Here’s an example of my custom quix.txt configuration file. I expect this will evolve rapidly over time (and I’ll eventually get this into github or something)(Done!)

David’s quix.txt

I use Chrome as my primary browser. Unlike safari, it does not allow for keyboard shortcuts for bookmarks or bookmark (ex. if you press cmd-1 while in Safari, the browser launches the first bookmark in the bookmark bar.

To hack this into Chrome (without using one of the clunky extensions available for this purpose), you use the Mac OS X System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts.

Instructions to set keyboard shortcut for bookmarks in Chrome

1. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts. Select Application Shortcuts and click + to add a new shortcut. Pick Google Chrome exact name for the Quix bookmarklet.  
2. I choose ctrl-1, which works pretty well since I use the caps lock key as a second control modifier. You should see the keyboard short right in Chrome’s Bookmarks menu  
3. Just ctrl-1 your way to productivity. An added benefit over the extension route is that the shortcut works even if the omnibar has focus.

(via Keyboard Shortcuts for Bookmarklet on Google Chrome – 5typos.net)

So the workflow becomes:

1. bang on ctrl-1
2. type mt
3. bang on cmd-c to copy the already highlighted markdown-formatted link into clipboard

Fast and no mouse required!

Remarkably, quix works on all browsers that support JavaScript bookmarklets — even safari on iOS devices!

Updates

• 2012-01-26: changed link to github gist

Aaron and I are on our way to Book^2 Camp in New York. It’s an “unconference,” an event that has a participatory style of generating bottom-up content from the attendees rather than providing top-down, pre-determined content. In the tech industry this is a very common format. After talking with a couple of our clients also attending, I realized that to people used to “normal” conferences, the notion of unconferences can seem really, really strange.

So in advance of the Book^2 unconference, and in the spirit of open participation that defines this format, I thought I’d jot down a few notes and approaches if for no other reason than to prepare myself for the weekend.

The Three Words

Usually, unconferences begin with an opening session where organizers set the framework for the day, thank sponsors, point out restrooms, etc. Very quickly, attention returns to the audience (i.e. you) before we sort the day’s agenda of sessions (more on that in a bit).

A very common ice-breaker is for everyone (yes EVERYONE) in the room to stand up, one at a time, and say, in three words, a little about themselves. Mine might be “Quality Creative Technology” or “iPad Book Maker” or “Breakfast Taco Enthusiast”– you get the idea. Inevitably, some people will be clever or even jokey with their words (let’s face it, 30 minutes of people reciting bland business card titles would not be a great start to the event).

The point is for you to listen to the other participant’s words as a way to identify individuals you may want to connect with during the day. Three words limits introductions to a managable time.

In practice, because people going to unconferences tend to have a variety of interests and even job descriptions, they are often too wrapped up in trying to decide on which three words they want to wear that day and don’t really pay close attention to other people. Ergo – People talk, but they don’t listen.

My tips:

• Decide on and write down your three words ahead of time (at home, even, where you can think about it) in big bold letters on an index card
• When it’s your turn – stand up, face as many people as you can (i.e. you may be in the middle of a row so people will be on all sides of you), and speak loudly (if you turn heads with your volume, you did it right)
• LISTEN to other people’s words and try to identify 2-3 people you will walk over to and introduce yourself to IMMEDIATELY after the 3 words session. (Bonus hint: These 2-3 people may be interested in organizing a session with you).

(I don’t know if Book^2 will use Three Words — it’s a pretty common one, but assume you’ll need a pithy intro of some kind)

“A Conference with No Content?”

When you pay thousands of dollars to attend the typical industry conference, you expect a lot in the ideal case – hundreds or thousands of attendees, side field trips, rigid schedules w/ (mostly) deeply vetted (and well compensated) experts offering advice or ideas that reinvigorate your work — heck, maybe a fancy dinner w/ celebrity keynotes.

While this is also arguably the case for “normal” conferences, I cannot stress enough that you will get out of an unconference no more than what you put into it. Your ROI of participation pays back many times over in the value you derive from the experience.

Be present. Be proactive. Be ready to talk. Ask questions.

There will come a time during the event where you will have the opportunity to propose a session on the agenda. I highly recommend making a suggestion for something that you are genuinely interested in LEARNING about and not PREACHING about. Find like minds around you and band together to talk.

For what it’s worth, at Book^2, DINO is likely going to propose a panel discussion with ourselves and 2 other smaller, indie publishers in the iPad/tablet storybook space. We intend it to be an opportunity for us to share some newly-earned wisdom as smaller, scrappy studios facing the challenges of trying to develop premium content on limited budgets.

Here’s a great resource that has more tips about preparing sessions: Scott Berkun: How to Run A Great Unconference Session

Avoid Energy Vacuums

It’s my observation that unconferences attract smart, motivated people with really interesting things to say. Here’s something that nobody ever mentions outloud, but I wish they would:

It is quite likely that you are the expert at something. The people around you are are also experts at things, and dare I say, collectively smarter than you on most things. Nothing ruins an unconference session faster than a blowhard who insists on dominating conversations. Make no assumptions about the skill levels or interests of your audience or you will be wrong.

And when you DO end up in a room with an Expert who is insisting on proving how much he or she knows, you are both empowered and requrired to “vote with your feet.” (i.e. walk out and go find another session that better allows you to participate).

Like most conference-like events, sometimes the better content happens in the hallway conversation, anyway.

Putting Sales, Business and Marketing in Perspective

Make no mistake: an unconference can be a fertile place to generate very qualified prospects for your business. DINO is going to Book^2 with an intent of meeting potential clients, no doubt.

However, unconferences are a terrible place to sell your goods or services if that’s your only motivation. You’d be better off just sponsoring the event or spending your time at a more appropriate venue like a tradeshow floor.

If you have a product or service you are trying to promote, you’ll have far more success if you lean towards transparency, conversation, and participation rather than blatant pitching. For example, while it’s a good idea to open your session with a brief description (30s or less) of your background and why you were interested in leading a particular discussion, it’s really bad form to then spend 20 minutes showing product demos and sales slides. A better approach might be to lead a session that shares best practices as you were developing your product.

I think, unlike a lot of networking events and tradeshows, you’ll get further if you come from an extremely genuine place. Have conversations with people with the idea that you are looking for relationships and not clients and you’re on your way. SHARE OPENLY. Now’s the time to be extra generous with your knowledge… it will pay itself back, I promise.

