Who?

Nº. 3 of  27
June 4, 2011

“We have seen this gradual transition of the city of Copehagen from a traffic-infested city to really a people-oriented city, which is quite lovely.”

From their pedestrian systems, public spaces, and low-speed areas to the bicycle highways, how Copenhagen has created such a healthy, social urban fabric in such a cold climate should be a real inspiration to Canadian and northern American cities.

irishboyinlondon:

Jan Gehl - Livable Cities.  …A place that recognises that “people want to be with people” and can work that ethos into policy and deliver it! Jan Gehl has done such good work forwarding the cause for human scale and liveable spaces!

(Source: twilightfades, via titularhumour)

June 4, 2011
Heaven lives amid our filth.

Heaven lives amid our filth.

(Source: brettsnews)

June 2, 2011

“Seeing the Future” at Minimal Mac

Patrick Rhone’s put down an insightful post over at Minimal Mac on how frustrating it is to see Microsoft floundering in its implementation of what ought to be game-changing technologies, and turning them, such as in the case of Kinect, into little more than toys, or, I might add, such as in the case of the ill-fated Courier tablet, never even letting products see the light of day. 

Patrick juxtaposes this with Apple’s product development decisions, which have ushered in a new era in the way technology interacts with our lives, asking why Microsoft can’t do the same. It’s hard to disagree.

Many parts of Apple’s design process can be emulated, and a lot of companies (including Microsoft) seem to be trying. Extraordinary attention to detail, the combination of purposeful restraint and open-ended creativity in product development, the commitment to sensible simplicity, to completeness in design — these things make for the process that makes Apple products stand apart. But Apple’s ability to leave the past behind is ultimately what frees them to create the society-shifting products that they do. 

Dizziness sets in if I run down a mental list of Apple hardware and software that I’ve had in my young life, all now marooned in the Sea of Obsolescence, piled on the shores of No-Longer-Supported Isle. It’s frustrating to think of the waste of perfectly useful and usable products predictably out-cycled by innovation, but that’s the unfortunate nature of a technological revolution.

Somehow, it seems like Microsoft doesn’t get this, or at least wants to stem back the tide. They’re slow to drop even the extremes of legacy support, and do it only as it becomes completely unavoidable, when the pain of continuing on with that old baggage becomes too much to bear.

An example is their recent encouragement that people finally abandon IE6. When they finally announced the “IE6 Countdown” effort, there was much rejoicing amongst those who cared about innovation in web media, but Microsoft only did even this small thing after 10 years of IE6 and a massive build-up of outcry. And consider that this was not just any 10 years, but 10 years during the thickest part of the internet revolution so far, giving it an effect of a much longer period. (Not to mention that their later browsers have standards compliance issues as well, making web innovation even more difficult than if they’d just quit the game all-together.)

This scenario seems to be repeated over and over, suggesting the pattern at Microsoft is to look back at how to leverage legacy rather than looking forward at how to maximise future impact. It suggests that when Microsoft’s teams finally make a clean slate product, at some point someone’s strongest impulse is to start copying over from the old chalkboard as much as will fit, and then to toss out the slate if it can’t fit the contents of the old chalkboard within its clean, new edges.

I don’t say these things with any sort of schadenfreude for Microsoft. To tell the truth, yes, I hated Microsoft in the 1990’s. I was a Mac fanatic to the core through those years when it looked like Apple was going to go belly up. I designed software on both Mac and Windows platforms (this was back in my high school / ReaCh Software days), and ultimately, Apple was rescued by that bailout from Microsoft, if we want to call it that, so for that I was and am grateful (and maybe just a little resentful.) But that’s old history.

I’d honestly love to see a modern Microsoft innovating and making phenomenal products that end up putting Apple to shame.

In the end, we’d all benefit from more competition at the “complete design” level that Apple seems to pretty well monopolize at this point. Microsoft already has the brains and the ideas to do it. But they need the vision and the courage to commit to it. Scary stuff. I bet we’d be surprised how much fear rules a lot of the strategy and development decisions at Microsoft. It’s the only thing that, to me, makes sense of how a company with that amount of resources can keep making the missteps it does.

So, here’s hoping somewhere over at Redmond, someone has a breakthrough with their therapist, and here’s hoping that breakthrough snowballs into us all getting gifted a better future.

