Last week, Engadget asked its readers "How would you change HP’s Mini 1000 Mi?" After the reply I started to post ran into a few paragraphs, I decided to cut and paste my thoughts here instead.

Why a Netbook?

My time logs show that it takes from 8 to 11 minutes for me to start working on the my regular laptop — time spent looking for an electrical outlet and waiting for the boot sequence to complete. Granted, my old laptop only has 1 GB of RAM and the battery is too exhausted to last more than 30 minutes before throwing XP into Hibernate mode. The HP netbook gave me something more agile than a full laptop: small, fast-booting, and with sufficient power to leave the charger at home. But is a netbook computer useful for serious work?

When I first started using the Foleo, I was primarily attracted by how I naturally carried it around: one handed in a neoprene sleeve, instead of a bag that would inevitably get filled things I didn’t need. Frank Lloyd Wright used to design homes with as few cupboards and closets as he could get away with, recognizing that if owners had additional space to fill, they would stockpile possessions rather than use them. I never missed having a laptop bag. Alas, I had to RMA the Foleo back to Palm when the product was canceled. Most of the netbooks released in the interim have either been too small, unergonomic, or otherwise compromised for me to take them seriously — until now.

The HP Mini 1000 Mi

Fast forward 18 months. From the moment I unboxed the Mini 1000, I had most of my Foleo experience back. Of all the netbooks currently on the market, except for a couple of sibling HP products, the Mini 1000 has the best keyboard I’ve tested, with keys that are flush-mounted and untapered. The Mini has a "92 percent," almost full-size keyboard, which is becoming increasingly common on netbooks. I only wish HP would have used a trackpoint (the eraser-like nub) for navigation instead of a trackpad, which would have created enough space to incorporate a full-size keyboard like the Foleo. As with a few other netbooks, like the Acer Aspire One, the trackpad’s buttons flank the sides of the pad rather than the bottom, which my thumbs have yet to get used to.

Software

The "Mi" version of the HP Mini 1000 features Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows XP. I wanted a less commercial operating system that would compel me to use web-based applications rather than native ones. The Mi was clearly designed with the non-geek in mind — there’s no command line console like the Bash shell, for instance. I miss the shell, since I much prefer to write with the classic text editor, vi, than the included text editor, gEdit. Most writers want a full word processor, and would probably be satisfied with OpenOffice, which is also bundled with the Mini. I’ve never been able to get into OpenOffice Writer, since it lacks the Outline View that makes Microsoft Word indispensable.

HP’s Mobile Internet Experience (MIE) user interface is a bit more attractive than a default Ubuntu distribution. The home screen is comprised of three panes. The left pane is for email, using Thunderbird. The center pane is for the web, featuring a search/address bar and bookmarks for launching a customized version of Firefox. The right pane is for music and photo, using HP’s own MediaStyle player and manager.

I set up the Thunderbird panel for my Gmail IMAP account, but after a couple of days I found myself more comfortable with accessing Gmail through the browser again. The Thunderbird interface is superficially attractive, since it displays the headers of your latest messages is soon as the computer is booted. But clicking on one of these headers doesn’t open the message directly. It opens the Thunderbird client in full screen mode, so you have to click on the header again to open the individual email. So the header column on the home screen is essentially a launcher icon for Thunderbird.

The same is true for MediaStyle. When you click on a thumbnail of a photo on the home screen, instead of displaying that photo full-sized, you’re taken to MediaStyle’s photo manager, from which you have to select the thumbnail again. Clicking on the thumbnail cover art for a music file works similarly: the selection launches MediaStyle’s file manager, and the file must be re-selected.

The web pane is better designed. The dropdown bookmarks menu and four Favorite thumbnails launch the browser and go to the selected website directly. The entry bar at the top of the allows you to put in a URL or search term, and the icons for Go and Search are intuitive.

The Linux version of Firefox, though customized, doesn’t seemed optimized for the Mini’s 1024 x 576 screen. The browser frame consumes too much real estate, but I’m still searching for a lightweight Linux Firefox theme — the two that I found wouldn’t install. Most of the extensions I use on the Windows version, on the other hand, did install (I have more compatibility issues with the latest Windows Firefox betas than with the MIE version). Fullscreen Mode (F11) is the best way to use the browser in most cases, especially when using Google Docs and Gmail.

In Daily Use

Switching between several computers nudged me into using the cloud exclusively on the netbook. After a couple of instances of leaving a natively written draft on the Mini, then needing that file later at a different computer, I decided to rule out local computing on the netbook. I use MindManager Web (the web-based version of MindManager, using the Mindjet Connect service) as my digital inbox. If there’s a thought I want to grab while working on something else I toggle over to MMW and drop it there; then process what I’ve collected on that collection map at the end of the day, opening the file from the MindManager 8 desktop version. I also use the "inbox" map on MMW for any collecting any sites, articles or documents I come across when using the Mini. 90 percent of what I need to be productive on the Mini is Gmail, Google Docs, and MindManager Web.

Like the old days of the Foleo, it’s been a relief to carry nothing but the netbook and it’s sleeve instead of additional paraphernalia. Unlike the Foleo, the Mini’s battery life is 2.5 to 3 hours, while the 2-year-old Foleo’s battery lasted nearly 6 hours with WiFi and Bluetooth active. HP sells a separate 6-cell alternative to the included 3-cell battery, but it protrudes from the base of the device at the center, which is neither visually attractive nor lap-friendly.

