Geek Drivel

I’ve only been back on the Getting Things Done (GTD) wagon for one week now, and I’m simply awed at how much I’ve gotten done, and on how many different things. Although I’d been using GTD before, it’s now painfully obvious that I wasn’t using it properly.

In my earlier attempts, I never quite grasped a couple of the essentials of GTD. For instance, I thought I had to plan out all of the major steps for a project up front, because I confused GTD with some other systems I’d studied before it. That’s not the case though, I only have to figure out what the next immediate action is on each project at any particular time. Correcting that misunderstanding alone has helped immensely, I don’t feel like taking on a new project is such a chore anymore.

The idea of breaking out actual physical actions has helped too. For example, I had several things on my actions list that were described as “Research X.” That’s all well and good, but I never made any progress on those items because “researching” something is too nebulous for a next action — when I went to my list to see what I should do next, I unconsciously skipped right over those because they weren’t things that I could do immediately. I had to break each of those down into actual physically-doable steps, such as “see what Google says about X” or “check out book on X from library.” Once I realized that and re-worked those nebulous action items, I rushed through them so quickly that my head was spinning.

(Both of these are described, at length, in the Getting Things Done book. I’d read it several times, but for some reason neither one sank in properly until the latest reading.)

One specific improvement to MonkeyGTD has also helped a great deal. When you put in a “tickler” as a future reminder, and the day you said to remind you of it rolls around, a flashing *ticklers* appears at the top of the screen. I normally hate things that flash or move on the screen because I’m very easily distracted, but this is good because I can’t ignore or forget the ticklers anymore — so long as I look at MonkeyGTD (which I do every morning, and throughout the day), I’ll be reminded to do whatever thing was listed. It’s better than my old Palm’s calendar alarms, because it’s day-specific and not time-specific.

Another thing that helped was setting up a physical tickler system. I never thought I needed one before, but this time I realized that I was already using a disorganized form of a physical tickler system anyway — I would put things that physically required my attention soon (such as bills) on my laptop’s keyboard, where I had to move them several times a week in order to take the laptop anywhere. (I use an external keyboard when I’m at my desk, it wouldn’t work otherwise.) It wasn’t a very good system, because when the pile was more than a couple items deep I wouldn’t immediately see anything below the top one, but I was regularly reminded of it, so I was able to limp along with it.

The physical tickler system that David Allen describes in GTD is far superior. It splits things up into the particular days and months when I need to be reminded of them, and a MonkeyGTD tickler reminds me to process it each morning. I still use the laptop’s keyboard, but it’s my in-box now, and it gets cleaned off daily.

The result: I presently have twenty active projects, everything a research project that I’ve been working on for five years now down to identifying a particular song. Five of them are repairs, most of which have been on my to-do list (and immobile as a boulder) for months or years. Three are urgent government paperwork things that I previously would have left until the last minute and then scrambled to finish in time. I’ve made progress on every one of them in the last week.

Even better, five of my active projects are new, things that I would have thought myself too busy to consider before, but that I can not only consider but also complete now.

And the best thing about it is that it’s almost effortless! Whenever I find myself at loose ends, I pull up my MonkeyGTD page and look it over, and dig into whatever catches my fancy at that moment — whatever I have the time, energy, and interest to do. I find myself making progress on things without ever having to invoke willpower or trick myself into doing them. I wish I’d known about this system when I was in school. I’d have had a lot less stress and a lot better grades. I wish I’d gotten it right when I first read it, the last few years would have been a lot more productive and enjoyable. But I know it now, and now that I’ve gotten it right, I won’t have any trouble keeping it up.

The head of Project Badger (at the much larger company that bought it a few years ago) recently moved on to other duties in the company. We talked briefly just before he did, and he said that he’d learned a lot from me.

I was startled, but I figured that was just a stock corporate-speak phrase he was using with everyone. It didn’t seem there was anything that I (primarily a hobbyist-turned-professional software developer) knew that would be useful to someone like him, a corporate manager. But later I got to thinking about it.

