Deadly Bloody Serious

I had the good fortune to attend GTD | The Roadmap in San Francisco the other week. If you're still not Getting Things Done after reading the book, join Connect and get the Roadmap discount. Or, attend Roadmap and get the Connect discount. Either way, you spend a day with David Allen and gain access to some fantastic audio and printed content. 

David warned that when we left, the Half-Life of Seminar Enthusiasm would confront the Fire-Hose of Reality. After two or three weeks of the fire hose, I'm happy to report that I'm still better off for having attended Roadmap. I still haven't made it all the way through a review without being interrupted, but the rest of my system is working better than ever.  

First of all, I've abandoned ResultsManager. I paid full price for it, but after a year of thrashing it still wasn't working for me. Its ability to gather tasks from a billion and one MindManager maps is nothing short of miraculous. If you haven't got GTD down pat, though, I predict you'll get lost in ResultsManager's twisty, turny maze of passages, all alike. Spend that USD$285 on half of Roadmap, instead.

Instead, I manage everything in Outlook tasks. One task per next action, one task per project. Not all actions have a project, but all projects have one to many actions. I copy the action description back to the project note to help me keep track. In a prior life, I'd have ranted and wailed and gnashed my teeth at the sheer inefficiency of it all. Compared to the effort of managing purpose-built task management software, however, this is a cake and it's working.

If I forget the double-entry, I pick it up later. Sometimes, I don't bother: the linkage is entirely optional. Many GTD practitioners report that they simply remember the linkage if they're doing their weekly reviews often enough. Say, weekly. 

Everything is mirrored from my PC to KeySuite on my Treo. One or both are always a little out of date. If that itches, I simply HotSync. I've dropped from several times a day to once or twice, which brings most things within range of memory. 

Best of all since Roadmap, I've experienced inbox zero. I got it that way by dragging my old not-entirely-processed mail into an Old Mail folder. You might think that's cheating, but it's still zero. The paradox is: you have to experience it before you want it hard enough to get there. So, cheat! If the thousands of stale messages bother you, schedule some processing stints for later. 

There's nothing quite like surrounding yourself with people who're better at something than you are. I soaked up more tips and tricks in the breaks during Roadmap than in a year of hunting for them on the 'net. All told, I'm bloody happy I attended.

Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood has, in two consecutive posts, highlighted my reasons for my two big switches of late, both of which were from home-grown solutions to something that works straight out of the box with no assembly required.

In On Frameworkitis, he passes on the cautionary tale of a programmer who felt so compelled to re-write his blogging engine when using it that he didn’t successfully post for two and a half years. Then, in Building and Overclocking a Core 2 Duo System, Jeff describes his own latest annual PC rebuild, including multiple tweak-verify passes to determine the highest safe overclock settings for his new CPU.

I love tinkering, but I’m sick of it being a productivity boat-anchor. Hence, my recent moves to WordPress and a Mac Pro.

Scott Bourne recently published Aperture Trick #59 on building a dream MacPro for use with Aperture. To summarise:

• Spend big on the graphics card;
• Scrimp on the CPU if you need to;
• Buy at least 2GB RAM;
• Buy third party memory if you’re buying a lot; and
• Spend big on the graphics card.

As I’ve found with my 2GHz/2GB/X1900 Mac Pro, this advice will also result in a kick-arse gaming machine. Oops!

I’d like to contribute some additional advice for people who, like me, have spent most of their computing lives on PCs and who don’t yet know the ins and outs of buying and caring for Macs. It’s not so much what to buy, as how:

• Buy from a good reseller;
• Talk to them often;
• Bring them repeat business; and
• Buy AppleCare.

In more detail:

Buy from a Good Reseller. I bought my Mac Pro from Total Recall Solutions in North Sydney. Lara helped me fine-tune the configuration and quote, saving me a few bucks. That doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a great start way to start a relationship. That’ll help more than you think, as you’ll need to…

Talk to your Reseller Often. You’re switching. All your friends have PCs. Those of them that you’ve persuaded to switch are also brand new. So, who’s going to help you out?

So far, Lara at TRS has:

• Helped me fix some initial problems with application crashes;
• Ordered me a rare Avocent KVM capable of switching DVI at 1920×1200;
• Sold me Parallels and helped me nut out its problems;
• Put me in touch with another of her customers that had managed to get Boot Camp working despite his X1900;
• Helped me find a retractable iPod charge and sync cable that actually works; and
• Sold me Aperture and swapped tips.

You might have time to browse web sites all night. I don’t. I’m delighted that I can lob a quick phone call or email at Lara and her co-workers and get a tip on how to solve some minor problem that Google can’t.

My more astute readers will have spotted that some of the items above involve add-on purchases, and might be wondering why I didn’t buy everything online. Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve discovered that it’s a great idea to…

Bring your reseller your repeat business. I always give my reseller a chance to match online prices on new Mac-related kit before I buy it. Most of the time, they either beat the price or come within cooee of it, even if it wasn’t on their price list the day before. Overall, I think I’m ahead on price and way ahead on support. (They’re not doing too badly out of me, either.)

There’s one more thing you can do that can substantially help your reseller help you:

Buy AppleCare. Your Mac is going to cost you a bundle. Should something go wrong, it’s going to be expensive and time consuming to fix. If you don’t buy AppleCare, you’ll basically have to send your box back to Apple to get it looked at and fixed, and your puny warranty will have you buying expensive bits only shortly into the machine’s useful lifetime.

If you buy AppleCare, on the other hand, there’s someone paid to take your calls and authorise your reseller to swap parts at Apple’s expense. Your reseller can get the parts and swap them while you wait, minimising your downtime and hassle.

