For many years, Getting Things Done has helped me manage the chaos of everyday life. GTD has made me happier, more relaxed, and more productive in the things that interest me most in my life.

I've used half a dozen different physical systems for GTD and always look for opportunities to simplify my GTD system.

Over the years, I found a way to contain my entire GTD system into a single Moleskine pocket notebook. Today we'll look at this system through the component parts of GTD: the inbox, project lists, next actions, and the weekly calendar.

This process refines Getting Things Done down to a system contained in single Moleskine notebook without modifications. I wanted a complete GTD system in my pocket, on paper.

Physical layout

Before I discuss each section and how it is used, I wanted to describe the actual physical layout of these sections within my Moleskine.

My inbox, calendar, and next actions all reside together in the main bulk of the notebook. After each weekly calendar, I fill a number of pages each week with action lists and loose note pages used as an "inbox". I average about eight to ten pages used each week. Writing these pages out in-line lets the notebook grow naturally without wasting pages by breaking things out into sections before they're written. When a new week comes on, I write in a new calendar on the next available two-page spread and continue onward until the notebook is full, which takes about three months.

Project lists reside on the last six pages of the notebook broken out by "work projects" and "home projects". I give about three pages for each of these so they have some room to grow over the three-month period that each Moleskine usually covers.

On the top spine of the Moleskine, I write the starting month and year. When the notebook is full, I write the end month. This way its easy for me to reference each notebook among my growing stack of archived Moleskines.

Here's a more detailed look at each section ordered by their appearance in the notebook.

Life goals and calendar

I keep my current week's calendar on a two-page spread that I hand-write each week during my weekly review. On this spread I also have my daily checklist with ten goals I like to track each day. This helps tie my larger 7 Habits style goals to actual daily activities.

Below the checklist, I write out my calendar beginning with Monday and Tuesday on one page and Wednesday through Friday on the other. Saturday and Sunday, my least busy days, share the bottom of the second page. I don't over-format my calendar, I simply write the time, name, and location of the appointment in the blank area below the day. In general, I only format as much as I absolutely need to.

In the Moleskine, I never bother to review my week more than one week out. I use an electronic calendar like Outlook or Google Calendar as a master calendar for future scheduling and copy over the appointments to my weekly calendar during my weekly review. My Moleskine never contains a calendar further out than a week.

These weekly calendar pages clearly segment my Moleskine into weekly chunks, making it easy to reference and look up appointments and notes months, and even years, later.

Action lists

After my calendar pages, I write my next action lists broken out by @work and @home. I use a whole page for each context. The physical limitation of a single page forces me to triage, refine, and eliminate actions no longer important. If I have too many actions to fit in a page, I'm trying to do too much and need to cut back. The physical constraint of the page helps me constrain the number of actions I try to take on.

As I go through my week, I might end up re-writing the list to keep it clean. I simply write the next action list on the next available page and ensure I've transferred any outstanding actions from the previous list to the new one. I make sure to mark or cross off transferred action lists so I don't get confused and look at the wrong one.

Inbox pages

The concept of an Inbox and ubiquitous capture — a single place to capture unprocessed stuff — is critical to the GTD system. A Moleskine works perfectly for this. Anything that jumps into your life can be quickly jotted down in the Moleskine and processed when you have a free moment. I process incoming action items with a small check mark next to notes that I have "processed", either eliminating the need to do anything with it or turning it into a project or next action. This way I can easily see what inbox notes have been and haven't been processed. When an entire page has been processed, I put a check in the upper right corner to note that the whole page has been processed. I also date each section of notes so I can easily see when things came in.

I don't worry about crudding up my notebook with stickers, sketches of ninjas, phone numbers, or whatever. Grabbing up unprocessed random stuff is what the inbox is for.

Project pages

In the back of the Moleskine, I reserve about six pages for project lists. I break these out into three major categories: home projects, company projects, and client projects. Again, I try to keep the number of project categories small so I don't over-categorize. Three has worked perfectly for years. These project lists can get large and messy over a three-month period so I leave about two to three pages for each large category.

Really only two sections

While it looks like I'm breaking the Moleskine up into many sections, it is really only two: the main section which takes up all but the last few pages of the book and the six or so projects pages in the back.

My calendar, life goals, and action lists are written in sequentially as the weeks roll on. Since I only write up next week's calendar during my weekly reviews, they simply go on the next available two-page spread. New action lists get written in on the next available page, mixed in with the notes. Their clear formatting makes the easy enough to differentiate between the notes. This way I'm using every page in the Moleskine without a bunch of blank pages in between multiple sections.

Eliminating someday / maybe and waiting-for lists

The GTD purists among you may notice that I have no "someday / maybe" lists and no "waiting for" lists. Over the years I've eliminated a few of the standard GTD tools, finding they had a higher overhead for their limited usefulness. You can read more about this in Simplifying GTD.

The Weekly Review

Each Friday afternoon, I conduct a weekly review with the following steps:

1. Go to the next available two-page spread and write out my daily goals checklist.
2. Write out next week's calendar and sync it with my Outlook calendar.
3. Write out a new @home and @work action lists.
4. Review last week's calendar for any outstanding actions.
5. Go over last week's notes for any outstanding actions.
6. Review my project lists, eliminating those I no longer care about, and recording new next actions.
7. Spend a few minutes staring out a window, pondering the question "What is on my mind that I have not captured?"
8. Get back to work.

All of this will seem extremely obsessive compulsive to some, but I see it as almost the exact opposite. Instead of obsessing about undone commitments all the time, I only consider them once a week. The rest of the time I'm focused on fulfilling those commitments most important to me and re-negotiating or eliminating those that are not. This isn't about obsession, this is about being relaxed and happy without obsessing about what we think we've forgotten.

Moleskine GTD vs. Omnifocus

Recently I've begun to use Omnifocus to manage project lists and actions, using the Moleskine strictly as an inbox, calendar, and daily goals checklist. While the Moleskine GTD system works just fine, it doesn't include two features of Omnifocus that make my life even easier: delaying actions until I need to remember them and re-occurring actions that I perform regularly. Read more about these key features in my Omnifocus vs. Moleskine article.

A Simple Life

Why would someone spend so much time pontificating the details of a system like this? To make my life simpler, to make my life easier, and to help me focus my limited time, attention, and energy on the things that are most important to me. Getting my system streamlined down to a single pocket notebook has made my life easier and because of this, I am a happier person.

