of the jobs were great. Maybe I’ll write about some of my past jobs one day. But the job I had last May was not great.
Johnny at his old job
It was so not-great, I felt bad taking the money. It was so so not-great, I felt like it was damaging my reputation. And I can’t just ‘turn up’ at work: if you’re paying me to do a job, I am going to do a stellar job. On this project, that really just wasn’t possible.
The state of modern IT infrastructure projects isn’t the point of this post. Let me know if you want to hear me rant about that later, though. I would be hap-py to do that.
At the same time, my little forum was starting to see a bit of action. The sort of thing that makes you think, huh, have I got a thing?
When you’re 46(?), and you have a thing, it’s time to do something with that thing
46? 47? Honestly when you get to this age you stop counting. Late 40s.
So when you’re in your late 40s and all you’ve ever wanted to do is not work for someone else, and you realise that you’ve got this thing, then it might be time to do something with that thing.
I’ve looked for ‘the thing’ for years. Friends and I have had weekly meetings where we try to come up with ‘the thing’. The problem is that I have absolutely no desire whatsoever to be the boss of a big thing. The CEO of some company. Responsibility. Power. Staff. Stress.
I just don’t care. I’m not that guy. I want what they sometimes disparagingly call a ‘lifestyle business’. Something that pays the bills, probably won’t make you rich, but doesn’t consume your entire life.
Well here I am with this realisation. This little website that I’ve kept going for about a decade now1 is my thing.
Anyway so I say to Lucy, “can I quit my job?”
And after a long chat discussing the pros (I don’t go to that place any more) and the cons (food costs money) we decide, yeah, I’ll quit.2 To spend time on the thing.
It happened fast.
I told my consulting company3 on Monday morning. Two weeks notice.
They told ‘the customer’ — whose project was the shambles to be escaped — on Monday afternoon.
On Tuesday morning my account manager gave me a little shush and come with me wave from down the corridor. We went downstairs.
“Alan is having you offboarded”, he tells me. Alan4 was the Program Director. He wasn’t there; he hid somewhere else that day. (I never saw him again.)
And sure enough, by midday on Tuesday I had handed back the customer’s laptop and access card. So now I find myself at my SmallConsultingCo and we’re all wondering what I do for the next 8½ days.
“Rather than me sit here and pretend to work,” I say, “why don’t you pay me out until the end of this week. And I’ll go home now, and we’re done.”
And they say yes.
So at about 3pm on Tuesday I walk in to the garden. Lucy’s there with the chickens. “I’m finished”, I say. “I’m done.”
Johnny in the garden with chickens
We had no plan and so for a while I used Microsoft Teams
A sentence I hoped never to write.
Given the disaster I had just witnessed, surely, I thought, helping large organisations be more organised is the way.
And so I started looking at developing a Teams app. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at developing a Teams app.
Do not.
The state of Microsoft Teams development isn’t the point of this post. Let me know if you want to hear me rant about that later, though. I would be hap-py to do that.
The state of disorganisation inside ‘the enterprise’ — the pure raw chaos that is today’s workplace, the sheer immensity of the challenge that would be making it sane again, the almost incomprehensible extent to which it’s broken and the fact that the people ostensibly in charge of your organisation’s data have no idea what to do and have essentially given up — isn’t the point of this post. Let me know if you want to hear me rant about that later, though. I would be hap-py to do that.
This feels like a natural place to end. Because the next part of this story is where we did find a thing to make that was useful, and I’ll tell that another day if I run out of more interesting things to write.
Suffice to say, 🥳
It was one of the best decisions of my life.
Thank you. Because we can afford to buy food because of your support. That sounds cheesy but it’s totally true. Whether you’ve bought one of my things or just spread the word or just been a friend online or whatever: you make this possible.
This is my job now. One year ago I couldn’t have imagined it.
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4/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
On Saturday morning, I dust and vacuum the house.
