just an asterisk

To me, a productivity tool has to have three components:

1. It has to be invincible – rendered illegible by flying coffee or left on bus cannot be reasons to miss a task. I love paper, but hate that it burns, smudges, rips, etc. Digital was the only answer.

2. It has to be everywhere – Paper didn’t just lose because I’m a klutz – I’m also forgetful. A digital task system, accessible from every device I’ve ever owned AND anyone’s computer, was the perfect solution. I couldn’t leave it behind.

3. It has to be simple – If entering a task takes 10 minutes, I’m not going to do it. Duh.

When I decided on those 3 rules above, I never thought about the data that I would generate after using these tools for 4 years. On a lark, I went through three months of data today in Toodledo and was amazed. It’s actually interesting!

Although it’s thoroughly geek, I thought I’d share, just to show how powerful the data we’re generating can be. I’m not sharing anything personal, professional or even the numbers. The graphs of relative values speak volumes.

First thing I did was pull my tasks completed by month from Toodledo.

The result made sense: Late November, I started using Toodledo. December was spent working my tail off. January was when my little girl was born – huge dip there – but by February, I was completing tasks again at full force. March I started a new job, so mid-way through the month, we’re already heading for a record breaker.

Next I tried to find a trend, something to make it more than just a total. Here is how I complete tasks based on the days of the week:

Interesting eh? I come out of the weekend strong, completing fewer and fewer tasks until Friday, when I  push before the weekend. My theory here is one word: meetings. As the week goes on, I have more and more meetings, reducing the time I have to complete my tasks. There is something to explore here…

My personal tasks, often the lesser quantity, generally don’t get done on Saturday and therefore Sunday is higher. This probably contributes to that sinking feeling I get on Sunday when I have to pack in my tasks and try to enjoy the last of the weekend.  Again, something to explore…

Next I grabbed the planned due date of my tasks:

What I love about this data is that it shows how I think about tasks too… These are the tasks by the day I schedule them for. Notice that I tend to come out of the weekend with a lot scheduled for Monday, but Tuesday – Friday, I plan to complete pretty much the same number of tasks. To me, this supports the meetings idea – I’m adding tasks to the list because new things are coming up. However, as we saw before, I’m not completing them.

In a similar story, on the weekend, I tend to forget how hard is to complete tasks on Saturday and I schedule equal efforts for both days.

Finally, I decided to compare how I’m finishing tasks this month vs last month:

The month isn’t over yet, but it looks like I’m getting better at closing out  my tasks on Fridays and keeping a steady stream of completions going through the week. Thursday is still a low point for me. I’m sure it’s related to meetings, but it’s a point of focus for improvement!

After playing with all this data from Toodledo, I exported my data from Remember the Milk going back to 2007 and did the same sort of analysis, finding almost identical results. I’ll spare you the details, but one favorite was that I seem to start the year off strong in January every year, but slow down as the summer approaches. I guess that’s why my resolution each year is to be more organized :)

Thanks for indulging me. The bigger point is that I was collecting this data without really thinking about it. I wonder where else I’m capturing useful information that could improve my efficiency? I’ll poke around and get back to you.

~ab

It was inevitable. My daughter was born last month (also inevitable in a way) and it was only a matter of time before I wrote a blog post about baby tech. But here is the funny part – the tech sucks. There isn’t that much to talk about. Maybe our litigious culture has squashed innovation or maybe the only people concerned are so blotto from not sleeping that they can’t invent anything, but either way – the technology just isn’t very interesting.

When babies are born, in case you are not aware,  they need to be swaddled, rocked and given something to slobber upon… As I see it, the result is that technology tends to focus on rocking and/or white noise. That’s about it. Sigh… I write this as I sit up waiting to do our late night / early morning feed and wish that there were magic bullets I could use from my bat belt. No dice.

Instead of telling you about our Fisher Price Cradle Swing (god send that it is), I’ll focus on the tech that I’ve found useful, rather than helpful, for life with a baby.

