#productivity

Introducing what I have affectionately dubbed my One-Page Notebook (1PN). The One-Page Notebook is simply a regular sheet of paper, folded in half three times. It’s big enough to write on without needing a card cover, and small enough to fit in a pocket or in whatever you’re using to carry your stuff.

I grabbed a piece of paper, folded it in 8 sections, cut in the middle to turn it into a little book, and started to write on it!

Nineteenth-century diaries show a growing middle class engaged in a constant quest for self-mastery and productivity. With the invention of printed commercial diaries came a new way of looking at life and new organisational possibilities. The future could be mapped out, goal-oriented, solution-focused. The Victorians were great innovators, but progress was Janus-faced. For every leap forward, a renewed pressure to go further, and faster, to do better, be better. The age of progress was also an age of anxiety.

What I've found works is to do my planning working backwards from my deadline, I break the goal into roughly fixed size tasks. So if the goal is "clean the house by this Saturday" I estimate (more on this in a second) how long cleaning a bedroom, the kitchen, bathroom, etc take. If one of those is much larger than others I try to break it it up to get closer to the same size. If something is much smaller, then I try to group it with other small things. This sometimes takes multiple rounds. Once I've done this, I work backwards. This tells me when I need to start working on the tasks. When I've finished about half the tasks, then I know I'm about half-way to the deadline. I don't need to think about the actual time of the deadline most of the time. If someone asks if I'll meet the deadline I just look at my list and I'll have my answer.

The key trick is to ensure that every project has comprehensive documentation and automated tests. This scales my productivity horizontally, by freeing me up from needing to remember all of the details of all of the different projects I’m working on at the same time.

Dot grid! Highlight:Make lists, plan your next book, study for a test, design an app—you get the idea. Endless potential. Plan your next book, study for a test, design an app—you get the idea. Endless potential.

Yep, you read that right. While it’s no surprise that remote employees are happier than their commuting counterparts, many business owners are shocked to learn distributed employees are also more productive. How could that be? It’s actually pretty simple. Psychologists have proven time and again that a happy employee is also a productive employee.

Writemonkey is a Windows zenware* writing application with an extremely stripped down user interface, leaving you alone with your thoughts and your words. It is light, fast and free. With an array of innovative tools under the hood and full Markdown* support, it helps you write better.

It may be hard to swallow but the extra effort and hours that you put into your job as a software developer does not usually amount to someone higher up thinking you should run the company. It has been my experience that good producers are more likely to be asked to continue to produce. If they moved you to a higher position and better pay then who would produce the software?

I’d be surprised if a policy like this didn’t make teams more productive. I’m going to try it.

Robinson writes: “If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them — we’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”

Robinson writes: “If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them — we’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”

Fancy Hands is a team of personal assistants ready to work for you right now. You should focus on what's important, let us focus on the rest.

Your to-do list is the hub of your personal productivity, so it makes sense that we're attracted to to-do apps filled with bells, whistles, and tassels. Then you realize you're spending more time fiddling with your app than getting things done. If you're tired of clicking around internet-needy webapps or getting locked into a specific to-do list service, it's time to switch to something simpler. Here's why a simple text file will make your to-do lists fast, easy to manage, and seamlessly integrate with everything else you use.

One company had a rule that the last to arrive was responsible for taking meeting notes. Another required that last person to clean up the meeting room when all was said and done.

"I started thinking about programmer performance a while ago. Everybody will tell you that you can’t measure programmer productivity, but this is at best a half-truth. We can, and we should. Perhaps what we shouldn’t do is use those measurements to compare programmers to each other, but we can definitely measure ourselves."

Some people still like shit work. They can spend an hour moving Twitter accounts to special Lists, and then at the end of it look back and say “Boy, I spent an hour doing this. I really accomplished a lot today!” You didn’t. You did shit work.