Without fail. Every week. For years now.
We call it the ‘floors chores’ and it’s just one of my jobs. I’ve come to love it: we eat breakfast,1 I clean the kitchen, then I put on my noise cancelling AirPods and vacuum while listening to ATP.
Routines are powerful but they’re hard to establish. We treasure the floors chores because it means our house is always clean. By now it’s effortless.
It would be ideal if we could reach this state with our work. In his latest book Slow Productivity,2 Cal Newport advocates for the formation of rituals:
“…form your own personalized rituals around the work you find most important.”
– Slow Productivity, p. 163.
So why are they so hard to establish?
Picture your work day
And by ‘work’ I just mean whatever it is that you want to get done.
If we assign shapes and colours to tasks, where shapes are analagous to categories and colours to areas (in Johnny.Decimal parlance), our days mostly look like this.
The types of work you do flow like words on the page, from left to right,
then on to the next row.
Chaos! None the wonder you can’t concentrate. Every switch is a switch in mental state; in the knowledge that you’re holding in working memory; in the files and apps you need open to perform the task.
This is not the best way to work.
Let’s reimagine. Here’s the same shapes, rearranged. And let’s introduce some line breaks; perhaps they’re actual breaks in your day?
Similar shapes have been moved together, and we’ve moved all of the ‘heavy’ stuff to the front; maybe it’s harder work that you should do while your brain is fresh?
Work in categories
I think we usually behave like the first diagram because we haven’t sufficiently categorised our work to enable us to behave like the second.
And this calls back to yesterday’s post and my desire to eliminate ‘due dates’.
Imagine establishing a routine such that you know, as sure as I know that I’ll do the floors chores next Saturday morning, that on the first Sunday morning of the month you tackle all of those heavy blue boxes.
And say they represent all of your home finances: paying your bills, checking account balances, updating your subscriptions, transferring your health insurance, finding a better savings account.
If you knew that you did that every month, you’d never need to be reminded to do it.
And you’d never get that slighly panicked feeling: oh crap, did I forget to pay the credit card this month?
How nice might that be?
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3/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
As in, what types of to-do are there.
Observations
This text should be considered an RFC, v0.1. In non-nerd terms: I’d like your feedback, and this is a very early draft.
I would potentially like to define these ‘classes of to-do’ as a standard in the context of Johnny.Decimal.
We use terms MUST, SHOULD, etc. as per RFC2119.
We classify these by priority: 4 is lower than 1. This aligns with most service desk ticketing systems: a ‘priority 1’ is the highest priority incident.
If I say ‘we’ll discuss this later’ I might mean in a later article.
Priority 4 (P4
): someday/maybe/‘tickler file’
These things aren’t really ‘to-dos’ at all. They’re ideas of things that you might like to do, maybe, some day.
Sometimes these are unrealistic. The other day I wrote a task, ‘buy an old Volvo’. I’m almost certainly never going to buy an old Volvo, and I’m certainly not going to buy one in the next five years.
So why even write this down? Because it forms part of your story. These are the things that tell you who you want to be. Remembering them guides you through life. They keep you on some sort of track.
They’re good, in other words; don’t stop writing them down. You will actually do some vanishingly small percentage of these things, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t do the rest.
But you MUST NOT allow these ‘tasks’ to clutter the things you actually need to do. They MUST, therefore, be in a separate task system.
And I don’t mean that they should be somehow tagged-flagged-foldered-filtered away from your actual to-dos while being stored in the same task system. No. They MUST be kept in a separate system.
Definition: a ‘task system’ is an isolated system where one or more tasks — i.e. to-do-like items — is kept. ‘Post-it notes’ is one task system. ‘Apple Reminders’ is another. ‘A text file’ is another.
We use the term ‘task system’ vs. ‘to-do system’ to move away from the term ‘to-do’. Not everything you write down is something you must, one day, do.