Camera(s) – iPhone and DSLR

She’s cute and everyone wants to see her, thus we’ve snapped away with both our iPhones and the big DSLR. Although in the beginning we went a bit overboard, expect to take tons of pictures. Having the DSLR, with its incredible resolution, reassures the compulsive in me who worries that we’ll miss the perfect shot. The iPhones have pretty decent cameras too, for all those times when you don’t want to lug around a baby, six pieces of matching baby luggage AND and camera bag…

Ways to share pictures – Picasa and Dropbox

Picasa lets us share our photos with the family, but Dropbox is where we consolidate. With two Macs, two iPhones and a SLR, there are lots of places where pictures end up. We combine our photos into a shared folder in Dropbox and then I upload them to Picasa. Easy peasy.

The white noise app on my phone

Hm… This one was almost a magic bullet… We were told that white noise would soothe her on our way out of the hospital room and by the time the elevator arrived in the lobby, I had a white noise app for the car ride home. The great part? It actually works (provided that she isn’t hungry, sleepy, wet, dry, too hot, too cold…)

If you want extra geeky points, go grab yourself a pillow speaker (very cheaply online) and use an old iPod to make your white noise machine. It’ll free up your iPhone for dropping calls.

Amusements – all hail the iPad

You will spend a lot of time doing nearly nothing (other than rocking your child) and your brain doesn’t have capacity for the russian novels you were planning to read. My iPad holds my books, my RSS feeds, Netflix, Hulu and my email. With a bit of balancing, I can use it one-handed. Late in the evening, ’round about 1-2am, this will become very important.

That’s it. Like I mentioned above, no true magic bullets, but there are plenty of ways to add techie flair to staying up late with your newborn. Best of luck – duty calls…

~ab

Sometimes, I forget how powerful a phone can be… The truth is this: my phone may be able to do 1 million things, but I’ll be darned if I can remember 5% of this magic when I’m under pressure. It’s like a Swiss-army knife with 100 tools – I only use the the bottle opener and the knife (incorrectly, as a screwdriver).  I don’t believe that I’m the only one in this state.  Feature overload is pretty much the norm these days.

As a result, I like to practice using features when I find them.  Some stick, becoming part of my daily routine and ritual, others fade away as simple novelty.  Knowing what your iPhone or Android phone can do is good.  Learning which features are right for you is better.

Just to give you an example, I was waiting for the wifie at the wine store and remembered Google’s photo search called “Goggles” that is part of the iPhone Google App.  Not really needing an excuse to buy wine (“google told me to”), I tried it out on a nice bottle of cabernet.

Googles Goggles (a tongue twister ain’t it?) went to work on my cab, using the image as the search query.  The result was pretty spectacular – even by the standards of the ever impressive Google.

In less than a minute, I was reading a great review of my selection and soon after SOLD.  It was a great shopping experience.  I was selected a bottle that looked about right (2 minutes), Googled it (30 seconds), learned about it (1 minute) and finished my purchase.  Not bad!  The process was fast enough that I would have happily continued to photograph bottles for a while, but the results rich enough to help me make an educated decision.  Sweet.

In closing for this rather short post, remember that the point isn’t Google’s Goggles.  The point is that my phone had a feature that was worth exploring and that a little practice was enough for me to see how I could use it in future.  That’s the key – use it and see if it’s useful to you.  If not, no sweat.  There are another 999,999 features to look into.

For the record, the wine was excellent.

~ab

I’ve heard a few people say that the iPad is for consumption rather than creation.  Something about this phrase both disgusts and intrigues me. It feels like the cheesy catchphrase of a generation, something that would be used on a VH1 special. When I was younger, I don’t remember us being so focused on hoarding content. There were collectors (comic books, baseball cards, etc) but these people were … well strange.  In the past few years though, products have emerged to satisfy a constantly connected and informed clientele.  We’re so design conscious and hip aren’t we?  We shouldn’t have to select the gems – give us everything…

Anyway, pushing my soapbox back under the bed, I have an iPhone and looking back at my activities for the last few weeks, I am struck by how little I’ve created with my new toy – it’s as if someone crammed every form of media into an all powerful demon in my front right pocket (the left pocket just doesn’t feel right after years of carrying my blackberry in my right).  I figure that, rather than fighting these forces, I should embrace them.  In that vein, here are my favorite apps on the iPhone, purposely split into groups, consumption and creation. Read more »

What follows is a super long story that is a bit indulgent on my part, so feel free to jump to the very end summary for the punch line if you don’t have the time/interest…