June 2, 2011

One of the things about design that makes it such a joy is that it requires balance. If elements are too large, each change will be more expensive than it needs to be. If elements are too small, changes will ripple across elements. And optimizing the design takes place against the backdrop of an unpredictable stream of changes.

—Kent Beck on Coupling and Cohesion

May 31, 2011

Big things afoot for The Hit List

I was greeted this morning with a 1.0 update for my install of Potion Factory’s The Hit List ($49.95), which I’ve been using as my primary task-tracking app for the last number of months.

This is a big deal, because The Hit List — once one of the most promising and well-received apps in its space — has been in perpetual beta for a couple years in which the developer, Andy Kim, seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. Bit by bit, users had been reluctantly leaving for the likes of Things or OmniFocus, believing The Hit List had become “deadware”. It did look grim, I’ll admit. But it seems like the faithful are finally being rewarded!

This is a very well-made piece of software, with a great user experience that balances between simplicity, style, and a well-rounded functionality set. Though the controls are not as granular as OmniFocus, and the app isn’t quite as minimal and clean as Things, for me The Hit List has found a sweet spot and is in many ways the best in its class. The Hit List nearly makes task management fun. 

Apparently The Hit List for iPhone and The Hit List for Mac are both awaiting app store approval, and over-the-air sync service (which supposedly works between multiple Macs as well as iOS devices) will be available for $1.99/mo or $19.99/yr.

There’s been a fairly large number of people already actively using this service in beta, and you’ll even find a fully operational sign-up site for the sync service (though I don’t suggest subscribing until the service officially launches): 

I’m eager to see what the sync service is actually capable of. I doubt it’ll have quite the expansive capacity that OmniFocus has, particularly with the OmniFocus iPad app and third party supplemental services (such as Spootnik’s amazing project-specific Basecamp-to-OmniFocus sync.)

Still, I’m betting The Hit List will emerge as the best value and most usable solution for personal task tracking. 

(Well, at least for the non-OCD set. Ahem.)

I’m very happy to see this app finally coming of age. Good luck to Andy and Potion Factory, and god-speed!

May 31, 2011
Globes — I grew up loving globes. My chief fun many nights after being tucked into bed was studying an old McNally globe under lamplight, using its colour-coded nations as the starting spot from which empires would rise and fall amid the tumults of battles, treaties and intrigue my mind’s stage would put on for my sole entertainment. The globe was predisposed to this game, I think, as it was already out-of-date enough to let me know the temporary nature of world domination. The British Empire was in red. USSR in green (along with a few other communist nations of the period). Africa was nearly as patchworked as the United States of America (the only country that got gifted more than a single colour — which generally made the U.S. the most likely candidate for a warzone, what with Massachusetts being allied with the Russians, and Texas with the British, and so on.) Most nights, the Mauritian Empire ruled the world. I liked the idea of an island much, much smaller than Britain being the focal point of the world.  Conquerors rose, and the masses cowered before them. Peace-loving patriots rose up and pushed back their oppressors. Alliances formed, alliances broke apart. An entire planet was at the command of a gangly 8-year-old kid, lying bored in his bed. Now that I’m older, instead of building empires at night, I often lie awake thinking about designs, deadlines, projects, bills, relationships, and on and on and on it goes. There’s no globe in my bedroom. But sometimes, just to keep that child I was — clear-eyed and right-headed — near the surface of my mind, I pull out an old globe I’ve got on a shelf down in my office, and I play that old game with my old self on that old globe. For a moment, my thoughts expand past the build-up of my situation, plans, fears and limitations.  For a moment, I’m a conqueror and a freedom-fighter again. And some days, oddly enough, just that makes a world of difference.

Globes

— I grew up loving globes. My chief fun many nights after being tucked into bed was studying an old McNally globe under lamplight, using its colour-coded nations as the starting spot from which empires would rise and fall amid the tumults of battles, treaties and intrigue my mind’s stage would put on for my sole entertainment.

