DevYou

I have this habit of cramming so much stuff into each and every day that I can’t possibly do it all. The good part about that is I get alot done, but the bad side is that I tend to feel mildly bad about the things I wanted to get done but didn’t. It’s not an overwhelming feeling, but it’s unpleasant and can add up over time and nag at the back of my mind.

A little trick I’ve learned is to plan my day by “looking back” at it.

Here’s what to do:

In the morning, write a paragraph or two about your upcoming day. Use a conversational tone and describe all the things you did and how it went. In other words, pretend you have a time machine and have transported yourself to the end of the day and are looking back at it and describing what happened.

For example:

“Today was great. In the morning, I worked on the Defobrinicator project and made a ton of progress. Then I returned those phone calls and replied to a few emails. I had lunch at Bruno’s Luncheteria. Afterward, I went jogging. In the afternoon, I worked on my taxes, wrote that article about Patagonian tree lichen, and cleaned the rain gutters. Finally, before taking a break for dinner, I followed up on some new client leads and cleared my GTD inboxes.”

The benefit of writing about your upcoming day in the past tense is that you’ll tend to get a much better idea if all the things you’re planning realistically fit into your day — much more so than if you scribble down a list of things you want to accomplish. If you describe a day that’s totally unrealistic, you’ll feel it as you describe it.

Give it a whirl, and see what you think!

I’m the first to admit I have too many feeds in Google Reader. As of this moment, I have 137 subscriptions. Since many of those feeds have rather frequent updates, that’s just too many feeds to read every day.

The trouble is, though I do go through the list and prune away the less entertaining or useful feeds now and then, I tend to always have around this many subscriptions. Sure, I could prune all the way down to, say, a dozen feeds and be more productive, but what about those rare cases when I have some free time to waste on the less important feeds?

My preferred way to handle this problem would be to use nested folders. I’d have a high priority folder with all the folders containing feeds that are actually important in my day-to-day work and personal life, a low priority folder for the folders with important but not critical feeds, and finally a folder for folders with purely entertaining, time wasting feeds for when I have a little time to waste and want to be entertained.

The lack of nested folders thwarts this plan, but I’ve come up with a workaround that seems to be doing the trick just fine for me.

I started with the 25 folders I was already using. For example, I have a folder called “clients” that contains all the feeds published by my consulting clients; a folder called “nerd, dev” for feeds about programming; a folder called “firehose” for the high traffic, pure entertainment feeds like BoingBoing, and so on.

Since I couldn’t put those folders into folders, I simulated parent folders by prepending a three-letter code to the beginning of each folder name. For example, “clients” became “aaa.clients” because those feeds are in my “A-list”, the high priority feeds. Google Reader naturally sorts aaa.* to the top of the list of folders. For B-list folders, I prepended “bbb.” to the beginning of the name (eg. “bbb.nerd, dev”). And finally, I prepended “ccc.” to the beginning of all the fluff feeds.

Now, when I bring up Google Reader, I have three, sorted, clearly-labeled categories of feed folders. When I’m busy, which is almost all the time, I whip through the A-list folders. If I have a bit of extra time, I do the B-list too. Once in a blue moon, I do all three categories — or even just the C-list.

This technique has dramatically decreased my feed reading time, and yet I’ve been able to keep the goofy, entertaining subscriptions I enjoy from time to time.

Give it a whirl, and see what you think. And if you have other, cool Google Reader tips, feel free to share them in the comments.

In my recent post — Clear Your Mind, Clear Your Desk
– I posted a photo of my physical desk in all it’s ridiculously tidy glory. Today, purely coincidentally, one of my editors asked me to send a screenshot of my computer desktop. The virtual one, not the physical one. She’s preparing a talk for MacWorld Expo, and she needs an assortment of people’s desktop screenshots. So, I took a screenshot and emailed it to her. When I was looking at the screenshot, I realized my virtual desktop is as absurdly neat as my physical desktop, and for the same reasons. Have a look:

(click for a full size view)

For those of you who are wondering, this uber-neatness doesn’t extend to all aspects of my life. My clothes, for instance, tend to end up in sloppy little mountains here and there in my home. But that’s okay. We all have habits we want to improve. I’ll refactor over time, and all will be well. My point is: I don’t make neatness an obsession, but in places like my workspaces, when I need to be tidy, I can be super tidy. Now… where did I put my socks?