Having Conversations

This post isn’t meant to be a treatise on how to do effective networking. I will say that all those lessons (ex. listen more than you talk, establish rapport, don’t be selling – be forming relationships) apply. The tenor of the event will be one of openness, optimism, and inclusion. Use whatever personal style works for you, obviously, but I think the casual nature of an unconference tends to reward gregarious conversationalists rather than aloof experts & rock stars.

Bring a stack of business cards and prepare to ask and answer, “What is the coolest project you are working on right now?” rather than the closed-ended “what do you do?” (Bonus hint: I like “what brings you here today?”).

Other Useful Guides

• Freelance Folder Guide
• PubMediaCamp Guide
• Crowdvine Guide

Aaron and I are SO looking forward to meeting you. Our pictures are on our About Page. Please do come say “hi” to us.

(this was meant to go up last Monday. Oops.) Ugh. Halloween, and by extension, October has come and gone. 2010 is nearing its end.

This has been a hectic couple of weeks for us. Transitory periods have a way of making you feel like time is rushing past and also like you’re not going fast enough.

Some highlights from the past these past couple of weeks:

• Aaron and I participated in the IBM Place Summit 2010 conference. That deserves its own post.
• We shipped some initial story scenes for our current book clients… these are going to be really, really amazing pieces — We’re helping these publishers put enormous amounts of thought and care into the experience of storytelling
• I watched The Social Network, and coincidentally(?) we had a meeting w/ our lawyer to review a few things.
• We pitched a Facebook-oriented “personal story of wellness” game for a potential client.
• I listened to a panel on ebooks at the Why Books? conference at Radcliff/Harvard. Post to follow.
• We launched a very cute flashcard app for toddlers for our client, Mezmedia.
• Aaron has put some great effort into sorting through some infrastructure of AMP, our skunkworks project.
• I bought a bottomless coffee cup from the nearby bagel place — either the smartest investment of the year or the direct contributor to my impending mental breakdown… probably both.
• Iggy, our green-scaled HR director, has been unusually frisky… making laps around the studio — climbing onto her high perch and through the supplies shelving. Her request for her new heating pad finally went through, so she’s in a good mood overall. Also, we’re thinking she may be gravid.

Current mode at DINO

Aaron and I have found that while we’re simultaneously running the day-to-day side of our studio, getting current and future work through the sales and production pipeline, and building the tools and frameworks to support even more work and income, we’re slamming face first into important decisions about the “best” use of our time.

At any given moment, we have a number of competing concerns. Obviously, we take care of our clients/customers first. This often means we have to steal hours (and attention) away from the projects and activities we need to work on for DINO 2011. It’s a vicious and classic cycle of the opportunity cost of using services to bootstrap your product development.

In services, we have proven that we do a really good job of finding opportunities and helping clients feel comfortable with starting to work with us. However, I’d give us a solid B for our ability to efficiently move through projects once they are in production — Our clients, I hope, are pretty happy with our work… admittedly, sometimes things go way over-schedule, but we do deliver good stuff in the end.

The root cause of friction is context switching (i.e. trying to spin too many plates); we’re raising the red flag that this could eventually take a toll on our business and, frankly, our personal sanity. It’s an area where we could improve.

It happens to healthy studios, I think… We have growing spurts and pains. The dam of work is bursting at the seams as we’re trying to balance a reasonable workload with the pressure to grow. Take on too much too fast and you’re done; don’t take on enough and the revenue flow dries up.

Capacity Building

We’re going to make some major announcements regarding our work in the “Book 3.0″ genre in the next couple of months that I think will make our studio in high demand for our interactive design work, adding to the high number of game/storytelling project opportunities already in the pipeline.

It’s become clear that we need more help if we’re going to take on projects in a way that preserves a quality client experience while DINO accepts more work.

A revelation for us lately is that in the same way we can bring on technical/art/production help, we can also delegate the development of a project management skeleton to handle that organic expansion. PM is not something Aaron and I need to be directly managing at this important phase of DINO’s evolution.

To that end, we’ve found someone who we want to bring onboard to evaluate our current projects in production, take on project management of some stuff in the pipeline, and help set up some workflow so that we’re making DINO even more awesome.

Opportunities

• We’re looking for developers (Cocos2D, Flash, Django) pretty urgently
• We’re also looking for content-creation people & studios to identify some potential collaborators on storytelling and book 3.0 projects in 2011.

The last weeknotes post was 38 weeks ago. Writing weeknotes, obviously, is one of those things that is very difficult to maintain as a habit, but it feels like one of those things that is really important, as well.

Before I left for a badly needed holiday last week, Aaron and I sat for coffee to have one of our quasi-regular “what the heck are we doing, here?” sessions. Half business and half therapy, it’s a conversation we have with each other on a micro/tactical and also a global/strategic level. It is a good chance for us to put the sales and production pipelines on hold and take stock of our direction.

We’ve started to narrow the definition for our external projects. We’ve been fortunate to have a lot of really good projects and clients this year, but we simply don’t have the resources to do all the great projects that come up. I’m proud to say that the “we have to take everything on or else we’ll starve” days may be behind us.

The absolutely most nerve-wracking thing for me is to turn down projects that don’t exactly “fit” with our current direction. I get very nervous if we don’t have a healthy pipeline. We’ve turned down high-budget projects in the past couple months which would have covered our studio overhead for a LONG while. We did not pursue a potentially studio/life-changing opportunity with a friend of mine who is working on a massive, highly-visible project with plenty of technical and creative challenges… it just wasn’t right for us.

It takes guts to say “no” to opportunities when the people are great, the projects are interesting, and the money is right. Saying “no” is basically forcing you to put-up or shut-up, to have confidence in what you are doing, and adds responsibility for driving the direction of your work rather than reacting to whatever might come up.

So what DO we do? We are a small studio feeding ourselves on client projects while rapidly building up some important assets for some products we expect to be launching next year.

First, we have 3 main creative book projects in production, 1 of which is internal. (We’ve averaged 7-8 open projects for most of the year, so this pace feels downright luxurious).

These projects have allowed us to spend engineering time in building a “framework” for this general concept we, somewhat tounge-in-cheek, call “Book 3.0″

Storytelling is going to dramatically define the services DINO will provide to clients ongoing. We think ebooks are part of this, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

While “Storytelling Technology” as a thing we do is a very hard idea to sell, establishing our studio as forward thinkers on generating narrative and emotional experiences through technology is becoming easier as we start chalking up successful, real-world projects.

We’ve been conducting a variety of internal experiments and are revving up a strategy that focuses on our becoming VERY vocal in this space. We’re going to be everywhere all of a sudden. Should be fun.