The globe was predisposed to this game, I think, as it was already out-of-date enough to let me know the temporary nature of world domination. The British Empire was in red. USSR in green (along with a few other communist nations of the period). Africa was nearly as patchworked as the United States of America (the only country that got gifted more than a single colour — which generally made the U.S. the most likely candidate for a warzone, what with Massachusetts being allied with the Russians, and Texas with the British, and so on.) Most nights, the Mauritian Empire ruled the world. I liked the idea of an island much, much smaller than Britain being the focal point of the world. 

Conquerors rose, and the masses cowered before them. Peace-loving patriots rose up and pushed back their oppressors. Alliances formed, alliances broke apart. An entire planet was at the command of a gangly 8-year-old kid, lying bored in his bed.

Now that I’m older, instead of building empires at night, I often lie awake thinking about designs, deadlines, projects, bills, relationships, and on and on and on it goes. There’s no globe in my bedroom. But sometimes, just to keep that child I was — clear-eyed and right-headed — near the surface of my mind, I pull out an old globe I’ve got on a shelf down in my office, and I play that old game with my old self on that old globe. For a moment, my thoughts expand past the build-up of my situation, plans, fears and limitations. 

For a moment, I’m a conqueror and a freedom-fighter again. And some days, oddly enough, just that makes a world of difference.

May 27, 2011
Must’ve been quite the flood. Noah would be proud of what we’ve done with the place. (Especially if he were a fan of geometry and agri-monoculture.) The unusual agricultural pattern of eastern Washington’s “channeled scablands” can be traced to a (series of) massive glacial outburst flood(s) which cut the deep into the region’s volcanic basalt, leaving fertile plateaus and barren, rocky valleys.  Mammoth looked at that event, the Missoula Floods, in a post last year, “a glacier is a very long event”.  (You’ll want to scroll down to “Jokulhlaups”.)  We might add that, if contemporary land use patterns are determined by Ice Age floods, a flood can also be a very long event. You know, this might be unrelated, but some days, I think our entire culture was created in Excel.

Must’ve been quite the flood. Noah would be proud of what we’ve done with the place. (Especially if he were a fan of geometry and agri-monoculture.)

The unusual agricultural pattern of eastern Washington’s “channeled scablands” can be traced to a (series of) massive glacial outburst flood(s) which cut the deep into the region’s volcanic basalt, leaving fertile plateaus and barren, rocky valleys.  Mammoth looked at that event, the Missoula Floods, in a post last year, “a glacier is a very long event”.  (You’ll want to scroll down to “Jokulhlaups”.)  We might add that, if contemporary land use patterns are determined by Ice Age floods, a flood can also be a very long event.

You know, this might be unrelated, but some days, I think our entire culture was created in Excel.

(Source: ummhello)

May 26, 2011
My current office setup (and part of our soon-to-be coworking studio, “Peel House”. Let me know if you’re interested in space.)

My current office setup (and part of our soon-to-be coworking studio, “Peel House”. Let me know if you’re interested in space.)

May 23, 2011

“The Daily Rind”, a Better Way to Plan the Day

My adapted "Daily Rind" Chronotebook format

Photo: A sample “daily rind” from my notebook

For years my task and schedule management lived across various apps — OmniFocus, Basecamp, Google Calendar, and others (and more recently, as I pared down my “productivity” tools, a simple combination of The Hit List + iCal.) But mapping out what to do throughout my day in a reliable way has always been a problem. Really understanding how little time there was and seeing patterns in time usage proved next to impossible, despite all the technology at my fingertips.

I think I’ve found a better way. 

I still track my projects and tasks digitally, and keep a calendar (with online sync + backup) for planning ahead, but for mapping out what I’m going to do in the day ahead of me, I’ve devised a decidedly low-tech system which I’m lovingly referring to as “The Daily Rind.”

For me, it’s proved to be more enjoyable, quicker and more intuitive, and — above all — flexible enough to accommodate the inaccuracies and foibles of my inconsistent, unpredictable daily schedule as a freelance creative. 


Re-introducing Analog -or- Can’t Get No Satisfaction?

I’d never really been attracted to using a paper-based day-planner. It seemed wasteful, mundane, and oh-so-repetitious. But gradually, I realized that my brain doesn’t work with the same rigid logic and demarcations that my digital systems require. I also realized that I missed the feeling of pen on paper more and more, and would benefit from taking more breaks from my glowing screen. But those thoughts alone weren’t enough to make me change as I’d tried using a conventional paper dayplanner and that hadn’t proved any better, really.

