org-mode. toodledo. aw naw.

The Healy interview I mentioned led me to Mike Hall's org-mode in your pocket is a GNU-shaped Devil. In it, Hall shares his suffering at the hands of org-mode, an emacs-based plain text approach to, well, everything. Been there Mike. I feel your pain. And yes, just because it's plain text doesn't mean you won't curse the day you began the learning curve of *'s in headers, and drawers, and properties and ... Excuse me. <sniff> No, I'm OK. I'll get through this. I'm OK.

Mike thought he was free when he met his iPhone. Hostile to emacsen, the iPhone ecosystem nevertheless offered plenty of shiny "personal information management" alternatives to org-mode. So he gradually let his emacs use atrophy, and allowed himself to be seduced by iPhone-ness. And Mac-ness. And mobility in the form of MobileMe. And iDisk. And he didn't see his peril until it was too late. org-mode found mobility in MobileOrg. And that would have been OK had Mike not realized that the only thing stopping his old ways reappearing was that MobileOrg needed a WebDAV server. But oh, horrors, what does iDisk provide? WebDav :-( As Mike says, it was as if emacs and org-mode were taunting him with:

“Sucker … walked away from Emacs and even took the extra step of slurping the MobileMe kool-aid thinking it’d harden your resolve against ever returning. Well … fine … keep your precious iDisk … it will become the tool of your re-liberation.”

Well, in my own case, my escape from org-mode came from toodledo. It too has a cute and shiny iPhone app, guarding me from the occasional madness of the form "but we like plaintext precious, yes...".

Yeah, well look what that wee emacs fiend Sacha's been up to. 

Productivity treadmills

Nice The Setup interview with sociologist, Kieran Healy. I particularly like that he shares my frustration over the fact that modern computing hardware and software can still leave us less productive than people in the past who had little more than two sticks to rub together. Healy says:

"On the hardware side, there's that absurd productivity counterpart to the hedonic treadmill, where for some reason it's hard to get through the to-do list even though the café you're at contains more computing power than was available to the Pentagon in 1965. ... One of the smartest people I've ever known spent half of his career writing on a typewriter and the other half on an IBM Displaywriter. His backup solution for having hopelessly outdated hardware was to keep a spare Displaywriter in a nearby closet, in case the first one broke. It never did."

Email things

Couple of email thoughts. This stems from my never-ending attempts to, well, stem the flood.

First, I'm on the verge of deciding that any bulk emails that use mail-merge style methods to make them look like they were addressed personally to me are a form of lying. If I'm validly on a marketing list, and you're sending out mailshots to your audience, no problem. But then be up front about that. Say "Dear <servive-or-product> users", or "Hey people who might be interested...". Just don't pretend I'm special by calling me by by first name. If you do, and I rumble you (and the context usually makes that easy), I'll be annoyed.

Second, here's an approach I'm trying out with gmail. The aim is, as I say, to stem the flood. Well, not really. I get around 30 to 70 emails a day (excluding spam caught by Google) but that's not a flood. Most are quickly dealt with. No, what I'm really trying to do is tame by ADD-esque brain. I don't want to have temptation present itself throughout my day in the form of new unread emails looking seductively at me, eyelashes fluttering from my Inbox. I know, it's a sickness. I'm ill. Sue me.

Of course, one obvious solution is to shut down my mail client. The problem with that is, a lot of my work involves email conversation. So while I want to be able to shut off the receiving of new email, I still have to be able to send stuff.

Now in the olden days, with POP email, that was easily achieved. Just tell your client not to check the server until you were ready. But with IMAP and also with whatever it is that Gmail is doing, it's pretty much always on from the receiving point of view. I imagine there are ways to control that too, but I haven't found them.

So, here's what I'm trying. There are three components: a label (could be a folder if you're not in Gmail), a filter, and a working practice.

The label/folder. It's called "Pending" and, most important, it's hidden. In Gmail that means it resides under the "<n> more v" link at the bottom of Gmail's label list. Since I have only one hidden label, my link says "1 more v". Only if I click on it, do I see "Pending".

The filter. Well actually there are a few I use to catch well-behaved mailing lists and stuff -- things I want to read at the weekend and so on. And I have another set aimed solely at trapping spam that Google can't see. But other than that, I have one all-important filter and it goes like this:

IF the incoming message has an attachment OR the incoming message does not have an attachment THEN leave it unread, skip the inbox, and apply the label "Pending"

In other words, pretty much ALL MY MAIL GOES INTO PENDING.

The working practice. Every morning -- ONCE A DAY (that's my preference, but you could do more or less frequently) -- I do the following:

1. Go to the "Pending" label
2. Select every email in one go (i.e. hit "Select: All")
3. Move them all to Inbox
4. Click the 'Remove label "Pending"' button
5. Go to my Inbox and run it through a GTD-style "get to empty" flow.

DONE. No more email handling for today. And no peeking at "Pending" just in case there's something juicy in there. (Do I always obey that rule? No. But it's a lot less distracting than if they arrive in the Inbox)

Now obviously this has implications for people who use email and want a fast response. But my theory is that this system will improve my overall average response, because it's lowering my distraction level. I suppose I could tune the filtering to allow urgent replies to get through. For example, I could provide a code word to important people who won't abuse it, and have my filter allow those emails through immediately. But for now -- well they can always pick up the phone, or IM/Skype me. There's more to communication than email!