P3
: Should do/nice to do
You should eat more vegetables. You should floss. You should update your blog software more frequently. You should cancel that subscription that you don’t use. You should prepare that recipe that you saved two years ago. You should buy someone flowers when it isn’t their birthday.
But if you do not, nothing catastrophic happens. Life goes on — with inconveniences or minor costs that your inaction has introduced, perhaps — but, nevertheless.
These things are actions: they are things ‘to do’. You should do them. So they SHOULD exist in your primary task system.
However, they MUST NOT ever nag you with an alert or alarm. If a ‘should do’ task interrupts your focus, your system is broken.
Therefore these tasks MUST NOT have a ‘due date’. They’re not allowed to make you feel bad if you don’t do them. You look at them on your schedule.
So how does this stuff ever get done?
P3 tasks are quality-of-life improvements. If you did more of them, life would be incrementally better.
The problem with our current handling of P3 tasks is that they pop up and interrupt us all the time, while we’re really not in the mood to do them. So if we did everything that our task manager told us to do, when it told us to do it, we’d be all over the place. It’d be a productivity shambles.
I think we know this, if only subconsciously. That’s why we don’t do so many of these things when previous-us decided that we should.
The other problem is that it’s easily possible to have hundreds of P3 tasks. They can quickly overwhelm the rest of your system.
The solution is to implement strategies to deal with this problem, which we’ll get to later.
Project subtasks
Note that many if not most subtasks that are in service of the completion of a larger project are ‘should do’ tasks. The vast majority of your work does not deserve the privilege of interrupting you while you are doing something else.
You know it’s the job. You know you need to do it: writing it down is more of a memory/planning thing than a reminder/nagging thing.
P2
: To do
Now we’re in to the stuff that you really actually should do. Not kidding.
Pay your rent: you get kicked out, eventually, if you don’t. Cancel an annual subscription that will renew for $500. Submit your timesheets before 2pm on Friday or you eventually get a formal warning. Renew your driver’s licence or you’re catching the bus.1
These tasks SHOULD live in the same task system as your P3 tasks. Because as we’ll see, P1 tasks SHOULD also live in their own system, and if P3 and P2 don’t co-exist then we’ve got 4 task systems and that’s obviously silly.
I’ll summarise all of this with a table, later.
P2 tasks are essentially P3 tasks but in this case you MAY set a due date. Although with good processes and habits, which we’ll discuss later, I think we can mostly avoid due dates.
Because the problem is the same as we described just above: every interruption knocks you off what you were doing. If we can design a system with very few interruptions — one where we choose what to do, and when to do it, and where we trust ourselves to actually do that — then I think peace and harmony will prevail.
P1
: Catastrophic if not done
The highest priority task is that which results in catastrophe if not done.
When next door was on holiday, I fed their cat twice a day. If I don’t feed the cat, it dies.
When I put bread in the oven, if I don’t take it out approximately 25 minutes later, a day’s effort is wasted, the house fills with acrid smoke, and in the worst case it sets on fire.
If you don’t buy tickets within an hour of them going on sale, they sell out.
There’s a subtle subclass of P1 tasks that might be useful:
- Completion-catastrophic: the cat needs to be fed twice a day but it isn’t really critical when. Morning and evening will do.
- Time-catastrophic: the bread really does have to come out in 25 minutes.
I believe that this class of tasks SHOULD exist in their own task system. We naturally do this anyway: we set a timer on our phone or we ask our home assistant to ‘remind me in 20 minutes’. We write something on a sticky note and leave it in a prominent place.
We’d never trust these things to our main task system because we know they’d get lost there.
Also I think having a separate place for these items really drives home their importance. When you see a notification from that app, you know it’s time to stop messing around. When your phone alarm goes off and it says ‘take bread out of oven’ you never dismiss it and keep doing what you were doing. You know it needs to be done now.
Scheduled things
Orthogonal to this — I’ll draw this up as a diagram later — are things that are scheduled.
