Developing Upwards

I’m going to take some time out of absolutely loving Evernote for keeping me on task and organized throughout the day to talk about what, I think, is absolutely the worse thing about it. Evernote is a completely different application on every platform and device it supports. For a product who’s main gimmick is keeping you organized and your data synced between all of your platforms and devices, that’s sort of a really hard knock against them. The Evernote for Windows application is great, but so is the Evernote for Mac application. These are quite different, and not just in the ways that usual differ between Windows and Mac to fit the platforms well. They are just fundamentally different applications which coincidentally happen to be sharing your data. Beyond the two desktop Evernotes, the problem only gets worse. Evernote for Android is yet another experience, with yet other features different from the two Desktop versions. The most jarring differences between these versions are dif...

I'm the kind of guy that hates the amount of time he spends considering, evaluating, and test driving new productivity software. Recently I had yet another surge of uncertainty over my use of Remember The Milk, and I tried a few other things. I gave a spin on Nozbe and Todo.txt, and I've come to a conclusion. For now... I have been a big fan of Remember The Milk, and I pay for a professional account. Even still, I'm not above admitting I might be wrong, so when a few things started to annoy me I sought out something new. I had heard Todo.txt talked up a lot on This Week in Google, given that the author is a host on the show. I had also tried Nozbe in the past, but new it had several large updates since then and wanted to give it another try. Remember The Milk I really was happy with RTM, so I want to make clear the things I do like about it! I really have been happy with the Android app, and with the use of smart lists to create filters that match different ...

I'm trying to "get all my ducks in a row" as the saying goes. I've got a lot of standing projects, some personal and some professional and many straddling a line between those two. As part of the process of figuring out what I need to do, I need to figure out what I want to do. I've got a broad range of things demanding my time and a broader range of things I'm wishing I could put my time to. There simply isn't enough of me to go around. I see so many others around and they seem so much more productive than me. Where do you find the time? How do you do it? I've obviously got some missing element I need to find. The plan at hand is a simple set of actions. Track my time 24 hours a day. This keeps me focused, especially for non-billable hours. Decide on each standing project if I can do anything. If not now, archive it. If never, delete it. Write every morning. Write more whenever I have something on my mind. There are things I wish...

I spent my Sunday afternoon familiarizing myself with a tool who's Getting Started page has been sitting in my Evernote tickle file for a couple weeks. This is one of those many projects that fall under the ever widening category of "Stuff I Wanted To Do, But Am Glad Someone Else Did It So I Can Just Use It And Get On To The Next Thing." If you use virtual machines as part of your development process, or want to, and especially if you already use the excellent VirtualBoxVirtualBox , then Vagrant  is certainly worth looking at. The Setup (for Vagrant 0.2) Now, the docs might need some updating and they seem to assume you're already a Ruby user, so they're missing a few dependancies that such a person would just happen to alread have. This is what I did, as an Ubuntu user who didn't even have Ruby installed. I'm also adding Virtualbox's Karmic repository to provide VBox 3.1, which Vagrant requires. sudo apt-get install rubygems libxslt-dev openssl-...

I have been making an attempt to record my day. I'm doing this for a number of reasons. I want to know how my moods change through the day, when I'm happy or not, when I'm feeling motivated, and when I'm being productive. To facilitate this, I have a spreadsheet on Google Docs called "Daily Me" and I've built two sheets. One tracks daily and one tracks hourly. This is what I'm tracking. Daily: When I wake up Weight How many of my morning exercises did I do? How many of the things I want to do every day did I do? This includes morning pages, sketching, picking up my guitar, reading, and writing. When I go to sleep Hourly: Mood What am I doing right now? 1-10 scales on how happy, depressed, energetic, and motivated I feel at the moment "Productive" which I mark yes or no. I consider being "productive" doing whatever it is I feel I should be doing right then. This is the thing I try to keep in the green and use everything el...

Today was a very troubling and frustrating day for both myself and one of my best clients. This is my declaration of ownership for the my own failure to make today not happen. The short story is right after declaring the "make the site more stable" milestone complete and shipping out an invoice, the site spent its most unstable day ever being frantically put on stilts and duct taped to the wall by myself. For the long version, read on. I had already spent roughly a week and a half working on an impromptu milestone in the project to increase the reliability and stability of the site, as well as beinggreenlit to apply hours to better build, test, and deployment processes. This is a good thing and it still stands as such. Now, the site wasn't fragile before, but a couple incidences understandably gave concern about long term quality. We had a few instances of corrupt MySQL logs, ran out of space on ourEBS volume, and embarrassingly I've had occasion to deploy code and f...