Now I'm off to go fly a kite on a beach.

Though cyberpunk books like Ready Player One show us a world in which we all live in virtual reality, current trends suggest that physical immersion isn't important to us. Instead of Cyberspace, we have Facebook. Instead of the Metaverse, we have Angry Birds. The future of internet commerce lies in microtransations for virtual goods. Creators of books, video, audio, and gaming content will sell through large intermediaries with a 70% / 30% split. Above basic physical needs, virtual goods will prove to be the only goods we care about. This new model will soon make 14 year old kids rich while a generation of corporate middle men will wonder what happened to their jobs.

Ready Player One

I just finished reading the book Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. It's a fantastic book that speaks personally to every gen-x geek who grew up reading Neuromancer and Snow Crash. As a guy who spent 9,600 hours as Loral Ciriclight in the game Everquest, I can definitely relate to those who live, breathe, and love in virtual worlds.

When I read books like Neuromancer and Snow Crash, I looked forward to a future where people lived and died in virtual worlds. In the earliest days of the 21st century, I fully expected that games like Everquest would lead us to this future — a future not understood by many but embraced by some of us.

At my peak, I spent 60 hours a week in Everquest. One long weekend, I logged in for 50 hours straight camping Ragefire to get my cleric epic resurrection stick. During this time, while writing for the website, Mobhunter, I predicted that 50 million people would play massive online games by 2013. I was right. I just didn't expect that massive online game to be Farmville.

I expected massive multiplayer online games (MMOs) to hit consoles but they never did. Hell, they never even tried. I can count on one hand the number of MMOs attempted on gaming consoles and all of them sucked. Sony tried it. Microsoft tried it. No one cared because they never offered anything anyone really wanted.

Instead, tiny flash games embedded in a social network embedded in a browser won the title of largest MMO. I guess it isn't a surprise, really, but who would have expected it?

50 million players roar over the whisper of hardcore gaming

It makes sense that games got smaller, simpler, and faster. They hit 80 million players by working on every computer and taking very little effort to start and play. Games like Farmville have none of the depth of a game like Everquest, but they're simple enough that anyone can play it.

Reading a book like Ready Player One, a book in which characters emerse themselves in a single huge online world called Oasis using haptic gloves and VR goggles, I wonder if it's a future we're ever going to see?

Sure, we have the Xbox Kinect, a device capable of full-body emersion sans-feedback. We also have affordable 52" 1920x1080 displays and six-speaker surround systems. We have devices in our pocket with over 300 dpi.

Yet we've almost taken a step back with console gaming. The Wii came and went fast, creating a vacuum of expectations that never panned out. Sony and Microsoft haven't updated their hardware in nearly seven years. And why should they? The systems have full HD resolution, excellent sound, and good network connections. What else do they need?

How about an audience that gives a shit

Seeing the popularity of mini-games like Angry Birds and Farmville, we have to wonder if the days of fully immersive MMOs are behind us. Big games are expensive to produce and don't draw in nearly as many people. Large immersive games may be forever destined to the fringe of people that would rather live in another world than this one and that fringe may never grow beyond World of Warcraft.

We hear about Valve's recent foray into head-mounted displays and we see the Minority Report glasses Google is developing and we dream once again of Gibson's cyberspace. But I think the days of the fully immersive virtual worlds left us when we realized that the only thing coming out of from Second Life was advertisement and porn. No one cares.

Who needs reality in their VR?

Maybe we just don't care to have physical metaphors. It's fine for specific games like Mass Effect and The Old Republic but for simple social interaction, we have Twitter. For watching videos, we have Youtube. We don't need a single unifying faux-physical land, as cool as it sounds in theory. We're just as happy clicking links and reading text. We don't need high-poly-count avatars, we're happy with a tiny 150x150 pixel icon.

The death of online social connections

As games fit more and more into our real lives, it comes at the cost of social interaction online. With 9,600 hours logged into Everquest, I had built a place in the society of the game. With far fewer hours in current games, my place in those societies are temporary and tenuous. The same connections with people simply don't last.

Gone are the games that demanded so much time of us and with those games go the relationships that required that time to build.

Yet social networks like Facebook and Twitter seem to connect us quite well. People don't meet and fall in love, but at least we get a sense for one another.

The future of virtual economics

So we're all wrong when it comes to immersion. Most people are happier playing Angry Birds and checking Facebook than they are living in some virtual world. We're happier with our cell phone than we are with VR goggles — at least for now. But what WILL the future hold?

Virtual economics will explode. Apple and Amazon have the 70% / 30% market down for virtual goods and I see no reason why games don't start picking this up.

Imagine some sort of core virtual world like Star Wars: The Old Republic. Bioware puts out a development kit to build flash points (their version of instances). Any user can create one, within some basic defined parameters, and then, when it's good enough, sell it through Bioware. Players of the game can purchase these flash points to play a nice repeatable hunk of content - sort of the equivalent of a short story. Say such a thing runs $5. Bioware gets $1.50 of that and the creator of the flash point gets $3.50. Everyone makes out in a transaction for something that never really existed. Blizzard is already experimenting with virtual goods for dollars with the Diablo 3 marketplace.

With a model like this, a 14 year old kid in his basement who is smart enough, talented enough, and creative enough can earn more money than his father is at his dead-end job as a corporate drone.

This sort of economics will grow fast. App stores, music stores, video stories, book stores; all of them are going to become transparent pathways of transactions between creators and consumers. Of course, this means the end of the middle men unless, like Blizzard and Apple and Amazon, those middle men add something worth a 30% cut. Places like EB Games? I'd start short-selling them right now.

Across the web, creative types have described Getting Things Done as too tweaky for the creative process and too regimented for simple peace of mind. Creative people spend too much time tweaking their systems or become tied so close to their contextual action lists that they forget to enjoy life. These criticisms have merit. These faults lie with the person, not the system. The intent of a good system is to help people relax and focus on the most creative projects of their lives. If it's not, the system isn't working. What can you do? Keep your system simple and keep it focused on the things most important in your life.

On Over-tweaking

In the article Rethinking Productivity for Creatives, C.J. Chilvers states:

My theory is that the creative mind approaches task management in a way David Allen, and the developers of most GTD-related apps, never accommodated in their methodologies. In short, I believe productivity methodologies themselves only aid Resistance.