Second, we’ll continue to do more kids’ or narrative games for clients or ourselves for the foreseeable future- we have a nice track record there and, let’s face it, kids’ properties do dovetail nicely into Book 3.0 ideas. We’re good at this and it’s fun work and budgets are realistic.

Finally, we are starting to work on a project that scratches a vicious itch we feel on every single project we work on for clients. Stunningly, we can’t find an appropriate, joyfully designed solution out there for what must be a really common problem. As entrepreneurs, we immediately think, “Oh. This is an opportunity which has a good shot!” This venture, which we’re calling AMP, is a long-jump strategy for DINO. We’re aiming for a minimally viable product for alpha testing by January and a launch soon after.

Specific Work

Aaron has been working overtime to help improve our communication and PM practices with clients. Thank goodness for his patience and temperament – he’s likely saved the studio on multiple occasions in the last few weeks, alone, much less since day 1.

He’s also finishing up work for a game we’re building for toddlers that will allow them to sculpt on the screen — should be wrapping in the next week or so.

I’m doing some cleanup work for an internal sales storytelling app for a snowboard company and finishing off a deck-of-cards coaching app for a client.

We’ve been contracted to work on a diybio project to create an engaging iPad experience for a DIY microscope which we need to push forward next week.

Finally, we’re building out the framework on which we’ll be hanging the first pages of our client’s stories. These are absolutely GORGEOUS pieces. The artwork is really incredible and they will be tons of fun to engage with.

Network

This weekend, we’re attending the 2010 IBM Place Summit put on by our friend Andrew Sempere. Somebody posted a “mobile device storytelling” topic. Looking forward to it.

Posted via email from davidnunez’s posterous

I’m sitting here, alone, on a Sunday afternoon at DINO’s studio. It’s cold and wet outside, a perfect day for reflection.

We’ve been doing projects together, as DINO, for the past couple of months, but Em has only been able to put in part-time hours as she completed her obligations with her prior employer. Her last day of work was the 15th and she started full time at DINO last Monday (although she couldn’t help herself and came in the weekend before her first DINO day to get caught up on project work and set up her space).

Today marks the end of our first week where all 3 of us are doing DINO — so in my mind, this is truly the first week of DINO, regardless of what’s happened before. I feel like something powerful clicked now that we can physically locate ourselves in the same place during the day, finally.

It’s been a busy week, indeed. I haven’t had things this intense in a VERY long time. What’s encouraging is that I’m not feeling burned out (well… yet). If anything, the intensity is giving me an energy I’m feeding off of.

A great moment from this week:

I was really excited by how quickly we were able to mobilize to put together a proposal for a kids’ iPhone game; we went on that sales call together and it was a lot of fun and satisfying to come together as a team. I think we all stepped it up to squeeze in what amounted to a decent sized set of projects in between all of the other work we had on our plates.

There was some basic office reconfiguration as Em got her second monitor installed on her drafting table and we managed to hook up the printer so we can all actually use it rather than emailing documents to the one machine that was configured correctly. Aaron consolidated a lot of extra craft supplies so that we could donate those to our friends and landlords at Sprout.

Em and Aaron made multiple trips to Pearl to stock up on some great paper and art supplies (an incredible sale!).

Em has been a powerhouse all week – business cards, document templates, and an initial set of designs for our website. She’s been helping with project management and will be doing PM for upcoming clients.

I pulled some long hours trying to finish off a couple web projects that have persisted through the New Year while also handling a few sales leads and getting a contract out to a new client.

Aaron continued his solid track record of hitting milestones and getting great compliments from clients about communication; he’s building playables and solving some memory issues for the codenamed “Awesome Safari” project.

And as if that wasn’t enough, Aaron’s Meta-Nixie Clock project was featured on the Make blog and CrunchGear.

I can’t speak highly enough of Pipelinedeals.com. I have a dozen or so opportunities at various stages being tracked through this service, and I would say I haven’t even scratched the surface of its utility. As I refine some of the funnel processes, I should be able to scale up my efforts in business development and really start to take advantage of having a central, simple tool to manage strong communication with both potential and active clients.

In fact, over the past few projects, we’ve been developing processes and templates which, over time, we think will both increase our capacity but also help us move projects along efficiently with a higher quality client experience.

Upcoming Week

We’re technically operating through my old consulting business (where I was sole proprietor), but we have a couple of pressing potential contracts of a larger size that we do not want to sign w/o at least an LLC in place. So Em is handling setting up our business structure and administration (legal registration w/ the state, bank account, etc.)

We have a number of client projects coming due in the next couple of weeks, so that’ll be dominating Aaron’s and my time. In particular, we have 2 web projects that are due this week, an iPhone app to be submitted for a client on Monday, deliverables for 2 other apps, and a kick-off for a new client. The iPhone game we’re developing (“Awesome Safari”) is due in a couple of weeks (can you say “Crunch time”?) We manage our projects in Basecamp and it’s been a lifesaver.

The encouraging thing is that if we can deliver some results for our active clients this week, our February is looking strong – the pipeline is full and converting better than expected, and we have a couple of interesting opportunities that may allow us to focus on fewer and bigger projects.

We do have a speculative project we’d like to work on, but we had to have a conversation about what’s currently on our plate, on our radar, and what we could realistically accomplish in a short time. We’ll be making a final go/no-go decision this week and we’ll definitely blog about it, etc.

Finally, we’ll be putting in some effort on getting our website live and blog posts flowing.

Parting Thoughts

Last night we all went out to celebrate our first week. We toasted the long adventure ahead over margaritas and delicious burgers at Christopher’s.

I’m very happy to be taking on this journey with good friends; the upcoming year will be filled with uncertainty, really awesome successes, and some terrible letdowns. We can’t know when those high and low moments will come, but when they do, I’m confident in my partners’ capacity to celebrate and survive. If the upcoming weeks are anything like this past one, we’re in for an amazing ride.

Events & Announcements

We’ll be attending the Mobile Monday, MassMobile, Drinks On Tap developer’s meetup tomorrow night. Come say hi!

Topics for upcoming weeknotes:

• What did we learn in our first 2 months of DINO
• How we met and how we became DINO
• More about our studio space

I’m currently in Pittsburgh at the Art&Code Mobile event.

We arrived last night and came straight from the airport to attend the Rossum’s meetup. The group is an Art and Robotics collective that meet regularly to host speakers, collaborate on projects, and promote their work.

