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 to Github. 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" and another called "iphone.css" for a mobile display. 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.

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.

When it comes to focusing on our primary job, whatever job that happens to be, we could do a lot worse than mimicking the performance of a doctor's office.

While a doctor's office has to deal with appointments, filing, phone calls, insurance companies, payments, records transfers and a thousand other things, the doctor herself only focuses on being a doctor. All the rest is handled by specialists who take care of their particular function. When the doctor comes in, she's focused only on providing medical care or advice to the patient, not all those other details that got the patient there, got the patient out, or got the patient to pay.

Be like a doctor. Delegate, outsource, or throw away everything that keeps you from doing whatever it is you were meant to do. Hire someone to clean your place or get a place small enough to clean easily. Get rid of software, social networks, or bookmarks that keep you from writing whatever it is you were meant to write. Set up your banking so that deposits, withdrawals, or transfers to investment accounts are all automatic.

Reduce, eliminate, or delegate everything you can that keeps you from doing your job in the world.

For some unknown reason, I'm jonsing to try Omnifocus, the online GTD system of choice for Mac users. That said, my own Moleskine-based GTD system works just fine already. There are certainly advantages to the digital system including easy refactoring of projects and actions and delaying actions until you actually want them to show up in your path. It was these advantages that got me to drop the $80 for it.

Considering Omnifocus

I'm becoming more and more fascinated with Omnifocus for a personal organization system. When considering the steep $80 price tag and the extra potential complexity it adds to my life, I want to make sure I choose it for the right reasons. Why exactly would I buy this program when I already have a smooth paper-based GTD system? Am I just delving into productivity porn at this point? Am I just tweaking a system for the sake of tweaking and will such tweaking end up breaking my already well-working system, not to mention take away my $80? That's what I want to investigate. Let's jump in to the criteria.

Advantages of Omnifocus

• Well integrated into the rest of the Mac environment.
• Solid implementation of the GTD system.
• Easy to add links, documents, and other reference material to your to-do item.
• Easy to refactor projects and tasks. You can fix projects that are too narrow or too wide.
• Reinforces the importance of tying next-actions to projects.
• Syncs across Macs, the iPhone, and the iPad.
• Built in process for your weekly review.
• Excellent tickler system that pushes tasks off until it is the right time to look at them.
• Easy to search and sort through all your old tasks and projects. Helps with examining your own true past behavior.

Disadvantages of Omnifocus

• No web-based client. No way to reach your system if you don't have a computer.
• One wouldn't want to use the inbox for everything, you still need a notebook to capture random junk.
• Printing to a pocket notebook isn't that easy.
• Expensive. $80 for Mac client, $20 for iPhone client, $40 for iPad client.

There's one big advantage that I have when it comes to Omnifocus. I use macs exclusively now. With my recent upgrade to a Mac Pro at work, I can use Omnifocus at each of my computers and each of my portable devices. That level of ubiquity is really required to switch to a system like this. If I didn't work exclusively on a mac, I probably wouldn't buy it.

Advantages of the Moleskine GTD system

• Single ubiquitous system. Notes, calendar, next actions, and projects all in one pocket notebook.
• Cheap. $10 gets you a new one. Lasts 4 months for each notebook.
• I can bring it everywhere.
• I trust it. It won't fail on me, run out of batteries, or get corrupted.
• Makes me feel like I'm using the same technology Ben Franklin used. Paper is cool.
• I can doodle right in the same notebook as my GTD system.

Disadvantages of the Moleskine GTD system

• No sync to the computer. When I'm in my home office, I usually don't have my Moleskine with me.
• No way to search.
• Boring old paper system. No software to futz with.
• Can't easily refactor projects. It gets crudded up with scratching stuff out.
• No good way to handle repeated tasks. You have to process them again every week.
• Doesn't sync with an online calendar.
• No way to directly tie digital artifacts to projects or actions.

So where does all this get me?