I’m tempted to replace MIE with Windows 7. Part of the reason for choosing the Linux version was the chance to learn something new. I don’t feel lost in the new environment, but the overall responsiveness is sluggish compared to Windows 7 installations I’ve seen on other netbook computers. I also find MIE’s slate-colored interface a rather cold ("Because modern science was looking for a color more somber than black," Mort Sahl once quipped about charcoal gray suits).

Overall, I like the practicality of the Mini Mi, but I’m still at a point where I feel more comfortable and productive when I’m sitting at a full-size laptop. But the netbook is perfect for taking advantage of smaller windows of time.

I want you or anyone to post in the comments or email me the coolest cloud-based work setup they use on a daily basis, with a least one example of how it allowed you to do something you couldn’t do previously.

I got a bunch of great answers that were informative and inspiring. It’s a platitude to say that I had trouble choosing only one, but that was definitely the case here. But let’s skip the handwringing and get down to brass tacks. Who won?

Congratulations . . .

Kevin A, whose implementation of cloud services struck me the most extensive and integrated setup (if you’re not Kevin but still want second crack at the Matrix, keep reading):

I’ve used various MS technologies to acheive “cloud-like” computing over the past few years. Anything from Live Mesh, Live Mail (to a hotmail-hosted domain), WHS, and various other stuff.

I rarely sync my WM devices to the phone, because Windows Live for Windows Mobile syncs both my e-mail and contacts OTA. In turn, Windows Live Mail syncs contacts back from the hotmail acct back to my desktop, thereby un-neccessitating the requirement that I use Outlook to “back up” my contacts and mail.

On the WHS side, I can not worry about “backing up” computers because WHS does it for both my desktop and laptop. I can tell Vista to redirect Documents, Music, etc. to the WHS side. And once Mesh for WHS plugin is complete, I can tell WHS to handle meshing important documents to MS’s cloud network. So I don’t have to deal with offline files, or synctoy, or other solutions where I need to be necessarily connected to “my” network to get a sync on my files.

I may be a bit MS-centric here, but I’ve beta-tested various MS products over the years, and WHS, Mesh, and WLWM/WLM are three products that stood out because it cuts out the unnecessary middle-men. Why should I be required to be in my network or establish a VPN into my network to make sure my file is up-to-date? WWAN technology are only going to get better, I just have to ensure that I have short bursts of ‘net connectivity (3G or higher) to get up-to-date contents. Same thing with “sync your mail” into Outlook. With apologies to MS, I don’t particularly use Outlook, since it is bloated and tends to get confused occasionally. WLM is all I need, and MS has made it very easy to sync to a hotmail-hosted account, which in turn does the same for the WM5+ devices. I need not to be “at” my computer to get the same effect as an actual sync.

With SSD becoming standard, I may resort backing up my files via Mesh so that I don’t end up losing it. Which in turn would be backed-up via Home Server server backup syncing to the mesh, and folder redirection on the desktop, and Mesh is smart enough (supposedly) to not use the WAN connection. Which in turn would result in less end-user confusion about which “file” residing where is the most up-to-date

As Kevin admits, his solutions are rather MS-centric, using Windows Live services to sync Windows Mobile and Windows Home Server over-the-air (OTA) — but he’s managed to completely bypass Outlook and Exchange ActiveSync in the process. If I were willing to migrate from Gmail to Live Mail, I’d probably install WHS and follow Kevin’s lead. Like the other examples posted by contributors, this isn’t a 100% “Cloud” solution (WHS is doing the heavy lifting until the Mesh plugin is available), but the level of integration demonstrated is closest to the “single distributed computer” ideal I’ve been trying to model for my own setup.

Other Noteworthy Contributions

The most moving post for me was by Brent Johnson, who’s using Twitter to chronicle his mother’s upcoming lung replacement surgery among friends and family, and to organize teams to raise funds for it:

As it stands right now, I’m posting updates through Twitter, and I have them appear on a private WordPress page for family and friends to read.

As the surgery approaches, we’re also putting together a fundraising team to help raise money to cover the estimated $525,000 surgery. The fund raising teams will likely have computer access for many of their tasks, but we plan on implementing Twitter into that as well. During the events themselves, we will be able to coordinate the event (and the site volunteers) through the use of Smartphones and Twitter. That means all we will need are our cell phones, and we will be able to dispatch important announcements to team leaders spread over a large event or venue. It will enable to us communicate walkie-talkie style without having to purchase (or rent) expensive walkie-talkies. Since these are fundraising events, it’s important to us to conserve as much money as possible so it goes towards the fund (and not expenses).

Once the surgery starts, we will be able to post short Twitter updates about my mom’s condition for everyone to read. During the critical surgery, the last thing I will want to do is lug around a computer in order to update a website. Furthermore, I don’t want to have to call dozens and dozens of people to let them know her condition. Utilizing Twitter, I can easily post short updates LIVE, and everyone can either use their favorite Twitter client, the Twitter webpage, or our WordPress blog (with Twitter plugin) to see how well she’s doing. It will simplify everything during a very trying time for us and allow us to keep everyone updates minute by minute.

Girlxoxo had a very extensive setup, and virtually tied with Kevin A’s solution (but Kevin’s seemed more streamlined by a hair):

Google Calendar – all entries are scheduled there for my food reviews website. It’s a private calendar, but all the reviewers have the address so they can see when their review will be published. Also like that they can search by their name and at a glance see the dates for all their reviews.

Google Docs. All food reviews are written & stored there (about 850 and counting) .

Google Spreadsheet. Used to keep track of all income for months and all payments to reviewers.