Resistance, coined by Steven Pressfield and popularized by Seth Godin, is a term is used to describe the anything creatives use to distract themselves from the pain of accomplishing projects and facing criticism. From obsessively cleaning the house to checking Twitter, resistance comes in all forms. It's sole purpose is to kill creative accomplishment.

It seems to me, GTD apps are Resistance's greatest ally. There are so many ways to tag, organize, re-arrange and review tasks, it becomes a comfort to fiddle.

Over-tweaking is a huge problem in personal productivity. Diving into raw creative activity or starting a brand new project takes a great deal of commitment and energy. Messing around picking the right Moleskine and fountain pen doesn't require nearly as much energy. This is where the concept of "the resistance" (coined in Steven Pressfield's War of Art plays a big part. The resistance makes you feel more productive even though you're not actually producing anything.

This isn't a problem of the system. GTD, at it's core, is a very simple system:

1. Capture stuff in a trusted system (write shit into a notebook).
2. Process this stuff into projects (big things) and actions (small next-steps).
3. Write down contextual action lists such as "at home" or "at work".
4. Review all your projects, schedules, and loose notes once a week.

On being too task-focused

In Toss Productivity Out, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits states:

Imagine instead of cranking out a lot of widgets, you made space for what's important. Imagine that you worked slower instead of faster, and enjoyed your work. Imagine a world where people matter more than profits.

When we get too wired to our personal organization system, we lose the joy of simply loafing around. I could get on my high horse and say "that's fine for a guy who blogs for a living" but he's not exactly wrong.

One of my biggest problems with GTD is that I spend too much energy ensuring I have an empty action list. As soon as I have a list with seven items on it, I work my ass off getting ALL SEVEN off of my list as soon as I can. This leads to half-ass jobs and a self-induced action-list stress. The whole point of the system is to get stuff out of your head and into a trusted system. The point is NOT to make you DO all that stuff as fast as you can. I should be happy with a list of seven unfinished items on it instead of stressing out until its empty.

Also, and this is really weird, when I find myself with an empty action list, I go a little crazy. An empty action list is like dividing by zero. Instead of feeling free and on top of everything in my life, I become convinced that I'm missing something. That something, somewhere, fell through, and I obsess about it.

Throwing out the lists, however, won't help us feel relaxed and creative. Instead, it will fill us with the stress of forgotten actions. Forgetting about tasks, as Leo might recommend, doesn't take away the stress of wondering if my credit card got hacked. That stress will just come back around sometime. We all have responsibilities in our lives. We can't simply throw away the action list that says "call accountant re: tax return" and hope the IRS doesn't throw us in jail.

Neither of these behaviors are good but again, it's not the system's fault. It's mine.

Simplifying your system and your life

Simplifying helps both of these problems. "If you want to get more done, do less" David Allen once said. The importance of getting all your projects out of your head and in front of you means you can decide which of these projects are really important to your life and which you should throw away.

GTD is a great system for tracking projects and actions but it doesn't do a great job tying them to the most important goals of your life. David Allen talks about it in his book but its not nearly as well defined as the core concepts of GTD. Stephen Covey in 7 Habits does a better job tying projects and actions to the life-fulfilling goals one might have.

Figuring out which projects you can get rid of, projects that are no longer important to you or to anyone you care about, is a great way to make your life easier. The weekly review is a great time to do it.

Your system itself can be simplified (see Simplifying GTD). Remove the parts of GTD that don't make sense and only use the pieces that directly help you. Let's be honest, those 43 folders are just a pain in the ass. Maybe you don't need nearly as many contextual action lists as you think. How about just @Home and @Office. Try getting rid of "waiting for" and "someday maybe" lists. Both were just crutches anyway.

Your system should only be as complex as you absolutely need it to be. Remove every component that doesn't help you feel relaxed and help you accomplish the things important in your life.

On Omnifocus

Omnifocus may seem tweaky but the ability to push off actions until the right time along with location made a huge difference. Like contexts, it ensures you don't see to-do items until you can actually do them. Being able to set up reoccurring tasks is also a huge benefit.

We all have things to do, things to remember. GTD gives us a way to get it out of our minds so our minds can focus on the large creative projects it should instead of trying to remember to get our oil changed.

Discipline is required in all of this. Don't over-tweak your system and don't lose sight of what is really important in your life.

First, I have enough inboxes. I don't need another app with a little red number in the corner demanding my attention.

Second, I realized that my desire to play came from the pressure I felt knowing that someone was waiting for me. That, in turn, meant my friends might feel the same pressure assuming I am waiting for them. We all have enough obligations in our lives without adding another in which only Zynga wins.

A lot of games; Farmville, World of Warcraft, maybe even my own beloved D&D; base their success on the obligations and pressures one player can place on another. We end up becoming walking unpaid marketeers for their product. The results are a twisted and destructive symbiotic relationship in which players no longer play because it's fun but because of the feelings of obligation created between them.

Next time you're playing a social game like Draw Something, ask yourself if you're doing it because you're having fun or because you feel obligated. If everyone's having fun (as I do playing D&D, and I believe my group feels the same), then everything is fine. If obligation begins to outweigh the fun of the game, your friends might feel the same way, and you're the cause. It's one thing to waste your own time but something else to pressure your friends to do the same. Stop the cycle and go have fun.

It's really hard to find a good set of iPhone-compatible headphones. After much searching and testing, I found that the Sennheiser PX 100-II on-ear iPhone headset had the best mix of sound quality, construction, and control. At about $55, they aren't cheap but they sound fantastic and have all the controls and features we need for the iPhone 4s.

The search for a good iPhone headset

For the past four years I've suffered with the white earbuds that come stock with the iPhone. For four years I've searched for a better solution and had found none. Recently, fed up with my fifth broken set of iPhone earbuds, I decided it was time to try a few different pairs out. I tried two in-ear headphones and two on-ear headphones. Here's a list of the headphones I tried in order of best to worst:

• Sennheiser PX 100-II on-ear headphones
• Sony MDREX38iP in-ear headphones
• Panasonic RP-HXC40-K on-ear headphones
• Skullcandy INK'D in-ear headphones

A quick review of in-ear headphones

Of the two in-ear headphones I tried, the (horribly named) Sony MDREX38iP earbuds sounded the best. At $28, they aren't the cheapest earbuds you can find, but their sound quality isn't bad, they have the full array of iPhone controls, and they're small enough to throw easily into your pocket.

