John Borwick’s blog

Well, I don’t like Wal-Mart’s labor practices at all, but I knocked out at least ten weird items that have been on my to-do list for a while by going to Wal-Mart yesterday:

• key identifiers to help me get in the building faster
• cat litter deodorizer
• tea water maker
• electric toothbrush heads
• TracFone card

I’m still trying to figure out how much I saved (in time) by only having to go to one store. For most of this stuff, I’ve looked in a half-dozen other stores trying to find what I needed.

I’ve been playing Urban Dead for a month now. It’s a fun game. I have three characters: a private (zombie killer), a zombie (human killer), and a scientist (zombie studier).

Some of the players have gone on strike because the zombies don’t have that many cool powers. Humans can get special “Zombie Killer” skills, they can use items, etc. Zombies can (1) bite and (2) claw.

So, my idea is that, if there are ten or more zombies in a given area (be it inside a building or outside), no human can leave for another area (i.e. go inside or to a new square) unless they kill a zombie in that area. Picture a swarm of zombies blocking all your exits: you can only escape by punching a hole out.
You would still need a fearsome number of zombies to make this into an actual game-shifting effect (where you surround areas and invade buildings to make them human-free), but it might make Malton feel more like it’s owned by the zombies. (It would also give zombies an advantage in being outside buildings, to counter the humans’ advantages inside buildings.)

I created a Firefox search for Wake Forest University’s ZSR Library. Unfortunately, I don’t know the smooth way to install this file.

You have to put this file in your Firefox “searchplugins” directory, which for Macs is at /Applications/Firefox/Contents/MacOS/searchplugins/.

I started out with GTD with around 100-120 tasks. That increased to around 200 in November, then ballooned to 280 as I added tasks to buy presents and added lots of recurring tasks. (The recurring tasks, obviously, are what kill you, because you end up doing them rather than much new work.)

In the last four days I’ve cut my tasks down from 280+ to 199. Yay!

I’ve been using the “Getting Things Done” method of dealing with my life’s tasks for around three months now. It’s worked pretty well. Up until a week ago, the primary benefit was that I no longer have to tell people that I’ve forgotten what they told me to do.

Well, I’ve found in the last few days, that if you start actually methodically doing what’s on your to-do list, you don’t necessarily stop having things to do. In fact, you may think of a dozen new things to do each day that you’re ambitious enough to do two dozen things.

The difference with these new to-do lists is that you’re now awesome at describing what you need to do in concrete terms, you have the benefit of reflecting on what you’ve already done and proactively thinking of tasks to help you in the future, and you’re writing at a higher level of “to-do” list.

For example, after a few weeks of checking off “buy soy milk,” you’re about ready to write down “search for ipaq-compatible grocery list system” so that you don’t have to write a bunch of one-off tasks anymore. You start writing down non-essential but cool things such as “blog more.” (Now you know the secret for finding out if I’m having a productive week

A few days ago on the UNIX tips listserv, someone sent in the quote “there comes a point in every administrator’s life where you have to go into mini-root and edit /etc/fstab without the help of vi.”

Well, I’ve got another (more generally applicable) coming-of-age quote for you:

There comes a point in everyone’s life when, for no urgent reason, they choose to wake up at 5 AM. And there’s no going back.

Today was that day for me, thanks to crazy guy.

Things To Learn From Waking Up At 5 AM

• You cannot motivate yourself to get up by thinking about chores, e.g. cleaning the bathroom
• When running in 25 degree Fahrenheit weather, wear more than a short-sleeved shirt, long-sleeved shirt, running pants, and running shoes. For example, also wear a hat
• ipod shuffle armband is not so useful with ipod shuffle earphones
• It’s nice to time your jogging so that you finish as the sun is rising

Today is the winter solstice! Sunrise here was at 7:28 AM!

I’ve been in GTD stride this week. I’ve done about 50 things on my to-do list (~20% of all tasks) in the last two days!

The two most important efficiency concepts for me at work right now are that you should “touch things” as few times as possible, and that you make decisions quickly.

A bunch of time management people advocate the “touch things once” philosophy, which is that you only process material one time. You don’t read an email once to decide which folder to put it in, a second time to review what you need to do, and a third time to reply to it. You do all manual action on an event one time.

The crazy dude I quoted last month advocates quick decision-making. He makes all his decisions within one minute, even flipping a coin if necessary.

How do these apply to my work?
Read the rest of this entry »

I went to LISA 2005 two weeks ago. Check out my trip report (PDF) if you’re interested. (The report is pretty dry.)