This morning, I particpated in the OpenFrameworks and iPhone workshop taught by memo akten and Zach Gage

The project we were working on was, essentially, pong for the iPhone. It was a great starter project for those that needed an intro to OF because it exposed the basic structure of an OF program (memo and zach did a great, patient job of going through the IDE and the file placement idiosyncrasies of OF). The class proved that OF can be quite cross-platform right out of the box. There are some obvious exceptions (ex. multitouch isn’t available on all platforms). These unique features are handled as addons to the basic OF project.

As expected, the most difficult part of getting an iPhone OF project to work is the whole provisioning / signing process. Luckily, I’ve done quite a bit of iPhone work before, so this was somewhat smooth for me (once I made sure that the correct SDK was selected in XCode — that messed me up a bit).

I didn’t realize that iPhone OF creates ‘legitimate’ iPhone apps that are acceptable for app store submission (and sale). What’s especially exciting about working with something like OF for iPhone is that the platform encourages building art / toy / pretty apps… so the scope of interestingly designed applications that can be offered is small enough that you could iterate through many experiments with ease. That being said, in my experience, since OF can also be essentially use any library that compiles (c++ or objective-c on OS X), you can use it as a framework for more complex applications.

Tonight, I’m spending evening at HackPGH – very cool do-oriented space. somebody’s soldering near me, somebody’s crocheting. I’ll be trying to build an iPhone toy using OF.

Special thanks to Matt Mets for letting me couch surf at his apartment this weekend.

Good times.

“What do glitter and glue, needles and thread, batteries and wires have to do with Human Computer Interaction? What can makers and crafters teach technology researchers and designers about the world and technology? How can CHI researchers engage with Do-It-Yourself communities? This session will be a dialogue about the relationships between academia and DIY communities. It will include presentations from the workshop organizers and participants who will demo and discuss their own DIY projects and then use them as springboards for open discussions with the audience. Come to see some interesting projects and to share your own insights and experiences.”

I have the pleasure of making some opening remarks; it’s a little bit of “what is dorkbot,” but I’ll be mixing in some of the call-to-arms rhetoric I’ve used before with a DIYist slant:

Opening Remarks for dorkbot-diychi 2009-04-07

Hello, Hello and welcome to dorkbot! I’m David Nunez, one of the organizers for dorkbot-boston.

Dorkbot is people doing strange things with electricity. We are technologists, artists, designers, scientists, and crafters who gather regularly to share ideas and support each others’ work.

A visionary artist named Douglas Repetto started Dorkbot in New York in 2000 as a way to connect with like minded thinkers and do’ers. Since then over 70 active dorkbot chapters have appeared all around the world from San Francisco, Seattle, and Austin to Tokyo, Vancouver, Melbourne, and Beijing.

I know we have some dorkbot organizers and participants from around the world today in the audience… if you would please wave or stand: dorkbot-seattle, dorkbot-tokyo, dorkbot-gotenberg…dorkbot-pittsburgh(?) are there any others?

So what is dorkbot?

Sometimes people try to place dorkbot along an art — technology — design continuum. I know I’ve been guilty of plotting a 4-quadrant graph in a fruitless attempt to construct myself and dorkbot into an easily digestible meme. What is dorkbot? I’m not even convinced its an interesting question, and I certainly don’t have a solid answer. Actually, if you were to ask random dorkbot people from any chapter you’d get wildly different answers. By design, the dorkbot founder doesn’t give us a whole lot of direction. Our common guiding motto of “doing strange things with electricity” is broad and ill-defined on purpose.

And paradoxically… but not really… this tremendous anti-pattern of ambiguity is why dorkbot has become such a vibrant movement. Each dorkbot chapter evolves in whatever direction its members need. Some chapters trend towards more fine art discussions while others embrace more DIY and tinkering content.

Because of this relentless grassroots position, the individual dorkbot communities feel a strong sense of ownership and are free to adapt to the peculiarities of different regions and populations. Douglas does offer a little bit of infrastructure; through his resources at Columbus University, we have access to webspace and listservs which some chapters use, but many do not. Otherwise most of us remain purely unfunded, and I don’t know of any groups that have their own venues. We’re volunteer led and user defined and we are sustainable only as long as somebody is willing to put in the very much uncompensated time.

The format of the activities themselves can vary. For example, in Boston, we meet every month and invite a few guest artists and engineers to demonstrate and talk about their current projects. We then ask audience members to bring forward any works-in-progress during a freewheeling peer-review session called opendork. It’s like geek show and tell. Chapters in other cities might host workshops or curate art shows.

In Boston, communication online is active but not overwhelming. We share a weekly summary of art and technology events and opportunities on our mailing list and members will often ask technical questions to the list and expect several answers within a few hours.

You can learn more and find a schedule of Boston gatherings at dorkbotboston.com and you can find all dorkbot gatherings at dorkbot.org.

It is useful to ask why these communities choose to self-organize. I’ve only been doing dorkbot-like things for about a decade and dorkbot itself only for a little over 4 years… (first in Texas and now here), so I can only offer a very anecdotal opinion.

To be honest, I can’t even say I speak for the members of dorkbot-boston, much less dorkbot itself, but let me give it a go because this is kind of ranting is what I love the most:

dorkbot / DIY Manifesto — my own take

a dorkbot gathering is a transitory thing. It exists as dorkbot only as defined by the people that gather in those bars, galleries, coffeehouses, and apartments all around the world. It persists in the conversations that happen during the events, but also afterwards online on mailing lists and in the new projects spawned from some new technique learned at dorkbot.

the community has a belief in the freedom to tinker – to tear apart our technology, our clothes, our food and even our bodies to use these raw materials to build something new and better… something only we could have imagined through the summation of our personal experience and curiosity.

Whether we use a soldering gun, software debugger, sewing machine, or welding torch, we tinker every day first for the pure love of making things with our hands and second for the joy we derive from showing our friends something new and interesting. We look at the world as a collection of parts that can be broken, reassembled and recontextualized for whatever beautifully strange ideas haunt our idle thoughts. We laugh at the artificial rules companies put on how we use their products and we willfully void our warranties to make sure we really do own the things we own.

We are the passionate hackers who believe that we must teach our foundational skills to each other and to the public. We insist that young students be encouraged to do undocumented, dangerous, and weird things with their toys, tools, and especially electricity because they will surprise us with what they choose to invent… the next Tesla is running around some primary school playground, both empowered and drowned by the staggering amount of stimuli streaming into her mobile internet device.

Let’s rip that cell phone out of her hand and and replace it with a welding torch and give her permission and love when she fails, learns, and tries again.