"DTerm's Philosophy: Command line work isn't a separate task that should live on its own—it's an integrated part of your natural workflow"

"Divvy is an entirely new way of managing your workspace. It allows you to quickly and efficiently "divvy up" your screen into exact portions. "

"I've been using Tinderbox for a while as a daybook and also as a kind of task timer to help me track what I spend my time on at work (purely for my own interest and education rather than for billing purposes, as many people do). However since I wrote those articles, I've altered the file a bit, and also discovered the Pomodoro Technique, which I'm finding really helpful, so I thought I'd write a bit about how I use the two together."

"One of the most difficult periods in any job is the first few weeks, while you are getting to know your team, the company and your new job. It can be a difficult time for any employee, but it can be even more difficult for employees who are working in remote offices or telecommuting. Getting to know the team and understanding the company culture are much more difficult when you aren’t sitting in the corporate office with the rest of your team. However, there are plenty of things that you can do as a remote employee, or as an employer of remote employees, to make that first week a little easier on everyone."

"The Pomodoro Technique™ is a way to get the most out of time management. Turn time into a valuable ally to accomplish what we want to do and chart continuous improvement in the way we do it. "

"Sometimes walking away from the computer is the best way to use the computer."

"Agile" is kind of a dirty word in some circles, but this describe some actually agile ways to deal with revision control using git. "When we started using git to manage our source code at work, we actually jumped in a little bit too fast. It seems like there is a lot of writing about how you can do lots of really neat things with git, but no real guide about one particular way of using git for your project. This post is going to describe how we use git day to day on a reasonably large “agile-style” project."

"The word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others. Preparing printable text using a word processor effectively forces you to conflate two tasks that are conceptually distinct and that, to ensure that people's time is used most effectively and that the final communication is most effective, ought also to be kept practically distinct. The two tasks are The composition of the text itself. TThe typesetting of the document. "

"When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it."

"Basically, you'll start the day off right by grabbing a sheet of paper and writing down the goals which you can realistically accomplish that day. The important part is to immediately assign time slots to those tasks by order of importance and difficulty because these designated times make you more likely to accomplish your goals and give you a way of tracking your progress once every hour. At the end of the work day, you'll take a few minutes to review not just the last hour, but the entire day."

"TaskFreak! is a simple but efficient web based task manager written in PHP."

"Software should be designed, written, and deployed in small batches.Small batches mean faster feedback. Small batches mean problems are instantly localized. Small batches reduce risk. Small batches reduce overhead. "

"I think I've managed to balance things out through a few simple techniques that I've been refining for years. I still sometimes feel frazzled and info-whelmed, but that's rare. Most of the time, I'm on top of my workload and my muse"

"If you want to be good at something, you have to to be obsessive. You have to do the thing all the time, and when you’re not doing it, you have to be thinking about doing it. Why do you think business people who make millions are so good at it? They’re always doing business. Even when they’re not working, they’re thinking about better ways to do business. Same with the greatest writers and painters. They obsess all the time. Ruby, if you want to be good at writing, you need to be obsessive about it."

So awesome. Rather than dividing up the page with a line per hour, there's a small clock in the center of the page that lets you write relative to radial time in open space. "Can be used as a notebook, or simple diary. Each page represents 12 hours, and can be divided as required."

"You can still do the other goals, but put them off for a month or two. Focus on one goal for at least a month … and turn it into a habit. So if you want to run a marathon, create the habit of running each day. If you want to write a novel, create the habit of writing each morning. If you want to create a successful blog, create the habit of writing insanely useful posts each day. Once your first goal becomes a habit and is on autopilot, turn to the next goal — you don’t have to worry as much about the first goal because it has become automatic."

This is just about time tracking, but with personal data tracking looking like the next big thing I wonder how well Tinderbox could be pressed into used in recording and studying personal data points in general?