The Skullcandy INK'dD headphones disappointed me in many ways. Their sound was ok but the cord picked up every brush of my shirt and directly deposited it into my ear drum. The control of the Skullcandy headphone also omitted any volume control.

By sealing your ear-canal, both in-ear headphones made it hard to hear anything else. The cords of both sets also picked up a lot of noise. Neither were ideal which made it such a joy to switch to the on-ear Sennheiser PX-100 II headphones. The rest of this article will focus on the Sennheisers.

PX-100 II Build quality

The build quality of the PX-100s feels great. Right out of the box they felt well made and solid, snapping into place and fitting well over my large head. The single cable comes out of the left ear instead of the typical Y-shaped cable that comes out of both speakers in most headphones. This makes it a lot easier to wrap up and untangle. The plug itself is a straight connector instead of an L-shaped connector, something I also prefer.

The iPhone control feels good and works perfectly. I can activate Siri, play music, talk, and control the volume without ever having to touch the phone.

Sound quality

The sound quality of the PX 100 IIs is also excellent. Norah Jones's latest hit, "Happy Pills" sounds full and rich with nice clean highs and solid bass. Voice quality over the phone is also as good as you can expect over typical cell-phone lines and, from what I hear from others, the mic quality is also good.

Not cheap but meets all criteria

Buying a good iPhone headset is a frustrating experience. There aren't many options available, with most manufacturers heading towards canal-sealing in-ear plugs. Amazon reviews of most headphones describe headphones breaking down after six months to a year, usually due to cable quality. Having only just received the PX 100 IIs, I can't say whether this is yet a problem or not. I plan to update this review a year from now with my experiences.

Of the five different iPhone headsets I've tried, however, the Sennheiser PX 100 IIs with its integrated microphone and iPhone controller stood well on top of the rest. At $55, they don't come cheap, but I still recommend them.

Last Saturday, on 10 March, I hit my 15 year anniversary with my company. A co-worker, who probably didn't know what he was getting into, was kind enough to ask me for my "old timer" tips to survive and thrive in our environment. I spent a little time considering the question and the usefulness of such tips, wrote some stuff down, and ended up with the five I think are probably the most important.

This is all going to sound a little like self-help bullshit, so be prepared or simply turn away. I will never hold it against you if your time is better spent elsewhere. For the rest of you, I'll keep this short so you can get back to making things, loving your family and friends, and being awesome.

Now, the tips:

Focus on what you love, what you're great at, and what others value from you

This one comes from the bullshit self-help book, Good to Great, when looking at companies, but it works just as well as a personal venn diagram. When you find this nice thing, this activity that you love to do, that you do well, and that you get paid to do - keeping doing it better and better. Don't fall into the Peter principle and get promoted away from what you loved in the first place. Don't expect your boss, your co-workers, or your company to help you get you where you want or help you stay there. Like habit 1 of the bullshit self-help book, 7 Habits of Highly Successful People says, take responsibility for your current and future state.

Reading List:

• 7 Habits of Highly Successful People
• Evil Plans

Stay organized

Get control of your shit. Stay on top of email, meet deadlines, deliver what you promise, and quit going to useless meetings. Get control over the inputs and outputs of your life. Stay more organized than your bosses, your clients, or your co-workers and you'll be more valuable to all of them. You'll also be a lot happier than if you're chasing your own tail trying to catch up most of the day.

Reading List:

• Getting Things Done
• Rework
• 4 Hour Work Week (the good parts of Elimination and Automation, not the asshole slimy parts of Definition and Liberation)

Build relationships

Organizational charts, titles, ranks, and hierarchies don't matter. Only the relationships you build with people, at all levels, and in all companies, will matter. Be nice to everyone, up, down, or sideways. Learn about them. Listen. Understand what drives them. Learn who is really valuable and which crazy bastards to stay away from. Be nice, even to the crazies. You never know who will be your boss in ten years so never assume you can be a jerk to anyone.

Reading List:

• Win Friends and Influence People

Embrace technological change

Learn how to accept and embrace technological change, especially when it's threatening your market. This is a good one to keep tip one in check, since that thing you're so good at might be obsolete in ten years. Always be looking forward at what people will find valuable and how technology will change the market. Be as agile as a start-up company even if you're a middle manager in a 200,000 person company.

Learn to write and communicate well

People will always value good writing and good communication. This is a skill that, if you don't have it, may take you ten years to develop. If you understand the importance of clear communication, you can learn how to do it. If you avoid it like you're in the 3rd grade, you'll never get good at it. Clear writing and communicating means clear thoughts and clear purpose.

Reading List:

• The Elements of Style
• On Writing
• Resonate

That's never all

There are a million other little tips, but I think those are the big ones. As always, it's a lot easier to say all this crap than to actually do it, but sometimes, after spending fifteen years working at a single place, it's worth figuring out what works well and what doesn't. Come up with your own list and figure out what works best for you.

Though 70% typical self help bullshit, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People still contains a few tools that help focus and direct one's actions towards their most important goals. While nearly a polar opposite to Getting Things Done, the tools in 7 Habits work very well with those of GTD. Still, 7 habits is full of cherry-picked personal stories instead of any sort of scientific evidence, a problem with most self-help books. 7 Habits provides a few tools to help leverage your energy but real change takes a lot of effort. Sometimes the only real change comes from a whole new lifestyle.

A recap of the fallacy of self-help

In Self Help Addiction I mention what I believe to be the greatest problem with self-help books. According to the cover, 15 million people bought 7 Habits. Of those 15 million, how many actually improved or enriched their lives? How many of them read it, nodded, shouted in victory, and then went back to the disorganized unsatisfying life they already had? How many of them said "that's fine for Covey" and went back to eating bins of ice cream?

People love self-help books but few people act on it. Real change requires a lot of willpower and a book isn't going to create it, but Covey really doesn't give a shit. He has his $12.