We will empower ourselves and our neighbors to make something delightful together. As we collectively add the results of our DIY experiments to the knowledge base we create speculative objects that help us imagine worlds filled with the small improvements we choose to build.

Sometimes we call this community a crafting circle, or hackergroup, or motorcycle club, or a quilting bee, or burning man, or progressive dinner, or diy bio, or barn raising, or sometimes, like tonight, we call it dorkbot and you are always welcome here.

Dorkbot is usually free and open to the public. Tonight, through the generosity of our hosts, we’re able to gather as dorkbot and share our ideas freely.

I will ask for your generosity, as well, and hope that you will grant me three favors.

First: I ask that you participate tonight. There will be opportunity for discussion and questions. The entire reason we’re here is for you to add to the ongoing dialog. If nothing else, be engaged and present for the next little while. You may learn something or nothing at all, but trust me when I say it’s always better when you are in the conversation.

Second: When tonight is over, I respectfully suggest that you have an obligation to relate what you’ve seen here with your colleagues, friends and family. Even if you hate everything about this evening and just want to share your curmudgeonly experience, please do have that conversation with somebody. And, if tonight inspires you to think about what being a maker of things really means, then please shout it from the rooftops or at least your blog. A curse of a thousand flame-throwing robots on you if you keep your thoughts to yourself!

and Third: If you at any point tonight think to yourself, “This is great! I wish it would happen more often” then please visit dorkbot.org and find the dorkbot in your own hometown. If there’s not one nearby or if you just don’t like what your city’s dorkbot is doing, then guess what? You’re it. I knight you as a dorkbot-overlord.

Starting a dorkbot couldn’t be easier. Invite one or more of your friends out for lunch and talk about the strange things you are doing with electricity. Do it once or daily or monthly at a bar or hackerspace or your living room. You can call it a dorkbot if you want. Or not. Tell us about it when it happens.

I will offer to you that you can email me or Douglas or any of the other dorkbot organizers for any advice or help as you get going. You’ll find there’s a wonderfully strange community out there really eager to hear about what you’re doing.

I’m also going to send around a couple clipboards for you to add your email address and hometown. Your info will be treated with respect, I promise. I’ll just make sure your local dorkbot organizer knows you’re interested in getting connected.

Thank you so much for being here tonight. and so with that, I declare the first dorkbot-diyCHI open!

The story is a “mockumentary” done in the style of a radio documentary you might hear as a 30-minute special on NPR. While parts were definitely funny, it didn’t seem to be presented as a slapstick humorous production (a la Chris Guest’s movies).

Instead, this was speculative fiction reported on in a very serious manner, peppered with the sound collages you come to expect from well-engineered radio stories. This particular story was about childcare in the near future. Robots watch kids (cheaper than university-educated babysitters), children have implants that provide biodata like “I’m hungry,” and society faces all sorts of questions about class differences, feminism, and the ever-present abundance of overbearing parents.

In fact, this was truly science fiction in 2002, as technology presented in the show was not widely available. Disturbingly (?), in 2008, just about every innovation mentioned in the program has been demonstrated by governments, universities, companies, or even the diy-garage inventor. It’s easy to see that given a little more tinkering time, everything in the piece could arrive in the next few years.

That got me thinking about what it means to be plunging the fringes as an amateur futurist. I have friends who are educated and trained futurists (Garry, for example). They have a toolbox of systems analysis that can find patterns in our world that would indicate trends in the observable future (i.e. they think 10-20 years ahead and not 1000 years. “In our lifetime”). When Garry talks about energy, I trust him because he spends his days researching and prospecting the domain while applying his pattern-matching experience.

This activity happens all the time in thinktanks. They get paid to speculate and present the future so organizations can create strategies that might improve their success (whatever that might mean)

However, I also like the idea of domain experts (ex. architects, fashion designers, software engineers) involving themselves in near future speculation by creating representative artifacts of the future.

I’m interested in what the amateur futurist, who is not necessarily involved in thinking about trends directly, would create given an appropriate creative prompt. For example, industrial design firms often go through this exercise (“What does the vacuum cleaner look like in 2020″). Their designs might not actually function, but they will build representative mockups and create websites and commercials as if they really did exist.

Nikhil Mitter describes speculative design as

an emerging practice based research methodology that promotes designed objects as tools for critical reflection.

He goes on to say of “research objects” (i.e. the artifacts of exploration)

A presentation of form as research has the advantage of implementing all the resources afforded to material objects such as imagery, sound, tactility, presence, feedback, interaction, duration, and behavior.

I believe that this begins to approach the notion of directed tinkering as an enabler of critical thinking. You are not just hacking to hack, but you are hacking to understand a problem.

At the same time, I think most shadetree-engineers who are playing around with microcontrollers and robots would probably not think about their work this way (frankly, they wouldn’t use the word “work” to describe their benchtop experiments).

I wonder: is it possible or worthwhile to set up channels for problem solving in the form of creative prompts for hackers?

It makes me feel like my code is more beautiful, somehow.

Maybe it’s because whenever I watch a brilliant hacker give a technical talk, they put their screens up on the projector and live-code with super-large type.

Perhaps it reduces the amount of stuff that fits on my screen to a more elegant “that which matters.” Too much text via smaller font makes it difficult to focus.

It’s a cognitive hack for creativity.

Monoco 18pt – Vibrant Ink color scheme for Textmate

Dev House convenes a group of people who all are working on or wanting to work on interesting projects for one, short day. At a strict time after the hack session, everyone shows off what they’ve finished. The scope of each project is necessarily small since the emphasis is on completing something.

Mac demo’ing the project we worked on

There were no sponsors (aside from the venue itself, betahouse) nor after-parties; these were just smart, energetic people putting in a good day’s work on mostly side-projects. Pizza and coffee and wifi flow freely and everyone has an impressive skill set and/or project history.

Simple and effective. The organizers weren’t egomaniacal pseudo-celebrities in an insignificant web 2.0 universe. In fact, while there were provably high caliber brains with large profile track records in the room, egos seemed to have been checked in at the door.

The hangers-on that tend to flock to your average barcamp who have little substantive input to offer and just get off on going to tech events would have been really out of place here.

You’ve met these people? Their cards say “Social Media Consultant,” but you still have absolutely NO idea what they actually have accomplished in their lives to enjoy such self-importance.

They somehow show up at every technology conference and happy hour, flitting around and constantly twittering and traveling and collecting “friends” on facebook like points in a game. They name drop other, bigger narcissists with @’s on twitter as if you are supposed to be impressed by their ability to weasel into places where they are hopelessly outclassed.