""When you put a thing on your to-do list, you are making a committment to do it," he says to me. "Meaning you aren't going to do some other things." He pauses. "So you have to choose between those things. Now, why do you have to choose?" ... I think about this for a second. "Because your time is limited?" I venture hopefully. ... "BECAUSE YOU ARE GOING TO FUCKING DIE," he responds. ... At this, the student was enlightened. ... Rich went on to observe that one's to-do list, in whatever form, is ultimately a skull on the desk, a memento mori, a reminder that our time here really is limited and we ought to make the most of it, in as much as the list is also meant to be a tool for helping one actually do so."

"But by making it a Big Bang release, you’ve maximized the chances that you’ll be behind schedule when you get to the end ... Imagine going to the hospital for a kidney transplant, and before and during the surgery saying to the surgeon: “Oh, and while you’re already in there digging around, I’ve had some problems with my lungs ... In many cases, these Big Rewrite projects have resulted in unhappy customers, political battles, missed deadlines, and sometimes complete failure to deliver. In all cases, the projects were considerably harder than the projects’ initiators ever thought they would be. ... While we’re all in the back creating the next revision of a product, who’s tending to the day to day issues of the existing product? Typically, it’s the domain experts and the original implementers of the product."

"Inspired by the post at but she’s a girl..., I thought I’d jot down a few of my own notes on how I too use Tinderbox as a Daybook."

"When you're working on a document, and don't want to be distracted, turn on Isolator. It will cover up your desktop and all the icons on it, as well as the windows of all your other applications, so you can concentrate on the task in hand."

"Whenever I need it, it is easier to find the nearest digital camera than pen and paper."

"Freedom is an application that disables wireless and ethernet networking on an Apple computer for up to three hours at a time." Claims to require a reboot to re-enable networking early.

"To Do is a lightweight and fast widget to manage tasks. Thanks to Mac OS X Leopard it integrates with iCal and Mail."

"Indeed the evidence for the 8 hour day, 5 days a week has been around and in practice since 1926"

"Things is an ambitious project to create the easiest and most fun to use personal To-Do management application. Simplicity, however, will not be achieved at the expense of powerful features..."

"A web implementation of TaskPaper. Primarily designed as a lightweight viewer for documents you have created in TaskPaper. It also provides rudimentary editing facilities for quick edits on the move."

"This package contains a Vim syntax file and file-type plugin for the simple format used by TaskPaper"

"TaskPaper is a simple to-do list that's surprisingly adept. Unlike the competition, TaskPaper's text based interface offers you paper-like simplicity and ease of use."

"Give us your del.icio.us username and we'll feed you anything that you've tagged as: "tagmindr" and "remind:YYYY-MM-DD". We'll remind you via RSS, SMS, Email or IM, so long as it's RSS."

"The do-it-yourself guide to converting a pocket-sized, ruled Moleskine notebook into a custom weekly planner and task management system."

"Be able to take notes as easily as: + I'm using TwitterNotes and you can even tag your notes: + The fastest way to take *notes* and *tag* them anywhere"

"Basically, I’ve made a list of personal unit tests: assertions about myself that I’d like to be true."

"Don't break the chain!"

"Since I’ve started to write things down more often I have also noticed – when reviewing old notes – how much my memory can leak."

"Google says in its user agreement that it will not be held liable for lost data, lost profits or lost revenue, or the cost of buying a substitute product if the Google Apps service fails."

"Tinderbox is a personal content assistant that helps you visualize, analyze, and share your notes."

"Keeping all efficiency stories out of the mix, a nice color palette makes me actually want to work. If my code “looks” good, I’m much more prone to feel like I’m doing well on a project."

"Here are 20 different ways of tracking your to dos, with examples of each."

"Shawkle is a clever bit of command line nerdery that measures high on the geek Richter scale, but it's an incredibly useful and flexible tool for plain text file enthusiasts."

"what better way to thwart a computer than to step away from it completely?"

I wish there was a Mac version of this. "MaxiVista turns any spare PC into a second monitor for your main computer."

"...one of the issues that consistently draws the most folks here is anything that helps them deal with email."

"What? That guy I work with is level 20 already? I've gotta go mow the lawn, that's worth 500 XP!"