Year One

September 10th, 2011. That is the first post that ever made it up to the site you're reading now. The year slipped by without me even noticing, which speaks to the pace of life, I suppose.

It all started because I wanted a place to park my thoughts on technology, development and productivity -- all subjects I like dealing with at some level. Topics we wrestle with daily bump up against these things and the intersection between them holds real meaning for me.

It has been an interesting year on all of those fronts. I have enjoyed writing about it. What was once just a collection of tips I used to get me through the week has become over 80,000 words on tools, methods, websites, writers, productivity, text files, computers and the technology industry as a whole.

I'd like to thank my readers, Carbon, and the many writers who have inspired and influenced me. Viticci, Agcaoili, Weatherhead, Mann, Blanc, Arment, Gruber, Brooks and Benjamin are people who have made reading sites like this one popular and I owe them a great debt. I think what is interesting is discovering for myself that I'd be writing even if I had no one reading. Hell, I paid up for a year of Squarespace before I had written a word because, first and foremost, I wanted to write. I thought committing up front would hold me to it. It turns out, people found some usefulness in my scribblings and I ended up meeting some incredibly, smart, witty and interesting people that I never would have met otherwise.

There have been times when I haven't posted for a while. Sometimes life throws some really difficult problems at you and you need to deal with that stuff first. Writing for this site takes a backseat when that happens and I apologize. Technically, I'm a terrible writer. I apologize for that too. Sometimes it is hard to come up with an idea that hasn't already been covered to death or covered much better than I ever could. In those cases, I'll just let a link suffice.

In the end though, I write what I like and what I find important enough to pass on; what might help a few folks along the way. If I found someone wrote about a topic but missed the boat, I'll let you know. You may not agree, but at least we all stay engaged and moving our thinking forward.

Thanks for the support for the last year, everyone. I truly appreciate every reader, every email, every ADN post and every tweet. I'm hoping to continue to provide something worth reading and I'll try my best to keep it interesting.

Getting Back To It

Things have been changing a lot for me personally lately. Stress, lack of time, meetings at strange hours of the morning (or evening) due to time zone constraints and difficult project deadlines have been conspiring to keep me from doing much of anything beyond work. In addition, throw in the site's Squarespace upgrade, which put a crimp in all of my blog posting workflows, and you've got a recipe for an empty RSS feed to show for it.

Getting out of the habit can be a dangerous thing as far as writing goes because getting back to it can often prove to be a surprisingly massive task. I'm sure smarter and better writers than I can come up with the explanations for this.

The forced hiatus from writing has given me some time to explore other things and the frantic pace of the current project schedule has me stretching my abilities with regards to juggling dozens of tasks and managing the needs of many people during the course of a given day.

Watching What I Save

The busy schedule has forced me to pare down what I read, save, analyze and send to co-workers and friends. Lately, a tech article has to be big before I send it somewhere for later reading. My Instapaper feed and Pinboard have filled up so much started examining what was going into them with a much more critical eye.

With each potential link, I'd find myself asking some basic questions.

"How long is this?"
"Will I ever actually read this later?"
"How is this issue going to affect me in the short term?"

I often find that it is harder to recover from these types of overburdened states when you pile things too high. You end with a feeling of helplessness when you look at an RSS feed that says "1000+" and pages of unread Instapaper articles. Stack those with the unending sea of email, social streams, magazines and books and you have a daunting hill to climb.

App.Net

Switching my focus from Twitter to App.net has disrupted things. I want to devote enough time to App.net that I can stay on top of how quickly that exciting community is changing and adjusting. New app updates for alpha apps are released on a near-daily basis.

Why bother with App.net or Twitter? Those who know my distaste for people in the past have always been curious about my love of Twitter. For someone as occasionally misanthropic as I am to want to see what others are saying and doing seems at odds but lately my views on people (in general) have softened. My focus has shifted away from what people say to what they actually do.

While serving a dark side, allowing people to air their insane views on things like the election and giving them a somewhat anonymous license to express them to the world, Twitter also allows people to show their humor, cleverness, and interests in a flowing stream of public consciousness. I love that part of it.