Engage them in their one-way conversation at an unconference (one of 20 they helped “organize” that month) and they kvetch about how they don’t ever have time to sleep and how their many podcasts and video streams and guest blogging gigs and Uber-secret, open-source coalition of boards and specification architects is just about to launch and change the universe forever.

The have to wear costumes… COSTUMES… to SxSW so they are noticed and photographed since you have never heard of anything they’ve actually shipped before.

You fall for it once or twice or a few years. You may even chase the glory. Then the veneer fades. Then you meet people who are actually smart and are producing projects daily that chip away at real world, observable improvements in our human condition. Then you get angry or bitter or jealous at the “evangelists” and “connectors.”

You look around and wonder what the hell happened and how did so much time disappear.

Not at Dev House.

Everyone was working and the socializing was all in the context of real effort. I suspect that there would have been very little tolerance for the BS that we generously call “expertise” at your typical tech conference panel sessions, for example.

“Tolerance” overstates the case. Valueless people would probably have just gone home on their own because they would have been ignored.

Coding notes

I also got a glimpse of what I’m missing as a lone wolf freelancer. I’ve not really participated much in pair programming sessions, and realized that there are some practical advantages. For example, watching somebody’s terminal commands might reveal a new shortcut that can shave precious seconds off of trivial operations.

With somebody looking over your shoulder and simultaneously working on the same problems, you tend to be on better behavior.

There wasn’t time for much architecture or even goal-setting at the session. We just kind of went forward as fast as we could. The day before, I created an initial framework that was refined pretty quickly by the others’ input and it did the job for the day.

In this team coding environment, you have to constantly think about what you’re doing and be prepared to explain or justify your approaches. So for better or worse, I found myself slowing down– I was coding at maybe 60% efficiency.

This was maybe my second or third effort using ruby-processing (although I’ve done dozens of things (including production work) in processing, proper). It was definitely the most involved ruby-processing project I’ve done. We chose ruby-processing since more people were used to doing ruby work vs. java, and frankly, it just seemed more fun. Processing will ultimately not be sufficient for this project. We didn’t even get into “real” graphics stuff.

I got stuck on some of the issues that “just work” in processing like file inclusions that were a result of our ruby-processing choice. Nevertheless, I do think that using some of the ruby idioms, combined with the ruby expertise in the room made for a more rapid development.

The last version control system I’ve used w/ more than one coder was subversion. I’ve migrated all my active projects to git lately. Git merges, etc, are something I don’t usually deal with as I’m almost always a lone programmer on a project, so I needed some reminding on how to address those in git.

Criticism was constructive, for the most part. There were some people who took conversations off on digressions, but that’s to be expected (reminded me of some of the better undergrad comp sci classes)

Get something done in a day, and you get the respect of at least a few minutes of attention and genuine questions or suggestions.

Most normal people took Sunday off.

The concept, called SmartLab, looks to be a fun way to reapply and improve on some work I have done previously in interface design, multitouch tables, and creative workflow research.

The project will involve prototyping a physical workbench (with integrated projection, multitouch screen, and image capture facilities), writing some system software, and developing a user interaction that will stretch my imagination in strange and useful ways.

Tomorrow I’ll be working with them at Dev House Boston (a self-imposed cram session of people completing interesting things over the course of a few hours) to design and possibly prototype some of the user interaction for this device.

I have an interest in people’s workspaces. I have reams of notes and photographs documenting how people set up their studios, kitchens, or even just their computer desktop. I adore artist studio tours because you can often get a sense of flow from the best producers just by their arrangement of tools or choice of decor. I believe that prolifically creative people set up their environments so that there are few barriers to successful accomplishment.   

The idea of introducing technology into an environment in an unobtrusive way to facilitate creation strikes me as a big problem worthy of exploration.

For example, one of the more interesting ideas that surfaced today was the idea of an “improved lab notebook.” Researchers must take copious notes about their experiments as they are learning and trying new ideas and techniques. These logs serve as both evidence of work progress and as fodder for the papers that are the mark of accomplishment for scientists.

While there are many attempts to digitize or automate these notes, it seems that most researchers revert to paper and pencil as their note-taking default; Mac relayed a story of a researcher printing out results and literally cutting and pasting the spreadsheet into a paper notebook.

Lifecasting as Means for Project Documentation

There are live video streams of offices and studios and workshops out there that I find fascinating. Sometimes I’ll just turn them on one of my monitors and just have them running in the background. Since I work alone from my home office, this sometimes makes me feel connected to other humans also pursuing some results.

A little while ago, I registered a ustream.tv account for an idea called “Tinkercam.”

lifecasting as means for project documentation.

There is a known psychological effect that when you are observed in a work setting (i.e. you think somebody is watching you), you will work more effectively and are more likely to stay on task. The surprising thing is that this will even work if you place a photograph of eyeballs somewhere in your peripheral vision.

I set up my tinkercam in hopes that it may be a way to mindhack my way into increased focus. On my test run, I just found that I was spending all my time fiddling with the webcam and that only one person was watching (who thought I was a tech support person and started asking questions about setting up their ustream account). Granted, I could have gone onto twitter and announced the “launch” of tinkercam, but I felt that it’s not at a launch stage yet. (The cam is live sometimes, nonetheless.)

I then started brainstorming on what else a tinkercam would be and how it needs to change to be useful or even fun.

First, because it’s video, it needs to point at interesting things. A guy, banging on his keyboard all day is actually not interesting. More interesting would be a stream of my computer screen overlaid on top of my face so you could see what I was working on, what I was paying attention to, and how my workflow progresses.

If I was working on my robotics projects (like the robot puppet), then I could get away with just pointing my camera at my soldering iron and that would be more visually interesting by the nature of the work.

Second, it needs to be unobtrusive. I shouldn’t have to think about turning it on or switching between camera views. Something like motion detection or application awareness could act as a virtual “director” for the tinkercam.

The more exciting potential is that by recording the stream or taking critical snapshots, you can document the progress of a project automatically for sharing. Documentation and process sharing has become increasingly important for creative producers in the hacker/DIY community. (see instructables.com) Software artists pay attention to the blogs of other software artists as they write about their projects.

We also discussed the value of “replaying.” Mac often captures a desktop stream as he is iterating over design (ex. photoshop). This way, he can replay his tinkering and watch the creative evolution of an idea. Often he will discover decision points where alternate choices might be useful in different contexts.