It's your responsibility

Like all good self-help books, 7 Habits has a lot of strong truths. Habit one, "be proactive", is one I wrote about before in You Are Responsible. Ultimately, only one person is in control of changing your life — you. You aren't just a puppet of circumstance, you control your destiny and you choose how to react to the world around you. It's a strong lesson that most simply dismiss.

"I can't have any fun, my car broke down."

"You don't understand, I have seventeen kids."

"I can't write a novel, I have stomach cancer."

As we know from another bullshit self-help book, The War of Art, this is "the resistance" talking and the most dangerous thing about the resistance is that it can be perfectly logical and reasonable. No one would ever say "Suck it up, mr. stomach cancer. Go write a book," yet it is still the resistance preventing the writing of this book none the less.

The spheres of concern and influence

Habit 1, "be proactive", also gets into another philosophy I like a lot — the sphere of concern and the sphere of influence. I touched on this in My Front Lawn is an Inbox. There are things we can influence and things we care about. If we can expand our influence and reduce the sphere of concern to only those things we can influence, we'll be happier people.

The eulogy at your funeral

In habit 2, "begin with the end in mind", Covey begins with an exercise I found quite valuable. You are present at your own funeral and four people are speaking: your spouse or close family member, your best friend, a close co-worker, and a member of your community (Covey is quick to bring up church but any community will do — I chose the gaming community). Each of them speaks of your character, contributions, and accomplishments. What do they say?

While this might be easily taken as an exercise more in convincing those around you of your value and worth, and also takes a bit of a vain approach to it, this still gleans some interesting results.

For example, do I really care about the money my D&D books make or do I care about helping game masters run better games? This exercise reminded me that chasing the profit isn't what I really care about as much as helping my community.

Urgency and importance

Habit 3, "put first things first", brings up another valuable tool, the urgency and importance chart. I've seen this chart before I knew where it came from and I always liked it. Do you spend your time worrying about trivial shit? Do you constantly find yourself firefighting? Do you waste your time reading Reddit all day? Are you spending quality time on things of high importance to your life?

I like the chart because it shows you what you should work to eliminate from your life, mostly stuff in the urgent but not important quadrant.

The rest of habit 3 is on personal organization, beginning with your roles and goals down to your daily activities. It's very practical if you happen to be Stephen Covey, but the rest of us can do better with a system like GTD that works with the giant amount of shit flowing into our lives. Still, it's not a bad way to think about things.

The irony of effective presentations

This article is already getting to bore me — gods know what it's done to you — so I'm going to skip habits 4, 5, 6, and 7. You can read all about them on the 7 Habits wikipedia page. There is one part of which I am particularly fond.

In habit 5, "first seek to understand, then be understood", Covey describes a conversation he had with one of his cultist followers. The follower kept telling Covey that he couldn't get his boss to change. Covey kept replying that the follower should make a more effective presentation for change. The follower said it was hard. Covey said "live with it". The follower said "I can't live with it." Covey said "than make a more effective presentation". Eventually, the follower never followed through.

So I ask - who actually failed to make an effective presentation? Didn't Covey fail just as badly to influence the follower? "Go do this." "I can't it's hard." "Fine, don't do it, live with it." "But I can't!" This is the purest representation of the failure of self-help books. The books can say all sorts of things but very few will actually do any of it.

Willpower and leverage

Above all, change requires willpower. It requires tremendous energy to change our lives and no $12 book will give it to you. At best, books like 7 Habits give you tools to better leverage what willpower you do have. Some tools, like the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab's 3 Steps to New Habits, have tremendous leverage but are ultimately worthless if there's no energy behind them. Sometimes it takes a complete change in your life.

If you're shopping for a Kindle, pick up the 4th generation non-touch Kindle for $80 from Amazon. With a small size, light weight, simple interface, and nearly disposable construction; it's the best device for the money. While a touch-based device seems like an effective interface for a Kindle, the execution doesn't work. With a bigger size, heavier weight, slow page-turning, and common accidental touch response; the Kindle Touch certainly isn't worth the extra $20 over the simpler, smaller, and lighter non-touch Kindle. For simple ebook reading, the straight 4th generation Kindle is the way to go.

A short note on ebooks

Moving to an e-reader is like jumping forward in time. The separation of the content from a physical medium never becomes so apparent as when you load up the same book at the same page on two different devices. I went from cultivating a nice library of paper books to the point where I repurchased books I already owned just so I could get them on the Kindle. My library gets smaller and smaller as my criteria for keeping or donating books changes. Within six months, physical books became museum pieces in my home. Even if I decided to read them again, I'd just go buy or check out the ebook version. Physical books now just feel like a hassle.

Add in to this my love for ebook publishing and my world is completely different now. Like a future written by Neal Stephenson (whose books Anathim and Reamde I both enjoyed on my Kindle), physical books are a quaint artifact of an older age. As a publisher, I can either sustain the costs for massive printers hammering chemicals on sheafs of dead trees and big hulking guys moving boxes from cargo ships stained by the salt of the pacific to diesel-stained semi-trucks hauling said boxes across the country or I can write some text, stick it on a server, and sell a million copies without even being aware of it until Paypal tells me to download my giant oceans of cash.

The Kindle keyboard

For the past year or so I've greatly enjoyed my Kindle 3. It's small, simple, lightweight, durable, and cheap. I read a dozen or so books on it and enjoyed every one of them. However, the device is far from perfect and the worst offender is that shitty keyboard. It sits there, under your thumb, just waiting for you to accidentally bump into one of its teeny 1980s calculator keys. It adds two to three inches onto the bottom of the unit and seems to serve no practical purpose what so ever.

I couldn't wait to get rid of it and that's when Amazon announced the new keyboard-less Kindles.

Touch, great in theory, weak in execution

When I first saw that Amazon was going to sell a Touch, it was the number one item on my Christmas list. I love my iPhone and iPad and expected, while not a perfect match, something close. A touch interface just seems natural for a simple device such as this.

Unfortunately, it didn't work out like that. There's a heavy price to pay, both literally and figuratively, for a touch-screen interface. While smaller than the Kindle keyboard, the touch just feels bigger and heavier. Something about the size and weight ratio makes it feel like it would break apart if you dropped it. The depth also seems much thicker. After spending a few hours reading with it, I could never really find a great way to hold the thing.

