Archive for the ‘GTD’ tag
Decryptable, only on fridays
The mini-post Bill Gates’ favourite prime number, encrypted below, can only be read on a friday. Here’s why.
[BEGIN URLCRYPT decode at lce.xamai.ca/urlcrypt.php]
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[END URLCRYPT]
bookmarks tuesday cleanup
Geeky Mom : Why am I blogging?. Been there before. Sooner or later
all non-pseudonomenous bloggers are faced with the same dilemmas.
There’s really no answer or advice to give except : blog when you feel
like it, if not do something different, after all its just one of those
billion of blogs around.
Texmaker : another
LaTeX-frontend, possibly having a few extras such as : a structure-pane
including labels you gave to formulas, theorems etc. (click on them
brings you to them). Intend to use it now as I’m in another rewrite of
the never-ending-book..
Microformats : “Designed for
humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open
data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.” May
have another look.
Quicksilver : a recurring
link. At times when I feel learning key-strokes may save me a lot of
time I have (another) go at Quicksilver. Last week, Ive reinstalled this
blog more or less post by post and used keystrokes to send a line in the
SQL-file of the database dump of NEB as a clipping to Scrivener to
MultiMarkdown it further. I used the app Service Scrubber
to define my own key-strokes. Must have another go at Quicksilver soon.
Im sure it distinguishes ‚”power mac users” from the rest of
us.
List of GTDTools : a good list of GTD-software. I’m probably just
too chaotic for GTD to improve my workflow but somehow I cannot resist
trying some of these things out.
LifeDEV : One of those sites that tells
me I should take GTD more seriously
DoIt : One of
these GTD-tools. It is said to go well with Quicksilver, so maybe, one
day.
Think
: Here a little seemingly completely useless tool which works well (at
least for me). No, it does not make you think, but at least it helps you
while you are thinking (or doing anything a bit focussed). Install it
and enjoy! The principle is that it just blocks out all other open
windows (and there are keystrokes (yes, again) to get you quickly in
and out.) Besides, it looks great. It’s in my dock and this says it
all
Thinkature :
a brainstorming tool. Dont know why I did bookmark this. Perhaps one
day, a few years from now
a talk by Toby Stafford I came across by accident. Maybe there are other
interesting talks on the site?
idea! Give yourself badges for how well you do science (or talk/write
about science). Have to collect my badges soon. I’m sure this only
works for people with a scouting-history, but who
knows?
that may become useful. MacResearch.org is an open and independent
community for scientists using Mac OS X and related hardware in their
research. It is the mission of this site to cultivate a knowledgeable
and vibrant community of researchers to exchange ideas and information,
and collectively escalate the prominence of Apple technologies in the
scientific research community. They have some interesting articles
and tutorials on e.g. DevonThink and BibDesk etc. Worth to
revisit.
">Jennifer in love : well‚ should I say something about this?
probably best not.
Breakthrough CLI : another pamphlet in favor of the Command Line! A
must read for those who perfer GUIs to CLIs.
<
p>
site : Rod is working hard on CLI-20. Whenever he releases version
2.0, neverendingbooks will be among the first sites to run it. I still
love the idea.
">Why do I bother? : an n-category post I got briefly interested in,
but was somehow flooded by professional
math-philosophers
-reviewed.html">Newton Legacy Reviewed : just that, a first review
on the next bookmark.
Legacy : a free online book, a murder mystery with a physics touch.
Perhaps this is the best investment of time/energy : write a popular
science book rather than another paper. Read half way through it (sorry
but not the best prose Ive read so far), may continue but was held up
reading a (real) murder mystery Equinox featuring also Newton and
alchemy (must be in the air somehow), also not the best mystery read
so far
: no comment
(to be continued)
the efficient academic
Can
software help mathematicians to keep up with the neverending (sic) flood
of new research material? In the past I touched this already… Recently, there is a new fairly active Google group
the
efficient academic which describes its interests as
Professors, Instructors, and Graduate Students
interested in getting things done more easily and quickly. We discuss
organization, task management, and tools that helps us to be more
productive and not procrastinate. We tend to discuss David Allen’s
GTD system but not exclusively. (278 members)
Personally, I think GTD is far too management-driven to be useful in
research, but I’m equally convinced that there are nice programs
around that I have to delve deeper into, in particular DevonThinkPro.