Leaving Google …
Pixlr.com – Use it to edit images. Works just like Photoshop which I have on my computer, and I love that I can import pictures from a URL. Unfortunately, I still save the edited images to the laptop.

Delicious.com stores links I come across during the day.

Keepm.com. Stores all contacts – phone, gmail, facebook etc. I don’t want all contacts on my phone – some I probably will never use.

Mobile Phone. Use it for blogging also to my mobile phone features related website – using SharpMT, xnViewer and PocketScreen for screenshots (guess that’s not really cloud but I like the all in one – FAST aspect of it).

Dashwire.com – all contacts, texts sync from mobile to Dashwire.

Speaking of sync – Google mobile (and calendar) sync (I know I said I was finished with Google).

Business phone line (for blogging contacts): Google Voice (formerly Grandcentral.com) – rings my cellphone.

Rather than paste the entire comment thread here, check out the great contributions in the last post.

Still Want to Win a Matrix Pro?

Tools for Thought is the first of over two dozen sites that are running contest for the Matrix Pro, courtesy of Pantech. The details of each contest will probably be quite different, but the prize is the same: the Pantech Matrix Pro. Head on over to one of the remaining sites:

Good luck, and thanks for all of your contributions!

First, instead of giving advice in my usual presumptuous fashion, I’m asking for it. I’m radically redesigning my workflow and need a few intrepid readers to share some successful or dramatic examples of how they’re using the cloud. Second, I’m “selling out” by aligning myself with a commercial promotion — cell phone geeks take note. I’ll get to the details in a few paragraphs, but first, an explanation . . .

Cloudsourcing

Just as it’s often said that true writing is rewriting, I believe that true thinking is rethinking — the ability to step back from deeply entrenched assumptions, opinions and perspectives, and actively look for further alternatives. As a mental exercise, I often find it useful to periodically reexamine the assumptions I take for granted and invert them to see what happens.

A recent starting point for that self-examination was 10 Technologies I Resist. I went down the list and see if there were a few of those technologies I could test drive to broaden or reverse my perspective. There more more that a few that I found worth experimenting with: virtual outsourcing, IM, online finance trackers, mobile email and Office 2.0. That last one is the kickoff point of this post. For the next 30 days I’m going to migrate all of my information into the cloud, and chronicle the progress of the project is a series of posts called “Cloud Studies.”

In switching from full self-employment to office work, I’ve had to distribute my personal and professional work across several platforms: a home desktop, a work desktop, a laptop, a netbook and a cell phone. Trying to reconcile my data by copying locally-stored files, or sharing them by email, was getting ridiculously convoluted. So my goal is to design a virtual architecture that integrates my data in the absolute minimum number of buckets.

I recently, painfully migrated from the Palm OS Treo/Palm Desktop combo — that’s been the bedrock of my GTD system since I first implemented it — to the Windows Mobile equivalent: a Treo Pro and Microsoft Outlook. My goal is to sync my phone and various Outlook desktop/OWA clients over the air with a hosted Exchange account, then gradually layer on additional services: Skydrive for mass storage, Live Mesh for file synchronization, Mindjet Connect for mind maps, and possibly My Phone for PIM data. If none of this sounds less convoluted that my previous scheme, I have a pretty good idea that once the infrastructure is set up, my workflow will be dramatically streamlined — essentially accessing one “computer” from any device.

This Is Where You Come In

Here’s what I want. I want you or anyone to post in the comments or email me the coolest cloud-based work setup they use on a daily basis, with a least one example of how it allowed you to do something you couldn’t do previously. “Coolest” here can mean a few things:

• The most efficient: e.g. how you run your life through a personal wiki or WebDAV
• The most dramatic: how you use Backpack and Twitter to dispatch work to a team virtual assistants in St. Croix (real-world examples please, not creative writing)
• The most elegant: how you eliminated your additional computers and run them as virtual images on Amazon EC2 from your netbook
• The most democratic: how you’ve replaced all of the files and applications on your hard drive with free and open source web apps

You have 48 hours from “now,” 12:00 a.m. Thursday, April 16, 2009, until midnight Saturday, April 18.

What’s In It for You

As you’ve no doubt gathered from the post title, the winner scores a brand new Pantech Matrix Pro. The Matrix is a dual-slider Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard (non-touchscreen) smartphone in the form factor of a feature phone. In simpler terms, it’s a phone that slides up vertically for a numeric keypad, and horizontally for a QWERTY keypad. I’ll be posting a review of the phone shortly, but the bottom line is that I would probably make it my default phone if I hadn’t just renewed my Sprint contract (long story). Included with the phone is a $100 gift card that can be applied to any products and services sold through an AT&T store, online or offline.

If you have everything you need in the mobile space, then don’t play to win. Play to share your favorite cloud hacks.

At the time I wrote:

It’s on my Someday/Maybe list to try the likes of Guru or AskSunday. At the moment I don’t have any tasks that seem onerous enough to dump on a developing country. Maybe I’ll brainstorm a list of tasks and outsource them just to be fashionable and say I’ve done it.

This year, my new schedule is a problem looking for a solution, so I began reexamining my assumptions about the value of a virtual assistant (VA) and looking for use cases that weren’t silly. In my research, I came across a couple of posts by personal development and productivity blogger Sid Savara that gave some of the most detailed examples of using personal outsourcing effectively. He generously agreed to answer some follow up questions I shot him.

Andre: In your post, The Price of My Dreams – $60 a Week, you discussed your experiments with outsourcing your cooking and laundry. Are you still maintaining your domestic outsourcing, or have you expanded the scope of it?