It should go without saying that something that is scheduled — a meeting, an appointment — must happen at that time.
Here I consider a ‘scheduled’ task to involve someone else who isn’t you. They often require you to be somewhere, even if that somewhere is virtual, e.g. a Zoom meeting.
You’d be an ass if you just didn’t turn up to stuff when you said you would.
Scheduling your own time is a separate thing which we will discuss later.
These thoughs form the basis of how we’ll be re-structuring Lucy’s life in the workshop. There’ll be more on this topic in future posts.
I’d love your feedback. This forum post is probably the best place.
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This post is the second of at least 31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
I have a gorgeous fountain pen: a Pilot ‘Vanishing Point’. Mine’s black and has developed a Leica-like patina such that the underlying brass shows through.
I love it. And I never use it. Because I rediscovered pencils.
Pencils are easier. They’re more adaptable. They smell better and I think they’re prettier. They’re cheaper; you can have a collection of pencils. I have at least 30, mostly sourced from the wonderful (Australian) site Pencilly.
I spent a hundred-ish dollars on my ridiculous pencil collection. About the price of one fountain pen.
Pencils are objectively better than pens. Fight me.
A few of my favourites
Here’s the daily drivers.
Mitsubishi 9850 HB
If I could only have one, this would be it. The lead is perfect for daily writing, and it has an eraser. It’s cheap and available. It’s the best all-rounder…
Colleen 2020 Super Drawing
…but not my favourite. That’s the discontinued Colleen 2020. This guy doesn’t love it but for me it’s just a beautiful writing instrument.
These are not readily available, and they’re a couple of dollars each. I have a supply that should last me a good few years, but as a result I don’t use it every day.
Blackwing Pearl
The pencil snobs just turned up their noses. Blackwing! Isn’t that a little common?
I hate snobbery. And I love this pencil. Actually this is the reason I rediscovered pencils. Me and Lucy were on holiday in NYC, staying at the Arlo, and they had these in the cutesy little lobby shop.
I didn’t buy any at the time — we travel light, and aren’t souvenir collectors — but the memory stayed with me, and I ordered a set when we got home. This was the realisation: that pencils aren’t dull. Every pencil isn’t the cheap thing you were given at school.
Pencils can be beautiful things. Crafted. Designed.
And it turns out the Pearl — my preferred of their standard range thanks to its slightly-harder-than-the-darker-one lead — is a terrific daily pencil.
I have them scattered all over the house. I Blu Tack them to the back of notebooks. I use them down to the nub. A+ pencil.
(Also, snobs, I use Global knives and I love my Lodge pan. Up yours.)
Caran d’Ache Swiss Wood
This one’s a little fancy and so is the price. But they last forever thanks to their you-must-be-joking-if-you-think-that’s-HB-it’s-more-like-2H lead.
So they’re great for finer work, such as writing on tiny little Post-it notes.
Oh and they’re made of Swiss beech wood and they smell amazing. Also I’m a sucker for Swiss iconography.
On doing-one-thing-at-a-time
The index card experiment continues and I’m loving it.
Here’s today’s story of not doing one thing at a time and having it bite me in the arse. There’s an issue with Astro, which I use to build this site. One of its plugins is turning “curly quotes” in to ”incorrect” curly quotes.
I’m working round it by running a regex, grep -r '\w>”\w' ./dist
, over the built site. If this picks up any bad quotes I just go in and hand-fix them. But when I add this to my build
step in package.json
, it breaks the Netlify build.
Long story short, I didn’t realise this because here’s what I did:
- Fixed some quotes.
- Did a build.
git push
to send it to Netlify to build for prod.
…at which point I should have waited and just watched it complete and then checked it. But what did I do instead?
I immediately switched to doing something else. So I come back later, check my site, the quotes aren’t fixed (the build failed at Netlify), and now I have to context-switch back to that and figure out why and fix it.