Much of that has to do with the constant worry that you'll accidentally touch the screen. That's not something I should have to worry about but you do. A couple of times I'd make a motion accidentally on the screen that seemed to jump me forward entire sections or chapters. Without knowing what gesture I had made, I would have to page back and back to get where I was.

I had hoped for a simpler device but the touch screen actually makes the whole thing more complicated.

When using the keyboard, however, the touch interface is quite nice - even responsive. While it can't quite keep up with your thumbing speed, it types fast enough to make it much easier to use than the D-button letter shifting you have to do with the non-touch Kindle.

In daily use, however, I almost never type text into the Kindle. When I'm using a Kindle, I'm reading a book. The only interface I really need is page turning and loading up the next book, two techniques easily done with the non-touch Kindle.

Amazon: iteration instead of perfection

The biggest problem with the Kindle Touch interface is the delay between your gesture and the response. This is why reading on an iPad or iPhone works so much better. Like Steve Jobs talked about back in 1980, the vast power of modern computers (like the iPhone, iPad, and the Kindle) should be used to make these devices easier to use. We experience this subconsciously with the iPhone and iPad. We touch it, it does something. We swipe, it moves. There is no perceptible delay between our action and the response. That just isn't yet possible with the touch Kindle.

Amazon doesn't care about perfection, they care about iteration. The first Kindles were bulky, hard to read, and expensive, but they kept iterating and the result is the 4th generation Kindle, a cheap device that does what it needs to do very well. While Apple was spending 5 years working with a processor company able to produce a CPU that gives it instantaneous response and long battery life, Amazon put out three generations of Kindles, getting it closer and closer to perfection each time. We get those evolutionary improvements in the Kindle, but the Kindle Touch feels more like a first generation device. It's a good try and the price is right, but it isn't good enough.

Go cheap, small, and light

At $100, the Kindle Touch isn't a bad price, but at $80, the non-touch Kindle is a much better deal. It's almost 20% better in many ways including cost, weight, and size. The only real thing you lose is the nice-to-use keyboard but when it comes to switching pages and reading a book, stick to the smaller one.

If you enjoyed this review, please consider using this link to purchase the 4th generation non-touch Kindle or, if you decide you really want the Touch, use this link to buy the Kindle Touch. Thanks!

I decided to formalize the script I use to generate this website and my other big website, Sly Flourish and release it. Pueblo is a single python script that generates a blog of static HTML files from a directory full of markdown text files. It's small, fast, easy, secure, and extensible. While it doesn't have many of the features of bigger blog platforms, Pueblo lets you spend less time on website maintenance and more time writing.

A single simple script

Pueblo is a single Python script that, when run, generates HTML files, an index file, an archive file, and an RSS feed from a set of markdown formatted text documents. If you're looking for a more full-featured blogging platform, one where you don't have to mess with the code itself, this isn't for you. Pueblo is primarily built to run my own websites, MikeShea.net and SlyFlourish.com. I wanted to release the code out there in case others could benefit from it or might teach me how to make it better.

HTML generation from Markdown files

At its core, Pueblo uses Markdown files to generate HTML. These Markdown files include a subset of MultiMarkdown metadata to generate page titles, dates, and author links. These markdown files must have a .txt extension, must be in either ASCII or UTF8, and must have the title, author, and date fields in order. You can look at the markdown for this article as an example.

The configuration lets you exclude certain .txt files in case you don't want them.

The generated index.html file uses a stylesheet called "style.css" that uses responsive web design to fit well onto many screens. The script also calls a file called "sidebar.html" to display aside content.

The advantages of static HTML generation

There are many advantages to a blog that generates static HTML. For one, you are putting CPU processing time where it belongs, crunching articles when you WRITE them not when your readers READ them. Most blogging platforms store your articles in a structured database. Every time a reader hits your site, it has to reach into that database and generate a page. There are lots of ways to speed up that process but much easier is to simply serve a static web page. This lets the website scale much better than any sort of server-side code execution.

Static HTML means your site will be very very fast.

Archiving your website

The ability to easily archive and transport your site is another big advantage to static HTML generation. If you decide your days running the blog are over but you want to keep the site, you can just copy all the text and HTML files and the site can live anywhere you want to put it. All of the generated URLs in Pueblo are locally referenced so you can even copy it to a thumb drive and still run the site like you would normally.

This means, years from now, you can still see your website as it ran without having to run a huge out-of-date blogging platform to see it.

Security

Static HTML is also inherently secure. Instead of constantly dealing with hackers attempting to find vulnerabilities in your server-executed code, you only serve static HTML. There's no code to hack. The script itself runs only when you run it either with a cronjob or as a single-run CGI script. There are no parameters accepted so you don't need to worry about dealing with bad data getting passed through. Securing the script and your website are still important but it's much easier than having to constantly and continually update your code (I'm looking at you Wordpress).

Few features

The disadvantage to a script like this is the lack of features. There's no comment board, no ping backs, no plugins, no built-in search, no workflow system, and no other advanced blogging features. Again, if these features are important to you, look elsewhere. This script does have two collaborative features. First, it generates a 20 article RSS file called index.xml and second, it lets your readers link articles on Twitter referenced back to your account. It also includes Google Analytics and Amazon referral requests, mainly because I use these on my own sites. Other than that, the features are very slim.

Make it your own

I expect the users of this script to know some Python and thus I expect you to make this script your own. I don't plan on doing a lot of updates or adding a lot of features so you should feel free to edit it as you see fit. A lot of the HTML generation is embedded in the script so you'll need to dig a little deeper to modify the code. That said, I hope you will build this script into the perfect script to run your site.

Released under the MIT Software License

I have released this software under the MIT Software License. Please reference the license, included in the pueblo source code for information on use, modification, and redistribution.

If you like Pueblo and want to give back, please bookmark and use this Amazon link to throw a few bucks my way while you pick up that copy of Deadwood you've always wanted to buy.

There are a lot of talkers in the world. Everyone has an opinion and a voice and seems incapable of not using it all the time. There aren't, however, a lot of doers. There aren't a lot of people who simply shut up and make things. Talking about things is easy, doing them is hard. When you find people who do things, stay close to them. Pay attention to what they do and how they do it. Want to be a doer? Try doing something small, tie it to a habit you already have, and do it every day.