It wasn’t until I came across the Muji Chronotebook (sometimes called the Chrononotebook — for those fond of tongue-twisters) that I really got thinking. 

The Chronotebook has you schedule your time out using hours mapped out on the radii of a circle, much like the face of an analog clock. You use one circle for morning, and one for afternoon. It doesn’t feel as rigid as a conventional, linear dayplanner format does, you’ve got more room for expanded notes on whichever particular parts of your day happen to generate notes, and — let’s face it — I’m a sucker for novelty (which, it turns out, stimulates dopamine.) 

As well, it’s a system that reminds me that days and years and life itself are inherently cyclical, as opposed to purely linear, and so challenges me by its very form to begin looking for patterns and recognizing habits — good or bad — where I might not have noticed them before.

Perhaps also as a result of its unique format, I feel like this Chronotebook system allows me to more naturally recognize the ebb and flow of my days, and attune to the rest of life happening around me. In this way, it prompts me to consider other parts of life in much the same way that Fiore’s Unschedule (which I learned about in The Now Habit) is suppose to (but failed to, for me, due to it’s rigid nature.)


Hacking the Muji Chronotebook

Though I loved the core concept of the Chronotebook, a few things bothered me about it.

1. Too much under-used paper. One sheet per morning and one sheet per afternoon? If necessary, sure, but most days I was ending up with not even enough content to fill one of the sheets, let alone two. 

2. My day doesn’t start at midnight. Replicating the format of a clockface seemed like more of a “comfort zone” crutch of familiarity to help people wrap their heads around the concept than something truly optimized. I also don’t really use analog clocks, so I didn’t see even that benefit. 

3. I lack discipline and don’t have many real routines, so as a general rule, my days are constantly in a state of flux. The things I plan to do are often different from the things I end up doing. Could I have a system that both accommodates my planning and helps track what actually happens?

So, I adapted the Chronotebook concept into what I think is a more responsive, adaptable tool. The clockface becomes double-rinded, with one circle for day, and one for the evening and night, and depending on how closely I keep to my schedule, may or may not have a layer of entries for what I actually did through the day on top of my planned events, within each rind.

Here’s a walkthrough of the basics of how it works. If you want to follow along, get a notebook. Something with decent-sized pages, like this or this. (Or failing that, just grab a sheet of printer paper.)

The First Rind — Day

I draw a circle. I write the date within the circle. I add 4 dashes along the curvature, or the “rind” of the circle, at the top, right, bottom, and left. 

Now comes the first real departure. I move away from having a “12 o’clock at top” convention for the hours. I choose to start my day at 6am, write that at the 0° mark,and map out my hours around the “clockface” from there. But it could just as easily have been 8am, or 9am, or whenever seems most natural and optimized. 

First I map out my day as I’m planning it, close to the rind of the circle, so that if plans change, I can write in new items further out. Question marks go beside tentative items. 

The next day begins. I’ve slept in. So, I put an “X” beside the items I didn’t actually do (everything before 8:30am), move forward putting checkmarks beside the items I did do, and write in new items and plans as I make them. 


The Second Rind — Evening

I’ve incorporated an optional second rind into my system — an “asteroid belt” above my daytime schedule — there for planning my evening (6pm-onward). This second circle is drawn far enough out and away from the first circle as to allow lots of space for daytime entries.

It is generally sparse and it is really meant just as a simple map for how the night will probably go forward, so I can make sure I’m planning in adequate family time, social time, sleep time, and am considering any evening events or chores. I usually create this during my morning review, and the main reason for it is not that I feel the need to thoroughly and explicitly plot out a set amount of time for my kids, wife, dishes, etc. Instead, I map out my evening and my sleep-time because if I don’t do this, I will subconsciously assume that I have “all night to do $this”. ($This being a variable that represents whatever task I’m currently procrastinating on.) 

I have wasted countless evenings holed up in my office, feeling guilty about not spending time with my family, or missing yet another great event — or, even more often, hanging out with my family despite the mound of backed-up tasks, and then not getting enough sleep when I go back to work after they’re in bed — all because I didn’t consider how very little time I actually had available during the day. 

