Coffee in moderation

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System:

Only drink coffee when you want it

Background:

This is one of those systems you might not actually have ever thought of before. So, if you’re having beverage questions, perhaps this will clear up some of the confusion.

I am not a super fan of coffee. It generally doesn’t taste good, isn’t that good for you and doesn’t ultimately replace the sleep that you probably need if you’ve been using coffee as a stimulant and/or habit forming drug to keep yourself alert in your daily life.

I do see how on occasion a cup of coffee can clear up mental fogginess and do so in a fairly fussy and tasty way that’s enjoyable.

And that’s why I’m saying, ok , drink your coffee when you feel it would be nice to have , but don’t have it everyday just because that’s what you do. Drink it when you want it , not when your mind tells you to have it.

Advantages:

The advantages are many, but the main thing is you can actually enjoy the mild effects of coffee when you want to as you haven’t become dependent on it.

Windows

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Background:

Yesterday was very hot. So much so that I used the phrase “beat the heat.” And, I had the window open. The window remained open all day, and now that I’m back in my house, it’s a little colder. I’m thinking perhaps now, I’d be more comfortable if the window were closed.

System:

Open the window when it’s hot. Close the window when it’s cold.

Advantages:

You’re comfortable in all temperatures.

Get the person who knows what you like to take your order

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When you’re on a special diet and eating out, you have to been in that little bit of extra effort to make sure your server understands your order. Of course.

But you also want to get the biggest bang for your buck, and a lot of times when restaurants leave things out (such as carbs), they don’t always find something for you to replace it. Many times I’ve order a dish without the grain, and they simply give you the portion as it was before.

Other times you luck out and the server will say “Oh, well if you can’t have rice, do you want potatoes? or extra veggies?” These are the types of servers you want to make sure you get.

If you frequent a restaurant, you might even want to have the chef write down what the order was (when it was full of an extra heaping of veggies), so that they are generous again the next time you go. At least see if you can get the same server who remembers your preference and has a strong influence on the chef, enough to order the chef to give you a heaping extra portion of veggies to replace the rice you’re avoiding.

Send To Bookmarklets

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I’m a big fan of “Send To” bookmarklets.

In my browser, in my bookmark toolbar, I have a folder titled “send.”

When I click on that it takes my current browsing page and send it somewhere. Here’s where I send my stuff:

  • Send to Instapaper – for reading later on my mobile device or on a nice desktop client designed for reading, Read Later.
  • Send to Pinboard – for referencing later. This includes videos to watch later, or web sites to check out again.
  • Send to Twitter – for sharing with friends.
  • Send to MarsEdit – for sharing with blogosphere with slightly more commenting than Twitter provides

Sometimes, after I’ve read something in Instapaper, or checked it out in Pinboard I’ll pull it back up in the browser and Tweet or Blog it. Loosely the first two are a curated map for private consumption, and the last two are a curated sharing map for public consumption.

Eschew PaperClips

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Look, I’m just gonna come right out and say it: I hate paper clips.

With a stapler and a staple remover (or some fingernails) you’ve got something that clips together paper extremely well and can be removed when you need to remove it. Why would you mess around with paper clips? They bend too easily, they fall off, they get entangled with other paperclips, and other papers can actually sneak in leaving you with a tangle of papers and clips that just end up getting disorganized anyway.

Eschew paperclips. That’s the system.

If you want to keep papers organized, but you don’t want them stapled just yet, then put a piece of purple paper in between your different piles, or leave them in 90 degree rotated piles on your desk. What’s the big deal?

 

Arranging Apps on my iPhone

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I’ve been through about 16 different systems (literally) for organizing apps on my iPhone. Of course, there’s a level of obsession and wasted time in all of this, but the ultimate goal is to have a super productivity device that works in concert with my workflow and thought process.

When you want to filter through a certain number of open to dos in your day, it doesn’t help if you have to think too much about which app to use, or where there app is. Here’s a real life example to demonstrate my point: Say you had a pen, a pad of paper, a knife, and a cutting board. If you had the pen and the knife organized together (because they’re both things you hold in your hand, say in a “handheld” folder) and the pad of paper and cutting board together (because they’re both surfaces, say in a “surfaces” folder) then when you want to write a letter, or cut some carrots, you’re going to have to go to the “handheld” folder to pick up the pen, and then to the “surfaces” folder to get the paper. It makes better sense to put the pen and paper together in the “letter writing” folder and the knife and cutting board together in the “veggie chopping” folder. We tend to have time-tested systems for these sorts of things (although I like experimenting with those as well).

But with computer apps, it’s still an evolving system of organization. You can see with computer apps, there’s any number of ways of grouping them together (should email go with notes because they’re both about writing something down, or should email go with the phone app because they’re both about talking to your friends? is Yelp productivity along with notes, is it navigation along with Maps, or is it “Places”? Is Hipmunk finance, navigation, or productivity?)

Also, you have to sort out which tools are more frequently used and which you want faster access to. And for those pens or knifes that you use only for special occasions (like colored pencils or to put some hors d’oevres on the table) is it better to store those in a drawer, or in a box way in the back of drawer?

It’s probably something most people don’t think about too much, but if you’re into having a super smooth flow, it could be a system worth refining.

Here’s my current one:

The iPhone screen has a 4×4 grid plus a persistant dock.