Fortunately, Serkan Cabi has
written two interesting posts on applications of DevonThink to
physics-research :
which can help me a bit. In the second post
appears another useful resource for the average desperate present-day
ringtheorist. Joanna Karczmarek
can help you to put the Hep-th
on Your Harddrive. A mere 8Gb containing all material published on
hep-th over the years, just waiting to be put in a database-tool like
DevonThink or, if you still need an excuse to buy one, on your iPod to
read on your daily commute…
mind on tracks
I just
started putting my mind on tracks but it will take
me a couple of days to offload most of the crap that keeps me awake at
night. There are three main components to Tracks: Next actions, Contexts
and Projects.
“Contexts are very flexible, and can
be places, states of mind or modes of working in which actions can be
taken. Next actions can be assigned to and sorted by context so that you
know when you are able to make progress with items. e.g. “Library”,
“Shops” or “Tired”.” So far I added only 10 contexts : _@inbox_,
_@books_, _@email_, _@home_, _@neverending_,
_@courses_, _@other_, _@papers_, _@computer_
and _@personal_. Probably I’ll have to add others such as
_@refereeing_ etc.
“Projects : any goal
which requires more than one next action to take it to completion is a
Project. In Tracks, you can view your next actions by Project.” So far I
added the first few things that came to mind ranging from small-easy
things such as _Learn
VoodooPad_ over _Paper with Jan_ to neverending-things
like Write nag@n !
“Next
actions : These are the heart of GTD. They are the very next
physical action that can be taken on something. It’s best to phrase
these in an active way e.g. “Call Bob about the committee meeting” or
“Search for a reputable garage”.” Up to now I merely added the next
foreseeable action in each project together with a few urgent persoanl
matters. It is a good idea to give each of these a deadline so they
appear on the screen with a color-code giving the date and red (urgent),
orange (coming up) to green (some day). I realize I’ve been rather
relaxed about my projects so far!
More information on tracks can
be found here. Try it
out!
tracks
Perhaps I
can surprise you by admitting that I’ve spend a lot of time lately
getting through Getting Things Done:
The Art of Stress-free Productivity, 250+ pages of management
babble. Probably you will even be shocked when I tell you that this book
is published in the same series as _Body Talk at Work_,
_Corporate Charisma_, _More Time Less Stress_, _Mrs
Moneypenny : Survival in the City_ and more of these. All in all, it
wasn’t so bad. It is a bit pompous at times, could be 50% condensed but
I wanted to find out first hand what all the GTD hype
was about (see this post for
some of the more interesting links).
I’m not looking for a miracle
method to become more productive or focussed (although I wouldn’t mind
either at the moment). No, my main motivation is simply : I want to be
able to sleep better!
This requires some explaining. The last
couple of months, I regularly wake up in the middle of the night and as
there are plenty of things on my mind, I start brooding on them and,
more often than not, loose a couple of hours sleep/night. And these
quickly add up! Now, the basis of the GTD-mantra is getting all the
_stuff_ out of your head to reach the _mind like water_
state whatever that means. And I can see some sense in putting all your
current projects and worries somewhere on paper or computer, setting up
a system that forces you to read through these lists at regular
intervals, plan _next actions_ and update the lists accordingly.
If you trust this system it just may free your mind from all the
stuff!
At a later stage I may end up setting up such a system
following the suggestions of the
DevonThink Forum or using
VoodooPad but at the moment all I want is to offload my mind as
quickly as possible to a GTD-able database.
Fortunately, But She’s a Girl has
compiled such a system : Tracks, a GTD Web
Application. At first I did the mistake following the generic
install instructions and quickly got lost in downloading packages from
SourceForge etc. until I found that there was an easy Mac OS X
Install Page. There is a Ruby and Rails .dmg
package but first you have to install Tcl/Tk Aqua. After these
easy steps, you have to follow the install man page which involves setting up a MySQL database and
filling it with the required tables (I have been using
phpmyadmin for this, but discovered in the process CocoaMySQL which makes all
this even simpler). Finally, you have to get to prompt-level and type
the magic commands
_cd Sites/tracks_
_ruby
script/server “”environment=production” port=3030_
(note
to self : make this a StartUp item as otherwise you have to redo this
step whenever you want to add material). Then,
_http://127.0.0.1:3030/login/signup_ gets you to a nice
webpage-interface and you can start to offload your mind of
_stuff_. I’ll report later whether it did have any effect at
all!.