So, my reasons for doing this evening schedule are perhaps not purely logical. They’re psychological. While the Daily Rind is about productivity, planning and tracking mostly in the positive sense, the Evening Rind, for me, is largely a trick to create more mindfulness through the day. If I don’t consciously and holistically consider all the demands my life — not just my work — make on my time, and make sure to juxtapose those life demands with the work I need to get done on a given day, something will simply slip through the cracks. Mapping it out at least forces me to make a conscious choice ahead of time, so that if something needs to slip, it can be something that’s less important to me than, say, getting to read my daughter her bedtime story. 

Because I’m doing it primarily for this purpose, I don’t generally tick off X’s or checkmarks for my evenings. (Though I may start, just for purposes of life-tracking.)


One Final Touch: the Vital Tasks List

One more element I use is a short list of tasks tucked down in the bottom-left corner of the page. These are my vital tasks for the day, brought in from a morning review of my tasks in The Hit List and events in iCal. My challenge for the day is to fit each of these into my schedule in whatever way possible, and to accomplish them — be they client work-related, personal projects, or errands. Manually transferring these to paper helps emphasize their importance (especially if I need to write them down on multiple days), and keeps me from constantly going back to my productivity apps through the day, where I can often: 

  1. become bogged down either with the inertia of fear caused by the amount of tasks and upcoming deadlines looming over me, or 
  2. get distracted by fiddling with my calendar and project lists.

This shortened, curated list of only my most urgent and important tasks for the day pretty effectively avoids that happening. And with my notebook open to this page throughout the day for making other small notes and tracking my schedule, those vital tasks are never more than a glance away, which makes it much harder for me to forget them.


Finis

So, there you have it: “the Daily Rind” scheduling system. I have an inkling that it will work best for those with a particular creative disposition, while those whose thought-patterns are more regimented and linear may prefer more conventional scheduling methods. But if you’ve got a more fluid workstyle and struggle with finding rhythm and balance with the scheduling of your days, give the system a try — perhaps it’ll help you the way it’s helped me.

If you’ve got any tips or tricks of your own, suggested adjustments to the system, or have questions or comments for me, feel free to send an email.

May 11, 2011
All life is music, and I mean to sing along.

All life is music, and I mean to sing along.

(via killmetheking)

May 11, 2011

That lump of coal called creative gifting.

Found in among my email drafts.

A ten pound melon, sopping with juice that wants to be released before it rots. And somehow, I’m missing the knife to carve into its rind and let that goodness flow. I beat my melon against a wall, metaphorical or real, trying to release it. I crave having it set free. I long for it. But a heavy thudding fog hangs over my head. Like I’m missing a specific chemical, or had a certain synapse lobotomized. 

How do we move forward? What can we do when presented with this awful thickening of the sense as we press against the soft, firm wall of whatever stands between us and creative release? 

If only there were a pill for writer’s block. A nice bit of chemistry, patented, drawn up in big vats and fed into gelcaps and plastic bubble and foil packaging. Pop it in your mouth, and up go the gates. We’re off to the races, writing that novel, coding that app, creating that design, planning that world-changing startup. 

Brilliance is always somewhere beyond that choked-up weedy barge of bilking one-liners and how-do-you-does. Caught underneath the weight of a thousand thousand email drafts, tweetery, unmade phonecalls and unwritten bills. Mother help me, I’m a child. Father help me, I need to be grounded. And forget 3 prongs, I need 7. 

May 7, 2011
Always temporary, but never temporary: corruption truth matter death beauty

Always temporary, but never temporary:

  1. corruption
  2. truth
  3. matter
  4. death
  5. beauty
May 6, 2011

Hiring support people? Look to the trees.

Great post from CoSupport on getting to the root of whatever problem is requiring you to do inordinate amounts of support:

Throwing more people at a problem doesn’t solve the problem, it just makes it a problem for more people. If your staffing is purely reactive, you have chosen for your support to be reactive as well. Why keep hiring people to just stay on top of daily emails?

Instead of hiring just one more person to do your support, hire up a person already on your team to swab the decks. Take them off emails for a month. Have them write new help sections. Have them work in the forums, have them work with your design team to get some common problems solved. 

Nº. 3 of  27

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