This analysis is probably overkill. As I write this, I'm just about to hit the "buy" button. The big factors for my purchase are the bolded items above in the advantages. I handle a ton of repeated tasks and having a system that removes them from my sight until it's time for me to look at them is very handy. My wife brought up a good point, that repeatedly writing tasks can be useful to sharpen your memory of them, but I usually just don't bother writing them at all. In the few days I've gone into the trial, I'm already seeing a lot of utility in refactoring projects so I can more easily store repeated next actions.

Anyway, expect more blog articles about my use of Omnifocus.

A lot of different organizational systems, business, and people love to plan things out. They have stacks and stacks of bullets of things that need to be done to get to an outcome. For every project they have the next thirty things laid out, ready to do step by step. Then reality hits and all that stuff changes. So why bother? Why not reduce projects down to the following three simple things: A goal, an end date, and the next step.

Toying around with Omnioutliner

Listening to the wonderful podcast Back to Work with Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann, I decided to give Merlin's Getting Things Done application, Omnioutliner a shot. I generally avoid any sort of electronic GTD system since I don't often have computers with me, even mobile ones, so my Moleskine based system works just fine.

One of the things I discovered when monkeying around with Omnioutliner is the way it handles projects. Each of your next actions can all be tied to a specific project. This, in turn, creates a project with many possible actions. This is certainly not how I work.

Focus on the next action

For about five years I've stopped planning out a bunch of steps for things. Instead, each project I work on I have only three things I really care about:

• What is the desired physical goal of the project?
• When do I want it completed?
• What is the very next thing I can do to move it forward?

These are all pretty straight forward Getting Things Done questions to ask but I don't think people really scale back to just these things. I think a lot of people still sit and walk through the next forty steps without doing the very next one. This is why I'm not big on mind mapping. You could spend days building beautiful mind maps of complicated projects instead of just sitting down and doing the very next piece. You might mind map an entire novel without ever writing any of it. I suppose if a project feels completely overwhelming to you, you might sit down and doodle some outlines to get your head around the problem but generally speaking, your best bet is to go do part of it.

One step leads to the next

The beauty of being so focused like this is that each step leads to the next. You don't have to map out fifty steps, you'll instead just do each one of those fifty steps when it comes time. Course correction occurs every time you complete the previous part. You don't have to shift every piece of a five year plan every time it turns out you didn't expect the outcome. Now you just worry about the next step after you've finished the previous.

And you save a whole bunch of time and energy to do it.

No plans, just checklists

That said, you sure can't build a complex project like this. You can't design and build an aircraft carrier or an office building or a 180 million dollar movie. Some degree of planning is needed to get the schedule down.

But most of the work we do doesn't fit into this. Most of the time we don't need to plan any further than the next thing we're going to do. On a daily basis, the only questions we need to ask is what we need to do next.

Even smaller projects, however, like planning out my D&D game every Wednesday night, has a few steps I need to remember. Instead of rewriting a plan every week, I just keep a checklist of the things I'll need to do and I can use the same checklist every week.

What's your next action?

So stop spending a ton of time doodling up lists of steps for a potential project or building a beautiful multivariate mind map of how you're going to clean your basement. Put in the blinders. Focus way down. Pick a single small thing you can do in 30 minutes, and go get started.

There's no doubt in my mind that David Allen built a multi-million dollar company selling a book about a system that most people never actually use. That doesn't mean the system doesn't work, though. Those that follow GTD can actually become more relaxed and feel more in control of their life. Most people will get nothing out of it, though. It's just like diet books. Fat people buy a lot of diet books.

All the books on creativity, from King's On Writing to Tharp's Creative Habit, state that success comes from hard consistent work. Even if you don't become a thin person with a clear action list, maybe reading those books was better than surfing Youtube. We might not ever institute our own Evil Plan, but sometimes its nice to dream.

That doesn't mean I need to keep spreading this crap, though. Maybe it's time I shut up and offer help only when it's asked for.