This week hasn't been great for my productivity. It has been a series of days overshadowed by a series of things coming up. Between standing in line at the DMV , computer issues, and today helping my brother-in-law with a very sudden move, it feels like typing is an unfamiliar act. (Unless its on the T-Mobile G1, which I'll be reviewing this weekend.) Today, I helped load a seventeen-foot U-HAUL truck, made a few last minute stops, drove said truck just over an hour south and helped unload it into a storage shed. I've never loaded and unloaded a complete truck in one day, in all the several moves I've made over the last years. I was always able to stretch them over two days, with a nice sleep in the middle. After all that, I had to drive the truck back to drop it off. I barely made it. My dear wife hit traffic on her way to pick me up, so I sat and I waited. I listened to the mechanic at the drop-off location declaring how "North Carolina is McCain country," w...

This is how to review Memiary in 5 easy steps: Forget what you did yesterday. Check! Decide that all problems can be solved not just with software, but by adding new software just for that purpose. Check! Get written about on the popular ReadWriteWeb so people find you. Check! Be nifty enough to grab someone's attention when they try out the new service. Check! Surpass a plain text file in convienience, flexability, privacy, and install base. Damn ! Maybe next time. The best way to solve a problem is to avoid needing to solve it in the first place.

Software Development in Really Big Steps How To Work a Sigmoid How To Work a Sigmoid - Part Two I've written about my use of FogBugz , driven by their great time tracking and estimation features. Using these, I've come across what I think is probably common and should be a goal for estimating the time of a project. There are two estimations of a project. When you start, you can make some wild guess, pulled from the ether, weeks or months ahead of when you think it will be complete. This is the number that is notoriously and unequivically wrong. This kind of prediction is simply an invitation to make a smart person look dumb, since so few of us realize that he never was able to make that estimate. The larger the project, the greater the exponent on your chances of being able to make this estimate. This is not new to any of us. The second estimate is the running estimate, compiled from the tasks the project has been broken down into. Now, the pro of this running estimate is tha...

I have been on an eternal struggle to find the rights tools to keep me organized and on track with my projects. Flying blind is just not something I can do, with such a wandering mind. I especially like time tracking tools, because if I am tracking my time in a task, I am far more likely to focus on it until it is complete. Distractions make a lier out of me. When Joel Spolsky blogged about the Evidence-Based Scheduling in the newest release of his FogBugz product, I finally decided to try the service out for a new project I am starting on over the holiday. It has been about a week and I already have some really good impressions. As far as bug tracking goes, FogBugz seems to be bare a good deal of similarities with Bugzilla, but is still very familiar to a Trac fan. They've even added a Wiki, although I've not used it. I'm working in solo on my FogBugz trial, right now. (More on that later.) I do wish for dependancy field on cases, instead of just linking to them in the co...

Mark Hurst of Good Experience has had a deceptive experience . I feel for his sense of accomplishment, but I'm here to let him and everyone know that an empty inbox is a terrible recipe for lost productivity. It was incredible. It was so stunning to me. I had written off the idea of ever having a totally empty inbox. - Mark Hurst The problem here is a subtle lie that none of realize we tell ourselves or others when we talk about the virtues of keeping a clean inbox. The word "inbox". I did all of this some time back, and I was really excited, just like Mark. It wasn't long before I realized I had only made things worse. Some people may know that I slowly slipped away from Python-Dev lists, and what you wouldn't know is one of the key causes to my lack of participation in mailing lists for some time now. The problem started when I added filters for all my mailing lists and started regiments to empty out my inbox to 0. I sat, looked at my wonderous empty inbox, and ...

After finally trying to spend some time using Backpack , to really get an idea of what it is all about, I decided it was to stick with. I was already at the 5 page limit for free accounts, so I went to upgrade to Basic for $5 a month. Thankfully, at the last minute I remembered that 37signals themselves post coupons . First month is free, so no risk. This also means I can try the calendar service, and have file upload capability. I'm trying out the use of page sharing to coordinate with a client.

I've been building up a large collection of del.icio.us bookmarks tagged 'toread'. I have not been reading them. When information isn't on your radar, it might as well not exist, so I decided to bring this stuff back to my radar. All I did was add my feed of 'toread' tagged bookmarks to my Google Reader, and now everything I tag to read later, I'll see come up in my feeds. If I decide to defer reading for even later, I can just not mark the item read.

I finally gave in and started using twitter. I actually think it might help keep me focused, somehow. Figure this in: I'll be posting what I do publicly, so I'll want to look good. That means I'll try to focus on really doing things more. I don't want to post to twitter that im play minesweeper, but if I am, I will. Posting one thing and doing another is lying to The Entire Freaking Planet, so I don't think I'll fabricate much. Anyone else twitter? I'd like to build a network. My Twitter Page.