It would have taken less time if I’d stared vacantly at the build process for one minute and seen it fail.
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This post is the first of at least 31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
I’m not claiming to have ADHD, but in a way we all suffer from some of the symptoms because of the nature of technology.
I grew up in the late 80s/90s. Changing mental state was a much slower process. If I was watching the telly, to change the show I had to get up. And then there were only three other shows to choose from. Or I could change the movie I was watching,1 but that involved ejecting a cassette. Or I could change the CD, but I have to go to the shelf and pick a new one. And so on.
Now, I can be on my laptop reconciling the monthly Stripe payments for Johnny.Decimal — a tedious task that requires deep focus — and with one keyboard shortcut (Cmd-Tab) I’m in my social media, or Discord, or my news feed, or I have a blank browser tab with literally the entire internet available to me.
No part of my body above the wrist need move for my entire focus to switch and be ruined. Needless to say this is catastrophic for my productivity and sense of calm.
In continuing the re-organising of my own life, which has been on hold as we completed the workshop, I realised that I needed to get away from the computer.
My computer notes are a shambles. Wherever I look: Bear, which is my main system; Apple Notes, which I use to share some things with Lucy. The thought of re-planning inside that chaos has put me off even starting.
In planning the workshop I wrote everything I did for about a week on pieces of 4×4cm coloured paper.2 This is just big enough to write a task; if you can’t fit a task on a sheet, the task is too large and needs to be broken up.
Then I used these coloured notes to help myself stay focused. You should know by now that multitasking is a myth. So my paper stack was just that: a single stack. With one thing on top. The thing I’m doing now.
That thing might be mundane — hang out the laundry — or complex — reconcile your Stripe payments. It doesn’t matter. The key is to do one thing until it’s finished. The paper then went on the spike.
I put these paper squares on my laptop3 so they were front-of-mind. There’s the thing I’m doing now, written right there.
This worked reasonably well. Obviously it’s easy to just ignore the paper and do something else, but I found myself feeling bad when I did this. I know I’m only cheating myself.
And so this is where we are again. But this time I’m slightly tweaking the strategy.
I’ve cracked out the 5×7” index cards.4
This is all in service of me entirely re-organising two systems:
- My personal life.
- Johnny.Decimal as a business. (The website is its own system; it’s fine.)
Each card has the category of work written at the top. These categories are not deeply considered: this whole thing is a stopgap. They may or may not be categories in the final, designed systems. It doesn’t matter: it’s crucial not to get stuck in analysis paralysis.
Interlude
We just broke for breakfast: a fried egg on toast with homemade Szechuan chilli sauce and spring onions. So before I got up from the computer I wrote a new note — Egg
— and stuck it on the Personal, fun
card and moved that card to the top of the stack.
As soon as I got to the kitchen I went to pick up my phone to play a podcast! Pure habit; I’m not bored, I prepare a fried egg in about 4 minutes. But that’s what it’s got to. I can’t do something for 4 minutes without some sort of entertainment distraction.
I stopped myself. I spent the time a) making breakfast and b) allowing my mind to linger on this post, which is what I’d interrupted to make the egg. I came up with the idea of typing these paragraphs.
I have to try really hard to do one thing at a time.
Back to the cards
Years ago — I have a note, 25.04
, dated 2013-03-05
— I had the idea of an iPad app which mimicked the flight progress strips that air traffic controllers use to track aeroplanes. You’d use it to track your daily work.
I’ve pasted the text of the note at the bottom of this post, if you’re morbidly curious. Note how this 11-year-old issue is exactly the one I’m describing here.
The idea is simple: whatever’s at the top is what you’re doing. It’s the flight ‘coming in to land’. You use this strip to track the small details of the task; they’re not meant be permanent.
This task then either:
- completes, or
- requires you to wait for a while.
Either way, another task rises to the top. If you need to come back to this task, move its note ‘down’. If it’s complete, discard it.