I'm Mike and I'm addicted to self-help books

I can't say exactly where it started but probably somewhere around the time I got into Getting Things Done, I started to really enjoy books on personal organization, writing, creativity, lifestyle engineering, and better business books. I've read Godin and Gladwell and Collins and Tharp and Fried and MacLeod. I eat these books up. I find myself quoting them all the time, recommending them to friends, using them as examples when situations come up in my own life. And I think people notice it. It's like bad BO. If I can start to smell it myself, that must mean it's really bad. It's probably driving my wife insane and my friends probably dread a conversation about the Flywheel and the Doomloop.

I am writing this mainly to get my own hands around this addiction, to see if all these self-help books really help me or if I'm just wasting my time, filling me with false hope, and alienating my friends. As Merlin Mann puts it (another self help pontificator whether he wants to be called that or not), there comes a point where productivity porn is just wasting the time you should be spending doing things.

They're not wrong, but they're not going to help you

Fat people buy a lot of books about dieting yet dieting still has an extremely low success rate in actually making people healthy. The rest of the self help book industry, I would expect, follows much of the same path.

How many top CEOs actually read Good to Great?

Did Jonathan Coulton read Seth Godin's books before becoming one of the biggest independent internet musicians? Did he study anything at all about this or did he just do it on his own? Did Steve Jobs read a bunch of books about how to manage a tech company or was his leadership built into his intellectual DNA? One of the things that often bothers me about self help books are the examples. How many self help books reference Tiger Woods? How many self help books did Tiger Woods actually read? I'd guess not many.

Successful people don't read books about success, they're successful because they succeed. They do stuff. They write a lot. They play a lot of golf. They do whatever it is that makes them successful a lot.

I doubt many big success stories follow the advice of any book but that doesn't mean it hurts to read them, does it?

Maybe...

Creativity books getting in the way of creating things

Where self help books can get dangerous are when they actively get in the way from actually doing things. There has to be some sort of irony in referencing a self help book on the topic but in Stephen Pressfield's The War of Art, he speaks of the Resistance or anything that gets in the way of you actually making whatever sort of art you want to make. His very book (and maybe this very article) might be counted in the resistance if someone ever used it to say "you know, I should read this book before I start writing my novel." That's resistance. I think it was this very idea, that a productivity site might get in the way of productivity that transformed Merlin Mann from the nerdy Hipster PDA guy into the much more silent "get out there and do shit" guy that he has become.

Am I getting better or just getting more annoying?

I like to think that I gain some valuable insights from all these books I read. Sometimes they are huge life-changing things like getting better control over all of my projects with Getting Things Done or just picking up a single idea from a book like the War of Art. I have to wonder, however, if I'm blind to the fact that they aren't really helping or if they just make me more and more intolerable in conversations with friends and loved-ones. Has this become my evangelical religion?

I try to think these tips and ideas actually help but how would I tell if I'm simply being tricked into thinking they do?

Maybe it's a waste of time, but so is everything else

Sometimes, however, we can read these books just for fun. I like Seth Godin's stuff. I think it helped me guide Sly Flourish into a site and a "brand" that I'm really proud of. I like what he says and I repeat it often when talking to people about it. Yeah, you might waste a lot of time and money reading his stuff if you think it's going to teach you how to be Jonathan Coulton but what the hell else are you going to do with your time, play Farmville?

I read the War of Art and I hated about 60% of it read little I hadn't already known in the other 40% but there was one thing that got me thinking, that The Resistance isn't always something easy to see. Sometimes the thing that keeps you from making something is perfectly reasonable, perfectly rational, and very difficult to argue against. You might be going through a horrible divorce or have a job that demands 60 hours a week or have five kids or have pancreatic cancer but you can still make stuff if you really want to. The resistance isn't always a clear dysfunction that keeps you from making something. Sometimes it's as rational and reasonable as everything else in your life. That was the only thing I got out of reading the book but it was enough. I wasn't surfing Slashdot for the five hours it took me to read that book. I still got a lot done when I was reading it. That book wasn't my resistance, it just gave me an idea about what the resistance really is.

Where am I?

I don't know where this leaves me. I guess reading a book can never hurt. Learning how to do something a little differently to make your life enjoyable can't be that bad. Preaching it might need to stop. Coaching might be the better path (there's lots of self help books on coaching - jesus, I can't stop myself!).

