I believed that dedicated gaming platforms were superior to gaming PCs. I was wrong. While previous consoles wallow in eight-year-old computing hardware and new consoles threaten to remove the basic freedoms we've always enjoyed, PC gaming offers the widest range of games at the lowest prices with the best performance. PCs aren't perfect. The cost is high and Windows isn't exactly an open platform. When it comes to a platform for gaming, however, the PC is currently the king and may be so for quite some time.

Why the Turn Around?

Twelve years ago I wrote an article on why computers suck. More recently I wrote my 2012 state of PC vs. Console Gaming. There are truths to these articles but I was blind to a few things that, recently, changed my point of view. The biggest thing I missed was the growing popularity among both developers and gamers for Steam. Steam changed PC gaming fundamentally. It made it easy to buy, install, and play games on a PC. Steam provided publishers with a fantastic platform to sell games, big and small, from both independent developers and big triple-A publishing companies. You can play games as big as Bioshock Infinite or as small as Awesomenauts.

PC Gamer recently wrote an article that does a better job than I in describing why your next generation console should be a PC. Here's a good quote that shows the value of a platform like Steam:

If youd have bought your third party games on PC, not only would you be able to play them on your new PC, theyd be better. Its not just backwards compatibility: think of the side compatibility benefits. Your game library can exist over multiple machines and form factors. You can have a PC in an office, bedroom or den, or under a television, and a laptop, and in a few years time, an affordable Haswell powered tablet with broadly the same specifications as an Xbox One. Your game library is guaranteed to work across all these machines. And any future machines you buy.

There is a danger and a touch of irony here. Steam is a DRM-focused platform. The games you buy are tied to your account and your account only. You can't sell them, you can't trade them, and if Steam goes away, there's no guarantee that your whole library of games won't go away with it. This is the big argument against Microsoft's draconian Xbox One policies. Steam is a locked-down platform, it's just a platform that can move from one machine to another.

There's another whole new variable in the value of the PC as a gaming platform — Kickstarter. Kickstarter has the potential to offer a new pathway for independent developers, both new and old, to fund and deliver games to a wide and open audience. Former developers like Chris Roberts and Richard Garriott have used it to fund new ventures from a classic portfolio. Crowdfunded games like Torment: Tides of Numenera, Wastelands 2, and Star Citizen won't likely get released on consoles. It's simply too expensive and too limited a platform for crowd-funded games to move to consoles.

All of this means PC gamers will have the widest range of potential games to play.

It Isn't About Marketshare

I made another big mistake when looking at the state of PC gaming vs. console gaming. I overestimated the importance of marketshare. Even though console games often currently outsell PC games, and likely will in the future, it doesn't mean PC gaming can't or won't be profitable. Companies who sell games on PC can get a much higher cut of the price of a game, probably between 70% and 95% depending on their payment and distribution options. I doubt they will get that same sort of cut on future consoles. While a game can't necessarily reach the same number of people, each person it does reach turns more profit per copy. This is the 1,000 true fans concept in action.

Chris Roberts of Wing Commander fame had this to say in an interview on Now Gamer in regards to Kickstarter and gaming:

"I dont think the console manufacturers are going to have the same advantage, before they were willing to lose millions of dollars on the hardware and making it up on the backend and Sony cant afford to do that and I dont think Microsoft is going to support it that much either."

"So theyre going to be on an even footing with everyone else, whether its Steam Box or whatever, and then whats the best platform? Is it a closed platform, which is controlled and curated like Microsoft, Apple and Sony, or is it an open platform that isnt controlled? There are good and bad things about both sides but thats basically the PC platform."

Here he is again in an interview with Gameindustry on the value of a publishing method like Kickstarter:

"In the old model as a developer I would have captured 20 cents on the dollar," Roberts said. "Ultimately that means I can make the same game for a fifth of the revenue, a fifth of the sales, and I can be more profitable, and I can exist on lower unit sales. I think that's good for gamers, because crowdfunding and digital distribution are enabling more nichey stuff to be viable. It's also allowing gamers to have their voice heard, and have their influence earlier in the process. You don't really have your input into how Call of Duty's being made."

Idealism vs. Practicality

Another major gap in my consideration of the value of PC gaming comes from idealism vs. practicality. Dedicated computing platforms should offer a better experience than universal computers playing games. At a technical level, this is still true. If a programmer knows exactly what sort of computing hardware she's writing code for, she knows how to optimize that code to make it perfect. She knows that playtesting will work much better because she only has to test on one platform. She doesn't have to worry about seven layers of APIs, platform layers, and device drivers all working well together. She can write as close to the chipset as she wants.

Except that's not how game development really happens anymore. Big games are written to run across platforms. Most big games are written around multiple types of hardware, different APIs, and with different libraries. Console games can and will ship just as buggy as PC games.

In our practical world, console games don't run nearly as well as PC games on high end PC hardware because consoles haven't kept up. Console costs are still very low but for dedicated gamers willing to spend the money, PCs offer much higher quality games with better visuals and higher framerates.

Windows as a gaming platform offers a better experience for high-end gaming than consoles.

The Current Problems of PC Gaming

Though it's the more practical solution, PC gaming is far from perfect.

For one, PC gaming still requires Windows. Windows is expensive. Windows is locked down. Windows is far from optimized. There's a ton of code being both stored and executed, code that uses up CPU cycles and memory, code that ensures you aren't circumventing DRM, code that doesn't help gaming at all. We've simply overcome this by pushing hardware further and further. Current high-end PC hardware has gotten cheap and powerful enough that, even though Windows isn't optimized, we've blown past it with sheer processing power.

A good PC gaming rig is still very expensive. A decent gaming rig still runs about $800. A high-end rig runs about twice that. That's nearly four to eight times as expensive as a good gaming console. Sure, you can use a computer for a lot more than gaming, but gaming alone is the one activity that pushes the need for higher-end computing performance for most home users. If all you want to do is surf the web, you can spend a lot less.

If you're a dedicated gamer, however, that's the cost we're willing to pay.

Windows 7: The Platform for Open Gaming

Looking back twelve years, I never would have guessed that Windows would become the preferred platform for open gaming. This has less to do with any advancement of Windows and more to do with the fact that every other platform became more closed. As a game publisher, you stand to make a lot more money selling games for Windows because no one else can take a cut. As a gamer, you get a lot more selection of games and a lot less digital rights restrictions than you do on other platforms.

Windows 7 also proved to be a lot more stable. A big improvement for PC gaming over the past decade.

This might not last, though. Microsoft is already looking to lock down Windows 8 and future operating systems. This is enough of a problem that Valve wants to move to their own platform instead. Here's what Gabe Newell of Valve had to say about it in an interview with All Things D:

"I think Windows 8 is a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space. I think well lose some of the top-tier PC/OEMs, who will exit the market. I think margins will be destroyed for a bunch of people."

If Microsoft succeeds in locking future platforms down, we'll be back to square one trying to figure out the best platform for us to get the most games. Valve is working to build a Linux-backed Steam box but I'm not sure if they can get publishers to support it over the short term. Instead, we could be back to game developers losing the majority of their money to the fat-cats who hold the keys to our living room and gamers who only get to play variants of Call of Duty for the next twenty years.

The Wildcard: The Playstation 4

In the 2013 Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3), Sony clearly came out the winner of early rounds of the next generation console wars. Most of this came down to providing the same freedoms consoles already offered. Games aren't locked down to individual users, systems aren't region locked, the system doesn't need to phone home to ensure you're not up to any funny business. Sony also seems very interested in courting independent developers while Microsoft would rather court Comcast to bring more privacy invasion into your "TV watching experiences".

It's quite possible the PS4 will win the next console war and offer PC-like performance for a lot less money. That said, I imagine there will be more games the PS4 won't be able to play than there will be PS4 games that PCs won't be able to play. I'm guessing those who have both will be happiest.

An Apology for Ten Years of Bullshit

I've been an elitist jerk over the past ten years. I focused on the ideal that game consoles were superior to gaming PCs. I ignored Steam. I ignored the turf-grabbing of closed-infrastructure consoles. I focused so much on these ideals that I missed the advantages of PC gaming in the modern world. For those to whom I held up my nose and made snide comments, I apologize.

At the end of the day, the platforms we gamers use matter little. Whether we use an iPhone, an Xbone, a Playstation 4, a high-end PC, or anything in between, we're still all gamers. Whether we play forty seven hundred hours of Eve Online or twelve seconds of Doodle Jump, we're still gamers. However we play and whatever we play on, we have a lot more in common than we have differences. From now on, I'm going to worry less about our differences as gamers and focus on the things that bring us together.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some device drivers to debug.

If you can't hold a complete copy of your data in your hand, you don't own it. If your data isn't in an open format you can open in multiple applications, you don't own it. Big commercial companies won't help you. They want to control your data so you will be forced to stick with them. They don't care what happens when they go out of business, but you will. As more and more of our lives move to "the cloud", we begin to lose ownership of our stuff. It takes a lot of work to maintain ownership of your data.

Principles of the Personal Digital Archive

Below are a few core principles to build and preserve our own digital archives.

• Store your data in files that can be opened with more than one program from more than one company without conversion.
• Stick to ubiquitous formats like HTML, text, jpeg, ePub, ping, mp3, and pdf. Proprietary formats like Word are bad. Video formats are a complete mess right now — I can't help you with those.
• Every time you begin to use a new program or service, know how you can get your data out of it. Try it out and ensure it works.
• Photos, music, and movies will be the hardest thing to handle. Text is easy.
• Any form of digital rights management (DRM) means you don't control the data. If you need a company to unlock your data for you, you don't own it, they do.
• If you died today, what would your loved ones need to do to recover your data. Could they reasonably do that? If not, fix it so they can. This, in particular, includes passwords.

A Personal Digital Archive Plan

Below is my own personal digital archive plan. It may work for you, it may not. The best thing you can do about this is write up your own plan, try it out, see what works, and perform it regularly.

• Store all of the files I care about in Dropbox. Dropbox stores files both locally on PCs or Macs and in the cloud. It's the best way I've seen to back things up both locally and remotely without losing control over my stuff. All the files I save are in open formats without DRM.
• Photos are a mess. I take pictures exclusively with my iPhone and use the Photostream to get them onto my Mac in iPhoto. iPhoto is currently a piece of shit, but it stores photos in a reasonably accessible structure. It also lets me export everything. I've started using Google's new photo backup service on my iPhone to store photos in Google Plus. Hopefully I can find a better way to manage photos but this will have to do for now.
• I used to use Time Machine but switched over to copying zip files of an iPhoto export, a zip of my documents, and a zip of some other big media I rarely touch over to Amazon Glacier. 10GB of storage on Glacier costs about $1.20 a year.
• Most of my writing is on the web. I have a set of scripts that creates a weekly Lifebackup of all my online writings, some select photos, an archive of tweets, an archive of my dad's writings, and archives of old websites, scripts, stories, books and writings. This is my last line in backup. If any one piece of my digital life remains, I hope it is this.
• I use iTunes Match for music and download my favorite playlists locally. Music is replaceable in a critical failure (like Apple shuts down iTunes Match without letting anyone download their stuff, which is unlikely). I'm mainly worried about data I created, though, so I'm not going to go through great pains to back up 20 gb of music.
• I use Twitter and Google Plus for social media. Both the Twitter archive and Google Takeout let you download a complete archive of your stuff from them. Facebook used to offer this but has since stopped. Most people probably don't care but the truth of this is scary. You previously owned your Facebook information but now you don't. Only Facebook has your stuff if you aren't carefully saving it locally, which I doubt most people do.

Every six months I'll do a full backup of my data. Here's the process:

• Export iPhoto to a folder, zip it, and copy it to Amazon Glacier.
• If any other big local data hasn't been archived in the past six months, zip that and put it on Glacier.
• Export Evernote to my Documents.
• Export Twitter to my Documents.
• Export Google Plus data to my Documents.
• Export Google Docs to my Documents.
• Export eBooks to my Documents.
• Download and expand my Lifebackup to my Documents.
• Zip my Documents and copy to Glacier.
• Copy these zips to a USB disk and make sure Michelle knows where it is.

A Dark Future for the Personal Digital Archive

As companies continue to move us to the cloud, we will continue to lose ownership of our digital stuff. It is not in these companies' best interests to give us full open access to all the stuff we own. The more we give them our stuff for "safe keeping" the more locked in we are with them. They are outspending us considerably in this and, the better their systems work, the easier it is for us to lose our ownership. Only by staying conscious of our personal data archive can we ensure we keep ownership over our stuff. We should review our procedures every six months. We should verify our archive is complete every six months. We should migrate our data to new current devices (USB drives, hard drives, etc) every five years.

Every time we start creating or buying digital stuff, we should know how we can get our stuff back out again. Some data, like TV shows, movies, and games, we will never really own again. We aren't buying that stuff, we're just licensing it.