So that’s what I’m trying with these index cards. I just started two hours ago so I’ll refine this over the next few days, but for now here are the rules.
- The stack of cards is that: a stack. There is only ever one thing on top: don’t fan them out so you can see more than one card.
- Each card has a category written at the top-left, e.g.
Johnny.Decimal, comms & content
. I’ve put a coloured mark at the top-right to group cards by broader area (just scribbled with a pen).
- Each thing to do is written on a tiny sticky note, e.g.
Blog this idea
.
- On each card, the sticky note at the top-left is the thing that I am doing. It is the only thing that I am doing.
- The closer a note is to the top-left, the closer it is to becoming active. New notes go at the lower-right.
- Completed notes are moved to a
Completed
card just because it’s nice to see what you did.
- If it’s not on a card, I’m not doing it.
- Exception: relaxing. I don’t need to track time relaxing.
So that’s it for now, I’ll run this today and see how it works. More tomorrow!
25.04
iPad ATC app
This is the contents of this note, copy/pasted as-is. So we’re looking back in time 11 years.
Overview
When we’re working, we have a bunch of stuff going on. We need to keep track of what we’re doing, and need to be able to switch between different tasks without getting “lost”.
A lot of people use task management systems - to-do lists of varying complexity, basically - which are great at tracking our high level tasks. What they’re not so good for is tracking the “here and now”.
Invariably, for this, we switch to sticky notes, or scribbled pages in a notebook. These systems work, but they have their drawbacks. The notes you write aren’t searchable, you run out of space on a page, or you lose them in a pile of other crap on your desk. Pages in a notebook can’t be re-arranged.
Most importantly, these systems don’t really allow us to see, at a glance, what we’re working on right now.
“What was that thing I was doing ten minutes ago that I had to stop because I got that important call?… I don’t remember… let me leaf through my notebook… ah! Yes. There it is. Now, where did I write the email address of that guy I need to speak to? Aah crap, it’s on the notepad I left on the kitchen bench!”
The iPad app I will describe solves these problems.
The app, in a nutshell
The simplest way of describing the app would be to say that it’s a bit like a “sticky note” app on steroids.
Boring, right? There are already heaps of sticky note apps! Wait. Listen.
Core features
This is what makes this app different from the rest:
What you’re working on now goes at the top, and is bigger
Say you’ve got five things on the go. You can’t really be working on five things at the same time - you’re working on one thing, and four things are waiting for your attention.
The thing you’re working on should be bigger: centre stage. The app resizes your notes so that, as you drag the thing you’re working on now to the top, it gets bigger and the rest get smaller.
When you switch to another task, you drag its note to the top; the topmost note is relegated, slides down, and becomes smaller.
The lower on the screen the note, the less important it is right now, and the smaller it becomes. You can move notes around whenever you like to represent your current priorities.
Inspiration for this app: flight progress strips
It occurred to me that a nice analogy for this app is the old “flight progress strips” that air traffic controllers used to use. (I presume it’s all computerised now.)
Flickr image: flight progress strips
They’re clean, they only show you exactly what you need to know, you slide them around the board to re-order them according to priority, and when the flight has landed you push it away.
Aah, still in use! From Wikipedia: “While it has been supplemented by more technologically advanced methods of flight tracking since its introduction, it is still used in modern ATC as a quick way to annotate a flight, to keep a legal record of the instructions that were issued, to allow other controllers to see instantly what is happening and to pass this information to other controllers who go on to control the flight.”
Think of the notes in my app as flight progress strips. I may even design the app so that it superficially resembles this sort of system.
At a glance “what am I doing today”, and “what do I do next?”
I had the idea for this app when I was at work and I finished something important. I knew that I had a bunch of other important stuff to do - that I’d been working on that morning - but because my brain was so busy, I couldn’t think what it all was.