The Creative Framework and the Digital Notebook

I’ve also been working on a digital sketchbook and ideaflow tool which allows me to rapidly iterate through ideas and follow threads. I am able to fork off ideas and replay/retrace iterations to discover their lineage.

This, in essence, is my lab notebook. It’s custom software that in itself is a creative work, but it allows me to open lots of streams of thought and follow them as I see fit (or as the software urges me to go).

I’ve written about my theory of creative infrastructure before, but to reiterate:

The creative process has steps:

1. Live and Observe
2. Wonder and Research
3. Tinker and Experiment
4. Build and Bookend
5. Repeat

You complete this cycle forever and at every stage, you have opportunities to share your output copiously so that you can create better work.

I think working with Jason and Mac on the SmartLab table and lab notebook will inform my continuous tinkering with the creativity framework. I think there are tools that may emerge that will become useful cognitive aids for knowledge workers.

I took for granted that Austin was a relatively smaller town and that I could go to just about any tech-related meetup and find at least one person that I knew.

So the question, “what do you do?” has had me stumped for a while now. When most people ask that, they really want to know “how much money do you make” or “can you even relate to my self-important world?”

I’ve been doing web and software development of some sort or another for the past decade with an occasional foray into non-profit organizational work and things like dorkbot and robotic puppets. There are also many things I aspire to and am working towards. I looked at web stuff as bread and butter.

I no longer introduce myself as a web developer or Rails guy. Ballast. All of my current gigs involve art or robots or innovative software. It’s a good place. When I consciously made the decision not to pursue web stuff as a source of income the universe rewarded me by presenting just enough non-web opportunity to keep my income pipeline fuller than it’s ever been while keeping the stress level way down.

I’m happier when I’m doing work that’s more creatively fulfilling.

I’m also realizing that if I keep all of my creative work closed up in a box out of fear or relentless tinkering, then it’s as good as “never done.” Nothing is more unflattering than trying to convince someone of the value of a perpetual “closed beta.”

As a side effect, I find that the people I’m wanting to meet deal in the currency of provable accomplishments and not vaporware ideas. Nobody cares about the network of people I know (since nowadays, it’s super easy to reach anybody via social media tools). Spinning multiple plates badly is not attractive. They aren’t even interested in what I can do.

The only thing that matters is, “What have you done lately that’s remarkable?”

Cal Newport defines Grand Projects as

any project that when explained to someone for the first time is likely to elicit a response of “wow!’”

There is a huge difference in multitasking because you are disorganized and consciously multitasking so that you accomplish interesting grand projects.

Interesting people are often involved in multiple grand projects, but they really only can get one completed at a time.

So the better question is “What project are you working on right now that fires you up the most?”

I’d like to live a life of prolific creativity. I’d like to introduce myself with infectious enthusiasm over some project I can literally put into somebody’s hands.

I’m working on a meta-grand project, then. I’m fired up about figuring out what creativity framework I need so that I and lots of other people can have a relentlessly creative output of accomplishment.

I won’t spend all of my time ruminating over the creative process rather than actually creating things. That’d just be procrastination. I am spending quality time doing research and building infrastructure that facilitates creative output. These ideas are to be field tested by me and eventually others.

I’ll probably blog about that research on occasion, but only when I have something provable to say or an artifact to share.

Most of the time, now, I want to talk about the projects that result from my creativity experiments.

I may, at some point in my life, call myself a technology artist or creativity expert. For now, I’m a guy making things.

This post is a response to the Holidailies writing prompt “Introduce Yourself.”

Jon Lebkowsky writes about the difficulty of multitasking

I was good at balancing many tasks, I could keep a lot of balls in the air without dropping them. As I matured, I realized that depth has more value than breadth, and in recent years I’ve been trying to learn to focus and do a few things well.

Jon is an interesting guy who is smart and involved in many worthwhile projects. I like to think that most of my friends fall into this category of diverse interests and passions. But how do we cope? When a thousand things come at you and all of them seem equally interesting or even lucrative at the onset, how do you decide which are most important? I’m still figuring out what my personal filters need to be.

In the meantime, there are projects to complete and things to accomplish.

How computers multitask

I distinctly remember a project in a computer architecture class where we designed multitasking systems and applications that ran on top of them.

Inside your PC is a device called the Central Processing Unit (CPU) which is, loosely, the “brain” of the computer. Its primary function is to do math as quickly as possible.

When somebody says they have a 3.0Ghz computer, they are referring to the CPU’s speed at doing math. 3.0Ghz translates into 3 billion arithmetic operations per second.

We’re only counting very simple binary operations (add, subtract, bitshift, etc). However, if you do enough small bits of math, and you do them very fast (ex, 3 billion per second), things like youtube videos and email emerge.

When you turn on your computer, you likely have dozens of programs that load automatically. The computer itself runs an operating system (ex. Windows or OS X) that, in turn, has dozens or hundreds of processes that need to run all the time, like the subsystems that deal with file management or the mouse cursor display. As soon as we load our email program or web browser, the computer adds a whole new set of threads of activity on top of the current workload.

So you are taking the limited resource of tasks per second and dividing it up among a large set of activities. That’s why when you have 50 applications open at once, you might notice the computer starting to drag (or why you have to reboot every once in a while to “clear the deck.”)

However, from our human perspective, most of the time, it appears the computer is not even breaking a sweat despite the myriad tasks it’s completing about every second. Never mind that you can easily identify the CPU on an opened computer because it usually has it’s own cooling fan or large spiky projections that help distribute the heat generated by so much math. The computer works really hard to be that fast.

Here’s the thing: our puny human brains are actually faster. MUCH faster. But we’ll get to that in a little bit.

The CPU can, roughly, do only one math operation at a time. Most interesting things a computer can do require billions of math operations to complete. If a computer only had to do one interesting thing at a time that required multiple steps or tasks, the fastest way to complete that single problem is to begin at the beginning and work through until it’s completed (i.e. not to get sidetracked doing anything off of the critical path).

So let’s look at an example.

Suppose a computer has a problem that requires 10 small math operations to complete and lets say that the computer can only process 10 math operations a second. This means the computer will accomplish this problem in 1 second:

It follows that if a CPU can work only one small step at a time, then if it has 2 complicated projects to complete each with 10 small steps, it takes 20 steps, or 2 seconds to complete. The diagram below shows the computer only working on one complicated project at a time. It completes the first project and then starts the second project. This is called “sequential processing.”

If computers actually worked that way, we would be so frustrated that we would bang our heads on our keyboards and probably spend more time outside.