For everything else, though, we should know how we can get our stuff out before we start putting our money, time, or creative effort in.

I thought it would be fun to make some predictions again for the next ten years of technology, so here are my technology predictions for the year 2023.

32x the Computing Power We Have Now

If we generally consider Moore's Law to be in effect, we can expect computing power to grow 32 times over the next ten years. While Moore's Law generally follows CPU power, it isn't that far off for all general computing capability taken in whole. We will see this 32x overall power increase in a mixture of CPU performance, memory, video performance, and network bandwidth. Battery limitations will keep up with this power increase, though not necessarily at the same pace. Increases in CPU efficiency will mean we can have small computers that can last for years on a single battery charge. Think about how long digital watches last now on a single battery.

Dominant Mobile Platforms

I think it's safe to say that mobile computing is the future of information consumption. For general information consumption and communication, the mobile platform will be what we all generally use.

I'm not sure Google Glass or wearable computing will be that future. I don't think head-mounted displays offer that much more to us than a mobile computer in our pocket. We might, however, come to some version of Snow Crash where a small headset feeds us augmented or virtual reality.

Audio-controlled systems will also get better. Systems like Siri and Google Now let us interact with our computer without the need for a screen. People already wear bluetooth headsets everywhere. As computers can better understand and communicate with us aurally, this might become a new dominant way we interact with our mobile computers.

Choosing A Lifelong Stack

Over the past ten years, megacorporations such as Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook have taken over the once open web. They've closed the doors and built proprietary stacks of hardware, software, networks, distribution platforms, and online services. Each of these technology megacorps will seal up their stack and grow stronger as they lock things down more and more.

Each piece of content you buy locks you further in to the stack. Our allegiance to the stack we choose will become our new digital citizenship. I'm personally a member of the Apple stack. I've got way too many shows purchased with them to painlessly leave them for one of the other stacks. My music is all held in iTunes Match. This is only going to get worse over the next ten years. In the future, children will follow the stacks their parents had. They'll inherit vast pools of encrypted data owned by the megacorps and licensed to the consumer.

The End of Physical Media

Blu-ray will be the last physical digital medium for movies. The cost, convenience, and control of digitally distributed media makes life easier for consumers and gives content owners the control they've always wanted over their material. Books, music, and video games will all follow the same path.

Digital distribution will be the end of the middle men. Best Buy and Game Stop will be artifacts of the past.

4K TVs

4k resolutions will be the new standard resolutions for TVs and computer screens 10 years from now.

The Next Game Consoles

After the 2013 generation of gaming consoles, the next set of consoles will come out in 2018. They will be digital only distribution systems tied to games, movies, and TV shows held within their stack. They will be small and relatively low power rather than the most cutting edge platforms. They will be roughly four to eight times more powerful than the 2013 generation. Some or all of these new consoles will be from companies who had not yet previously developed a game console such as Valve, Apple, or Amazon. These consoles will support 4k resolutions and one or more of these systems will support a virtual reality headset like the Oculus Rift.

Nintendo will cease to make new consoles, going the way of Sega and licensing out Mario, Metroid, and Zelda to other systems.

Independently Produced Content in Massive Online Games

The next massive online game to make a big splash will bet he one that lets its customers design their own content, such as a virtual dungeon, and sell it with 30% of the revenue going back to the game manufacturer and 70% going to the creator.

What would World of Warcraft be like if there were ten thousand instances you might try out, all lovingly created by people who know what sort of content we actually want? The game producer would make millions on content they never even created. Independent game designers would make thousands building game content and selling them directly to customers. Customers make out by having a nearly infinite pool of custom-built content to digest for not a lot of money. This will be the next big thing in massive online games.

3D Printing

There's a misconception that 3d printing is cheaper than overseas plastic manufacturing. Cost isn't the reason 3d printing will be a big deal, customization is. My hope is that, in ten years, we'll have desktop 3d printers that use recycled plastic to turn plastic cups into flower pots when we need them. I'd love to see desktop 3d printed custom miniatures for my D&D game, including color, but I think that's more than 10 years off.

The big struggle with 3d printing will come from control by both politicians and megacorps. 3d printing will be rife with intellectual property theft. Why buy a Mickey Mouse toy at the store when you can just print your own? The solution to this is mandatory digital rights management in every US 3d printer that only accepts "approved" models. Yes, hackers and makers will get around this, but the rest of the populous will have to suffer with buying pre-approved models for digitally limited commercial 3d printers.

Medicine and the Quantified Life

The 32x leap in computing power will be most felt with medicine and physical monitoring of our bodies. We're starting to see movement this way with things like the Fitbit, the Withings scale, and life monitoring apps on our smartphones. How soon until we can measure vital statistics, blood sugar levels, calorie intake, calorie expenditure, and other things? How soon until our insurance companies and health management firms start to get a hold of it?

There will certainly be a struggle for privacy with this sort of data, but if we can get a hold of it ourselves, we can learn much more about our actual behavior instead of just our perception.

Space Robots

I just started reading Arthur C. Clarke's Songs of Distant Earth. Clarke makes a great case for the idea that robot ships will be the future of space travel. Getting humans out of Earth's gravity and surviving in space is a tremendous pain in the ass. Sending out robots is much cheaper and much less dangerous. Robot ships can travel all throughout the solar system and even outside the galaxy. We can explore other planets and beam back the results just as we did with Curiosity.

This is more than ten years out but the future of the human race resides in robotic ships soaring throughout the Galaxy on billion year voyages filled with frozen genetic material and databases full of our digital lives.

So there are my predictions for the next ten to one billion years out. Check back in 2023 and we'll see how I did!

Fifteen years ago it was important to include a comment system in a website or blog if you wanted to build a community. These days, websites are no longer the hub of your community, social networks are. Websites and articles now float around these centralized hubs, linked and shared through the core social networks we've built surrounding our particular topic. Removing comments also dramatically simplifies your website, making it easier to maintain, safer to run, and requiring no moderation. Blogs simply don't need comments anymore. Anyone who wants to share an opinion has a thousand services to do so.

The New Web

The web is a very different place than it was fifteen years ago. Online communities don't swirl around particular websites. Instead, readers post the articles they like across their social network of choice; Twitter, Facebook, or Google Plus. Communities now centralize in these social networks and our beloved articles hang off of them at the edges. Articles are now an extension of a conversation, not the beginning or end of one. Someone my write an article, some people may post it to Twitter, other people read it and write their own articles, those articles are shared, and the cycle continues.

Simplifying the Technology

As ubiquitous as comment systems are and as long as they've been used, they are still very difficult to maintain. As a website developer, you have a choice of going with a hosted solution such as Wordpress.com or Blogger, or running your own software. Most bloggers choose WordPress to run their blogs, but WordPress is notoriously hard to keep up to date and fiddly when it comes to plug-ins and custom templates. After using it for years, I finally gave it up and wrote my own simplified software, Pueblo.

When you remove comments, you remove all need to run CGI scripts on the open web — a common vector for hacking attempts. You also remove any ability for a spammer to fill your site up with links for online gambling, drugs, and porn. When you remove comments, the whole operation of running a blog gets a lot easier.

Earning Your Keep

When we build a website, we fight for every reader that comes by to read our post. We fight for this by writing great content, writing it consistently, writing things that people actually want to read, and engaging with the community of people who might be interested. We drive every pixel on our page to provide something interesting and valuable to those who spend their time reading our work.

Yet when we put comments on our site, we're giving up our own site to those who haven't earned any right to get the visibility we're giving them. When I hear pro-comment arguments, I often feel like I hear that the argument is for exactly that, that every reader has a right to have their opinions read at the same level as the original work. That's simply not true. Content creators fight for every reader yet commenters don't have to do anything at all other than post a comment to get nearly the same level of attention.

There's no lack of places for people to write their opinions. Numerous websites offer free blogging packages, the most common being either Tumblr or WordPress.com.

There's no reason someone can't make their opinions heard on any topic. If their opinion is interesting enough or valuable enough to get attention, it will. If someone reads something on one site, disagrees with it, and writes up their own opinion on their Tumblr site, they will get the level of attention they deserve.

It isn't About Cutting Communication

Not having comments doesn't mean we don't have to listen to our readers and engage with our community. I have an open email address on every page I write and I get lots of good and interesting email related to the topics about which I write. I also spend a fair bit of time on Twitter and a little less time on Google Plus. These are great places to talk to people with like minds and interesting opinions. Like the web itself, those worthy of attention often get the attention they deserve. More importantly, everyone can engage at the same level in the same space.

Everyone in the free world has a chance to speak on the net. It isn't the responsibility of every website to offer up space, time, money, and attention for it.

"I didn't mean to take up all your sweet time. I'll give it right back to ya one of these days."

- Jimi Hendrix, Voodoo Child

Reading someone else's personal 2012 year-in-review is about as interesting as listening to them describe their latest colonoscopy procedure. That image firmly in mind, I give you a self-absorbed look at my own successes and failures in 2012 backed by data. In my attempt to give you something valuable, I leave you with three potentially useful observations:

1. Following daily goals and habits makes me happier than focusing on big year-long resolutions.
2. Digging into data and metrics helps me focus on actual behavior instead of assumptions.
3. It's easy to spend all our time tweaking and not enough time actually doing this stuff.

The rest of this article describes the daily goals I've decided are important to me and the metrics I've recorded to determine my success. If this is of little interest to you, please, move on with my blessing to something more relevant to your own life.

Relooking at the Ben Franklin Chart

In the 1700s, Benjamin Franklin used to keep a little book containing his 13 virtues. I read about this in his autobiography back in 2005 and I loved the idea. Based on this idea, I came up with a list of ten goals I wanted to accomplish every day. Though focused daily, each of them aimed me towards a larger state of being I want to achieve. Unlike Franklin, I track successes instead of failures. Over time I hope to build each of them into a habit I no longer need to even think about. My daily goals include:

• Read
• Write
• Work
• Relax
• Love
• Befriend
• Simplify
• Benefit
• Eat Well
• Exercise

Each week, during my weekly review I write a list of these ten things on the left side of the page in my Moleskine notebook. Across the top I put the dates for the next seven days. Each day I fill in the checks for the goals in which I succeeded in the previous day. In practice, I often forget and end up filling it in at the end of the week.

In the beginning of 2012 I transcribed these check-marks into a giant spreadsheet and analyzed the data to determine monthly and year-end totals. Here are the results by month in a heat map:

Guess in which months I took vacations.

These ten daily goals are useful ways to look at the rest of the metrics I recorded this year. These sources of data include Omnifocus, AT&T, Amazon, LoseIt, Twitter, Facetime, my daily goal spreadsheet, and my own websites.

For books, games, and TV shows, I also included a score of my enjoyment on a scale from 1 to 10.

Let's look at the list.

Read

Books read: 10: Mistborn (8/10), Cloud Atlas (8/10), Wool (8/10), Great by Choice (7/10), Joe Golem (8/10), The Wind Through the Keyhole (9/10), Snow Crash (10/10), Ready Player One (10/10), The Hunger Games (6/10), 11/22/63 (10/10).

Daily checklist markings for "Read": 231 (63%)

Create

Words written on Sly Flourish.com: 42,979 words total in 50 articles.

Words written on MikeShea.net: 11,648 words total in 12 articles.

Words written for the book The Lazy Dungeon Master: 34,205 words. 280 copies sold in December 2012.

Words written for D&D freelance assignments: 6 assignments, 34,227 words

Tweets from mshea: 875

Tweets from SlyFlourish: 3,195

Total D&D books sold: 672

Omnifocus actions completed for Sly Flourish: 433 (18% of total actions)

Daily checklist markings for "Create": 249 (68%)

Work

Work-focused Omnifocus actions completed: 985 (41% of total actions)

Daily Checklist Markings for Work: 230 (63%)

Relax

Video Games Played: 7: Dishonored (9/10), Borderlands 2 (8/10), Assassin's Creed Revelations (7/10), Batman Arkham City (8/10), Mass Effect 3 (9/10), Super Mario 3D (7/10), Journey (9/10).

Shows Watched: 62: Sons of Anarchy (7/10), Breaking Bad (10/10), Walking Dead (8/10), Spartacus Blood and Sand (7/10), Game of Thrones (8/10), Castle (8/10), Mad Men (10/10).

Omnifocus actions completed for "Relax and Enjoy Life": 79 (3% of total actions)

Daily checklist markings for "Relax": 309 (85%)

Love

Coffees enjoyed with Michelle: 162

Calls to Mom: 52 (528 total minutes)

Facetime calls with Mom: 47

Omnifocus actions taken to support family and friends: 188 (8% of total actions)

Omnifocus actions completed for home and family care: 143 (6% of total actions)

Daily checklist markings for "Love": 311 (85%)

Befriend

Dungeons and Dragons games played: 73 (44 home games, 7 one-shot games, 12 games played in my friend's campaign, 6 games played at D&D Experience, 4 games played at Gencon)

Calls to my friend Ben, the Stay-At-Home-Dad: 259 (4,391 total minutes)

Calls to other friends: 47 (671 total minutes)

Omnifocus actions taken for running D&D games: 269 (11% of total actions)

Daily checklist markings for "Befriend": 235 (64%)

Simplify

Daily checklist markings for "Simplify": 233 (64%)

Benefit

Daily checklist markings for "Benefit": 109 (30%)

Note: An easy way to complete "Simplify" and "Benefit" on the same day every day is to pick one thing I have in my possession and leave it out for people to take at work. I could do a big bunch of this a few times a year, but a daily habit with just one item reinforces the behavior.