I realised that I wanted to be able to glance at a dashboard of my stuff to remind myself what I had to be thinking about.
I think this is why people like sticky notes so much: they’re just there.
This app gives you the simplicity of that view, while allowing you much more flexibility than a sticky note.
Where sticky notes fail us is in their inability to record multiple pieces of information. They’re just too small. That’s when we resort to the notebook, but then that doesn’t give us the at-a-glance view.
What if you could attach smart bits of information to a sticky note?
My example: working in IT
I work in IT, so for any given task (“install the software on the server”, say), I have a bunch of information that I want close to hand:
- The server name(s)
- The email address of the guy I’m installing the software for
- The software license key
Let’s say I start to install the software, but it takes ten minutes so while it’s doing it I switch to another task. When I come back to the install, it’s asking me for the license key. Now, where was that? Did I write it in my notebook, or was it in an email?
You get the idea. In this situation, my app helps me like so:
- I finish the other task and think, okay, what now?
- I glance at my iPad and see that the “install software on the server” note is in the middle of the screen, and reasonably big - because it was at the top ten minutes ago, but then I switched to another task and dragged it to the top: the “install” note got moved down a bit as a result. (There’s probably a bunch of other stuff below it, that I was working on an hour ago.)
- I think, ah yes, I’ll finish that software install. I drag its note to the top.
- I need to log in to the server. What was its name? There it is - right in the note.
- I log on and need to enter the license key. Where is it? There it is - right in the note.
- I finish the install and want to mail the guy to tell him it’s finished. What was his email address? Of course, there it is - right in the note. I tap it and a new mail window appears to allow me to compose the email on my iPad.
- I’m done with this task. I drag it off to the side as it’s complete and I want it out of my view. More on this later.
- The remaining items re-fill the screen; I scan around, pick what to do next, and move it to the top if it isn’t already there.
You can only have a few things on the screen
Because this specifically isn’t a “to-do” application, and as such isn’t meant for tracking what you need to do tomorrow, or next week, you can only have a few things on the screen: the things you’re actively working on, now.
I’m thinking five, six, maybe seven max.
Track your to-dos somewhere else. When you start actually doing them, use my app.
Completed stuff disappears, but is still there
One of the enormous benefits of using a computer to do this sort of thing is that the information never really disappears.
When I finish my server install, I drag its note off to the side to indicate that it’s complete and I don’t need to see it any more. But, of course, if next week I need to install the same software again, or if I need to log on to the server again to check something, or whatever, I can quickly find that old note and the information I need is right there.
You can’t do that with a sticky note, because you threw it in the bin.
The app is simple and clean
The idea of the app isn’t that it becomes your notebook. We don’t want a screen full of prose: we want a quick visual indicator of what we need to be doing, and a place to quickly store short snippets of relevant information.
The main display (mockup below) shows only the “headline” title of each note. If you want to add additional information, there’s a special place for that - a pop-out drawer, or whatever.
We use data indicators to try to make the additional data smart. (“Show me all the notes where I had Alex Garner as a contact.“)
Design principles
Clean, clean, clean.
No yellow sticky notes. No faux-cork background. No skeuomorphic pins.
Helvetica. White. Square. Sparse. Beautiful.
Mock it up yourself at home!
I ran a version of this system on my Mac for a while. It works really well - try this at home, kids!
- Create a new Desktop just for this purpose. Make sure no other apps show on it.
- Open TextEdit. Hide as much of the window as you can - get rid of the ruler and … can’t you hide the font toolbar any more? I was sure you used to be able to. Anyway, pretend it isn’t there.
- You want as plain a white window as you can get.
- Set your font to Helvetica. Make it big (48).
- Type whatever it is you’re working on (“Do the server installation”).
- Make another one. Type something else. Move them around. Make the text on those you move lower on the screen smaller, and vice versa.
- To add bits of information, put them at the bottom in regular sized (12) text.
The note ends here.
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