In the end, who can really say, but happiness is always a good goal so why not focus on that?

A good "Getting Things Done" system, like a good user interface, can only get better when there is less of it. Getting Things Done captures so many people because it is a relatively easy system to incorporate once you get going but it's up to us to customize it around our corner of the world. GTD has aspects that are really required: inbox, next action lists, project lists, and the weekly review. Other components like tickler folders, project support folders, the massive file reference, and even the beloved Someday Maybe list can often be eliminated to keep our personal project management system nice and clean. In each of your weekly reviews (you're doing weekly reviews, right?) ask yourself what elements of the system you can simplify or eliminate to make the whole thing just a little bit smaller.

What's required for GTD?

There are some aspects of GTD that can never be eliminated. You always need a place to capture random stuff that enters your life, stuff you can't yet fully process into next actions, projects, calendar items, or trash.

After spending almost five years with Getting Things Done, I can safely say that the following elements are absolutely required in my own system:

• Inbox: I absolutely need a little notebook to jot stuff down, regardless of what it is. I tend to find I can skip the inbox for a lot of items and immediately turn them into either projects or next actions. Still, I always need a place to just throw down some random stuff and my plain pocket Moleskine notebook does this very well.

• Project Lists: Still the primary DNA of my system, project lists include everything I want to do in my life over the next year. Getting a little more morbidly zen about it, if I'm not doing it over the next year, than it's not important enough for me to do it in my life. If it's something I really want to do in my life, I should already be working on it.

• Contextual Action Lists: @home, @work are pretty much the only two that I need. I might whip one out for a grocery store visit or if I'm traveling somewhere, but mostly I only need to do stuff in those two locations. I've simplified a little bit by putting errands on the action list I'll read before I'll be leaving to run the errand. Having seven contextual action lists is just madness. I bet most people can get away with two or three.

• Calendar: We all have appointments so we all need a calendar. The calendar is also a great place to put actions you don't need to do right away. This way your calendar becomes your tickler file. Want to sign up for that drawing class but it doesn't allow sign ups until may? Stick it on your calendar. It's an easy trick.

• The Weekly Review: The weekly review went from a process I dread to one I look forward to every week. It takes me about 15 to 30 minutes to complete now, down from an hour, and it helps me clear out all the stuff I no longer care about, reset myself for the next week, and ensure I'm focused on something I really want to focus on. Make it part of your weekly habit and you'll be a lot happier for it.

Things I don't need

Over the past five years there are a few things I no longer really need. Some of these might be considered crutches, important to have early in when using GTD but no longer required once you feel like you have a handle on your life. Here are a few of mine:

• Someday maybe list: This is probably the most shocking elimination in my system and one I have only recently gotten rid of. What I found is that my someday maybe list items never really bothered me when I didn't keep track of them and rarely became real projects. If they were important, I'd have made them projects. If I was just putting them off, I can stick them on my calendar. What I don't need is a list of all the things I'm procrastinating on that I have to review every week. Either decide you're not going to do it or do it. There isn't a need for some purgatory to just make you feel better.

• Tickler Folders: I got rid of this almost right away. The whole 43 folder system was just too complicated and helped me very little. Using the calendar as a way to store reminders for things works just as well.

• Paper: It's pretty clear to me that the whole GTD system was built around paper. David Allen loves his giant file cabinet and his file folders and stapler and shit. I've managed to get rid of nearly all of the paper in my life. It's a lot easier to keep your things together when it's all bits on a system with a good search engine. Tools like Evernote, TadaList, and DropBox make it very easy to manage your stuff across multiple devices. One easy way to simplify your system is to, as much as you can, eliminate paper. Of course, the Moleskine I use for my GTD system itself is paper but that gets a free pass. For personal organization, no electronic system has been as fast or as easy to use as paper for me.

• Waiting For Lists: Waiting for lists are another list I got rid of a long time ago. If I really care, I make it a project and track it that way. If I don't than I don't track it. Sometimes it gets me into trouble to not track someone else's actions but I would rather like to assume they have their life together instead of tracking it for them.