Eat Well

Number of days I recorded calories in LoseIt: 276 (76%)

Average calories recorded per day: 2,330

Highest weight recorded: +7.7 pounds from 1 January 2012

Lowest weight recorded: -9.9 pounds from 1 January 2012, measured on on 21 March 2012

Total weight fluctuation: +17.6 pounds from lowest to highest

Omnifocus actions taken for health and well being: 199 (8%)

Daily checklist markings for "Eat Well": 132 (36%)

Exercise

Stairs climbed at the office: 56,400 (24 stairs a floor, 5 floors twice a day, 5 times a week, 47 weeks of the year)

Calories burned climbing office stairs: 9,024 (.16 calories per stair)

Miles walked with Jebu (70% with Michelle): 913

Daily checklist markings for "Exercise": 231 (63%)

2013's Focus: Eating Well

I plan to continue focusing on my ten daily goals in 2013. In particular, I want to focus on "eat well". Other daily habits I want to reinforce include:

• Read 15 minutes a day before bed. (Read, Relax)
• Write D&D material useful for both Sly Flourish and my own D&D game. (Create, Befriend, Benefit)
• Listen to Michelle during our two 30-minute daily dog walks. (Exercise, Relax, Love)
• Give away a single book, game, piece of clothing, or DVD each day. (Simplify, Benefit)
• Listen to my friends during our conversations. (Befriend)
• Eat under 2200 calories a day. (Eat Well)
• Walk up 5 flights of stairs twice a work day. (Exercise)

The 2013 Checklist

I've decided to tweak my checklist a little bit, eliminating a couple of items that didn't really do much and adding a couple more specific ones I want to spend more time on. Here's the new list:

• Read
• Write
• Code
• Game
• Love
• Befriend
• Eat Well
• Exercise

If I cared to, I could combine write, code, and game into "create" and be down to six. Create is pretty fuzzy, though, and I'd rather lean towards specific so I know what I've done. I started using this checklist in March. We'll see if it sticks.

Measuring a Life Well Lived

Each of us has a limited amount of time in our lives. How we spend that time will determine how well our lives are lived. Humans are terrible at self-evaluation so we have to fall back on ways to measure our output. It's often difficult to break out of our busy daily lives and focus on what is most important. Focusing on small, specific, and daily goals seems to work better for me than worrying about larger goals. These small goals lead me to my own definition of a life well lived.

How will you measure the happiness and success of your life?

"If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

- Carl Sagan

My good friend Dave the Game wrote an excellent article entitled Get Bit and the Tabletop Effect describing his experience in getting his game, Get Bit, on Wil Wheaton's Tabletop. In it, Dave makings the following quote:

With that in mind, I get asked relatively often how it came about. It's not a story that I think is duplicatable for other game designers (though I'll tackle that question specifically later), it just might provide some insight into how it all came about, and how having some advantages plus working hard plus getting lucky can lead to some pretty cool things.

Dave does a great job covering how his game got picked up by Wheaton and Tabletop but there's a bigger point in the statement he made I want to discuss and that's recreating success. I would argue that the type of success Dave saw with Get Bit is repeatable with a simple plan:

Start making awesome things and keep doing it for ten years.

Note that I said simple, I didn't say easy. Making something that really gets people's attention isn't just luck, it's a lot of hard work building up skill and building up a reputation for delivering awesome things.

Stefan Pokorny and Monty Cook

Another good friend of mine and I were talking about the Dwarven Forge Game Tile Kickstarter and he asked how we could get in on something like that. I told him "easy, we start by running a successful gaming company for the next 18 years". That's what Stefan did to get $300,000 in Kickstarter funds in three days. Stefan has worked hard over the past 18 years learning his craft and producing the best 3D fantasty terrain available. He has struggled with it for a long time, connecting with his tribe at conventions like Gencon for nearly two decades and he's likely run into quite a few of rough patches along the way. I'm guessing it's never been easy.

It takes a long time to build up the skill and reputation to make something truly remarkable. It takes time and effort learning how to make awesome things and building up the reputation to be successful in an attention economy.

That's exactly what Monte Cook did with Numenera, a Kickstarter that pulled in over $500,000. Do you want to pull in that sort of attention (and dollars) for your RPG product? Simple. Start publishing remarkable roleplaying games and do it for the next twenty years.

Here's an interesting thought when we consider the attention economy and Monte Cook's time at Wizards of the Coast working on D&D Next. I have no idea what happened behind the scenes on his departure but I bet Wizards didn't pay him $500,000 to work on D&D Next. The value of his reputation has a clear quantitative measure and I bet it was worth more than Wizards was willing to pay him. Whatever his reasons for leaving the D&D Next team, I'm betting it ended up as a good business decision in the end.

Good is What People Pay For

It's easy to argue against the drive of the masses when looking at what is valuable and what is not. Some shitty movies end up pulling in a lot of money while some great ones get ignored. In general, value is a very easy thing to determine: value is what people pay for.

Stephen King says it best in his most excellent book On Writing:

"If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented."

The creative world is in a much better spot than when King wrote this. We live in a wonderful age where corporate middle-men no longer determine what people see, hear, play, or read. Nothing stands between you and a billion people except the quality of your work and your ability to market it. Twitter, Amazon, Kickstarter, Lulu, and even Facebook (ugh) all help you get your art in front of people. Sure, everyone else in the world is trying to get attention but even your post apocalypse novel can compete with the Walking Dead if it's remarkable enough.

What makes your piece of art remarkable? What makes it different and cool and interesting in the eyes of your audience? Why would they spend their time, attention, and money on your thing when so much else demands the same? If people aren't buying your thing, it's a lot less likely that you don't have the visibility you need and a lot more likely that it's not worth people's attention. If you want attention, you have to create something remarkable. Not just good — remarkable.

How do you make something remarkable? Work at your medium of choice over and over and over again. Ship. Get it out there. Know your tribe. Get good honest feedback on your work.

The Luck Factor

The easiest argument against these ideas is that luck plays a big factor. It's the same argument I bet Stephen King hears about the light bill quote. Somewhere there's a guy in a little cabin writing the best science fiction novel ever read but he'll die of an embolism and the novel will be eaten by crows before we ever get to see it. Bullshit, I say.

Dean Gilbert, the guy who knows why you're so miserable all the time, has a fantastic TED talk entitled why we make bad decisions that touches on why we might fixate on these stories of lost genius. We suck at really understanding the odds because we fixate on individual stories instead of the bigger picture. Let me spell it out for you:

It's far less likely that your genius is going undiscovered than it is that your work simply isn't that great to begin with.

So much less likely that we shouldn't even pay attention to it at all. Instead, get better at your craft, make some stuff, get it in front of people who will care about it, and then make more stuff.

Back to Wil Wheaton

Looking back at Dave's original article, it is true that his process isn't repeatable. You're not likely to get your game about sharks and dismemberment on Wil Wheaton's Tabletop show. Luckily, Tabletop isn't the only way to get your work seen, heard, and played. There are an infinite number of paths to success. If you work hard, work for a long time, and end up making lots of awesome things that people care about, you'll get the attention you deserve.

In the mean time, it's time to get back to work.

"Monkey Mind: A Buddhist term meaning 'unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable'."

- Wikipedia: Monkey Mind

"Had he been a Manni holy man, he might not have even been thirsty; he could have watched his own body dehydrate with clinical, detached attention, watering its crevices and dark inner hollows only when his logic told him it must be done."

- Stephen King, The Gunslinger

30 Second Summary

We all feel anxiety at different points in our life. We might feel that tightening knot in our stomach as a flash of panic hits us or wake up with a work problem first and foremost on our mind. When minor anxiety hits us, there are a few things we can do to help deal with it. Here are a few:

• Look clinically at the feeling itself. What's causing it? Is it warranted?
• Recognize it for what it is, a personal physiological reaction to something.
• Figure out what actions we can take to deal with it.
• If you can't deal with it, find other ways to engage your mind.
• Spend time on activities that bring you flow.

Time for the Disclaimer

I'm no shrink, and there are over 24,000 books on handling anxiety. Anxiety and panic attacks can be a real problem, not just some first-world problem for white collar "knowledge workers" (I use quotes to keep my feet out of the bullshit). If anxiety is getting in the way of your life, this article isn't what you need. If anxiety, depression, and panic is a real problem, seek professional help. This article is a way for me to bring my thoughts together on the topic, poke and prod the ideas in public, and find what works best for smaller bouts of non-debilitative anxiety.

On Anxiety

We all feel anxiety. Regardless of how much we've simplified our life, reduced our inboxes, and focused ourselves on the most important areas of our lives — anxiety still flows in from both seen and unseen forces. It sneaks up while we might be involved in our favorite activities. It manifests as a tightening in the pit of our stomach, a slight flow of adrenaline, or simply a preoccupation on a topic about which we can do very little.

This sort of anxiety is just one of the irrational behaviors of the monkey mind, a general metaphor for the chaos of uncontrolled thought.

Recognize the Monkey Mind

The first thing we can do to deal with the monkey mind is to recognize it for what it is. This is one of the better techniques for dealing with panic attacks. If you can step outside the situation for a moment, step outside your own body, you can look at it and try to understand it. You can look objectively at both the physical and mental effects and any potential causes. Many times these causes do not warrant the effects. This doesn't mean one should disocunt the feelings — we feel however we feel &mdash but it means we can get a better undestanding of why.

Understand What's Really Going On

All of these ideas circle around the idea that we must first understand what is really going on, recognize it as our own problem and not strictly an effect of the situation. This is where we can change the nature of our internal questions from externally focused to internally focused ones. Consider the following:

• Why is that guy such a jerk?
• How come they keep giving me so much to do?
• What can I do to make that other person stop doing that thing they keep doing?
• Why is the world so unfair?
• Why is that irrational person being so irrational?
• Why won't that jackass just listen to me?

Now compare to the following:

• Why do I feel like this? Why do I care?
• Are these physical reactions worthy of the actual problem?
• Is this actually a big deal? Will I care about this in a month?
• What's the worst that can happen?
• What small thing can I do right now to help make this better?
• What am I going to do next?
• What else can I put my mind on that's more productive?

Internalization helps us move our focus from trying to change the world around us to changing how we behave and act in the world as it is. It's the key idea behind the serenity prayer and the cornerstone of a lot of mental health work.

Analyzing The Situation, Avoiding Decision Paralysis

One of the reason nerds love system like Getting Things Done is that the system returns us to widgets. GTD takes big hairy problems and breaks them down into small simple steps with clear actions that help us move things forward. Breaking down the things that bring us anxiety into small actionable steps helps us turn unknown problems into things we can face.

Sometimes even after you've done all you can do, after you have your actions taken care of, you still have that anxiety. It isn't gone yet. It may not be a big deal in the length of your life or in the history of the solar system but it's a big deal right now. How can you tame the monkey mind that keeps stewing about it?

Find Your Flow

What activity do you do that fully engages your mind? What activity are you best at in your life? What is the activity you perform in which time slips away completely? Those activities are where you find your flow. For me, I find my flow in reading, writing, coding, gaming, watching exellent movies or TV shows.

My mom loves making jewelry and singing in the choir. It doesn't matter if she's in a half-empty church or in front of a bishop. When she gets into the song, she loses sense of everything else. She's "in the zone". She doesn't have time to think about reorganizations at work or some bit of Facebook drama. She's wired in to what she's doing.

Most of us, I believe, have activities like this. We have moments where we completely lose ourselves in a single activity. I have it right now as I write these words — writing self help bullshit is apparently one way I find my flow. What are the things in which you find flow? When do you lose track of time? What activities make you feel like you have total agency and control? What activities take over your whole brain, pushing out the monkey mind and focusing you on the moment?

Find those activities. Embrace them. Write them down. And delve deep into them when the monkey mind gets out of control.

• How do we save our own?
• How do we get more from others?

The article referenced above is a long article, but it's worth your attention. One of his final points is particularly interesting: His final points are particularly interesting:

• As the flow of attention becomes more important, so will cyberspace.
• The importance of stars will increase, with a corresponding decline in power for those who insist on anonymity.
• A lessening role for large organizations, because they can't focus or trade attention easily.
• The same goes for governments, whose role will diminish as well.
• Almost everyone will have a personal Web site.
• For a secure old age, you will not want to rely entirely on Social Security or any kind of investment, monetary savings, or pension fund.
• In projects of all kinds, comprehen- sive lists of credits for everyone involved will become as common and necessary as in Hollywood films now.

