The availability of NPR Podcasts have given me a whole new appreciation of This American Life. Act one of last week’s show is an absolute riot:
Out for a simple pleasure cruise with two friends, Alex Zharov (pictured), relaxes as he steers their boat into Jamaica Bay in New York City. But this end-of-the-day excursion, which should have only lasted 40 minutes, is about to turn into an out of control adventure that will leave him lost, stranded, and bleeding … all within sight of the Empire State Building, but without hope of rescue. Stories that take place on the edge of civilization, just out of sight.
Listen to the show here: In the Shadow of the City.
JanRain CEO Scott Kveton’s 5 minute talk about OpenID at Ignite Seattle is probably the most succinct explanation of OpenID I’ve heard to date:
If that doesn’t make you want to run out and get your own OpenID, I don’t know what will.
fon is offering free wireless routers to anyone near a Starbucks or other café type place. They will also split the loot from the customers you skim from the T-Mobile hotspot with your strategically placed router. This violates the terms of service for just about any home broadband provider. Now, violating those terms of service to share your broadband for free doesn’t seem all that bad. But doing it for profit seems like it might end in a lawsuit. Remember when London Terrace Towers was sued for reselling the super’s bandwidth?
If you’re in a real sharing mood, why not just give it away? Join up with nycwireless or similar organization in your area.
via Gothamist
Vonage is offering current customers a discount if they prepay for the year. Taken at face value, it might appear that Vonage is giving their existing subscribers a break if they are willing to shell out a year’s worth of subscription charges up front. Alternatively, it could be that they are seeking to get some much needed revenue on the books before the end of the first quarter. Given Vonage’s less than stellar performance in the market, the latter might just be closer to the truth.
It made me think twice about Vonage’s long term viability anyway. I’m switching to Earthlink’s trueVoice service.
Gothamist takes exception to Bloomberg’s refusal to suspend alternate side of the street parking after Wednesday’s snowfall. While the Mayor’s attitude did seem somewhat harsh, given the amount of snow, he probably almost made the right call.
I say almost because the right call probably would have been to enforce parking regulations in Manhattan below 96th street and give the rest of the city a break for a couple days. Manhattan does not have an abundance of on-street parking and the snow needs to be removed. It is difficult to remove snow when there are cars in the way. Indoor parking garages are also plentiful in most parts of Manhattan. So, if one does not wish to move their vehicle, they can opt to stick it in a garage. Upper Manhattan and other boroughs don’t necessarily have a lot of garages so alternate side of the street should be suspended in those locations.
This is all sort of a moot point since the Mayor eventually caved by excusing these parking tickets. So, this dustup is all for naught. Nevertheless, the next time we get a couple inches of snow, normal parking rules should be enforced in Manhattan.
Yahoo Pipes caused a bit of a stir this week. The wizzy drag and drop editor allows one to mash up RSS & Atom feeds to their heart’s content and publish them for the rest of the world to use. Very cool, but I found myself wanting for a few more features. For instance, there is no way to draw bits of text from a feed to use as input for another module. That feature alone would open up many more possibilities.
Here’s my first crack at a pipe: NY Metro Craigslist. This is very basic in that it allows one to create an RSS feed for a craigslist category (e.g. bicycles for sale) across a few craigslist sites that cover the New York City area (NYC, North Jersey, LI). It will work with most CL categories (not the personals though, sorry casual encounters fans). The end result is an RSS feed. Since it takes user input, one can make a feed for just about anything like garage sales, motorcycles, or jobs in biotech.
As one who subscribes to the Getting Things Done philosophy of, well, getting things done, I should probably know exactly when I started applying GTD techniques. I can’t pin down an exact date, but I know it has been a shade longer than a year. In that time, it has helped me immensely. I simply would not be able to keep my head above water without some form of system in place.
For the most part, GTD stays out of the way and just lets things happen. Nonetheless, it is useful to evaluate what is going on once in a while to see if things can be improved. This is precisely what I did with Outlook, and it helped quite a bit. I used to really loathe Outlook. I can’t say I really love Outlook now, but if it were a person, we would be on cordial speaking terms. We might even have a beer together after work once in awhile. It is doubtful that we would hang out on the weekends though.
So, things were clicking along nicely. Everything but the weekly reviews. This seems to be a common problem in the GTD crowd. GTD was working for he most part, things were not falling through the cracks or getting lost; they just were not happening fast enough. Without reviews on a regular basis, there was no defined time to sit down and prioritize things. I just kept adding to the list and once in a while, I would knock a couple off.
The good news is, since everything was captured on a list somewhere, I was able to pull out of this downward spiral very quickly. I knocked a bunch of items off my lists in one afternoon. After getting all this work done and feeling good about it, I wanted to keep things that way. So, I turned by gaze towards what had led me down this dark road: Lack of Weekly Reviews.
After looking at the problems, I decided to do two simple things:
- Reschedule weekly reviews for Friday mornings
- Make a couple weekly tasks daily
After a year of trying to do reviews in the afternoon, I found that Friday afternoon is generally a crap time to schedule anything like this. I really needed minimal interuption, but I didn’t want to be unavailable. So, when people stopped by the office or called to chat, I chatted. Eventually, the work day ended and I wanted to get out of there. Sure, I could have stayed on and finished the review, but I’d rather be elsewhere on Friday evening. The result was that I rarely completed reviews. Rescheduling to Friday morning solved this problem. The review gets done and I have time to chat if need be.
With that problem solved, I focused on what I was trying to accomplish during the review. I actually had a check list for my weekly review. Not a long list, but there were a couple items on it that I really dreaded. Specifically, making sure all of my data entry was complete and following up on emails were cumbersome. These are both very important tasks that need to get done on a very regular basis. I decided that if there was less to do, it would be more palatable. So I started dealing with these items more often.
In the case of data entry, this was not all that difficult. For the most part, my data entry is quick and easy so long as I keep up with it. It normally consists of notes I’ve jotted down in meetings. Now, I try to enter those in shortly after the meeting. If I don’t have time, I put them in my data entry folder. When I have a few spare minutes, I’ll dive in and enter whatever time allows. If I have a bigger data entry task, I don’t just toss it in that folder. I make note of it on a list so I am sure I’ll get back to it at some point. This makes for a thin (or empty) data entry folder that is easy to deal with during a weekly review.
As for the email follow-ups, rather than waiting until the weekly review to do them, I now review them daily. Basically, I look for any email in my @Waiting folder that has gone for more than a week without a response and follow up on it. This means I am normally dealing with less than 10 emails at a go rather than 45 or 50. Following up a bit sooner also has the side effect of keeping the total number of follow ups down to a more manageable number.
These minor adjustments to my review process don’t seem all that earth shattering, but they have made GTD much more effective for me. Reviews are probably one of the biggest hurdles for people trying to practice GTD. They certainly were something I grappled with for a while. As I said before GTD is pretty damn effective even if your reviews aren’t, but regular reviews make it hum.