When we first sold Project Badger to that company, I had to adapt quite a bit. I’d never dealt with a large corporation before, and didn’t understand the culture. I thought the Dilbert comic strip was an exaggeration. It is, but not by much.

For example, soon after we sold it to them, they asked us to embed their help-line 800 number into one of the error messages. Several months later, a customer who got the message actually called the number and got a big surprise — it was a phone-sex hotline. It turns out that the phone number they’d given me was wrong in one digit.

It was a simple and innocent mistake, and one that was easily corrected (though not quickly — there were a lot of products incorporating it by that time). But I watched in amazement as they assumed that it was deliberate attack on them, and paranoidly tried to find some conspiracy. No doubt they discussed whether we were working against them too, though they didn’t let us know that. I hadn’t noted which one of them had given me the number, and after several months I couldn’t remember for sure, so they were looking cross-eyed at each other too. I know corporations have to be concerned about that kind of thing, but they took it to a ridiculous extent. My feelings are plainly read on my face (I’m no good at poker), so I’m sure my stunned amazement showed; maybe it helped show them how badly they were overreacting.

As another example, different people would load a different project onto a single person at each meeting, and a few days later ask why this task or that one wasn’t done. It was just like college, where each professor assigned you enough work to keep you busy until the next class, deliberately ignoring the other classes you were taking. It was ludicrous, and no one seemed to be able to see that it was a problem, let alone do anything about it.

I can only concentrate on one thing at a time, so I came up with an aikido-style solution: whenever someone tried to give me a new task, I would agree to it, then immediately ask that person to clarify which one was the priority, the new one or the one I was working on already that was assigned by person X. If they felt that they had the authority to override person X, they could give their project priority; if they didn’t, then they would realize that their project was on the back burner. Whenever anyone started playing the blame game, or confronted me about not having something done, I could give a logical and air-tight reason for it, and one they couldn’t argue with. I think that earned me some grudging respect.

Then there’s e-mail. When someone asks for my analysis of a situation, I assume they want to know it, so I try to give them the whole thing. I quickly learned that when I did so, the management people didn’t bother reading it — they wanted a quick yes or no answer. So after writing my full analysis, I went back to the top and added a one- or two-sentence “executive summary”:

Subject: Preventing the sharing of licenses

Executive summary: don’t do it, it would cost us more, irritate our legitimate customers, and do nothing to stop the abuse.

Long answer:

> This is an old subject that for some is unpopular, however this
> addresses the problem of customers sharing their keys with contractors
> and associates despite the fact that our EULA specifically forbids it,
> and I think it’s time this was addressed. [...]

Sorry to do this, but I have to disagree.

[Long analysis with example follows.]

The management people could quickly see the results, and members of the team who were interested in the reasons behind it could see that too.

I’m not even going to dig into the culture of having hour-long meetings about even the most minor things, and requiring the developers to attend them instead of getting any development work done. I’m sure I stepped on more than a few toes while getting that straightened out, but I can’t apologize for it; it’s a ridiculous practice, and a waste of valuable programming time.

So in the end I think he was telling the truth: he did learn a lot from me, and I just didn’t realize it at the time.

At the end of my last iPod Touch entry, I mentioned that I was going to try jailbreaking the Touch so I could load music onto it from Linux, instead of relying on a VMware Windows machine.

I did so. Everything seemed to work with no problem, but after I loaded any song into it, the Touch claimed that it had no music on it at all, and iTunes said that I had to restore it to factory settings before it would even look at it again (which involves rebooting into the full version of Windows, and about 45 minutes of restoring various things). After the fourth failed attempt, I stumbled across a note on the Ubuntu forums that explained the problem: Apple has changed the hash algorithm they’re using for the database. Again.

Why? I don’t understand the purpose behind it, since it does nothing but cause problems for people (their customers!) who are trying to load music onto the device without going through iTunes, and pretty much the only people who want to do that are people using Linux. If it were Microsoft doing it, I’d understand it — discriminating against anything non-Windows is part of their culture — but Apple already supports Windows as well, so it can’t be a matter of OS snobbery. I know Apple is a control-freak about some things, but that doesn’t sufficiently explain it.