Think about the second-to-last bullet. You don't want to lean on money as a safety net for retirement, you want to rely on your ability to capture attention — to be valuable to people. I suppose this is the key concept in knowledge work, your value comes from your applicability to another's interests or needs. You have to have knowledge that others perceive as valuable. John Gruber does.

Twenty Five Ways to Save Your Attention

Let's look at the other side; saving attention. You can't really save attention, you can only be conscious of where you're spending it. You can spend it watching 20 minutes of ads per hour of the Oscars or you can learn how to program a computer. We're going to have to get better at figuring out how to refocus our attention because everyone else in the world is figuring out how to take it from us. This is why I experimented with info agent and plan further such experiments. Thats where I want to spend my attention.

Here are twenty five other ways to refocus your own:

• Use a browser ad-blocker plug-in to get rid of web ads.
• Stop watching mainstream TV - use on-demand streaming shows with no ads.
• Stop listening to commercial ad-based radio, listen to audio-books or podcasts.
• Use a podcast app that lets you skip ads like Instacast.
• Stop using RSS, surf the sites you love when you really want to read them.
• Take a Facebook or Twitter break.
• Mute friends that make you frown.
• Save articles using Instapaper or Safari's Reading List. Read your saved articles later instead of randomly surfing.
• Stop reading books you don't enjoy after the first 50 pages.
• Stop playing games you don't enjoy after the first five hours.
• Steer conversations towards stimulating topics instead of mainstream debate.
• Avoid the ignorant.
• Focus on the best way to learn that works for you.
• Watch only the movies and TV shows that you love.
• Use and live by a good goal / project / action list system.
• Get control over your email.
• Cancel your land line.
• Shut off your voicemail and redirect people to email.
• Turn off instant messenger apps.
• Walk in silence for 30 minutes a day; leave the phone at home.
• Eliminate and renegotiate low-value commitments.
• Eliminate projects you don't care about.
• Ignore comment boards and forums.
• Ask trusted friends for recommendations on books, movies, TV shows, blog posts, and other things you might surf for yourself.
• Focus your time, attention, and energy on the projects that matter the most to you.

News, blogs, and social networks demand more and more of our time to process an ever-growing torrent of noise and separate it from the stuff we really care about. Tweet Threshold is a Python script that helps you filter noise from Twitter so you can read only the items worthy of your attention and refocus your attention on doing things instead of processing and consuming. This script and it's related files are all hosted at Github and released under a Creative Commons license.

Moving from Urgent to Important

"The most essential service of the next decade will be the one that keeps you the best informed in the least amount of time. Theres more to life than staring at screens all day."

- Mike Davidson, VP of design, Twitter, and founder, Newsvine

In the popular self-help book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey describes how we might move our time, effort, and attention to activities of long-term importance instead of the urgent distractions we face throughout much of our day. Urgency isn't importance, regardless of how most of us act. Covey puts this together in a four-section grid:

Ever since 9/11, mainstream news has moved from importance to urgency. We've grown used to the idea that we have to know what's going on right now. This attitude has filtered down and propagated to every news site and blog on every topic in which we might be interested. Regardless of the topic, everyone seems out to be the first to break a story, even if the results of that story have little to no direct impact on us.

We've become news junkies.

Now it's filtered down to Twitter, a social network built on urgency. We can learn anything that happens the minute it happens by the very people it happened to. Do we really need to know it? Must we spend four hours a day watching Twitter? Must we have a constantly open chat log with the whole planet invited in? Is this really important or is it simply an urgent distraction?

I say we have better things to do and better places to put out attention. Tweet Threshold is the coded manifestation of the philosophy that urgency isn't importance.

Outsourcing Our Attention

Thousands to millions of people might monitor the very same Twitter streams you do. When they like something, they retweet it to share it with those who follow them. Their own brain power processes incoming information and determines what is important.

Instead of working in parallel with all of that brain power, why not work in series? Why not let these other brains work for you? Imagine if you could run your own MapReduce cluster across human brains instead of the CPUs of commodity computer systems.

Yesterday's News Today

One of the HTML pages included in this script gives us a different way of looking at the news. Rather than showing you all of the news up to the hour, it only shows you news from yesterday, ranked by score, and then all of the news of the previous six days before yesterday, also ranked by score. It won't show you anything from today. You'll see today's news tomorrow. Check out my own personal news page as an example.

This may seem counterintuitive. Since it only shows you news from yesterday, you're only going to check it once a day. There's no reason to check it more than that. Now you can catch up on all the news you care about, pre-filtered by other people, once a day in just a couple of minutes. This moves the urgent distractions of up-to-the-minute Twitter surfing to focusing on pre-filtered news of importance read only once a day. Let's look at this on the Covey chart:

What This Script Does

This script reaches out to Twitter and pulls down the latest 100 tweets in JSON from one or more authenticated timelines. It saves any tweets containing a URL to a local SQLite3 database. From this database, the script outputs an HTML page filtered by an algorithm based on retweets / followers with a minimum threshold so you just get the ones a lot of people thought were retweet-worthy.

The score is determined by running an algorithm on retweets / followers for Twitter and normalizing the results. You can change the threshold of the visible score in the parameters and edit the white list and black list to eliminate any tweets containing certain words or showing tweets from white-listed users you always want to see regardless of score.

This program is intended to run every hour as a scheduled event or cron job.

How Do I Use It?

You'll want some experience working with Python to run this script. This script uses Tweepy to handle the interactions with Twitter and Jinja2 to handle the HTML templating.

To run this script, you'll need to register this script as an application with Twitter. See https://dev.twitter.com/apps for more information.

Change the parameters in "fetch_tweets.py" script to your own twitter authentication codes and the local directories where you want the results. Modify the html_template.txt template to suit your needs. Set up a scheduled event like a cronjob to run "fetch_tweets.py" once every hour.

The index.html file only shows tweets from yesterday and the previous seven days. This is on purpose. Who really needs up-t-the-minute news these days? Relax and spend some time in a park for God's sake.

Saving You Time and Attention for More Important Things

The whole intent of this script is to save you time and help you redirect your attention to doing things instead of just surfing news all the time. As the stream of information grows ever wider, it's important that we have some way to sift through, find the stuff we care about, and ignore the rest. This script helps you use the experience of other people, through retweets and upvotes, to bring the right things to your attention.

Released Under a Creative Commons License

This script is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license so you can distribute it, modify it, and share it as long as you release it under a similar license and attribute the original program to me.

A Small Solution to a Growing Problem

We're going to need better agents like this if we want to take back our attention from the hordes of content producers demanding their space in our brains. I'm hoping to continue working on this problem or finding better solutions. We can't trust the big companies like Twitter or Google to do this for us. It isn't in their interests to help us avoid using their sites. We can only trust our own tools and our ourselves to do it for us.

If you're interested in this topic, know of some other tools like this, or have used the script and found it useful, please send me an email to mike@mikeshea.net to let me know.

For the sake of this discussion, consider an "inbox" any place new commitments, whether they be messages, packages, or any other source of "stuff". There are three ways to deal with continually inflating inboxes: manage them, eliminate them, or not give a shit. There's no reason we can't use all three of these methods at the same time. Start by eliminating any inbox you don't care about to stop the flow of new low-priority commitments into your life. Build a system to manage the remaining inboxes you DO care about. Finally, ignore any inbox you can't either eliminate or manage — just let it fill up and overflow. Quit worrying. Relax. Go focus on the big things in your life.

Ignoring Email and Focusing on the Big Things

I had lunch with a couple of friends today and one of them said something pretty profound. I'm paraphrasing his quote here but it went along the lines of "If you want to get ahead, stop answering your email." He wasn't really kidding either. "If they want to find you, they'll find you. Instead, focus on the big things." I thought it was a pretty good example of the difference between 7 Habits and Getting Things Done. 7 Habits says to "put first things first" by focusing on big important things than small urgent things. GTD teaches us how to deal with the giant pile of urgent things filling up our inboxes so that we can then, once it is all clear, focus on the important ones.

One of GTD's problems, however, is that we never really clear everything off and everyone else in the world seems to want to get a new inbox into your life. We GTD ninjas end up spending our lives constantly cleaning and dusting, going crazy if we see a stack of mail more than six letters high. Everything that enters our lives is a commitment we must resolve. That can get pretty paralyzing if taken too far.

The iOS Red Dot of Failed Commitments

Consider iOS apps. It seems like every iOS app we install on our iPhones wants to immediately notify us of any tiny event it considers critical to our lives and we consider little more than an annoyance. Our app screens are littered with tiny red dots, each one of which displays a number of commitments we have failed to meet. Each of those apps with their red dots stares at us, pouring shame over our lives for our failure to live up to all of the Words with Friends games we've missed or the number of podcasts sitting unlistened in our queue.

The Commitments of Inboxes

We've discussed the value of eliminating inboxes before. It's bad enough to bring more crap into our lives, but when we bring crap that has some sort of additional demand as well, that's when our lives get really complex. It's the reason parents would rather give a kid a fake stuffed puppy than a real one. The real one adds all sorts of crap (literally) into your life that you now have to deal with. It's the difference between buying a copy of Wired at the newsstand (are there newsstands anymore?) and subscribing to it — adding a new stream of paper into your mailbox and a nearly constant deluge of requests to extend and renew your subscription for the next seventy years.

If we consider adding a new "thing" into your life a constant, adding a new inbox is a multiplier. The commitment never ends. It's like Lucy eating all the chocolate on the conveyer belt. It never ends. It's the difference between bringing in a glass of water and bringing in a hose that sits on your living room floor streaming water onto your fine beige carpet.

Eliminating Inboxes

Luckily, we capitalize off of that same multiplier when we eliminate an inbox. Think how good it feels to know that a source of nearly constant new "stuff" is cut off; that we no longer need to worry about it again. It's one thing to get rid of a pair of shoes. It's something else to turn off the subscription to the shoe-of-the-month club.

So you don't walk away from this article without a single piece of practical advice, here are a few inboxes you might turn off:

• Extra voicemail accounts (try eliminating your work voice mail account - see who complains)
• Extra phone numbers (one or two is probably the most anyone needs)
• Extra social network accounts (one is probably enough)
• Extra email accounts (reroute them to a single inbox if you don't want to turn them off completely)
• Subscription services you no longer care about
• Magazine subscriptions you're not using
• Regular events on your schedule that aren't really important to you
• Parasitic relationships (there are a million self-help books about this, I bet)
• Bills (auto-pay or get your bank to pay them for you)
• Things that require constant or regular maintenance that don't matter to you
• Extra computers, mobile devices, or other electronics that require updating

If you have other sources you've cut off that helped you simplify your life, send me an email to mike@mikeshea.net and I'll add it to the list.

Ignoring Inboxes

Like aggressive advertisement, it seems everyone else in the world wants to drag in that sewer pipe into your living room and start spraying their crap into your world. It seems like every major company wants to bring a new inbox into your life. Sometimes, like the stupid Starbucks notification I see every day on my iPhone, we can't get rid of. Instead, we have to do something else, something very hard for us obsessive GTDers.

We have to stop giving a shit.

We have to learn to let it go, to let it pile on up with every expectation that we will never check it, never care for it, never worry about it when it gets full or overflows. Let them scream. Let those numbers in the little red dots increase. Let the Google Plus Eye of Sauron go past 99+. Worry about something else; something that actually matters to you.

Like advertisement, We'll never clear our view of these alerts and notifications completely. We'll always have the annoying car salesman in the suit stomping around in our zen rock garden. That doesn't mean we have to let it into our brains.

Sources:

• Buzzfeed: Hunter S. Thompson's Daily Routine Was Way More Intense Than Your Daily Routine
• The Project Gutenberg eBook of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Contents

• About This Essay
• Why e-Publishing?
• Publishing an E-book in Ten Minutes
• A More Detailed Process
• Writing in Markdown
• Converting to HTML
• Building E-books with Calibre
• PDF or No PDF?
• Publishing on the Kindle Store
• Publishing on Apple’s iBooks
• Publishing to Barnes and Noble
• Publishing Your Own E-book Package
• Selling Paper Copies on Lulu
• Other Publishers
• Avoiding Unneeded Services
• Designing a Cover
• Page Design
• Editing and Copy Editing
• Focusing Your Work
• Understanding Your Community
• Pricing
• Real World Sales Examples
• Escaping the Gatekeepers
• Recommended Reading
• References

About This Essay

E-book publishing is the new land rush on the net. Authors now have a way to get paid and, in some cases, make a decent living writing, publishing, and selling their own words without an agent or editor giving them the permission to do so. There are thousands of different ways to publish an e-book to the web. This essay only touches on one such method.