A few months ago I moved to a new city a couple of states away. When I moved, I put almost all of my worldly possessions into a big storage unit. To the new city, I took only what would fit in the back seat and trunk of my compact sedan and I shipped a few moving boxes ahead. Other than that, everything remained behind in storage.

Much of that mini-mountain of stuff I’ve been dragging with me from home to home, city to city, each time I moved over the last few decades. It’s quite a bit of stuff!

So now since I’ve moved, I’ve been living with relatively few possessions. (By American standards anyway, and certainly far fewer possessions than I surrounded myself with in my last home.)

The experience has been eye opening.

My day to day life with this minimal subset of possessions is as rich and full as it ever was when I had all my possessions around me. During these months, I’ve discovered I didn’t have with me some thing I needed or wanted only a mere handful of times. So the question arises: If I can go without all that stuff and be as content as when it’s around, then why do I own all that stuff? Are most of those possessions then just unnecessary complications? Are the experiential insights I’m having now keys to further simplifying my life?

Eventually I’ll return to retrieve my belongings. But when I do, I believe this time away from them will make parting with the things I don’t really need or that don’t have special sentimental value easier than it was before. When I was packing them all away into storage, I intended to simplify, and I did manage to part with some things, but still each and every thing that went into storage seemed like something I couldn’t bear to part with. My experience now is teaching me to question this lingering attachment.

One last, unrelated thing: Recently, Walking the Black Dog featured a moving, thought-provoking post called Removing the arrow. In it the author discusses, in an extremely personal way, difficulties and depression that has arisen from family relationships, and he shares his insights and questions as well as discussing the value of asking, a la Albert Ellis, “Why Not?” and the Buddhist parable from which the post’s title is derived. Highly recommended.

I have too many projects. It’s true. I have so many projects on my projects list that I couldn’t possibly get them all done in the next few years. At age 21 or even 31 that wouldn’t have bothered me quite as much as it does now at 41. I hope to live a good long while, but even then, the number of years I have left to complete projects is finite and growing smaller with every passing year.

I’ve tried tackling just one project at a time and pouring all my energy into that one focused goal, but — though that sounds logical and efficient — it has never worked out very well. On the other extreme, having too many projects doesn’t work out either. A few projects get done, but there’s a lingering unpleasantness around all the projects that are laying fallow. So, somewhere between the two extremes is the best number of projects. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know what that magic number (or more likely, the magic range of numbers), but I do know that I’m on the high side, and it’s not working well.

Today, on his blog Zen Habits, Leo has an excellent article on striking that elusive balance between too many and too few projects, based on his Haiku Productivity principles.

This application of Haiku Productivity may be one of the most useful and powerful (along with the two I mentioned above), transforming your ability to get projects done from one of juggling to one of focused completion.

How about you? Do you have too many projects? Too few? Or perhaps you’ve found the magic number of projects that works best for you. Feel free to leave a comment, and, as always, thanks for reading!

I’m still in the midst of packing up my home in preparation for my move, and I happened to stumble upon two stupendously useful and timely tips while reading my RSS feeds. (Hooray for feeds… Again!)

Both of these tips are on Unclutterer, but I originally found a pointer to one of them on Lifehacker.

The first tip comes from the Unclutterer article Digitize Your LP Collection, or Penelope Will Leave You. I have a ton of vinyl LPs (or at least they feel like a ton when I have to move them). For the last couple of decades I’ve been storing them in some milk crates I “borrowed” from the old (now non-existent) Faletti’s in San Francisco. The article has a nice tip on digitizing LPs, but that’s not my goal at the moment. The real gem for me was a link to a supplier of excellent archival storage boxes:

If you need a solution for storage, Bags Unlimited has a great selection of boxes and sleeves sized appropriately for LPs, 45s, and 78s. I label my boxes and have the contents organized with dividers that are also labeled by artist and genre.

The second tip is to photograph and throw away sentimental stuff. Brilliant!

Over the next few weeks, I went through the contents of the bin and took digital photos of the items with my camera. I organized the photos in an iPhoto album and filled in the photo’s Notes field with information about the object’s associated memory. Then, I threw away the object without any guilt or sense of loss. If I want a trip down memory lane, now I just open a file on my computer.

Both of these tips are excellent examples of how blogs can supply tremendously useful information. One need only find the right bogs. Unclutterer is obviously one of them!