Sid: Yes, I am still outsourcing my cooking and I love it.  At this point it’s truly changed my lifestyle – I no longer shop, I no longer cook and I no longer even think about what I need to eat.

I am also experimenting with a maid service (The Maids). Full disclosure, my parents own The Maids franchise in Honolulu.  One cleaning takes them about 1.5 hours, and saves me a total of about 6-8 hours.  They also do a far better job than I do, but if we’re just talking about time saved, it saves me about 6 hours every two weeks.

I’m interested in outsourcing my event planning (calling friends, organizing potlucks, etc) but so far my friends have done an admirable job picking up the slack, and I use Socializr to send out on email and then handle the RSVPs.  I had my TimeSvr aides send out the invitations for me, which saved me a few minutes of work each time as well.

Andre: You’re on record of having used Craig’s List and TimeSvr. Have you tried any other outsourcing resources, like Elance or Guru?

I have used Elance, but never Guru. My understanding of Guru is they are focused more towards heavily technical projects. As a software engineer myself, if I have something especially technical I want done, I tend to write it myself or collaborate with friends.

I have had a good experience with Elance.  I’ve hired a couple people to do minor, fairly mundane tasks (analyzing values in a spreadsheet for example) and it was always well worth the money.  My single virtual assistant that I used for much of my blog set up and research I also found from Elance. I asked Prabhu to find the best posts for me out of the mounds I read, cull my RSS feeds, look up names and contact info for various blogs and moderate comments. In addition, I had him do some minor proofreading etc of posts.

The most important thing is to find a good assistant.  I am sure there are bad ones out there, but I tend to be ruthless in my questions. If someone doesn’t show enough drive, or sounds to me like they’re trying to fool me into believing they are something they are not, I reject them.

Andre: What’s your judgment process for deciding to offload a task rather than doing it yourself?

Sid: I would love to offload more tasks.  I think the main issue is finding someone capable of doing it for a reasonable price, and looking at whether it is worth the effort to give the job to someone else. Any outsourcing requires a certain level of management or trust, and that’s the biggest issue I’ve had.

For example, I’d like to outsource more of my email responses as I get hundreds a day. I’ve discovered though that with judicious GMail filtering I can get it down to a manageable 30 or so “real” emails a day – and the responses tend to be customized.  If I was running a mail order business, perhaps I could outsource more, but as a software engineer and writer, most of my replies tend to be based on my experience and judgment calls.

Cooking, laundry, cleaning, car service, car washing etc are all activities that are solid candidates to outsource because I am sure I can get someone who can do it at least as well as me, and at a price that saves me enough time to make it worth my while.  Similarly, event planning (calling my friends) doesn’t require a lot of skill – but perhaps requires my personality,

Andre: What are the biggest mistakes to avoid when delegating tasks and projects?

Sid: I think there are two main mistakes people make (and by this I mean, these are the two main mistakes I made).

The first is assuming that the person who has been delegated the task knows as much as you do about it.  Knowledge that I take for granted and skills that I find basic may be foreign to my assistant.   Assume that your assistant has no skills, and that you’ll need to explain each step in plain english – the first time they do it.

The second is assuming that you know how to delegate. Most people are great at delegating tasks to one person: themselves. In order to effectively delegate, instructions need to be laid out very clearly with all the decision points explained. The type of results expected, the format of documents, etc should be specified in advance so that the assistant knows end to end what the process should entail.

Finally, one cautionary note – don’t assume silence is a good sign.  If you tell your assistant “I’ll expect it Monday, email me if you have questions”, and then don’t follow up by Monday, you may be in for a rude shock.  Oftentimes silence can indicate your assistant does not even know what questions to ask. Come Monday, you’ll either have a confused assistant asking for more time, or worse, the completely wrong task completed because they were too proud or too ashamed to ask for better direction.

Andre: What are some common assumptions made about outsourcing that you’ve found through experience to be exaggerated or false?

Sid: I think one large misconception is that foreign assistants are of inferior quality.  From my (admittedly narrow) experience, foreign assistants are skilled enough to handle data entry and analysis tasks given accurate instructions. Their command of the English language is strong enough, even though some may have accents.  So while they may not be suitable for speaking on your behalf at a keynote, they can certainly put together the excel spreadsheet and pie chart you present.

Another misconception that I had was that it would be difficult to get started.  I thought it would take weeks to find someone, to bring them up to speed, etc.  This is false – in all my experiences outsourcing, finding a provider was the easy part. My assistants were ready to help the same day – they are hungry for work.  The hard part is the delegation, and learning how to effectively get the most out of your assistant for mutual benefit.

Andre: In Can Virtual Assistants Make You More Productive?, you talked about your experiences with your individual VA, Prabhu, and with the team of VAs at TimeSvr. In the comments, you mentioned that you would be keeping Pradhu after your trial of TimeSvr lapsed. Was that out of loyalty, better rapport or better results? Which approach would you recommend to others: an individual VA or a team?

Sid: It certainly wasn’t out of loyalty – if I had a superior experience with TimeSvr that blew Prabhu away, I would likely have given him a couple weeks notice, perhaps tried to find someone else to take his services, and leave.  The main issue was that Prabhu was a well oiled machine by the time I found TimeSvr.  I had been with Prabhu and we had settled on a process to handle my tasks.  While TimeSvr benefits from economies of scale and can offer a large number of tasks (with specialized assistants for each tasks), Prabhu handled a few tasks that were especially time consuming and did it well – for minimum expense.  TimeSvr is a fantastic service for someone who wants a general purpose virtual assistant, or who wants solid reporting on individual, discrete tasks.