This essay came from experience writing, publishing, and selling Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips, Sly Flourish’s Running Epic Tier D&D Games, The Lazy Dungeon Master, and Seven Swords, and the works of my father, Robert J. Shea. This essay is designed for authors with a moderate technical background. You will get the most out of this essay if you understand the following concepts:

• You are easily able to install and run software and applications.
• You are comfortable working in a text editor such as BBEdit, Notepad++, or another text editor.
• You have a good understanding for HTML markup and are comfortable writing HTML by hand.
• You are able to move files around, upload and download them to websites, and compress a handfull of files into zip archives.

This essay is not a complete step-by-step guide to publishing an e-book. It covers the general concepts of e-book construction, pricing, publication, and workflow. If you’re looking for a step-by-step guide, there are better books that cover each of those topics. For a book that digs much deeper into the world of e-book publishing, I recommend Ape: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch. Kawasaki and Welch have a lot more to say on the topic and a a great deal of experience in publishing books. If you want to read an experts’ opinion, read theirs. If you’re looking for something a bit smaller and more focused, read on.

Why e-Publishing?

We live in a wonderful age. Only two decades ago an author had no chance of getting his or her work read by any substantial number of people without the permission of editors, agents, publishers, and marketeers whose motivations were not the same as either the author or the reader.

Those days are over.

The wonder of the internet, an advancement I argue trumps any other advancement in human existence, gives us direct access to one another. We no longer need to seek permission to publish our work. We need only to make our work known, build the trust of our readers and our community, and deliver on that trust with quality work.

Though we have broken through the barriers that once required we sell tens of thousands of copies to sell any at all, substantial obstacles still stand in the way. We each now act as our own agent, our own editor, and our own marketeer. Instead of convincing a single agent or editor, we must convince each and every reader that our work is worth their money and, more importantly, their time.

Our work is likely too small to get the attention of the agents, publishers, and marketeers who help big-name authors get into the spotlight. We don’t even register on their radar. Yes, we broke through the barriers to publication, but it’s a wide open and scary world on the other side.

We are free. And we’re all alone.

Beyond direct access to our customers, other world-shaping changes affect e-publishing. Only a few decades ago, authors hoped, at best, to receive royalties of 7% to 10%. To make a living on a $10 book sale, an author would have to sell 70,000 books to make a modest living. Now authors can receive a 70% commission by directly selling books on Amazon. Selling that same $10 book, an author only has to sell 7,200 books to make that same living. 70% royalties gives us the potential to find a focused set of core fans who, if they reach a critical mass of 1,000 to 10,000, might support our creative work enough for us to make a living. Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine and Technium discusses this concept in 1,000 True Fans.

That probably isn’t us, though. Let’s talk about reality.

The reality is you might only sell dozens to hundreds of copies. The reality is that e-book publishing will likely, at best, provide us an extra source of income or a bit of extra spending money at the end of the month. You aren’t likely to write the next 50 Shades of Gray or Wool. If you want to see what realistic sales look like for a non-fiction gaming book with a clear target community, skip to the “real world sales examples” near the end of this essay.

We’re not likely to make a living at this and our chance of getting rich are about the same as winning the lottery. If you’re doing this for money, you’re doing it for the wrong reason and your readers will know it. Let me give you the best piece of advice you’re likely to get out of this document:

Don’t quit your day job and write what you love.

As hobbies go, writing e-books is a good one. It doesn’t cost a lot of money and stands to help buy a fancy coffee once in a while. You also get to find the joy in writing something of value and reaching the people who might like to read it without anyone else getting in the way.

Now it’s time to dig in.

Publishing an E-book in Ten Minutes

Every year the tools to publish an e-book get better. If you’re not too picky, you can publish your work to Amazon’s digital bookstore for the Kindle in just a few minutes. Most people will be comfortable writing their book in Microsoft Word. Though not ideal, considering the number of conversions it must go through, Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing website will upload word and turn it into a reasonable Kindle book. Here are the basic steps:

• Write your book in Microsoft Word.
• Format your book using Amazon’s Guide for Word Formatting.
• Build a simple cover using Amazon’s KDP Cover Guidelines.
• Use the Kindle Direct Publishing website to publish your work.

With roughly 50% of the market buying books at the Kindle store, you’ll hit your largest audience at this single store. If your primary goal is to get something published without a lot of hassle, this is the way to do it.

It’s not ideal, though. You’ll be skipping on some other big markets. You’ll also potentially face problems with some of the details of a good e-book including a well-working table of contents, proper page breaks, and a few other potential formatting problems. These sorts of errors happen any time you do a direct conversion from one complicated format (Word) to another (Kindle). It might work out fine, but likely you’ll find something wrong and there’s no good way to fix it without doing it yourself.

The rest of this document digs into the details of rolling your own e-book using text files and free software instead of converting from Word.

A More Detailed Process

Instead of a conversion from Microsoft Word, we’re going to look at another process. Breaking this process down into its steps, we have the following formats and tools:

• We author the document using Markdown, a lightweight formatting syntax for structuring documents. Any text editor will do but I tend to prefer BB Edit on the Mac.
• We will convert our Markdown document to HTML. A number of programs can do this for us but I prefer Brett Terpster’s Marked on the Mac.
• We will convert the document to ePub (for Barnes and Noble, iBooks, and our own e-book package) and MOBI (for the Kindle and our e-book package) using Calibre.
• If we want a self-formatted PDF version of our book, we will copy the HTML version into a word processor such as Apple’s Pages or Word to build PDF versions of our book for our e-book package or we’ll hire a freelance designer to build the PDF (this is what I did for the Lazy Dungeon Master).
• We publish the MOBI version of the book to the Kindle store, the ePub version to Barnes and Noble and the iBook store, and we build our own e-book package and sell it direct to customers.

This process is certainly more complicated than publishing Word to the Kindle store and is only recommended for the technically inclined. This process gives us greater control over the output of the work, though, and more venues from which to sell it.

Writing in Markdown

Markdown is a lightweight system agnostic formatting syntax to add light structure to text documents. Markdown uses very simple character and line formatting to tell a processor how to treat certain text. Markdown adds light structure to a text file that is readable by humans and can be processed by computer programs.

If you want to bold something, you simply wrap it in a pair of asterisks. If you want to make a link, you put the phrase you want linked in square brackets and the URL right after it in parentheses.

Here are some examples:

# This is a main header

## This is a secondary header

* this is an unordered list item

**This text is bold**

*This text is italicized*

[this is a hyperlink to Mike Shea’s website](http://mikeshea.net)

You can learn all about the syntax from the website of the original author, John Gruber on Daring Fireball’s markdown page.

Markdown keeps you from worrying about page formatting and gets you closer to the words you type. You can write in whatever editor you prefer and convert the result directly into HTML, the syntax used to generate web pages all over the internet. Keeping your original work in Markdown ensures you can preserve it for as long as raw text can be read by a computer. Other structure and format rich document types such as .docx and Pages do not offer us that level of longevity. When was the last time you opened a document written in Apple Writer or a Word Perfect?

Writing our document in Markdown helps us focus on the words themselves instead of the complexity of page formatting in a word processor. We can write it, restructure it, and edit it all before we worry about conversion and formatting.

Converting to HTML

Once we’re done writing, rewriting, editing, and copyediting our book; it’s time to convert it to HTML. We convert our book to HTML for a couple of reasons. HTML is the most widely accepted structured document type on the planet. When formatted in HTML, we can load our document into any web browser and import it into nearly any word processor.

HTML also happens to be the format most easily converted into the various e-book formats we’ll want later on.

There are numerous processors that convert Markdown into HTML. My favorite happens to be a beautiful and simple Markdown processor known as Marked. Marked takes the Markdown document, converts it to HTML, and lets us export it to any number of formats.

BBEdit, my text editor of choice, can also directly convert Markdown to HTML. With your Markdown document in the text window, click “File” and “Export to HTML” to convert to an HTML document.

Numerous desktop and mobile applications exist to convert Markdown to HTML. Pick the one that works best for you. Right now we just want to convert Markdown to HTML so we can pass it to the next part of the process.

Building E-books with Calibre

Originally designed as a program for converting and exporting your e-books between formats and devices, Calibre is a perfect tool to convert HTML into the formats we need to submit them to various ebook publishers and build an ebook package.

There are two popular e-book versions currently: ePub and MOBI. ePub, is the most popular e-book format in use, but it is not supported by the Kindle and converting Kindle books from ePub often loses valuable formatting and features such as the Table of Contents and proper page breaks. Kindle accepts a different ebook format known as MOBI. Luckily, Calibre makes it easy to convert our HTML document to both ePub and MOBI so we can support nearly all platforms.

This essay won’t describe all the steps required to convert an HTML document to ePub and MOBI using Calibre in this document. With a little bit of understanding of HTML, you can learn how to use Calibre to convert HTML to MOBI and ePub with the e-book conversion section of the Calibre manual. There are a couple of tricky pieces to using Calibre to construct your e-book, however. Here are a few things to keep in mind while converting your book from HTML to MOBI and ePub.

• The simpler and flatter your structure, the easier it will be to format it. Stick to a single type of chapter headers and avoid a complicated hierarchical structure.
• Use H1 tags (a single pound sign in Markdown) as your main chapter headers. When you’re building the table of contents in Calibre, you can have it look for h1 tags and build an interactive table of contents from that.
• When creating the MOBI version of your e-book, use the option of “both” in type of MOBI document it creates on the MOBI tab. This will ensure the Kindle store will recognize your content.
• If you can, avoid using internal artwork or tables in your book. The simpler your book, the easier this will go. Text works best.

When you’re done converting your e-book, you’ll have your original Markdown text file, an HTML conversion, an ePub conversion, and a MOBI version.

PDF or No PDF?

At some point you’ll want to decide whether or not to produce and publish a PDF version of your work. Mainstream e-book publishers don’t use PDFs so if your primary goal is distribution through Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and iBooks; you don’t have to worry about a PDF.

If you plan on distributing your own e-book package, however, including a PDF will make it a lot easier for people to read your work on their PCs, or print it out on paper.

Creating a PDF version might be as simple as saving your document from Word to PDF. Usually, though, you’ll want to do some page formatting to get it to look right. Page numbering, proper page breaks, chapter headings, and internal PDF linking all take a fair bit of work. It’s up to you to decide if it is ultimately worth the extra work.

Over time PDFs may become less and less necessary as people embrace and support hardware and software e-book readers. For PC users, you might just include the HTML version of your e-book and let them choose how to format and print it should they wish to do so.

Ultimately you must decide whether the time you spend formatting a PDF will be paid back by those who choose to use it that way. The type of work you create and the audience you expect to buy and read it will fuel this choice.

For my topic of choice, Dungeons and Dragons advice books, the audience largely expects and depends on PDF versions of electronic products. Poor reviews of the PDF versions of my first two books led me to commission a professional graphic designer to format the PDF versions of my third book, The Lazy Dungeon Master. This added an extra cost and a more complex development plan and final product but for the audience I serve, it is worth that cost.

Now that you’ve built the final version of your work, it’s time to publish!

Publishing on the Kindle Store

According to Publisher’s Weekly, Kindle devices accounted for 55% of e-book reading in the middle of 2012. My own sales of Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips corroborate those results with 49% of sales coming from the Kindle store over 30 months of overall sales.

At this time, the Kindle is likely the best avenue for sales you will find and its the first one you should target for an e-book.

Amazon made it very easy to publish a work with them. Their publisher’s website, Kindle Direct Publishing, makes it easy to upload a work, insert the metadata, and get it published to the site. Their internal review process only takes a few hours before your work is available on the Kindle store.

Amazon also offers a great royalty rate of 70% for most countries for works priced between $2.99 and $9.99. We’ll talk more about ideal pricing later.

The only problem with Amazon’s kindle publishing website is the lack of direct ePub support. As we discussed earlier, Amazon claims to be able to import from ePub but my own experiments broke any usable table of contents and often ignored page breaks. One can hope their import of ePub gets better so we only need to worry about building a single e-book version to support the widest range of publishers.

For now, we stick to MOBI which imports directly to the Kindle store and to Kindle e-book readers.

Publishing on Apple’s iBooks

According to Publisher’s Weekly statistics Apple devices account for 18% of MOBIle readers. This doesn’t necessarily mean that iBooks has a large market share, however. The Kindle App on the iPad probably accounts for most of the use of e-books on Apple’s devices.

It’s taken Apple some time to catch up to the ease of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing website. Unlike Amazon, Apple requires the use of a downloaded program, called iTunes Producer, in addition to their own online publisher website, known as iTunes Connect. As of this writing, the process is cumbersome and slow. Even with a well-formatted ePub, it can take you a couple of hours to upload our book and it can take a week or more to get it approved. Apple sticks to the industry standard royalty rate of 70%, however, so you have little to lose by uploading your book to their store. You might find, however, that you’ll receive very little sales and that it isn’t worth the time, at least right now.