The talker

Talkers are easy to find. They're everywhere and they never shut up. They have opinions about everything. They live in hypocrisy, defining themselves by what they think they want to do instead of what they actually do. They're loud. They love any new tool or mechanism or widget or website that lets them talk more to more people. They leave 300 comments on every article ever written on the net. They can't imagine a world where people don't care about what they have to say.

The doer

Doers aren't easy to find. They're quiet. They stay out of social circles. They don't self promote very often. They don't correspond well. They don't read through a thousand RSS items a day. They don't criticize much and the things they criticize directly affect them. They love talking about turpentine. You follow doers by seeing what they do. You'll see a trail of creations behind them, a series of things you probably didn't know they even did.

A world of edge cases

Of course, few people fall perfectly into one of these camps. There are a lot of talkers who do stuff and there are a lot of doers who can't shut up. A lot of people probably lean one way or the other.

Are you a doer?

If you have to ask the question, you probably aren't one. Worse, you probably won't ever really be one. People talk all the time about doing things but its really hard to do it. It's like dieting or writing or Getting Things Done. It's easy to understand the mechanics but its something else entirely to actually do it. Most of us would just be happy sitting around watching other people do things.

Everyone who buys a fancy notebook and pen thinks they're a writer, but until they write something, they're just talking. Everyone who reads forty updates a day on seventy six firefox extensions to simplify your life on Lifehacker thinks they're being productive. All they're doing is wasting time. Productivity is measured in what you produce and what value it is to others. That's it.

Inertia

Why is it so hard to get people to change? Why do so many people talk about things without actually doing them? It all comes down to inertia. People like to stay in the same state they're in now and it's easier to stay in that state than it is to change. When people habitually do things, they keep doing things. That's their current state — doing things. For most people, their current state is not doing things, so they keep not doing things. Getting from one state to another is the hardest part. It's the part most people simply will not do.

What's the point?

So what good is talking about it? Why bother discussing something most people will not change? First, if you're looking for people to surround yourself with, choose doers and you might find yourself caught up in their state of doing things. If you're already a doer, finding other doers keeps you on track, like hanging around a bunch of runners. If you're looking for colleagues, look for those who exhibit doer traits.

Be careful when listening to talkers. Judge someone's opinion based on their own creations. If they don't have any, listen to someone else.

If you're one of the extremely rare people who wants to change from a talker to a doer, consider the Stanford Persuasion Laboratory's three steps to new habits:

• Do something small.
• Tie it to something you already do.
• Do it every day.

I rebuilt Sly Flourish this week into a set of static HTML pages generated from articles written in Markdown processed by a small 100 line Python script. The site is complete HTML5 with semantic tags for articles, sections, asides, and what not. The biggest change isn't technical, but social. I decided to finally remove comments and focus exclusively on the article. Overall, the site is simpler, smaller, faster, and more flexible.

The problems with Wordpress

I used Wordpress for over two years to power Sly Flourish. It's a powerful program that builds pretty amazing websites. That said, it tries too much to be everything to everyone. You might not be running a photo gallery website, but you're executing the code to do so every time you run the site. There's a lot of code in Wordpress and it generates a lot of HTML and CSS that you don't need and clients don't need to download and render. There are programs you can add that speed things up, but now you have even more code.

Every few months you have to update the site. If you don't, you risk being hacked. Upgrading is far from simple and often results in having to hand-fix a lot of stuff. It's pretty messy.

So for two years I had hoped to get out of Wordpress and run Sly Flourish the same way I run this website, through processing static markdown files with a python script into a series of static HTML pages. Only one thing stood in the way — comments. But I'll get to that in a moment.

The benefits of static HTML

With my new setup, I write documents in Byword, upload them using FTP to the site, and my little Python script generates HTML, rebuilds the home page, the archive, and the RSS feed. The results are all static, and they are very very fast.

Unlike Wordpress output, I have control over every single character of text, markup, and style. There isn't a single element that I didn't want there. It meant I could generate a mobile version of the site that looks awesome on an iPhone in about an hour.

It's fast, small, and fully under my control. I love every single bit of it.

No comments

The biggest change in the site is a change I have thought about for some time. I wrote about it before, discussed it with my good friends the NewbieDM and Dave the Game. Removing comments is an unpopular choice, it seems antisocial, stuck up, and isolationist. I had some good reasons though:

• Dealing with spam is a pain in the ass.
• Comment software can be easily hacked.
• The vast majority of comments don't really add value.
• You're giving up screen real-estate you earned to promote views that aren't your own.
• You have to spend time moderating, removing asshats and keeping things smooth.
• You have to make painful choices about whether to delete borderline asshat comments.
• It's an extra inbox of incoming information you either ignore or spend your valuable attention on. Isn't that attention better spent on new content?
• The vast majority of readers never comment. It's important to focus on the silent majority.
• If people really want to talk about it, they can use Twitter or send me an email.

A simpler world

It took one such asshat comment to move me forward but I'm really glad I did. My site is fast, small, clean, focuses on what I want it to focus on. The simplicity of the site and the way I manage it lets me focus my attention where I want. I'm a lot happier now.

Our creative work holds value and only one person decides what that value is -- you. When I decide to do a new project, it must meet one of the following criteria:

• I get paid a reasonable amount for the work.
• I retain the rights to the work so I can redistribute it and use it to promote my other work.

Most important, it has to be something I want to work on.

What value do you place on your own work?

Hard decisions

This spring I had the opportunity to work on a high visibility project. It sounded cool. Some friends of mine had worked on it, it was for someone I knew and respected, and it was a project I was interested in. After a few emails, however, a few things became clear. First, I wouldn't be paid for it. Second, I wouldn't hold the rights to it once I was done. These restrictions didn't come from greed or malice. The project was tied to some intellectual property that wasn't owned by the project lead but he had an agreement to use it for these projects as long as they maintained the rights. It was also a project that wouldn't end up generating any money so they wouldn't have any ability to pay.

I had to make a big decision. At that point I had gotten paid for about three freelance articles already and had two self published books that generated income every month. Through affiliate links, my website also generated a modest amount of money. I wasn't ever going to get rich, but this small income at least helped me pay for my hobby.

Luckily, the decision came more easily when another large freelance project showed up in my inbox and I had to choose between the two.

Still, at that point I made a decision.

Valuing my work

I determined a new value for my work and it came down to a single rule.

My work isn't free.