In any case, someone will figure out the new algorithm soon, and update the Linux software to account for it. Until then, I’ve found a way to move my playlists from RhythmBox (my Linux music player) to iTunes* to get them onto the Touch, so I suppose I can keep using iTunes for now. It’s just an extra (and unnecessary) step.

[* It requires exporting the playlists to m3u format, running sed over them to change the filenames to Windows drive-letter format, then importing them into iTunes, which is using the same on-disk music library.]

If you have any sympathy at all for Microsoft, you’ve gotta wince at this story. It’s not the first time something like that has happened either… on a trip to Toronto a few years ago, I saw an absolutely HUGE electronic billboard — which was showing a gigantic Windows error message-box instead of the ads that it was supposed to. Not a Blue Screen of Death, but just as embarrassing to the owners, and to Microsoft.

Adapting my Getting Things Done-based productivity system from a Palm TX to the new iPod Touch has been something of an adventure in itself.

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a remarkable productivity system when used properly, but I haven’t been using it properly. Three times in the past few years, I’d start using it properly, but then I’d get deeply into a project and skip my reviews for a few weeks, and the next thing I know I’ve fallen back to relying on my Palm’s calendar alarms and to-do lists to keep up with important things like taxes and bills, and my computer’s desktop is covered with disorganized little electronic sticky-notes for things I want to remember. The GTD stuff is left by the wayside.

The Touch’s audible alarms are extremely quiet. Far too quiet to hear them when I’m out and about, in fact. It was obvious after a couple days of using it that my old method of relying on calendar alarms and to-do lists wasn’t going to suffice. It was time to try GTD again, and to keep it up this time.

After reviewing the system, the first thing I did was look at the most recent incarnation of MonkeyGTD (a TiddlyWiki-based GTD system that I’ve mentioned before). It was good when I looked at it a year ago, but it has really improved now! A few hours with it and all of my to-do list items were transferred, properly set up as projects, next actions, future actions, future-dated “tickler” reminders, or reference items. My electronic sticky-notes were reduced to four, all actual notes relating to things I’m working on at present. My calendar items were trimmed down to only appointments and things that have to be done on a particular day or at a particular time.

It’s quite a weight off my shoulders, as it has been the last three times I’ve done this. But since I can’t rely on my Palm’s alarms anymore, I think I’ll be forced to keep the daily and weekly reviews going this time. Things shouldn’t be able to accumulate and hang around for ages (like fixing a piece of exercise equipment — that has been on my to-do list for over a year). And if I can keep the reviews going, I should be able to keep the entire system going.

Wish me luck!

I have a confession to make. I’m a self-help book junkie.

I love a good self-help book. Most of them are useless to the vast majority of people, but a well-written one always fascinates me regardless of whether the problem it’s addressing is one that I have or not. But when you find one of the tiny percentage of them that’s useful specifically to you, it’s like finding gold in your back yard.

When I read about a free self-help e-book called “What Do You Want To Do With Your Life?” (via LifeHacker), I checked it out. It’s similar to others that I’ve read, but since it’s free, it gives me something to recommend to people that’s a little easier to get than my three favorites.

I haven’t finished it yet, but from what I’ve read so far, it looks like a good place to begin answering the most important practical question you’ll ever find.

So, having learned that the iPod Touch probably could replace my slowly-dying Palm TX, I’ve picked one up a few days ago. The box said that it required Windows or Mac OS X, which is an irritation but not a problem; I have this system set up to dual-boot between Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP, as well as having a VMware virtual Windows XP box under Linux.

I pulled it out, carefully unwrapped it, and turned it on. It showed a screen that seemed to be saying it had to be plugged into my computer, so I did so. Then, reading the quick-start manual, I saw that I had to load iTunes. Grumbling, I downloaded and installed it.

iTunes says that my brand-spankin’-new iPod Touch has an old version of the OS, and would I like to upgrade to 2.0 for an additional $10? Grumbling further (but not really surprised — I’d read up on it before I bought it), I agreed, paid my ten bucks, and downloaded the update. iTunes wiped the old OS, put the Touch into recovery mode, and then… said that there was an error.