What I don't like is general populace groupthink and that is what Twitter is trying to foster with their new API rules and constant pushing of ads, celebrity accounts (written by handlers no doubt). And, like my shifting views on people being a measure of what people do rather than what they say, I'd say Twitter is doing all of the wrong things.

Enter App.net. Yes, the $50 barrier to entry seems high but, as a card carrying early adopter, that's the price you pay to see if someone is going to create -- realize -- that platform Twitter showed so much promise to be had they launched with a more focused business plan.

Nowadays, I'm ok with paying money for a service that I feel holds value for me. I think the people balking at (or criticizing) the cost of App.net probably never understood what was so cool about Twitter. Maybe they were following the wrong people or maybe they had different priorities or maybe they got their stream of social news from Facebook (gross) but I think people will either get it or not and the tide of criticisms don't really mean much to me at all. I remember when people were criticizing Twitter and trying to wrap their heads around why someone would want to bother typing out little 140 character messages to strangers. I think we can safely say at this point, most people don't know what the fuck they are talking about.

Doing the legwork up front to find the in-development App.net apps that look like they'll suit my needs (for now) has helped tremendously. After switching back and forth between moApp and Appetizer for a few days, I've decided to stick with moApp for a while. The developer, Michael, has been doing a great job cranking out new releases and the app is getting very stable and usable.

On the iOS front, AppApp has been my weapon-of-choice but it looks like there are a lot of nice clients coming. I suspect there will be a large number of interesting and innovative apps coming in next few weeks. For now, AppApp has a bunch of impressive features, cleanly implemented and stable as hell.

Task Management

OmniFocus is still my go-to and I continue to use it daily. Unfortunately, despite daily reviews, large-scale weekly reviews and my ubiquitous capture, things still aren't getting done as quickly as I'd like them to. The main reason for this is that, despite completing things that need to get done, they often get submitted and require changes or, upon "completing" something, I'm often given a handful of new tasks as follow-up. It all adds up to falling behind.

All I can do for now is try to manage priority, delete the truly unimportant things in the queue to make more time for the critical, and hope that there will eventually be a light at the end of this brutal slog of a tunnel.

For now though, this part isn't too fun. It's proof that, despite faith in a tool and process, sometimes tools can't bail you out of a bad situation.

Hill Climbing

Obviously, it all comes down to priorities. How do you manage your time and focus on the pieces that move it all forward? How do you decide where to spend the limited time you have to put you in a position to provide the biggest relief? What do you do to get out of that space where there's too much to do?

Maybe the solutions will result in a few new and interesting posts on this site. It's something I truly enjoy doing and I want to make more time and energy for and I have three or four new pieces in various stages of completion sitting in Byword waiting for a few minutes to finish.

In the meantime, hopefully I'll see some of you on App.net, Glassboard or Twitter.

Website Migration Almost Complete

I got the site up and running on Squarespace 6 in a couple of hours. There were a few glitches but for the most part it went off without too much of a hitch. There was a point where the site looked like it was a Geocities site from 1997 but that was mercifully brief. I hope your eyes weren't subjected to it for too long.

I apologize for the spam of old posts in your RSS feed but I guess it relinked to the new blog and gave everything a new timestamp. Hopefully that's the least of the problems I'll encounter during this switchover.

So far, I've been very impressed by the new features. The integration with Twitter (and maybe app.net at some point, I hope?) is really nice. I'm hoping to test the post notification features after I get done typing this.

The text editor is nice and supports markdown but I have yet to figure out the best workflow for inserting pictures and getting longer-form articles up since I am usually writing them in Byword and posting them via MarsEdit. MarsEdit doesn't work with Squarespace 6 (yet) so, for now I'll need to work something else out. I'll play around with that in the coming days.

For now, enjoy the fancy new graphics and let me know if you find anything wonky via Twitter until I get my contact page up and running again.

Thanks for reading.

My Thoughts on Patrick Rhone's Enough

For someone as focused as I am on technology, both at work and at home, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about “when is enough enough?”.