“More than 30 years ago, RiceSelectâ„¢ introduced Texmati®, the first basmati Rice to be successfully grown in America, and still the most popular because of its unsurpassed flavor and aroma. Today, RiceSelectâ„¢ offers a wide variety of delicious rice and other dishes all grown and packaged in America, all inspired by cuisines from across the world. Requested by name in countless recipes and cookbooks, RiceSelectâ„¢ tastes like no other rice.”(Source)

What they didn’t add, but certainly should have, is the following: “RiceSelect products, like our amazing Sushi Rice, can be used to rebuild shattered hopes and dreams!” By now you’re probably checking the URL to make sure that you didn’t mistype the link, but I promise you that this is a technology story.  It’s just a roundabout way telling it… Read more »

I discovered something interesting this past weekend.  I had convinced my wife to allow me the upgrade from my old diehard Blackberry to the new iPhone 4.  Trust me when I tell you that it was a process.  You see, I had argued that by carrying a blackberry and an iPod touch, I was wasting space, buying and keeping track of extra cables and so on… When I travelled, this tedium slowed me down… It’s true – none of this was brilliant rhetoric, but I guess she gave in mostly to shut me up.  I was allowed to buy the iPhone…

After all that, I was utterly stupefied to learn that I had missed the biggest, humdinger of an argument for the upgrade.  I went on Gazelle.com to try to sell my old Blackberry and iPod and discovered that  Blackberry + iPod really does equal an iPhone.  I had known this would be true functionally (phone + music player = iPhone), but I had never really thought that selling my old hardware would cover the cost of my new stuff!  As a thank you to Gazelle, I thought I’d give them a bit of a shout out.  You will get more money if you try to sell your stuff with Craigslist, but the added convenience of this service is worth checking out. Read more »

When I tell someone I have an iPhone and after the unavoidable “antenna” questions, the second line of questioning is about battery life.  In the hopes that it might help someone, here is what I did yesterday on my iPhone:

6am ( 5am CST) – woke up in NYC and unplugged
1 hr music on the plane – anti-screaming baby white noise.
2 hrs in Airplane mode – reducing consumption I suppose.
1 hr talking on arrival – conference call.
20 min facetime – interactive utilities repairman visit with my wife at our apartment on her phone.
30 read emails – over the course of the morning
10 sent emails
2 photos – whiteboarding session capture
1 video (<20 sec) – simply goofing off
1 youtube clip – again, goofing off
Google Reader push all day – I read the odd article while I walk between meetings.
Exchange push all day – email is set to PUSH.
50 + text messages – Wifey and I like the chat feature.
4:30pm CST – Check point: 48% battery life.
3 app downloads – I’m still learning what is good out there…
Chatted another hour – Calls for work + personal
20 more text messages – Wifey and rental car arrangements with the team.
more emails – they just keep on comin’
9PM CST – Checkpoint: 18% battery remaining… plug in phone to sleep.

That’s not bad.  My blackberry had slightly better battery life, but I couldn’t do a few of those things… Also, it’s not like I really need to facetime every single day… Anyway, hope this helps someone decide if this is the right phone for them.  I was using it for 16 hours and still had 1/5th left to go.

Good luck in your mobile decisions.

~ab

In truth, I get it. The idea is so simple: click a button, pay $100 for a year and receive your push mail, contacts, calendar, storage for your photos and files, plus a “find my iphone” application all in one handy interface to your computer. However, it forever irks me when I’m told about these services as if they are the only game in town. I mentioned my doubt to the Mac Store genius a few days ago and was told “yes but MobileMe is seemless and far less complicated”…

That sounded like a challenge to me, so I wrote out my alternative to MobileMe system.  I thought it would take longer, but it’s actually quite simple.  Here are my choices: Read more »

If you’re trying to decide between the hot new Nexus One vs. the iPhone 3Gs, here’s the skinny on what sets them apart. Both phones sport the aesthetic appeal of that sleek “wow” factor sheen, but there are a few differences you should know about which may make one a better fit for your needs than the other. Read more »

Dear reader,

In a discussion about possible posts with some colleagues, I realized that there were subjects that you might want to know that I either don’t want to or simply shouldn’t write about.  I say shouldn’t because it’s not an area of expertise or more realistically – someone has already written about it better than I ever could. This post will be a mishmash of links to sites that do what I don’t.  Hopefully, it will provide useful reading.

Read more »