Coincidence? I don't *THINK* so (Part 2 of 2)

So, how come y'all are being overrun by foreign engineers? Well, let's look at some options.

The Indians are smarter than y'all? Well, there are certainly some bloody smart Indians, but my experience is that they're much the same as the rest of us. Sure they'll throw up the odd Ramanujan, but they don't have a monopoly on brains. Ditto the Chinese. Smart, but no smarter.

OK, so maybe they're more experienced? Absolutely not. Here, the Americans do win. Experience in semiconductor design means "tape outs" -- or, pretty much, numbers of designs. In my experience, your average Indian (based in India anyway) hasn't had enough time to get as many tape outs under his belt. It doesn't mean they're bad, just young.

So something else that makes them "better" in some way? Better at learning quickly? No. Better at explaining their ideas? No.

No, I think we'd have to conclude that from the point of view of actual ability to get the job done, your average Indian or Chinese engineer is no better than your average American .

So is it cost then? Yes, I think maybe that could be it. It makes sense. If the foreign engineer is pretty much the same as the local engineer in capability, but is lower in cost, then that could account for at least some of the difference, no? But the trouble is, immigration rules are supposed to deal with that. I've hired "foreign" engineers, and the way I hire, the way I advertise, and the way I pay is scrutinized. You can't just pay foreigners $4.00 and a chocolate cookie an hour.

But there's more than one way to skin an immigrant. Let me tell you of my own experience at the hands of US immigration.

Coincidence? I don't *THINK* so (Part 1 of 2)

Let's do an experiment. You can just do it in your head if you like, or go out and do it for real if you're feeling scientisty.

1. On a clear, starlit night, go stand in the middle of a field, with your arms hanging loosely by your sides
2. Looking up at the stars, start to spin around (Try not to fall!)
3. Notice your arms going up. Notice the starscape spinning above you.
4. Think, "Coincidence? I don't THINK so"

That's Mach's Principle. The arms raising while the starscape spins is not a coincidence. Isn't this fun! Here's another one. You probably won't want to do this for real:

1. Go find a copy of each of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions published from 1665 to 1850
2. Arrange them into piles, against a wall. One pile per decade, with the 1660s on the left and the 1850s on the right
3. Take a marker, and put a dot on the wall at the top of each pile
4. Return the journals to from wherever you stole them
5. Join the dots with your marker
6. Stand back, and notice the way the piles grow in size (Hint: it looks vaguely exponential)
7. Think, "Coincidence? I don't THINK so"

That's roughly what triggered Derek de Solla Price to develop a theory of the exponential growth of science. So, the moral of the stories so far is, be careful when coincidences appear, because they're not always so.

So, now consider:

Prospecting or Upselling

Interesting blog post from Basho about the ROI on upselling versus prospecting. Seems like prospecting is "coming back into vogue". It never really should have gone out of it, should it? No. Pick up the phone!

Why GTD (Getting Things Done) Sucks

GTD is the most popular of naked Emperors to hit the personal productivity scene. I bought the book, like hundreds of thousands of others. Like my entranced brethren and sethren, I read it avidly and thought "at last". Then I collected, processed, next actioned, contexted, someday/maybed, and pretty much everythinged. But did I actually Get Things Done? Nope. Well actually, I get a lot done. I'm the CEO of a small but international consulting firm. I'm very very busy. But did GTD make a difference? Nope; not a whit.

At first, I couldn't figure out why. It's so simple, and logical (with just a whiff of Zen thrown in to make you think you're all calm and mind-like-water-ish). How come it didn't work? My first reaction was, I imagine, like that of most people: I'm not doing it properly. Then that became: I'm just not doing it. And then the more I asked about, the more I realized - very few people are doing it. It's not me; it's not us. It's the bloody thing itself. It sucks. And I think I've just figured out why.

It's all about thin slicing. Malcolm Gladwell discusses it in "Blink". Thin slicing is essentially the very rapid processes that go on in our heads, largely subconsciously, to help us process certain complex situations. One example is the ability of a famous tennis coach to predict, just prior to a tennis pro's serve, whether the serve would fault or not. But here's the point. Our ability to thin slice can be seriously undermined when we try consciously to analyze the problem at hand. The example he gives is where the Getty Museum engaged several experts over several months to check the provenance of a Greek kouros prior to buying it. The result of the analysis -- that the statue was genuine and worth several million dollars -- was rapidly overturned by several other experts who spotted that it was a forgery after only a brief glance, a "thin slice". And the thin slicers were right. The conclusion, expanded by Gladwell throughout the book, is that as we perform conscious analysis of a problem, our thin slicing deteriorates.

This is, I think, part of the problem with GTD. It kills any chance we have at being productive because it overloads us with silly analysis over what the next action is -- "Move hand forward; Pick up pencil; Move pencil over paper; Lower tip towards paper ...); or what "@Context" a given action belongs to. And so on. As a result, the real underlying source of effectiveness -- the productivity equivalent of thin slicing -- is overwhelmed.

Exactly what that underlying source of effectiveness is, will be the subject of a future post (when I get around to it, someday, maybe). But for now, remember. GTD - just say no.