In my case, I had a few tasks that I needed done, that Prabhu did well.  The prices for both would be approximately the same to me (since I was likely paying Prabhu a rate similar to what TimeSvr assistants make).

I would recommend TimeSvr (or another VA team) to people who want a variety of tasks and a variety of different aides to do them, or if you are not sure what you are going to outsource just yet.  On the other hand, for a long term relationship with a few specific tasks an individual assistant and the teamwork that comes with that may be superior.  I believe that firms with VA Teams, such as TimeSvr, offer this dedicated assistant service as well. If I recall, the pricing was very comparable to what I was paying Prabhu – I just had no compelling reason to switch since he already performed efficiently.

Andre: Can you illustrate how outsourcing saved you time or effort with one or two of the most graphic examples?

Sid: I think cooking is still probably the best example.  Cooking is a process that requires so much more than simply frying up something in a pan – it involves looking up a recipe, driving to the store, purchasing ingredients, storing those ingredients until I have time to cook, cooking, and finally cleaning the pots and pans.  Compare that with just going outside and having food dropped off in tupperware, and it turns out to be a monstrous saving.

Having my apartment cleaned by the Maids is another great example.  They sent a team of 4 people, who are all trained to clean, with tools specifically made to clean.  My shower looks cleaner than it has in months, and my kitchen is spotless.  My friend remarked that to get his bathroom to look the way it did after they cleaned it would have taken him 3 hours of scrubbing.  I think part of this is because it’s their job, they work harder and faster than we would if we were unmotivated and cleaning it on our leisure time.  I will gladly trade some of my hours earning money developing software for a few of their hours spent cleaning and sanitizing my home.

Andre: In the latter post you mentioned “better parallelization of tasks” as one of the advantages of outsourcing. Will a VA team actually work of multiple tasks you assign simultaneously?

Sid: This depends on the VA firm, so it would be best to check with whoever you are going with to ensure your expectations are appropriate.  I gave TimeSvr so much work during my initial test that I don’t think they could do anything but parallelize if they wanted to give me good service.  I also emailed for status updates and heard back from different VAs on each task, which leads me to believe they had multiple people working on my account at the same time.

Andre: You documented how you dispatched a couple of research tasks: one for comparing e-commerce solutions, and another for comparing subnotebooks you were interested in purchasing. What would be your top tips for assigning tasks right the first time?

Sid: If it’s a research task, I absolutely recommend specifying exactly what format you want your research in. If you want a spreadsheet, tell them you want a spreadsheet. If you are interested in 5 specific features, ask for those columns to be listed.  This was a slight misstep I made with the e-commerce solution task, though the results still turned out fine. In the subnotebook task, I was much more specific with my request and ended up getting results that matched well with what I requested.

Bottom line, if you don’t ask for it – you won’t get it.

I would also caution against tasks that require some implicit cultural knowledge. For example, rather than saying get me the biographies of 10 popular US basketball stars, I would name the basketball stars by name – or risk having a few on that list that may not be popular anymore.  Another reader commented to me they assigned task similar to this asking for popular groups in a specific niche and their assistant ended up misunderstanding and providing them with useless information.

Andre: What’s the most fun experiment you’ve conducted with outsourcing?

Sid: I enjoyed having my assistants call friends and restaurants to make reservations “on behalf of Mr. Savara.”  I always felt like the restaurants treated me a little better because my assistant had called, though that could also just have been the enjoyment I got from having someone else call to make the reservation =).

(Photo credit: miss_rogue)

I’ve always been skeptical about how these bloggers use email, probably because I’m not important enough to get that much. Using email has never been the cornerstone of my job description. Recently I was sick with an inner ear infection, and after five days of not opening my email (I never open my email unless I’m absolutely sure I’ll process it to zero), there were less than 400 messages in my inbox. In my last job, where I did get a lot of email and processed it at least hourly, I still thought that claims of massive email backlog were exaggerated — until I saw my co-workers’ inboxes. But rock stars in any domain, like Merlin or Jeff, have popularity issues that would persist regardless of the medium.

Less is more

Tantek prefers IM and Twitter messages to email.

I’m probably responding to less than 1 in 10 emails that are sent directly to me, and even fewer that were sent to a set of people or a list. The usability of email for me has deteriorated so much that I exclaimed on Twitter: EMAIL shall henceforth be known as EFAIL.

Tantek believes, if I understand him correctly, that email tends to be overwritten because senders try to batch too much information in each message to reduce the need to send more messages. That saves time for the sender, but demands more of the receiver.

I agree, but we all have different ideas on how to use email. I think there are two types of senders: those who treat an email like a letter, and those who treat it like a postcard. I’m squarely in the postcard camp, preferring one thought or request per message. Imagine going to your mailbox and getting 80 letters to read each day.

But aren’t short emails cold? I don’t think so. I think cold is cold. A gregarious person sending a short email can infuse more warmth in two sentences than a curmudgeon can in two pages. As I’ve written before, I believe that any human expression is like a hologram — a fragment contains the integrity of the whole. A polite email is one that  doesn’t wear out its welcome with excess verbiage.

My two favorite media are SMS and Twitter. As a writer, I have a perverse fascination with trying to pack as much content as possible into a 140 or 160 characters. They’re like haiku for the 21st Century. IM, to paraphrase Robert Frost, is like playing tennis without a net.

What’s your relationship with email?

I happen to think that most of the discourse on email overload is, well, loaded. The discussion tends to be monopolized by victims of their own success. What about those of you in the trenches?