I’ve been reading Patrick Rhone’s pieces on MinimalMac for quite a while now and they have always resonated with me on one level or another. Patrick has some interesting things to say about how we handle ourselves in life but, obviously, his approach to technology has been somewhat of a focus for me.

In the rush to always find the next “most helpful app” or the next “device that fixes your life”, it’s easy to lose sight of the idea of what Kevin Kelly calls “appropriate use of technology”. As gadget geeks, we tend to flit from tool to tool, using something for a brief moment before the next one comes along, and so on. The same goes for apps or workflows or iPad cases. Novelty has come to drive many of us. Being the first to spot the app to solve a problem we never knew we had, or a piece of news that will send the “echosphere” scrambling for context and follow up is like a drug, if twitter is to be believed.

Enter Patrick Rhone’s book Enough, a collection of essays about how Patrick approaches a life with too much. It is a short book but dense in content and strikes at the heart of what has been bothering me lately on this subject of “appropriate use”.

We don’t need to have the latest thing. We don’t need all of it. We don’t have to always have the best. We just need to have “enough” and we need to realize that what is enough for me might not be enough for you. Rhone explores that gray area over the course of 90 pages in interesting ways.

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A few years ago, a life change saw me getting rid of most of my “stuff”. I sold or gave away all of my audio equipment, instruments, 95% of my paper books, and traded in all but a few CDs. It was a purge of epic proportions and during that difficult time I saw the saying from Fight Club’s Tyler Durden (by way of Jim Uhls by way of Chuck Palahniuk) was true to a disturbing extent — the things that we own really do end up owning us. 

Now, I’m not saying that you need to get rid of all of your stuff. In fact, as time went on things I slowly started accumulating things again (books not available in ebook format, for example) but forcing a harsh evaluation was an eye-opening experience for me.

Some people like paper books and feel the world is a richer place for their existence, whereas I’m fine with a Kindle app or iBooks and having no book-shaped objects sitting around, collecting dust. At that point, the iPad transcends a mere gadget but becomes something that fundamentally changes the way I approach things. It’s not an extravagant gadget. It is something I use everyday to do something essential and real. That is appropriate use.

Sean Bonner wrote about these topics a while back in his “Year of Less” series of posts right when I was in the heart of my Great Purge and the timing seemed eerily appropriate[1]. They helped a lot when I was trying to form my own ideas about what was really important.

One particularly interesting piece in Enough was entitled “Use Technology To Enrich, Not Distract” and it strikes at the heart of the topic. After getting a sense of similar strains of thought in Kevin Kelly’s book “What Technology Wants” , hearing Rhone’s take was welcome and interesting.

Another chapter in the book is called “You Will Never Catch Up”. In many ways here, Rhone hits the nail on the head. Email will always roll in, your Twitter stream will keep streaming, your RSS articles will keep piling up. It will go on, day after day, and we’re faced with the daunting task of finding ways to manage the chaos. Part of what I enjoy is finding those ways, indeed, but there are still times when you throw up your hands and reset. Ironically, after those resets, it’s rare to find out that you’ve missed anything crucial.

It underlines the point that a lot of what we see as real work is often just busywork. We are just fighting to push back the growing tide of neverending drudgery of digital management. I don’t know about you, but putting technology to work for me instead of making me feel farther behind is something that I think is worth spending time on, as long as it’s done within reason.

Patrick Rhone has a included a lot of good stuff in this book. Its length insures you’ll get through in a few sittings. While some of the writing is introspective and almost like a minimalist poetry, there is some surprisingly workmanlike prose as well. These parts focus on outlining “things to do” and which lists to make, intended to jar your mind into getting some of the book’s more well-meaning points.

Scattered throughout the book are quotes that keep you thinking about it long after the last page is turned.

It is well put together book which reached me at just the right time. I recommend it for those of you who are looking for a quick read and who have been thinking about where our time, attention, money and space go.

  1. Also read Sean’s excellent BoingBoing piece “Technomads” ↩