This doesn't mean I won't give the result away for free, but I won't write it for free. I expect a return for my work. Sometimes that might be a fixed amount of money. Sometimes that might be a percentage on sales. Sometimes it's a product that helps me promote my other work and my name value.

More specifically, however, my agreement to work on a project comes down to one of two things. Either I retain the rights to the project so I can use it how I want or I get paid for it.

Most of all, it has to be something I want to do. This is, after all, a hobby. I have a day job and I never plan on leaving it. Writing Running Epic D&D Games won't pay for a colonoscopy later in life.

RPG freelancer Robert J. Schwalb wrote a series of excellent articles on the nature of freelancing including a favorite of mine, Crapping on your Dreams, Freelancing 101. He wrote another one earlier called I can't help you that draws his line in the sand when it comes to helping people for free. It reminded me a lot of another favorite of mine, Neal Stephenson's Why I'm a Bad Correspondent.

Why not set our own declarations? Declarations help focus our work where it has the highest impact, keeps us happy, and keeps us productive.

On gift giving

Seth Godin talks a lot about giving gifts and I don't see my mercenary ways getting in the way of that. I want to give away gifts as part of Sly Flourish. I have two adventures and a DM Cheat Sheet I give away as gifts. They may not be totally selfless as I expect the gifts to help promote my site, but they give away valuable stuff (about $2 each if I sold them) for free.

When it comes to creative projects, however, unless I'm paid for it, I want the freedom to choose if, when, and how I give it away as a gift.

Undervaluing your work

I have another friend who had an excellent idea for a project. He spent a lot of time on it and eventually shipped it. In my opinion the price he chose undervalued the work. I haven't had a chance to ask him if he was happy or not with his initial price. I thought he ended up selling it for about half of its true value. Maybe he was worried about how it stood next to similar products but for this particular product, he had, as far as I know, a unique product.

Unique products give us the freedom to determine value. There are other fantasy novels out there but George Martin has a corner on the market for A Dance with Dragons. He could have charged double for that and people would have bought it. There are millions of books but each one is unique and, if it differentiates itself enough, you can charge what you really think it's worth. When I read news articles like The Rise of the 99 cent Kindle e-Book, I don't worry too much. They aren't all the same books. If your book is really unique, people will pay $4 or $8 or $12 for it.

Writing for visibility

What about writing for visibility? I'd ask the disgruntled Huffington Post bloggers about that. I don't know what agreement they originally made on the rights to their posts. If they retained the rights, they have little to be angry about. If they signed them away for visibility, giving Huffington Post the rights to redistribute indefinitely, they made a choice and probably a bad one.

There are other ways to make a name for yourself than handing the rights over to someone else for free. Build your own brand. Engage with people interested in your topic. Build your own site, write your own articles, and make a name for yourself without handing it to someone else.

You determine the value of your work. If you give away the rights to your work for free, you're setting the bar pretty low.

Initially, the only differences I noticed when upgrading to OSX Lion were the ones that annoyed me. Now that I've spent a few days with it, I'm beginning to see how Lion's refinements match the philosophy that, in the words of Edward Tufte, a good user interface always gets better when there is less of it.

Not everything is awesome, though. The attempt to unify OSX with iOS is a bad idea manifested in Lion's worst features. UI additions like the Launchpad and Mission Control crud things up, though they can simply be ignored. The default for mouse wheels and gestures to scroll the opposite way actually hurt my brain. Even when I disabled it, scrolling still feels wrong.

Still, features like application sandboxing, autosave, and versioning take this OS above and beyond what we're used to. Lion is a strong OS with a lot of great changes that will get better as time goes on.

Having moved to a new iMac, my backup strategy has changed. Now I'm using Apple's Time Machine running on a 1TB Western Digital external disk. Every three months a task pops up on Omnifocus to remind me to flip my current Time Machine disk with a duplicate disk in the trunk of my car. My "Documents" directory is then tied to Dropbox so everything that happens in that directory is automatically saved remotely. All large filetypes like video and audio files, are stored in a "Large Files" directory outside of the Dropbox directory so it is only saved in Time Machine. Other various cloud services provide off-site backup of stuff like mail, websites, and photos.

A continually evolving strategy

Every time a home computing system changes, it's worth looking at how things are backed up. I've written on this site a few times about my current backup process and it is time to do so again.

A strategy review

It's important to know exactly what we're trying to do. Here's my own personal backup strategy:

• All data should be backed up locally and off-site regularly.
• Vital data should be version controlled and stored off-site immediately.
• Every byte of data should be stored in two places.
• Vital bits should be stored in more than two places with one copy physically away from the others.
• Don't trust the cloud, store data locally AND in the cloud. Know you can easily recover from the cloud.

Local backups

Before I was mirroring my OS drive to two identical 2.5" drives so I could swap them out if the internal disk died, I can't realistically do that with an iMac. Instead, I've gone back to Apple's Time Machine which, paired with my 1TB Western Digital disk, provides a completely hands-free backup and file versioning system. This works very well for the 400gb of data I have on my main computer.

Offsite backups

A single time machine disk is fine for most people but if there is a theft or disaster in my house, I don't want all my data to disappear. So I bought a second identical 1TB drive that I store in the trunk of my car. Every three months, I have a reminder set up to remind me to swap that disk with the current one. This means my time machine backups have large 3 month gaps in their versioning, since each disk is on for 3 months and then off for 3 months but I can live with that.

A stronger system for vital data

What about my most critical data such as freelance articles, saved passwords, books I'm writing, web projects, and other stuff I can't ever get back? I have a second layer for that stuff that includes Dropbox. Dropbox lets you store 2gb of data for free over the web. It syncs to all of your other computers and mobile devices so I can store my data over on Michelle's machine as well. It does so very transparently. If you hit save, it pushes it to the cloud. There's no "sync" button or anything to mess with.

A small mac program called MacDropAny lets you remap directories so your "Documents" directory is actually my main Dropbox directory. As long as that directory stays to less than 2gb (it's 1GB now), I have no problems and my most vital data are stored both remotely and using Time Machine.

Other data stored to the cloud

A lot of my other data such as mail and photos are stored on services like Gmail and Picasaweb. Of course, one cannot trust these services alone so it's always important to have a copy locally as well.

Review the procedure yearly

Every year I'll review the system and see if it still fits my needs and current setup.