• Are you getting too much volume?
• How many times do you genuinely need to check email each day?
• Do you process your inbox to zero, or chip away at it incrementally?
• Do you prefer letter-length or postcard-length email?
• Is there a better medium for workplace communication (IM, phone, wikis)?
• Which medium, if any, would you like to get rid of?

(Photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography)

Technorati Tags: Productivity, Technology

As with other notebook apps, Springpad lets you collect notes and information related to a topic into “notebooks” with an arbitrary number of pages. Pages can consist of photos, documents or web services. It can take some up-front discipline to remember to use the notebook where you’re doing online research if your habit is to simply surf the web by free association, but once the collection habit is ingrained, you might save hours of inadvertently retracing your steps.

Once you create a notebook, or “springpad,” you can share it with individuals or groups by selecting the Share option, which provides urls to the notebook’s text or HTML for pasting into an email or web page.

Interface

Springpad shines with it’s slick Martha Stewart-meets-37signals user interface. Features are generally more discoverable in Springpad than other notebook apps, partly due to layout, but mainly because of the large number of preformatted notebook templates already installed — like the difference between using Microsoft Works versus Microsoft Word. Springpad has exercise trackers, favorite restaurant checklists, meal planners, generic To Do lists, and about three dozen others springpads.

All pages elements, like notes, lists, appointments and maps, can be reordered by drag-and-drop.

Alarms can be set to send email or text alerts. Other elements that can be added to a page are:

• Budget
• Contact
• File
• General List
• Packing List
• Recipe
• Restaurant
• Shopping List

Each springpad occupies a somewhat smaller pane, and with smaller fonts, than most online notebooks. I find this less sprawling view much clearer for some reason — my eyes don’t wander around the page as much.

GTD and personal organizing

While I’ve never been fond of using notebook apps as task managers, there’s no reason they can’t be configured for that purpose. The default GTD Notebook is pretty threadbare, with tabs for Inbox, Home, Work and Someday. I tried to customize the tabs in Page Settings and found a Tab Control option that disappeared when I selected it, never to appear again.

The apparent lack of customizable contexts can be compensated by tags, which can be applied to any list item or other page elements. Once tagged, you can view a filtered list by the corresponding tab. Calendar entries or list entries with due dates will show up in the weekly Agenda column on the home page.

Next to the Agenda column is a Recent Updates column that lists your most recent edits. I would have preferred that the space taken up by Recent Updates be used to display a user definable pane, like an alternate calendar (monthly or daily view) or an untimed task list.

Conclusion

Springpad has a clean layout that easier to intuit your way through than competing apps. Google and Zoho notebooks has tighter integration with their office suites, but I don’t find myself making much use of that integration. Usually I just want throw pictures, web clips and notes under the same label without exporting the collection to other tools, so Springpad fits the bill more elegantly. If you don’t need Evernote’s ability to maintain notebooks offline, Springpad is a good first choice.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Technology, Springpad, Springpad Review

By default, Google’s PageRank algorithm can be frustrating for finding recent information. The simplified explanation of PageRank is this: results are prioritized by the number of incoming links to a page with the searched keyword.

Each link is a “vote” for that page’s relevance. Like larger states in the U.S. Electoral College during an election, some links carry more weight than others. Sites with more links that link to another page pass on more “link juice,” or PageRank, to that page than sites with fewer links.

Reverse ageism

Compared to the pre-Google days of search engines manually indexing sites, the relevance of search results has vastly improved. But sometimes a search that keys on popularity is a disadvantage. Suppose there’s an “it” toy for Christmas that hasn’t yet been released. You want to track the latest news on it, but you want to do it by searching at your discretion rather than cluttering your inbox with Google Alert notifications.

Searching the product name will usually bring up the company product page, followed by other results with more marketing than substance. Drop “iPhone” into Google, and the first page’s search results are the most popular ones that have been around long enough to accrue the most links, not the latest news from Engadget or TechCrunch.

Standard date-filtered searches

The two main ways to get more recent results in Google are to use that Advanced Search page or the daterange operator. Advanced Search is definitely more palatable. You put in your search term, click the plus sign next to “Date, usage rights, numeric range and more,” to make these options visible, then select the “date” from the dropdown menu. “Date” is actually a time frame specification, allowing you to select the past 24 hours, the past week, the past month or the past year. I’ll use “date” and “date range” in the literal and figurative senses interchangeably.

For anyone but hardcore geeks, daterange is a horror show. To search a keyword (i.e. a word or phrase) within a specific date range, the syntax is [keyword] daterange:[first Julian date]-[last Julian date]. The Julian date is the number of days that have elapsed since January 1, 4713 BC. Today’s Julian date is 2454790. The Google API likes to make like easy for computers, not humans.

A date search worth bookmarking

Here’s how I use the Advanced Search without the annoyance of clicking on the link to get to it and expanding the date option menu.

1. From the Google page, click Advanced Search
2. Enter the single-quote ( ‘ ) character in the main search field
3. Expand the “Date, usage rights . . .” menu and select “past 24 hours” from the Date menu
4. Run the search.
5. Bookmark the result page. The result will say “Your search – ‘ – did not match any documents,” which is fine
6. Notice that search box on the result page has a date dropdown menu next to it. That’s the reason for bookmarking this page
7. Optional: create a keyword shortcut for this page that allows you to access it from the address bar. I Firefox, go to Bookmarks, find the bookmark you just created, right-click it and select Properties. In the Keyword box, enter a keyword (I just use the single-quote) and click Save Changes. Now you can get to this page by hitting Ctrl-L and typing the keyword into the address bar
8. Do a search. For an exact string search, add another single-quote at the end of it (that was the reason for bookmarking the single-quote search result). For a regular keyword search, hit the backspace key to clear the single-quote character before entering your keywords. Then select your date range from the menu and click search

That’s it. The next time you need to track time-sensitive information, filter out the older results with this bookmarked page.