Publishing to Barnes and Noble

Like Amazon, Barnes and Noble has a very easy-to-use website for e-book publishing called Pubit. Unlike Amazon, Barnes and Noble only offers a 65% royalty payment and accounts for 14% of book sales according to Publisher’s Weekly. A 5% royalty difference between Barnes and Noble and Amazon may not sound like much, but it’s worth considering. Why sell an e-book for less when you can steer your audience towards a more flexible e-book package you sell yourself for a 90% royalty? The main reason is convenience for and discovery by Nook owners.

One way to ensure you steer customers to your highest profit margins is to publish your book to Barnes and Noble but not market or advertise it. This way anyone who learns about your book through your own marketing campaign will buy the higher royalty version while those who find it on Barnes and Noble will buy it direct instead of missing it completely.

Publishing Your Own E-book Package

70% is a great royalty percentage to pull in and Amazon has made a few lucky independent authors rich on this break from the traditional model. You know what’s better than 70%? How about 90%. If you write and publish your work with no other real marketing on your part, you’ll be lost in a huge sea of other independent e-books.

Regardless of where you publish your book, you’re going to have to market it on your own on a blog, across the web, and on various social networks. When you handle your own marketing, you have the opportunity to sell from your own channel on top of Amazon’s channel. Any marketing website or social media account you create can point to your own version of your e-book, one with a higher profit margin. You can also make this version more useful to your customer than those sold through other ebook publishers by providing an ebook package instead of just a single book.

Here’s how it works:

1. Take the HTML, ePub, MOBI, and any PDF versions of your book you create and package them up in a zip file.
2. Set up an account on Paypal and another site called E-junkie that connects to Paypal.
3. Upload your book to E-junkie.
4. Build a web page or website for your book that links to the E-junkie product link.

E-junkie is just one of many sites that offers to distribute an electronic product for a fixed flat-rate fee. E-junkie handles all of the transactions between your customer and your book. You don’t have to send an email with a link or set up some sort of system to handle temporary links so people don’t pass the link around and download a bunch of free books. All of the transactions are handled transparently by E-junkie. To your customer, it looks like they’re dealing with Paypal and you.

E-junkie costs $5 a month for up to ten different books. Twenty books runs $8 a month. On a $5.99 book, you’ll pay for one month with a single sale. There’s no cut per purchase from E-junkie. Paypal takes between 30 and 50 cents.

The disadvantage of rolling your own ebook package is convenience for your customer. Moving files around after receiving an email to a zip file isn’t easy for a lot of people. This method lacks the convenience of clicking a button and having it show up on a Kindle. Power users, however, will like the flexibility of having multiple versions they can back up and move to different devices.

When you sell your own e-book package, include good instructions for loading your e-book on the most popular e-book devices including the Kindle, Nook, iPad, iPhone, and Android e-book readers. Project Gutenberg has excellent instructions for transferring e-book files to various devices you might share with your customers.

Selling Paper Copies on Lulu

Many people still like the feel of a paper book and companies like Lulu found an economical way to let independent publishers print books on demand with no minimum order and no upfront fees. You probably won’t sell a lot of books through this channel and building the internals of a paper book can be quite time consuming. Unless you have real evidence that you’ll sell a lot of hardcopy books or a burning desire to see your work in print, consider skipping the hardcopy. It can take a lot of time to format the book correctly and can cost you a lot as you test print runs.

Should you choose to build a print-on-demand version of your book, there are many details you’ll want to work out. Here are a few:

• Your book PDF will need an internal margin of .8“ in the gutter. This requires special settings in your word processor to ensure you have ”outer“ and ”inner" margins since left and right margins will change from page to page.
• When you’re commissioning a cover, make sure to say up front how big it will need to be. Check Lulu’s cover guidelines (they change) to ensure you get the right resolution.
• You’ll want to verify that left and right side pages are correct. You’ll have to account for a lot of blank pages or the book will look funny when it’s in hardcopy.

In the end you’ll have a nice paper copy of a book in your hand. You just have to ask yourself if its worth the extra time, money, and energy when most of your audience will focus on digital copies.

Other Publishers

Depending on your audience, you may want to distribute your books with other publishers. One example, RPG Now, has a large following of pen-and-paper roleplaying gamers. Other markets might have other primary distributers to which you want to pay attention.

While deciding which publishers to use, base your decision on actual evidence. The Apple iBooks store may seem really important until you realize you receive less than 1% of your sales there and took a week to put your material on it.

It’s also important to pay attention to the details of the contract. 70% is a good baseline royalty. You should consider why you would sell it for less on a smaller platform than the Kindle. You should never have to pay anything up front to publish and every publisher should offer you a non-exclusive contract and let you eliminate the contract at any time.

Spend some time researching the audience for the material you want to produce. If there is a large and popular publisher outside of Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Apple, it may be worth the extra time to publish your work through them.

Avoiding Unneeded Services

Like a lot of industries, millions of “e-book services” want to fleece you of your money while feeding you the dream that only they can help you make it big in e-book publishing. Take care considering which services you want to work with and ensure you know exactly what they’re giving you for your money. You’ll see no end to technojargon and marketspeak from shysters trying to convince you that you need them or you’ll remain a nobody.

When choosing a publsiher, work directly with the main e-book distributers instead of middle-agencies who work between you and actual distributers. They often take a percentage cut on top of the cut the big publishers already take. Often, they provide no additional service for this cut other than, at best, some convenience. For example, though Lulu offers some excellent print-on-demand services. You don’t really need them to stand between you and Apple iBooks or Barnes and Noble. They will take an additional 10% to give you the convenience when it only takes an hour or so to publish your book with either of these services yourself.

Seth Godin refers to working with this layer of middlemen as buying expensive scaffolding

Avoid any service you don’t understand. Technological advantages and marketing are two big industries for this sort of pseudo-service. Most marketing groups won’t have any greater effect than one you can create yourself. Most large technical services can be broken down into components you can buy as needed such as editing, conversion, cover art, and page design.

When working with a freelancer or service, use personal recommendations to know who to work with and how much to pay. Stick to the basics like ebook conversion, cover art, page design, and copyediting. Negotiate for a flat fee instead of a percentage of sales and keep in mind the realistic number of sales you can expect compared to the costs you’ll incur.

Designing a Cover

Depending on the services you commission, the cover may end up being the highest cost of your book. A good cover makes for a good book, even in the age of digital books.

Designing and selecting a cover is also extremely hard. We all know instinctively when a cover is good or bad, yet few of us have any real conscious training into what makes a cover good or not. In the end, all we have is our own taste. A simple cover is better than a poorly designed cover. Even simplicity can be very hard to pull off, though.

Your best bet for commissioning a cover is to find an artist who you like and has done cover art before. Prices will vary widely from $100 to $600 depending on the artist. You’re best off finding an artist who has already done e-book covers and can design the entire cover for you instead of just the art itself. If you’re going to build a print copy on a service like Lulu, you’ll want a front and back cover.

Keep in mind that the cover of an ebook will be used in all sorts of different sizes. Your cover should look good and still be readable when shrunk down to an icon on the Amazon web page.

Consider avoiding any internal art in your book. Internal art will add additional costs and art embedded within an e-book requires tricky work to scale correctly across devices. Art that looks good on a 9“ iPad or a 24” computer monitor might look terrible on a 3“ phone or 5” e-ink Kindle. It also adds a fair bit of complexity to the e-book construction itself. For the internal design of your e-book, stick to text.

Page Design

Depending on your audience and the theme of your work, you might want to commission a professional page design for the PDF copies of the book. For gaming products, a good page design is essential to separate a professional product from one of an amateur. Professional PDF page design can run 50 cents to $1.50 a page depending on the complexity of the design. You will likely want to use the same design and designer for any print copy you plan to make as well, though doing so may add to the cost.

Professional page design is one of those expenses you might cut out should you choose to skip PDF and print copies and just stick to electronic versions such as MOBI, ePub, and HTML.

Editing and Copy Editing

Great books come from great editing. If you think you can do it yourself, you’re wrong. Every work needs two types of editing: content editing and copy editing. Content editing is best done by someone familiar with the subject matter of the work with a good understanding of the use of language and a good eye for clean writing. A content editor will go over a work to determine the clarity of the message, the proper structure of the work, and the focus of the material. A content editor moves around and cleans up the big parts to make sure that the whole thing is tight, clear, and focused on a single message.

Copy editors focus on the words themselves. They cover spelling, punctuation, and proper grammar. A good copy editor has a level of obsessive compulsiveness that borders on clinical. A good copy editor is hard to find, you can’t simply ask your friend or spouse to do it (unless your spouse happens to be a top-notch editor — lucky me!)

You can get away with having friends read over and edit the content of your work, assuming they have a good understanding of proper grammar, writing, and the subject matter. The better these friends are at this work, the better your work will be. The more people you have read and edit the work, the better the work will be. Copy editors are harder to find yet crucial to a well-formed document.

Focusing Your Work

Let’s take a step back from the mechanics of writing an e-book and look at who we’re writing for.

In On Writing, Stephen King discusses the idea of an “ideal reader”, the single person to whom you steer your ideas and words. This ideal reader helps you target your writing and understand the community you’re writing for. When you’re writing your book, the ideal reader ensures you don’t write something unfocused and vague. It keeps you targeted on a single reader and their own needs as they read your work. Once you’ve completed your work, this ideal reader helps you understand for whom you should market your book and the avenues you will use to reach them. It also helps you choose the publishers you choose to distribute your book.

The more vague this ideal reader, the harder it will be for you to understand who you’re writing for and the harder it will be to find the right audience when you’re done.

Here’s a real trick. The more narrow your audience, the more likely you are to reach them. If you’re aiming at young-adult fantasy readers, you’re competing with JK Rowling. If you’re writing a roleplaying game aimed at parents to play with their kids, you’re market is a lot clearer and a lot more focused.

Understanding Your Community

In olden days, producers used to talk about their audience. In independent publishing we don’t have an audience, we are part of a community. Everyone is a producer. Tweets, blogs, Facebook updates, Tumblr posts, Instagram photos, Youtube videos; everyone is now a producer creating content other people can enjoy.

When you write an e-book, you aren’t reaching out to readers or finding an audience, you’re joining a community of people that already create great content. You are not making something unique or new anymore, you are adding to an existing pool of material produced by tens, hundreds, or thousands of other people around the topic you have chosen. This leads to two important considerations:

• You need to be part of the community to which your writing.
• You need to understand what makes your voice unique within this community.

You can’t pretend to be part of a community. They will know you’re a fake. Big megacorps spend billions in marketing trying to pretend to be part of the community. Entire industries of “social media gurus” formed around the idea that you can fake this stuff. Other than Old Spice, almost all have failed.

You have to be part of the community with whom you choose to create. You can’t steer it or manipulate it or get people to buy things they don’t want. You have to know who they are, what they care about, and what they want. You have to be one of them. The more you sound like a company instead of a person, the less likely anyone will care about you or what you produce.

Becoming part of a community means finding out where the members of that community spend their time. Is it on Twitter? On a message forum somewhere? Google Plus? Who are the linchpins in the community? Who are the unofficial leaders in this community around which others gravitate? Where do they spend their time? If you hope to become part of that community, you will want to spend your time where they spend theirs. If this is hard to do, you probably aren’t into your topic enough to be able to speak to it. If you’re reading this and saying to yourself “of course! I’m already knee deep into my community of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans” than you have nothing to worry about.

It is likewise important that you understand what you can give your community that they can’t get anywhere else. In bullshit business speak, this is called a “differentiator” or in somewhat buzzwordy terms of Jim Collins, the Hedgehog Concept — doing one thing and doing it better than anyone else.

Once you establish a voice and build a reputation for work that people trust, enjoy, and care about; your own voice becomes your monopoly. No one else can speak for you or write for you. No one can write a Stephen King book but Stephen King. Once your name has a reputation for high quality, useful, and entertaining words, there is nothing more useful and no better way to differentiate your work.

You build this reputation by writing things of consistent quality, things that people find directly useful to them, and lowering your own self value. Your words aren’t about you, they’re about them. Write to help others, not to boost yourself. When you do a search, how many times do you find the word “I ” in your document? How much of your work is talking about yourself and how much is talking about the topic people actually care to hear about?

You build your reputation with high quality, value, and consistency, and low self orientation (a nod to The Trusted Advisor for clarifying the importance of low self orientation. If your work is good, interesting, valuable to others, and gets better every time you put something out; your reputation will grow.

Pricing

There are numerous ideas on pricing products and many things to consider. Generally speaking, the price of an e-book will run between $.99 and $9.99. More than that and you’re either over-charging or it cost you considerably more to produce it which probably means its not an independent work and outside the scope of this discussion.

Selling a book below $2.99 has some problems. Amazon will only give you a 35% royalty on books sold below $2.99 and the $.30 base fee of Paypal cuts substantially into your profits if you sell below $2.99.

Prices above $6 will likely sell fewer books than prices below. Prices above $6 is a bigger gamble for people to pay on an independent author.

