New blog, domain

I took the plunge, bought a few domain names and got myself some hosting. So I’ll be over here for the foreseeable future. What I’ll call it, I’m not sure. In Medias Res I kind of like, but I’m not sure that I really do jump into the middle of things. Often, I circumnavigate things or just avoid them completely. Maybe I should call it The Notworking Blog. Yeah. I kind of like that. For one, blogging doesn’t seem like working, and secondly, it looks like Networking, but I hate that too. Err, I mean, I like working, but not networking. Most of the time anyway. I should probably have it cross out the e and put the o above it or something.

That’s settled then. Join me at The Notworking Blog. Or Journal. Or something. For now.

Inbox Zero

If you’re like me, you check email obsessively. Sometimes you’re waiting for something important, sometimes you’re bored. In either case you should probably be doing something else. Enter Inbox Zero.

Inbox Zero is the brainchild of Merlin Mann (great name!), founder of 43 folders – a site dedicated to helping you manage your most limited resource – time.

The video above, which is about an hour long (but worth watching if you have trouble managing your inbox(es)), takes you through his entire system and philosophy. If you’re short on time, it can be summed up fairly quickly:

1. Your inbox is not a task list. Don’t use it as one.
2. Don’t check your email, instead PROCESS your email inbox once or twice a day, and when you do, PROCESS every email so that when you are finished you have an inbox with ZERO unprocessed emails.
3. When processing your inbox, you may only take one of four actions on each email (or thereabouts depending on how you adapt the system). You may: do it (if it takes less than x minutes (generally 2 minutes or less)), delete it (in gmail, archive is pretty much the same since space is virtually unlimited), delegate it (don’t forget to follow up on it if you’re ultimately responsible for the outcome – ie. set a reminder on your calendar), or defer it (if you need to do it but it will take longer than x minutes – this is akin to creating a future to-do list).

For my personal email account, I use a modified system where I have two task lists – one that includes everything I must do (‘Action’), and one that is more like the ’20% rule’ – stuff I’m interested in but doesn’t matter immediately. Then I set about completing all the of the tasks marked ‘Action’. If I’m bored or need to reinstate flow, I switch to the ‘Someday’ folder and complete whatever tasks I might be interested in, or further archive items if I’ve now decided the item is no longer of interest to me.

The important lesson behind Inbox Zero is that we all need some form of a system to process the information that piles up on our virtual doormats everyday.

What system(s) do you use?

Improving the user experience

I’m going to begin this entry a little off-topic, at least as far as the title goes; I was discussing browsers and ‘the browser war’ with a friend the other day when it seemed that I was, for some reason, ignoring my own advice, which was that everyone interested in speed should use Google Chrome. I was saying how I knew (‘knew’ in the sense that I had read in a number of reasonably reputable sources) that Chrome was faster than Firefox which in turn was faster than IE, and yet I persisted in using Firefox. We speculated whether Google had grown large and popular enough for my personality to turn away from the corporation, but of course realized this was false since (so far, at least) I love everything that Google does and, really, it’s getting kind of scary how much I trust them right now. My friend asked if I used Firefox extensions – of course, I said, they are great – and that of course was the true reason why I had tried Chrome and liked it but turned back to Firefox. Which is not to say that Google Chrome does not have its own extensions and plugins – it’s just that I am well-versed in the extensions of Firefox and so are my friends and colleagues, in which case there are too many productivity related (and, for that matter, non-productivity related) issues for me to switch to Chrome.

And this brings me to the topic of improving the user experience. First, let me say that I am about to whole-heartedly plug my favourite extension to date, because it has truly improved my user experience of browsing the internet, and that I will say right now everyone should be using this thing because it is really that great. The thing is called Ubiquity.

I will say a few things about it first, and then I encourage you to watch the video which I have (hopefully!) embedded correctly below.  (On that note, if anyone knows why I am so far unable to embed things in wordpress, please let me know.)  Ubiquity is about improving the way in which we interact with the internet.  The idea of the project is to create more  of a flow experience in that what you want to do online should really take as few keystrokes as possible – consider Ubiquity a shortcut to a less impressive but still amazing future not unlike the kind of object manipulation and interaction Hollywood has presented to us in films like Minority Report.  So, for example, if someone wants to meet you at a certain location and sends an address to you in an email, you should be able to press one or two keys and have a map of that place in front of you.  Ditto for adding that date to your calendar.  The idea (in my mind at least) is to create shortcuts that get away from the ol’ highlight text, copy, google search, click link, paste, hit enter etc. of yesterday and to get us closer to a future of true object and data manipulation in real-time.

From the Ubiquity about page itself:

The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
• Extend the browser functionality easily.

While Ubiquity isn’t perfect, the great thing about it is that it exists today, it’s easy to install and use, it is fully customizable meaning you can program your own shortcuts (or mashups), and it really changes the way you think about all the little actions that make up everything you do online, at least in the sense that everything has a process, an order to it, which taken collectively makes the browser experience a series of repeated interactions and iterations that lack the level of interactivity that many of us have come to expect from the promise of a tomorrow that is never far off yet never quite comes into sharp relief.  The title of one of my favourite blogs sums it up best – Where’s my Jetpack?

more about “Mozilla Labs » Blog Archive » Introdu…“, posted with vodpod

The second design and user experience thing on my mind can really only be seen to be understood, and so I will once again try to embed a TED talk onto this site.  This gets a lot closer to the Minority Report ideal, but of course, while this thing exists, unlike Ubiquity it does not exist (yet) for you and me to use.  But it is definitely worth a viewing and it is less than 9 minutes long.  It is entitled Unveiling the ‘Sixth Sense,’ game changing wearable tech and it is presented by Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry, of the aptly-named Fluid Interfaces Group at the MIT Media Lab.

more about “Pattie Maes demos the Sixth Sense | V…“, posted with vodpod

My guess is neither of these will embed properly so I have, quite amazingly, used foresight and added links to each video.  Ubiquity’s is here and Patti Maes is here.  Man, I really can’t wait for the future when I can simply think and have a blog entry appear online.  Good times ahead folks.

What free online productivity tools do you use? Do you know of any other demonstrations of human-computer interaction that could change the way we use technology in the future?