It seems that you can do nearly everything with the Touch via Windows XP running in a VMware virtual machine, but upgrading the OS requires Windows to be running on the bare metal.

After taking care of that little problem (via dual-boot), I settled down to moving my data.

My contact list isn’t all that large — about 100 people — and it had ten years worth of accumulated cruft and outdated information, so I decided to move that manually, updating each one as I did. That took a while, but had no major surprises. I decided to sync it with my GMail account as well, so I’d have an online backup; no problems there either.

The 120+ e-books that I’ve purchased for my Palm over the years were all bought from eReader.com. The eReader program was available in the iTunes Application store (for free, of course), so I loaded it up. I dredged up the password for eReader.com, entered it, and was pleased to discover that my e-books were all there, waiting to be downloaded for the iPod. I downloaded one old favorite and tried to unlock it. Tried being the operative word… somehow, even after entering the proper unlocking information, it wouldn’t work. I had to sign onto the site via a web browser and update my information, then re-download the book, before it would work. It should work for all of them now though.

The To-Do List was… interesting. The iPod Touch doesn’t have one built in, so I checked out their Application Store. There were three free to-do list applications that I downloaded and tested. The first two (I don’t remember their names) were too simple to be useful for me; neither one could handle more than a single list, for instance. The third one was Dobot Todos, and it didn’t take long to realize that I had a winner. Unfortunately the Apple store is two revisions behind, and is dragging its collective feet about updates… I’m sure they’ll correct that eventually, but I wish they’d do it more quickly.

Next up: my calendar information. This is the single most-used function of my Palm TX, and I really really didn’t want to have to re-enter all of the data for it by hand. But from everything I could see, the only direct way to get my information moved over (without a Mac computer to go through) was to go through Microsoft Outlook.

Yuck.

But I did have a long-since-retired copy of Office XP (with Outlook 2002) around here somewhere, so I started excavating my CD-ROM collection and finally found it. It installed with no problem, and with a little setup, it synced to the iPod easily — the only trouble was that two of my contacts somehow got duplicates. I carefully deleted the duplicate entries, re-synced, and made sure the originals were still in both places (they were) and wouldn’t re-duplicate themselves on later syncs (they didn’t), then I was ready for my Palm data.

Unfortunately, my Palm doesn’t seem to want to retire, and it and the rest of my electronics fought me all the way.

First I had to dig out the CD that it originally came with (which meant another excavation), then RE-install the Palm Desktop software (for some reason, the installation I already had on that machine wasn’t good enough for it), then tell that to sync to Outlook instead (carefully telling it to overwrite the Palm’s contact information with the desktop’s). Then the virtual machine wouldn’t make a wired connection with the Palm, no matter what I tried — I never did figure that one out. Then the network connection couldn’t find my XP virtual machine (VMware’s bridged network connection was hooked to a different network card than the one that I’m currently using). I finally got everything set up properly though, and the Palm reluctantly turned over its information to Outlook, which then sent it on to the iPod. A few manual tweaks (because the iPod doesn’t seem to like the “zero minutes ahead” alarm setting), and all seems well now.

My next project is getting a few audio-books (that I purchased from Audible.com) onto it. That shouldn’t be a problem… I hope. Then, once WinPwn comes out with an update for the 2.0.1 firmware, I’ll jailbreak the iPod so I can load my music onto it from Linux. Then the configuration stage should be complete.

Well, I did it. I’m writing this entry on my new (and newly-updated) iPod Touch.

I have to say, I really like the interface. I’m still trying to figure out how to import all of my data to it, other than the music, but I’ll get it eventually.

(This post is mostly a test.)

Hm…

I’m usually an all-out pro-technology guy, but I agree with this completely: no e-voting until it’s provably (and checkably!) secure against fraud. There are too many people who would see the ends (the election of their chosen candidates) as justifying the means (tampering with the voting system) — you’ve got to make it as hard to do as possible, and I have yet to hear of an e-voting system that’s secure against even a determined amateur.