There are two factors that help you determine your price:

• What were your costs?
• What do you feel is the real value of the work?

You can get a firm idea of costs and then figure out how many you will have to sell to make up those costs. If you count in your own time, it will cost even more. You will have to ask whether you can reasonably sell that many copies at that price to make back your costs.

The value of your work is clearly subjective. You have to look at other books similar to your own and use their costs as a judge. How do the production values of their work compare to your own? Ideally, there really aren’t any other books like yours, so you’ll have to look for things as similar as you can find.

Sell your work at the price you think it’s worth. If it doesn’t sell, it probably wasn’t the right product to begin with.

Real World Sales Examples

Below you will find some real-world sales statistics for my three books, Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips, Sly Flourish’s Running Epic Tier D&D Games, The Lazy Dungeon Master. These statistics will not give you a 100% accurate view of what you or anyone else will see when selling an e-book. They can, however, give a gauge of what a normal person might expect to see after following the other ideas in this essay.

These statistics represent 1,224 total sales of Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips from July 2010 to November 2012.

The following table outlines the percentage of sales by each publisher. E-Junkie represents direct sales through the book’s website. Note, the remaining 1.72% were sold through RPG Now but only for a portion of the time. I expect, had I sold through RPG Now the duration, it would have sold more than iBooks.

It is worth noting that Amazon Kindle sales became the dominant source of sales later in the book’s publication. Here is a chart outlining the first six months of sales.

The first four months of sales were largely driven by visitors to the book’s website, my blog, and Twitter. Later on, however, more people found the book through the Amazon Kindle store. Amazon sales will largely account for sales in the long tail of the book’s publication history.

The following chart shows the total sales across all platforms by month.

Escaping the Gatekeepers

Billion dollar corporations try and fail to do what you’re doing. Armies of suits in giant ancient towers of glass built for book distribution in the 1950s can’t comprehend the world in which we now live. They can’t understand a world in which anyone can make anything and reach out to other people who care about it without the suits’ giving their blessing. The tools and technologies exist to give us a chance to spread our ideas as far as e want. The only thing stopping us now is our own fear of failure.

You’re not going to get rich. It’s unlikely you will come anywhere close to making a living. You can reach people, however. You can boost up the community you care about and offer something that enriches the lives of others. You might even pay for your hobby while doing it.

Put together a kit of the tools you need and start making the work you always wanted to make. Don’t let anyone or anything get in your way.

Recommended Reading

Uncountable resources exist to guide and motivate you in the journey of the written word. Below are a few of my favorites.

• The Chicago Manual of Style
• Seth Godin’s Linchpin
• Seth Godin’s Poke the Box
• Guy Kawasaki’s Ape: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book
• Stephen King’s On Writing
• Anne Lemott’s Bird by Bird
• Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style

Take heed when studying these works. Sometimes exploring tools and philosophies ends up pulling you away from the actual act of creation.

You can’t be a writer without writing, finishing what you write, and getting it out there.

References

• 4 Things Media Companies Must Do … or Die
• About Mike Shea
• Amazon.com: Kindle Direct Publishing: Help
• APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book: Kindle Store
• Apple iBooks
• Apple - iWork - Pages - Create beautiful documents in minutes.
• Bare Bones Software | BBEdit 10
• Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life: Kindle Store
• Calibre
• Calibre Manual
• The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition: Amazon.com: Books
• Daring Fireball: Markdown Syntax Documentation
• eBook & eReader Stats and Charts
• E-junkie Shopping Cart for selling downloads & tangible goods
• The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition: Amazon.com: Books
• Fifty Shades of Grey: Kindle Store
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t
• How Much Should You Charge for Your eBook?: Book Baby
• iTunes Connect
• Kindle Desktop Publishing
• Kindle Desktop Publishing Cover Guidelines
• Kindle Share of E-book Reading at 55% - Publisher’s Weekly
• Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?: Seth Godin: Amazon.com: Kindle Store
• Long tail - Wikipedia
• Lulu: Self Publishing, Book Printing and Publishing Online
• Markdown - Wikipedia
• Marked - smart tools for smart writers
• MobileReader Devices How-To - Gutenberg
• NOOK Books, Barnes & Noble
• Nook Sideloading
• Old Spice | The Man Your Man Could Smell Like - YouTube
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: Kindle Store
• Paypal
• Poke the Box: Kindle Store
• PubIt! Registration: Home
• Robert J. Shea’s Homepage
• rpgKids « www. Newbie DM .com
• RPGNow.com - The Leading Source for Indie RPGs
• Seth’s Blog: The short head, the long tail and buying expensive scaffolding
• Seven Swords
• Sly Flourish’s Dungeon Master Tips Book
• Sly Flourish’s The Lazy Dungeon Master
• Sly Flourish’s Running Epic Tier D&D Games
• Smashwords — Ebooks from independent authors and publishers
• Subcompact Publishing by Craig Mod
• The Technium: 1,000 True Fans
• The Trusted Advisor: Kindle Store
• What It Takes: The Story Behind The “Random House Gives $5,000 Bonuses” Story
• Wool Omnibus Edition Kindle Store

Copyright 2012 by Michael E. Shea

This work is released under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license. You are free to share and remix this work as long as you attribute it to Michael E. Shea and do so for non-commercial purposes.

Over the past three years I've become obsessed with packing light when travelling. I've tried a whole bunch of different clothes, accessories, and techniques for travelling light. This article gives a current snapshot of my favorite techniques, clothing types, and accessories for packing light and traveling with ease.

We'll begin with some ideas and techniques.

Traveling with a single small backpack

Traveling with just a backpack is incredibly convenient. It's easy to get around, easier to secure, and you'll never have to chase your bags across an airport again. I've tried a couple of backpacks, but the High Sierra Loop backpack has gotten the best ratings. It weighs about a pound and a half, carries everything I need, and can easily fit in under the seat in a plane. It's the only bag you'll need. It's far easier to manage than a roller bag and you'll never have trouble storing it somewhere. The backpack is also under $30. Not bad for the only piece of luggage you'll need.

Wash clothes nightly in a sink

The biggest and most radical change one can make when travelling light is committing to washing clothes each night in a sink. This concept alone reduces the amount of stuff you bring tremendously. Think about how many shirts you need to bring for a week of travel. Now imagine that number is one. One extra shirt is all you need no matter how many days you're on the road. Same for socks, same for underwear. You wear one set, you pack the other.

Pants and overshirts can usually go a few days before you have to wash them so you really only need to sink-wash underwear, undershirts, and socks. It takes about ten minutes total.

I've tried a few different types of soap for sink washing clothes. Woolite is quite popular and works well. While I haven't tried them, these Woolite travel packs look like they would do the trick, though they're a little bit expensive. Still, it means not having to mess with little bottles that could break open. You might even wash your clothes with a bar of Ivory Soap letting you pack even less. A single bar of Ivory can wash your body, hair, and clothes.

A smart phone: the only electronics you need

There's really only one piece of electronics we need these days, a cell phone. That and a charger can keep us connected and entertained just about as much as we need. If you're doing some writing or blogging, throw in a bluetooth keyboard and you're all set with a mini-computer. You don't even need to bring a Kindle - you can read your books right off the phone. Of course, I always like to bring a Moleskine and three good sketching pens wherever I go in case the phone runs out of juice.

Want to travel lighter? Lose weight

I know, this isn't really the right place for it, but if you want to shed weight from your bags, try shedding it from your middle. Travel becomes so much easier when you're not overewight. Thought I've lost 50 pounds in the past year, I could sure stand to lose 50 more and it's the most efficient weight I can cut to travel lighter. If a million health reasons aren't a good excuse, consider the efficiency gained in travel and leisure activities.

What do I absolutely need?

Traveling light requires a change to our mental state as well as the crap we bring with us. Instead of preparing for all contingencies, we should instead accept that there will be circumstances out of our control and we'll just deal with it. If we forget something, we can buy it there.

Favorite travel clothes

Good travel clothes are light-weight, versatile, and durable. They're also usually expensive. Many items should be dual or multi-use. Convertible pants, shirts with sleeves that roll up and work well both buttoned and unbuttoned are examples.

The company Exofficio carries excellent travel-light clothes including shirts, pants and underwear. Their stuff is expensive, however. Yet, when you consider that you will only need two pairs of clothes, the price doesn't seem that bad.

Here are a few specific types of clothes I've found incredibly useful when packing light:

Exofficio Pants These pants come both normal or convertable to shorts. They're super lightweight, very comfortable, and easy to wash and dry. Like everything Exofficio makes, it costs a bit more, but its worth it for such great travel pants. These pack extremely well.

Exofficio Reefrunner shirt My favorite overshirt from Exofficio, the Reefrunner has some excellent useful pockets without any of the crazy vents of the more popular Airstrip. It looks great either loose and untucked out on the trail or buttoned up and tucked in for a bit more formality. Wear one on your travel day and pack one in your bag and you're all set for as long as you need.

Exofficio boxers: Rotating two pairs of boxers on a trip can keep you going indefinitely. They pack small, wash easily in a sink, dry overnight, and feel great. They're a bit expensive, but worth it.

Tilley Travel Socks: Like Exofficio underwear, these socks pack lite, wash in a sink, dry overnight, and feel awesome. Two pairs of these rotated each day can last indefinitely on the road. They work well for both dress shoes and hiking shoes.

Exofficio Exo Dri Tee Shirt: These shirts cost a lot at about $40, but they're worth it. They feel like cotton but dry like a synthetic. You can wash one of these in a sink, hang it, and wear it the next day. I have two, one I wear and one I pack, for any trip. They work perfectly as a layer beneath the Reefrunner shirt. If you're going somewhere cool, a long-sleeved version works well as a layer below the Reeefrunner shirt.

Other travel-light accessories

I've tried a bunch of other travel-light accessories. Some have been useful, some not so much.

Compression bags seem like a great idea but big ziploc bags work just as well for less money. Compressing clothes means they take up a lot less room in your bag. It also helps you separate dirty clothes from clean if you're traveling in the middle of a trip.

Zip-loc bags of a few different sizes work really well for storing toiletries, wet things, or dirty clothes. Bring a few small ones and one or two big ones even if you don't compress your clothes.

I've tried the Rick Steves Travel Clothesline but you probably don't need it if you can hang your clothes in a closet or somewhere else. This can come in handy, though, if you're camping or not staying in a conventional hotel.

A lightweight hat is a must. I still swear by my Tilley Airflo hat. I've had it for six years now and love it more each year. It crushes down nicely and weighs next to nothing. It protects you front and back from the sun and looks marvelous.

I don't need it often but a travel towel can be very useful once in a while. For the price and the weight, it's something worth throwing into the bag.

A good collapsable rain jacket is a must. I'm using some Eddie Bauer one I've had for years, but this Marmot Precip Jacket would also do the trick and is rated well. Traveling light is all about layers. If you're in cold weather, this jacket with a long-sleeved Reefrunner underneath and a Exo Dri longsleeved t-shirt under that should keep you warm enough. If that isn't warm enough, go someplace warmer.

For footwear, I have a pair of Merill Moab hiking shoes that I really wish I had had when I was hiking in Shenandoah. My Doc Martens just didn't hold up to three hours on rocky trails. These are lighter, tighter, rugged, and waterproof. They wouldn't hold up for a business trip, but look good just about anywhere else. If I'm headed to the beach, I'll probably still bring a pair of Tevas — not exactly ultra-light, but I can't see wearing hiking shoes to the beach.

The complete packing list

With the details out of the way, let's look at my breakdown packing list:

• Exofficio Nomad Convertable Pants (worn)
• Exofficio Nomad Regular Pants (packed)
• Exofficio Reefrunner shirt (one packed, one worn on the day of travel)
• Exofficio Exo Dri Tee Shirt (one packed, one worn on the day of travel)
• Exofficio Exo Dri long-sleeved shirt (if headed somewhere potentially cold)
• Exofficio boxers (one pair packed, one pair worn on the day of travel)
• Tilley Travel Socks (one pair packed, one pair worn on the day of travel)
• Merill Moab hiking shoes (worn)
• Marmot Precip Jacket
• travel towel
• Eagle Creek Travel Gear Pack (med) for toiletries including: small dental floss; toothbrush; small tooth paste; deodorant; small zip-loc bag with a few Advil, Tylenol, and Pepto tablets; Ivory soap (for hair, body, and clothes); razor; ear plugs
• iPhone & charger
• All packed in a High Sierra Loop backpack

If I'm traveling for business, add a blazer instead of a suit and pack polyester shirts and pants instead of the pants above. Some dress shoes or boots would replace the hiking shoes.

Good resources for traveling light

Here are a few good links if you're interested in learning more about traveling light:

• How to Travel 12 Countries with No Baggage Whatsoever
• How to Travel the World with 10 Pounds or Less
• OneBag
• Packing Smart and Traveling Light

Note: This article is an update to my original travel-light articles written in 2008 and 2009. Those article URLs now redirect here.