Technorati Tags: Technology, Google

So go find a streaming video of a talk you’d like to download convert to an MP3, and let’s make the conversion.

Download Live HTTP Headers

Live HTTP Headers is described on the Firefox Add-ons page blandly: “View HTTP headers of a page while browsing.” It’s a little more capable than that. If you launch your video, then open Live HTTP Headers from the Tools menu, you’ll see the stream of recently opened urls under the Headers tab. If the window is blank, it may take up to half a minute or more for the information to appear.

You’ll notice underneath the window that the “Capture” option is checked on by default, which is the setting you want. Scroll through the headers in the window and locate the long url with the appropriate file format, typically .flv or .avi, somewhere inside of it. This can take a bit of scrutiny, since there might be more than one url with the same file format. If that’s the case, look for the url with the relevant keywords (“jacques” and “derrida” embedded in the long url for an interview with Jacques Derrida).

Highlight this url then click the “Replay . . .” button, bringing up the dialog box with the “Save File” option. Save the file to the appropriate directory and let the file download. That’s all there is to it. This technique also works for downloading streaming audios.

In one of my early posts I recommended a similar procedure using the application FreeMusicZilla. Despite the open source connotations of that app’s name, I quickly realized that it’s proprietary freeware that limits the number of downloads per session — a limitation designed to compel the user to upgrade to a non-free “Pro” version. The Live HTTP Headers approach is more efficient and less restrictive.

Convert to audio with MediaCoder

Next, you’ll need to transcode your video into an audio-only format. Download MediaCoder Audio Edition. When launching MediaCoder for the first time, you’ll notice that it opens a page on the MediaCoder website prior to displaying the applications. MediaCoder does this by default each time it launches to check for updates, so if you’d rather not go through that, check the “Do not show this page on next startup” option on the bottom of the page prior to clicking the “Start MediaCoder” button.

Once the app is open, click the “Add . . .” button to add the video file, click the file in the window to highlight and select it, then from the menu select Transcode | Transcode Audio Only, then sit back and let MediaCoder work its magic. An hour-long video might take 10 minutes to convert. Depending on the original file’s compression rate, the reduction in file size after converting it to audio will probably be 7-10x.

You can actually skip using HTTP Live Headers by adding the stream’s url and transcoding it directly in MediaCoder instead of transcoding the separately downloaded file, but I find that the two-stage approach takes about half the time. If you don’t mind the extra wait, the MediaCoder-only approach is one less thing to monitor.

(Photo credit: hansdorsch)

Technorati Tags: Technology, Audio, Video

Three months later

At the end of the previous post mentioned above, I added a qualifier:

There’s always a placebo effect that accompanies any change of gear, so once the novelty wears off, I’ll be in a better position to reflect on just how substantial the progress has actually been.

And that’s exactly been the case. I was working through my lists faster for a while largely because the medium was new to me. The fact is that the essence of my system has always been most effective when I collect on paper, and process what I collect into a digital organizer.

I assumed that if I could capture incoming information on paper faster than I could on a laptop or PDA, then the same speed increase would apply to processing, organizing and review phases of task management. Over time, I noticed that I was increasingly irritated with having to leaf through the pages of my Filofax to find items or make new entries. Hunting for the right page added just enough sand in the gears to bring things to a halt. It would only take a few seconds, but it was long enough to unconsciously resist the impulse to review and enter information. I was less inclined to pull out the planner to write down small tasks.

For users of traditional time management systems, that’s not much of a problem. Small tasks are probably not worth writing down in the first place — that’s good priority management, right? But in GTD, anything consuming attention that goes untracked is an open loop, regardless of whether it’s big or small; it’s still an incomplete thought.

That might seem academic, but for anyone who’s experienced having nothing on his or her mind, despite having a heavy workload, any system that makes it inconvenient to track everything is unacceptable. I want to spend most of my time doing things, not thinking about them.

Rewriting lists

Whether this is a bug or a feature depends on your temperament, but I really got tired of having to rewrite my lists from scratch, instead of making local edits, during weekly reviews. Proponents of paper systems maintain that having to write new lists forces them to look at their lists more carefully, enabling them to see items that have been sitting around too long. Writing down the same task three weeks in a row gives them pause, prompting them to either redefine the task, get rid of it or move it to the Someday/Maybe list. On a digital system, it’s easier to gloss over undone items, since they stay on your list until you deliberately delete them.

Oddly enough, I found it easier to ignore undone items when I was using paper lists. Rewriting lists from scratch was just irritating enough to make me want to get the exercise over with a soon a possible, mechanically copying the items from the previous list that weren’t crossed out, and in my haste I would gloss over some that really needed further examination.

Copy and paste

Like the iPhone, the Filofax is crippled by the inability to copy and paste information into a notes field. Most of the information I’m exposed to comes to me over the computer, and being able to copy and paste relevant sections of content as action support was an enormous advantage I realized I wasn’t willing to give up. I liked being able to paste addresses into entries on my Errands like, or urls into certain entries on my @Computer list (it was actually more convenient than using bookmarks).