* * *

I realise this advice isn’t as attractively geeky as tips on shaving GHz in exchange for GB, but how you buy your Mac can have as big an effect on your productivity as what you put in it.

Spending time on a professional relationship might feel weird to some geeks. It would have felt weird to my younger self. I’ve found, however, that buying from a good reseller and keeping in touch with them has contributed more to my satisfaction with my Mac than a mild CPU upgrade would have.

It’s time to come out of the closet.

I use a Macintosh at home.

At first, it was just a Mac Mini used for the occasional build and test of Juice. Then my PC started flaking out, and I had to pull half of the memory out. Its performance became awful. Unfortunately, at three years old it was too hard to swap out just a few bits: I was going to have to get a whole new machine.

I spent a few months locked up in analysis paralysis over the four digit upgrade whilst also wrangling a five digit kitchen upgrade, planning a six digit forced rebuild on the back of the house, and helping customers figure out seven digit upgrades to their IT environments.

I eventually decided that if I had to choose two items out of good, cheap, and shipping before 2020, I was going to compromise on the price.

That, in combination with accidentally subjecting myself to three contiguous hours in a reality distortion field chasing down a friend’s recommendation that I find out about Time Machine, made for a decision I hadn’t anticipated.

I ended up getting a Mac Pro.

To my surprise, I’ve taken to Mac OS X quickly. I thought I’d be switching back to XP under Parallels a lot, but so far it hasn’t been necessary: I spend all my time in Aperture and Firefox. I’m already trying to use Expose on my XP based work laptop and wishing it had the Dock.

A Mac Pro might seem overkill for browsing the ‘net, but photo management is already making good use of my investment. Video might even make the beast seem slow, which leads me to another reason I bought the Mac Pro: I don’t want to get painted into another architectural corner like last time.

One of the claimed benefits of the Mac Pro’s more expensive server chipsets is extended system life: server manufacturers would much rather upgrade parts in an existing production line than start from scratch with a new motherboard. It looks like I’ll be able to upgrade to eight cores pretty soon, I can quadruple my memory whenever that becomes affordable, and I sincerely doubt my gaming requirements will stress 16 lanes of PCI Express anytime soon. Bwa ha ha. Which reminds me:

My other important use case was being able to run PC games. Boot Camp has turned out better than I’d hoped. Half Life 2 is so smooth (with full detail!) I’m getting motion sickness if I play too long. I’m looking forward to Portal turning my guts inside out.

Overall, I’m happier with my Mac Pro than I expected to be. A lot of that is thanks to Aperture, about which I’ll definitely be ranting soon, and the rest is due to a solid and easy operating system on some kick-arse hardware I won’t have to fuss with for ages. Life is good.

Further to my previous post about a way to improve your productivity on the cheap, some anonymous benefactor has used my personal coupon code (CC15-15411) to buy ClearContext, and in the process:

• Saved $15 for themselves, and
• Saved me the [as yet unknown] cost of the upgrade.

I’m delighted with ClearContext for providing me with a way to save money using my blog, and with whichever of my readers it was that gave ClearContext a shot. Thankyou both!

[Attempt 2, thanks to some WordPress mishap]

As I mentioned on my experimental MSN space:

ClearContext assigns priorities to mail based on thread and participant, and colour-codes and sorts your mail by those priorities. That doesn’t sound as amazing as it is. I’ve never put down my credit card faster than when told my trial had expired.

I’m still delighted with the product, despite barely scratching the feature set. Important items float to the top of my inbox as if by magic, and I can assign labels and file them without dragging and dropping. Once I’ve labelled a thread, future mail in the same thread automatically inherits the label. There’s even a whole Getting Things Done workflow system in there.

Not resting on their laurels, they’re nearly ready to release ClearContext IMS 3.0, which has a feature I dearly want: unsubscribing from threads so that they’re automatically filed out of your inbox. That one feature alone is probably worth the cost of the upgrade.

The evil geniuses in ClearContext Marketing have come up with a strategy to generate pre-launch buzz that might save me that upgrade fee, however: a personal coupon code that’ll save you $15 and get me my upgrade for free. Just quote CC15-15411 when you buy ClearContext, and we’ll both come out ahead of the game.

PS: it worked!

After one too many glitches, Cameron has given up on electronic capture. He’s converted to the Moleskine, and now seeks more Moleskine hacks despite Rob Irwin’s dire warnings about the dangers of unconstrained experiments in self-organsation.

I’m somewhat cautious about the Rimmer Effect, also, but (so far) find there’s a subtle balance in GTD that helps: it’s somehow extensible enough to keep me interested and entertained (and, thus, productive!), without becoming so entertaining that I zoom in and dump myself into la-la analysis paralysis land.

(That’s just as well: there’s plenty else in the world that’ll pull me through the looking glass, trust me.)

In answer to Cameron’s question, though:

So far, the only Moleskine hack I’ve needed is to use a removable 3M coloured tag to indicate the page up to which I’ve processed. If it seems a long way back, I spend some idle time at a cafe copying things forward. If I run out of Moleskine, I can buy another one and copy stuff in. I’m on to my third of the big Moleskine reporters, with no sign of stopping.

Processing is a matter of wading through the Moleskine, updating my Mind Manager maps with action items and important notes, and moving the tag forward. I also cross my to-do boxes through horizontally to indicate I’ve moved them to the real system. Genuine completion gets a tick. If it’s no longer interesting or useful, I cross it out.

My other tip can’t be called a hack, because Moleskine did it deliberately: the back pages are perforated. Need to hand someone a diagram? Rip, scrawl, and hand it over. For some reason, that always seems to amuse the IT professionals. Paper can do that?