30 second summary

While die-hard PC gamers continue to promote the virtues of PC gaming, consoles still provide a better choice. Consoles are cheaper, easier to use, optimized for gaming, and let you play games on your couch instead of an office desk. PC gaming will always be around, but the landscape for electronic games is changing. New consoles are on the horizon, mobile gaming will continue to grow at an exponential rate, and I predict at least one new platform, a download-only gaming console, that will change the industry over the next five years. Whatever happens, it's a great time to be a gamer.

The state of PC gaming

A few recent articles on the virtues of PC gaming got me fired up about the topic of PC gaming. My very first blog article talked about why computers suck, a topic I reviewed again in 2008. Over the past ten years, little has changed.

Looking at current retail sales, it is clear that most gamers agree with me. Of 14.6 million retail sales of Modern Warfare 3, 2.38% were sold on the PC (source: VGChartz). This doesn't include Steam sales, of course, but I seriously doubt that pushes the number up much higher than maybe 10%.

Why are PCs a poor choice for gaming? Let's take a look:

Computers are expensive. As typical home computers go further down in price, it becomes harder and harder to buy an off-the-shelf gaming PC for any reasonable price. Building one yourself puts you at risk for component failure, compatibility problems, and painful troubleshooting. The cheapest decent home-built gaming PC still runs four times the price of a console.

Compatibility still suffers. Even though PC operating systems have improved, much of the hardware in our PCs comes from the lowest bidder to keep the costs down. Device drivers are poorly written by sub-standard programmers who don't know the rest of the hardware you have or the software you plan to run. This results in compatibility failures and unreliable performance.

Software isn't optimized. Since game publishers have no idea what sorts of hardware will be used to run their games, they can't optimize their software for any particular build. Most PC games have a thousand little settings with identifiers no reasonable person should ever have to understand (mip-mapping, 16x anti-aliasing, trilinear interpolation) much less weigh when tweaking a system. The best publishers, like Blizzard, write for the lowest common denominator, ignoring the latest and greatest graphical improvements to improve performance and reliability.

You play sitting at a desk. A lot of people spend all day sitting at a desk looking at a monitor at work. Who wants to do that at home? Why look at a 24" monitor in an office chair when you can look at a 52" TV with a six-speaker surround system? Sure, you can move your PC to the living room but doing so goes far outside how any software designer expected you to use it so you'll have all sorts of other quirky problems.

Two things have happened over the past five years that improved the PC as a gaming platform. The first was Windows 7, one of the better operating systems Microsoft has released. The second is Steam, a console-like interface that makes it much easier for PC gamers to purchase, download, and update games. I like Steam a lot, but it's clear, even to Valve, that Steam isn't the future of gaming on PCs. They're going their own way.

The advantages of consoles

Over the past ten years, consoles have gotten a lot better than ever before. Built-in wifi networking, high definition video, and multi-channel audio all greatly improved the quality of the games we play on a console. The best shooters, platformers, and RPGs are all out on consoles. Only massive online games appear to be missing on consoles, which continues to surprise me.

Consoles continue to hold many advantages over PCs for gaming:

Low cost. Good consoles run about $300 for a top-end system. That's about a quarter of the cost for a decent gaming PC.

Easy to use. Consoles "just work". You don't have to monkey around with graphic settings or device drivers. Recently, however, console operating systems and games have required installations, updates, and account management that reminds us why we left PC gaming in the first place. Consider all the EA account wrangling with Mass Effect 3 as an example. Still, overall, consoles are much easier to use than PCs for gaming.

Optimized programming. Game publishers know exactly what hardware they're writing for. They can write, test, and optimize their games to run as intended on hardware they know well. Recently, however, publishers like Bethesda seem to have more trouble programming reliably for the PS3 but this seems limited to this one publisher.

A relaxing experience. Sitting down, whipping out a controller, and playing some Batman: Arkham Asylum is a pleasure, one very physically different from "work". We get to sit on a couch in front of our big-screen HDTVs with Dolby Digital surround sound and just enjoy our games.

The advantage of dictatorship

There is an inherent advantage to a platform where the same company owns and controls the hardware and the operating system. I argue it's the reason the mac is such an outstanding desktop and laptop computer. I argue it's the reason the iPhone is the single most popular phone and the iPad is the single most popular tablet. We libertarian hackers hate the idea that a single company should control the total pipeline from hardware to content, but when they do, the whole "system" runs better. In my mind, the Xbox 360 is the best product Microsoft ever put out. It's the only product they've ever put out that I truly love.

The future of electronic gaming

We're in a very interesting point in time when it comes to electronic gaming. Windows 8 has scared Valve, probably the biggest distributer of PC games, so badly that they plan to build their own linux-based operating system.

iOS gaming continues to grow at an exponential rate, eclipsing even console gaming. People seem to really love the convenience of buying, downloading, and playing a game on a handheld device. The publishers of these games who do well, do REALLY well. I predict mobile gaming will continue on this exponential growth for the next five years.

The Nintendo Wii U is the first of a new generation of consoles (though I sure as shit won't be buying one). Microsoft and Sony will both likely have new consoles out in the next couple of years and I bet they focus these consoles on downloadable games, a very successful trend we've seen with the Apple app store and Steam.

I fully expect Apple to come out with a gaming console in the next two years. Unlike Microsoft and Sony, they have no retail baggage to bring along with them so they will focus exclusively on download only games. This will dramatically reduce the cost and complexity of the console (imagine a console the size and cost of an Apple TV).

PC gaming isn't dying. There's no reason for manufacturers to abandon the platform, although Windows 8 may do more harm than good in expanding the popularity of the platform. 3% of the gaming market is still a profitable margin and a lot of game publishers still prefer the platform. Most of them, however, know who really pays the bills and will (or should) give the bulk of the efforts to the largest audience - console gamers.

Whatever happens, we have an interesting future ahead.

A view from the other side

Friend and compatriot, Mike Schiller, wrote an opposing view to this article I felt was worth of attention:

While the knuckle-dragging "Brosefs" and SmokeDogg420s of the world pay $60 a year to endure racist taunts from 12-year olds on Xbox Live, PC gamers are enjoying an unprecedented cornucopia of Free-to-Play titles, pay-what-you-want indie games, innovative PC mods, beta opportunities and technically superior versions of console games (using the same controllers.) Also, Farmville 2.

Technological change continues to crush established businesses like a silvery monster truck smashing over a stack of old station wagons. Music stores, book store, now just about every retail store seems to struggle to stay relevant when, ten years ago, they sat on top of the world.

Wired recently had an article entitled Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?. We shouldn't be too surprised at these sorts of turns of events. For all I know, 50 Shades of Gray was written by a computer algorithm. After all, it's been six years since online sex chat bots passed the turning test. It's just a matter of time until we start seeing Amazon flooded with books written by computers. It won't surprise me at all when a computer-generated book becomes a best seller. Amazon won't only handle distribution, but likely the processing power used in its creation as well.

It sounds horrible for writers but it doesn't really matter. The percentage of writers able to live off of their money seems to get smaller, even though writers can now get a far greater cut. It's a problem of increased supply. With so many words available on the net, they just aren't in great demand.

Here's what Seth Godin had to say about it:

Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? Poets don't get paid (often), but there's no poetry shortage. The future is going to be filled with amateurs, and the truly talented and persistent will make a great living. But the days of journeyman writers who make a good living by the word -- over.

Four years ago, a guy built an algorithm to write books, increasing supply in parallel to processing power. Here's his Amazon site.

Algorithmically generated books are just the beginning. Music, movies, TV shows; it won't be long until algorithms can generate just about any of them and do it better than anyone else. Some day soon you might have your own personal channel of content with articles and TV shows built just for you based on your tastes and desires. It will hit all the right buttons and it will be relatively cheap to do so.

One day, not too far off, we'll simply sit in gray cubicles filled every eight hours with a nutritious sludge as we sit back and watch an infinite number of episodes of Friends, auto-generated for our individual tastes and enjoyment.

Of course, I'm not sure how we'll pay for it. All the jobs are gone.

It won't be long until computers know how to generate enjoyable content. All that's left is a computer able to enjoy it.

According to trend analysis, if you want your tweets to be read, post them at 2pm EST. Use tools like HootSuite, Bufferapp, Tweriod, Tweet4Me, and Tweetbot to build a workflow that lets you post your tweets at the most opportune time for the reader. If you don't think such things are important, rethink why you're tweeting in the first place.

Twitter and the Sly Flourish Empire

I love using Twitter to connect with like-minded D&D players and as a vehicle for promoting my works on Sly Flourish. Recently, the topic of best tweeting time fascinates me. Twitter contains so much data that we can analyze large trends in behavior like Hari Seldon in Foundation. We can't predict individual behavior, but we can predict large trends &emdash; like when most people are active on Twitter.

Bitly's post on best tweeting times and Dan Zarella's infographic give us these large trends. Tweriod, however, gives us something else. It analyzes our actual followers and, from that data, tells us the best time to tweet to reach them. Here's a quick breakdown of the best times to tweet from my Sly Flourish followers. The time in brackets tends to be the sweet spot:

• Monday: 11am, 2pm to [4pm]
• Tuesday: [2pm], 5pm
• Wednesday: 3pm, [5pm]
• Thursday: 1pm, [3pm], 5pm
• Friday: [12pm], 2pm, 5pm
• Saturday: 11am, 2pm, [5pm]
• Sunday: [2pm], 5pm

Using these results, I can queue up tweets directly in a tool like HootSuite, or set up a pool of tweets using Bufferapp that posts at the most desirable time.

A third tool called Tweet4Me can take any direct message from any Twitter client and throw it in the buffer. This lets me use Tweetbot, my favorite Twitter client, to queue tweets for posting at the best possible time.

A better workflow for tweeting

Once a week I queue up seven new D&D DM tips using Hootsuite. I schedule these tweets for the ideal times discovered by Tweriod. I usually queue a month's worth of these tweets. Hootsuite, though horribly clunky and over-engineered, has the most articulate tweet queuing system I've used. Since I only have to use it once a week, I can't complain too much.

When an idea comes to me or I want to repost something I think has real value, I open up TweetBot, start a new tweet, and type "bbb". This lauches a shortcut set up in the iPhone's keyboard settings to insert "d @tweet4me +b ". This sends a direct message to Tweet4Me that pushes the message to BufferApp. I type my tweet and hit send. BufferApp adds it to my pool of tweets and, when the time is right, it posts the tweet. I have four times scheduled each day in BufferApp based on the results from Tweriod: 11am, 2pm, 3pm, and 4:30pm EST.

Who cares?

If you're shaking your head at this whole thing for being too obsessive, you're partly right. I spent more time dorking around with this research than any direct value I'll get in return. If you're a heavy twitter user, however, and you don't think this sort of stuff is important, than you might not be valuing what you're tweeting. If you don't value it, why are you wasting everyone's time?

140 characters can change the world. Strive to make them the right ones.

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.

On the other side we have games like Skyrim, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age; games that give us the freedom and the choices to tell our own story. Sure, the three-choice mechanics of most Bioware games still routes you down one storyline or another, but in every conversation I've had with another player of Mass Effect, we've all played completely different games.

When you sit down to build your D&D campaign, are you planning to tell a story or are you building an environment in which the players get to tell their own? Are you simply stringing battles between cut-scenes? This is something I've done many times, I admit. Do you give them three meaningful choices at the end of an adventure? Do you use the five-by-five method to build a webwork of potential adventure paths? Do you run a completely open sandbox game?

Don't take this the wrong way. People love them some Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid. Sometimes your players might like a game with just enough story to string together some fights. Sometimes they might want a little help with the structure by having some clear choices and directions. Sometimes they want an open world they can fully explore as you hash it out block by block on an erasable battle mat.

What can you do to build an environment instead of force-feed a story? Here are a few tips discussed here before:

• Focus on your NPCs. Who are they? What do they want? What are they up to right now? See the world through their eyes and their actions, not some story you want to tell.
• Build a setting and environment instead of a story and a plot.
• Use random themes and Fiasco-style relationships to tie the PCs to the story.
• Use the 5x5 method to line up story threads your players can navigate instead of a single rich story.
• Watch the body language of your players to see if they're bored or actually interested in the story that's developing.
• Build an environment for ad-hoc DMing and embrace spontaneous group storytelling.

These are just a few tips for building a good story. If you enjoyed it, take a look at Sly Flourish's Dungeon Master Tips and Running Epic Tier D&D Games. You can also read some great tips for group storytelling in the Dungeon Master's Guide 2. Need some great maps to keep on hand for spontaneous events at the table? Take a look at the Gamemastery Flip Maps at Troll and Toad, an official Sly Flourish sponsor.

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 crap, 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 corporate 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 most popular cult-like 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 world. 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:

• The Trusted Advisor
• The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook
• 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!