A hard edge between collecting and organizing

I don’t equate technology with complexity. Sometimes it’s simpler to commute to certain places with a car instead of a bicycle. One of the ways using a digital organizer simplified things for me was in distinguishing between the collection and organizing processes. I knew that if anything I wrote down was still on paper, it needed to be processed. If I had nothing on paper, there was nothing further to process. When I did everything on paper, it always seemed like whatever I collected passed through a fuzzier continuum.

I’m perfectly aware that all you really have to do is get specific about defining projects, next actions, etc., then cross out what you’ll collected; but while that make intellectual sense to me, it didn’t make experiential sense. Even after processing an item, it still felt like “stuff.”

What about digital distraction?

I’ve been using a smartphone and notetaker wallet ever since I adopted GTD. The notetaker wallet just replaced my standard wallet without significantly taking additional space, and since I would carry a cell phone anyway, adding PDA functionality to it saved me from having to bring another device.

The biggest drawback to smartphones, for me at least, was having too many options available: games, document editors, outliners, and other tools and toys. As soon as I pulled out my phone to look up or enter something in my calendar, I’d start thinking about what else I could be doing on the phone.

Since going back, those potential distractions really haven’t been a problem, even though I haven’t specifically done anything to prevent those distractions. I’m not entirely sure why that’s the case, since I did have those distractions before. I think I’m undergoing a shift in my attitude toward distractions, especially since I’ve eliminated so much of the emotional backlog I was keeping (see Disembedding Your Identity from Your Stuff). The more focused I’ve become on what I want, the less need I feel to block out what I don’t want. Knowing more precisely where I’m headed obviates the need to wear blinders to prevent me from going off course.

A few months ago, I was doing most of my freelance writing on an Alphasmart Neo — a decidated word processor with no internet access, no media player, and none of the distractions you expect in a laptop. Now I do virtually all my writing directly on the laptop or a junior legal pad (when I’m out, a junior legal pad is more portable than the Neo). Distractions happen from time to time, but I’m self-assured enough now to know that I’ll get back on track.

Stick with your system

I’m not advocating that anyone abandon a functional paper system. If you’re not having these problems, don’t adopt them just because they’re rhetorically persuasive. As always, do what works for you. But if you find yourself reading this thinking, “I thought it was just me!”, then you’re the one I’m writing this for. I’d actually prefer using a paper planner for a number of reasons that I outlined in the original post, but at the end of the day, the costs outweighed the benefits — for me.

(Photo credit: chaz_dixon)

Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity, Technology

Honestly I do not see the point in “resisting” new technologies. CHANGE is all around you and unless you accept it you will be left behind. Not that I am already on top of all the technologies you mention, but if I came across them I would not resist. Some of them can only may life easier and/or more enjoyable.

In this flow of thought, new technologies equal change, and change equals an easier and/or a more enjoyable life. That might be the case for some of them, even ones on the list that I do resist. Part of my motivation for writing the post was to reflect on which basis I resisted each of them: moral, rational, intuitive, emotional or sentimental.

For instance, I resist television primarily on an emotional basis. A running TV irritates me like cigarette smoke — it’s cognitive pollution. I could say that people mainly use TV as a time filler, that it diverts people from “real” issues, that most of the content on TV is unbearably stupid; but none of those reasons are why I resist it.

On the other hand, I feel like I’m there’s something about social networking that I’m missing. Back in the early nineties, when I started telling people about email, the reaction I got from most of them was, “Why not just call?” When people ask me to get on Friendfeed, I have a similar reaction: “Why not just email?” I suspect that it’s just a matter of finding the unique use cases where social networks have an inherent advantage over email.

Two attitudes

Some people will argue that other people are fundamentally optimistic or pessimistic about technology. I think that’s a false axis. In reality there are two fundamental attitudes you can take toward adopting new technology:

• Problem solving
• Exploration

In problem solving mode, you’re not interested in a technology for its own sake. You have something you’re currently trying to accomplish, and when a new solution comes along, it’s only valuable to the extent that it helps you reach your goal. The first Apple computer was a hobbyist machine until VisiCalc made it a radically useful problem solving tool for accountants and analysts.

In exploration mode, you’re specifically interested in a technology for its own sake. You have a solution in search of a problem. You spend your time tinkering with the new resource at your disposal, and occasionally something very valuable springs from that leisure activity.

Let’s look at one of the technologies I resist from both perspectives. Of all the problems and projects on my radar, social networking doesn’t appear to fill a void. When I need to contact people online, I email them. Facebook adds another point of contact, but doesn’t seem to expedite matters at all, unless the other person has a heavy emotional preference communicating through Facebook. Otherwise, from a problem solving perspective, it’s counterproductive.

Suppose, instead, that I’m willing to spend some leisure time exploring some of Facebook’s features, particularly the fact that, unlike email, it’s an inherently “one-to-many” medium. I can add a “Welcome” video, introducing myself for anyone who “friends” me. I can see which of my long lost friends are on Facebook. I can look at my friend’s profiles for things I didn’t know about them to talk about. I can look at their friend’s profiles for new people to friend.

One way to waste a lot of time with any new technology is by being unclear about which attitude you’re adopting in the moment. People will adopt products that might be inherently innovative, but aren’t relevant to a specific problem they have. The best time to explore the advantages of a new tool is when you don’t have to use it. That might mean acknowledging that what you have is a toy, and playing with it until you can use it functionally as a tool.

If you suspect that you’re spending more time reengineering your production system than using it — downloading new software, buying new gadgets — you may not be giving yourself enough play time with the technology that interests you. If you find youself not using a tool that you “should” be using, you may need to just give up on it and get back to work, or block out some exploration time for the tool apart from your work.

(Photo credit: Eryann)

Technorati Tags: Technology