  • In the first row I have communication apps.
  • In the second row I have productivity apps.
  • In the third row I have information apps.
  • In the fourth row I have media apps.

I think I’m getting closer to understanding the four basic uses of the device for me.

I have at least 8 apps per category, so I have apps arranged left to right by importance across two screens. For example, on the first home screen, for communication I have

Twitter, Mail, Phone, Messages.

If you swipe to the second screen I have:

GVoice, IM, Skype, Instagram.

So, straight across two screens I have my main 8 apps for communication/social network:

Twitter, Mail, Phone, SMS, GVoice, IM, Skype, Instagram

Below that row is productivity over two screens:

Notes, Reminders, Calendars, Clock, Contacts, Calculator, Voice Memos, Weight Tracker

Below that row I have my main 8 apps for a more nebulous category of “information”:

Google Search, Wikipanion, Maps, Weather, Safari, Yelp, CityMaps2Go, WeatherBug

So, that’s getting at information, either by searching or going directly to the type I need, be it maps, weather, or local interests. It’s generally a reference category but also accessing resources for adventuring through an urban landscape.

Below that I have media:

Boston Globe, RSS Reeder, Instapaper, Podcasts, AirVideo, Video aggregator sites, Slate

So, in total the apps that sit directly on a screen are 32 in number, are arranged left to right in importance, and top to bottom in category, which are the four rough major purposes for a smartphone: communication, personal assistant, reference/navigation, and media consumption.

On the next page I have folders for overflow for those four main categories as well as a few lesser used purposes: Music/Drawing, Games, Health (which could mostly fit under personal assistant/productivity in that they are trackers, finance (again, a more specific case of personal tracking), and then Network, which is a meta operation for the iPhone when I use it to interact with my home server or Apple TV.

The Dock, which I’m not totally happy about, right now has Camera, Photos, Music, and Settings.

I guess it’s pretty good, as you want access to the camera quickly and that’s kind of its own category. Also, you might as well but Photos alongside that to show what you’ve just taken pictures of. Then Music is just one of the background basic functions of the iPhone, it’s an iPod. You need to have Settings quickly accessible, as I switch wifi on and off a lot, and a work mail account on and off (so I don’t get notifications when I don’t them).

The problem with any system is that someone could develop some app that wouldn’t fit any of these categories and I’d have to rethink the whole thing. Or I consolidate, or there’s an update, or I want to try out a new one that does something in a slightly different way.

How to learn Metric

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When metric is taught in American schools, it’s taught in the “unit conversions” chapter of the math book or the science book. Students are encouraged to use a simple fraction multiplication and a conversion factor to go from one unit to another. This requires that you know the conversion factor. For Celsius and Fahrenheit you have to know the 1.8, the 32, and how those fit into the formula. For centimeters and inches you have to know the 2.54. Who’s going to remember any but the most common ones?

So, clearly conversion is not the same thing as being conversant in a different system.

If you’re learning a new language, say Spanish, in an American classroom often they teach it to you in English and homework is a whole lot of translating. This leaves students struggling thinking that to speak a foreign language is to be super fast at translating. This is so far from the actual process of acquiring a new language to be laughable.

If you want to learn Spanish, you do it in Spanish, building up your vocabulary from context not from a dictionary. It’s all about created new associations from context.

My friends, that is also exactly how one should approach learning metric. It should be about create new associations rather than doing translation or conversion.

Here’s an example: You’re in your house in the morning. You look up the weather in celsius. Say it’s 5 degrees. Well, know you can train your brain to do one of two things. You can either multiply by 2 and add 30 and say to yourself “That’s about 40 degrees fahrenheit, I’ll need some gloves today,” OR walk outside and say to yourself “This is what 5 degrees celcius feels like.”

The system here is to do the latter.

The next day when it’s -2 C rather than try to convert to fahrenheit walk outside and say “This is what -2 C feels like. I wish I had my earmuffs.” Make a mental note of the need for earmuffs. Slowly like this you build a set of contextual associations.

I’m currently working on 24 hour time. When I see my clock and it says 23:25, I could subtract 12 and say, “Oh it’s about 11:30pm” or I can say “This is what 23:25 is like, do I feel like I should go to bed soon, or what do I feel?”

Think of all the times you’ve looked at the time and gotten an emotional response and association with it. For example, if I say 6:30am I’m sure you have a thousand memories of that time of day. If I say 7:30pm you know the night is young, but you don’t feel that same sense of promise when I say 19:30 do you? Learning the new system is about reprogramming yourself to feel those time of day emotions with the new set of numbers.

I’ll let you know how it goes, but I’ve had a lot of luck with celcius and I’m currently working on time, and soon will move to liters and grams.

Seatbelt

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I finally figured out why I have this system.

I half expect when I get in to a car, I may need to either:

  • Turn back around because I forgot something
  • Fix something on the outside of the car that didn’t seem like an issue before (snow, etc)
  • Get gas soon
  • Make another quick pit stop or pick up
  • Pull my phone out of my pocket
  • Get something in the back of the car for use up front

Once those prelimanaries are all completed then my mind is able to “click” into destination mode. It is at that point that I put my seatbelt on. I am fully aware that there’s a risk of accident before then, but since there seems to be so much potential shifting around, I don’t like rushing into putting my seatbelt on.