Right now, your computer is doing, easily, a few million extremely complicated processes (ex. the video rendering that causes these words to show up at the right place on your screen). If you had to wait for the first million projects to complete before the computer started the next million, it would take minutes for your mouse to move a couple pixels in any direction.

So we need something like this:

Notice how we haven’t saved any time at all. However, the perception is that lots of things are finishing at around the same time. That’s all computer multitasking is about — it’s just getting things finished at a time which seems acceptable to the end user.

For complex problems which require many steps, the computer maintains a set of holders in its memory called “registers.” At any given time, as the computer is working through a multi-step problem, it can take the state of everything it is working on in its CPU and put all the values into some of the registers. It can also load up a different collection of values from another group of registers and pick up where it left off. This is basically how the CPU can keep track of many complicated problems in various states of completion. This process is called “context switching” and happens every so often (i.e. millions of times per second.)

We can amend our previous example by adding context switching tasks. The worst case scenario has you switching projects after every task. Let’s simplify and say that a context switch takes the same amount of time as any other small task.

Whoa! We almost doubled the amount of time required to complete just two projects by adding context switching. In fact: we get exponential increases of time for every new project we add a multitasked project just because of the overhead of having to think about a different set of information.

Computers deal with this in several ways:

• They optimize the time it takes to context switch by storing as minimal amount of information as necessary to continue working on a problem.
• The engineers who build CPUs design chips so they are physically able to context switch faster than anything else.
• They add more brains. The only way a computer can physically do more than one math problem at a time is by adding additional CPUs. So when we hear “Quad-core CPU” you have 4 math machines working at the exact same time. This adds a whole new layer of complication because how you split up a problem among multiple processors will affect the speed of your computer. The Saguaro 2 supercomputer has hundreds and hundreds of core CPUs and requires elaborate water cooling systems to keep it from melting down, but can handle 50 trillion math operations per second.
• They can reduce the number of times they context switch by chunking their problems differently. Rather than switch between every task, for example, they might switch between every 5th task.
• They can pre-process complicated tasks so that they are prioritized and broken up into parts that will complete faster. Major branches of computer science deal with the serious math behind this approach.

Multitasking is a tough problem for a machine. There’s a huge amount of computer science around how you schedule and prioritize tasks and how they are broken down so that the most complicated projects don’t consume too many resources at the wrong time. Many times a “faster” computer is not faster at all. The software is just tweaked, via mathematics, to deliver finished projects sooner. Projects which deliver the most perceptual impact (ex. graphics processing) are usually prioritized.

Human Multitasking

Our brains are capable of about 100 000 000 000 000 000 operations per second. That is at least a hundred thousand times faster than the fastest super computer requiring all that water cooling and government money.

So why are we so bad at multitasking?

We, thankfully, do not perceive each of the trillions of operations required to observe, wonder, tinker and build things in our world around us. On a conscious level, we do not manage the the tiny tasks of our brain computers.

We operate on a higher level. Our self-awareness is an application running on top of a really fast wet operating system. However, as is of any abstraction, as we simplify and aggregate functions, we start lose flexibility and power. We don’t have complete control over ourselves. We are prone to mental illness (bugs in our synapse programming), there are daemon processes that run on autopilot, backing up our memories and making sure the graphics displays of our visual processing render with a reasonable precision. Reasonable, but not perfect.

What’s a puny human mind to do when we can’t add CPUS (yet) and are limited by our core OS? We have to reduce our context switching. It’s the only way to get multiple interesting things done.

1. Eliminate tasks to reduce context switching.
2. Chunk tasks so you get as much done on one project before you must switch to another.
3. Focus on projects which provide the most perceptual impact. Those projects which provide you the most value, recognition, and velocity towards your passions should deserve more cpu time.
4. The final task of a project is the most important task. All effort should be placed on getting the final task crossed off the list. “The quicker you finish, the quicker you finish.”

I think those four things are easier said than done.

As a parting shot, after reading many self-help productivity books and blogs, trying to implement system after system of productivity, and listening to people who might know better, I’ve come to the conclusion that getting things done can actually be boiled down to one word:

Decide.

What you are seeing on my blog today is a temporary placeholder until I can officially “relaunch.”

I’ve recently moved to the East Coast (Somerville, MA) and have been doing some Big Thinking about where I’m going with my work, life, etc. Part of this is a renewed emphasis on ego-building online. It’s easier now than ever, and I’m really exhausted by seeing uninteresting people have all the fun.

However, as an antidote to my bad habits of taking on too many low-value projects and passive aggressively making the last 20% of ongoing projects drag on and on, I have been trying to implement Cal Newport’s idea of a completion-centric productivity. In a nutshell:

• Make a list of the areas of your life (ex. Professional, Relationships, Physical)
• Under each category, brainstorm on all the projects you have going on for that “sphere” of your existence.
• Identify the top 1 or 2 in each category that, if you finished them w/in 2 weeks, would make the most positive impact (however you’d like to measure that). Break down large projects into mini-projects that will take around 2 weeks to finish. I aimed for 8 or so projects.
• Create a worksheet listing of these projects. (Excel worked well for this) Next to each project, identify a completion criteria. This is a narrative that describes what your world will look like when that project is finished and out of your hair forever. (hint: write this in the past test. ex: “I submitted the article proposal to the editor.”)
• Print this out and carry it with you everywhere. This is your script for the next 2 weeks. You have to adopt a mentality that no matter what happens, you will make as much forward progress towards completion on these projects as you can every single day. At the end of 2 weeks, you should have completed every single project on that list.
• If other project ideas come up (and they will tempt you over and over), you need to put them in a holding bin. Nothing new can come on your list. If you are in the thick of it and don’t have your act together, trust me, new stuff can wait a couple weeks. Just write it on the back of your worksheet.
• Here is the key that make it work for me: I only work on one project at a time in 4 hour chunks. I also have been blocking in “me time” for things like sleep, hanging out w/ the SO, and exercise (a la The Now Habit)/ All of these are scheduled into iCal and are treated with the seriousness of meetings and appointments.

For me, this means I’ve been pulling late nighters to just get festering projects off my plate so.

It also means “Relaunch the blog” is a project that’s currently sitting in the holding bin until 8/17. So you should see a relaunch w/in 2 weeks after that (i.e. around the end of the month).

I am staring at my holding bin (and backlog of other projects) and see lots of extremely valuable, lucrative, exciting, and downright fun ideas. It is so tempting to drop the current list and just start working on those.

But that kind of action got me into lots of trouble before Hence, rigor.