Simplify, a lifelong goal

Simplifying my life is a constant drive for me. I'm always looking to remove elements of my life that don't make me happy. I'm always looking for ways to get rid of physical stuff. I'm always looking to use one less application than I need. My GTD system is no different. Anything I can do to make my system more efficient, smaller, and faster is a goal worth seeking. So, what element of your own system is generating more work than it's worth?

Almost overnight book publishing moved from shipping a limited quantity of physical books to locations all over the world to digital distribution of data across the internet with a material cost as close to zero as you can get. For five thousand years libraries built themselves around the physical possession of books. What will happen to libraries when the medium is stripped from the physical media? What should become of it? Perhaps they should become free internet cafes with uncensored fast connections to the web available to anyone who wants them. Perhaps they become a resource of librarians who help people find information they're looking for. What they shouldn't do is become virtual representations of their former selves. Outdated systems and models need to die to be replaced by those that fit the new world in which we live.

From books to Kindle in 30 days

In thirty days I went from swearing that I only wanted archival quality hardback books in my library to swearing off physical books completely for the the Kindle. I didn't expect to get there so easily or so fast but here I am. I won't buy a book unless I'm buying it for my Kindle. I no longer see myself as responsible for archiving the world's knowledge. I know a digital dark age may come.

Barnes and Noble realizes that digital books are the future. They built the Nook and set up the store. From my own experience selling digital books, it doesn't appear to be going anywhere. I've sold hundreds of copies of my books on the Kindle and not a single copy of anything on the Nook. Same goes for Apple's iBookstore where I've sold less than a dozen books.

The one thing the Nook has going for it is some sort of deal with local libraries where you can check out books as though you were checking them out physically at the library.

The broken business model of libraries

But wait just a minute. What sense does that make? As far as I can tell, these library check out systems require a link to your local library and have a limited number of copies to lend out. But we're talking about an unlimited resource here. The cost for me to distribute a single copy of my book or 100,000 copies is almost zero. I don't have to print them. I don't have to physically ship them. Bandwidth is cheap. So what is this fake limit that a library puts on them? As far as I can tell, the only purpose is to make it hard to get these free copies.

As a guy who now makes money selling books, I'm glad there's some sort of limit or we're all giving away all our material for free. That doesn't make much sense. It took time and effort to make these books, they shouldn't just be given away.

I'm all for giving away free samples. My favorite feature of the Kindle is the ability to get the first 50 or so pages of any novel I want to read. If I don't like it, I haven't paid anything. If I do like it, I get to try it out and buy it when I'm already committed. It's a perfect model.

The only way people have been looking at how libraries fit in this new digital distribution system is as they have always been. They're imposing fake limitations both in tying it to a local library and in limiting the number of available copies because that's the way it's always been. That's a stupid way to look at it. HBO is doing the same idiotic thing with their iPad client. Sure, you can watch Game of Thrones on your iPad, as long as you have cable and a subscription to HBO. That's making me buy a saddle, stable, and a buggy whip in order to drive a car. Trying to force the model backwards hurts everyone.

What libraries should become

There is a real need for libraries in our communities, not as warehouses of old dusty books, but as access to information for everyone for free. Libraries should become protected internet access areas. They should have access to pay services and uncensored connections to the internet. They should help people learn how to use the net safely and productively. They should have internet specialists on hand to help people learn how to tie into this new mechanism. If libraries are going to go digital, they should be access points, not virtualized models of the old ways of doing things.

Watching old gods die

I am always fascinated by watching the titans and old gods die. Circuit City, Borders, the RIAA, the MPAA; I love watching these behemoths fail to keep up with our changing world. I would never want to be in charge of a large company. Any company with more than 100 people simply cannot change fast enough to keep up with the evolution of our world. Giant book publishers now have to compete with assholes like me who can publish books in our basements while they're still paying dudes in trucks to ship pallets of paper around the country. Sometimes it can take a long time for these gods to die. The movie industry still manages to stay afloat, as does the music industry, but they kick and scream every step of the way into the new digital world. They can't last forever. And for every industry that can't manage to keep up?

Let them crash.