3 Things Today

David Seah found a great way to make sure sudden great ideas don’t get forgotten but at the same time don’t totally derail what he is currently working on. He writes down the ideas on a scrap of paper and tosses them in an actual Pickle Jar:

“The best part: You can see that you‚Äôve got the ideas queued up, but it‚Äôs hard to retrieve them. They‚Äôre in a jar! Getting at the idea entails trying to stick your hand in the jar (which shouldn‚Äôt fit, if you‚Äôve chosen your glassware wisely), or dumping them out in a mess and unfolding all of them. It‚Äôs just inconvenient enough that I tend not to look unless I really am in the mood. The use is similar to that of a piggy bank, in that it encourages easy deposit but prevents casual withdrawal. So you tend to deposit and get on with your life, which in my case is getting back to #&!@*! work.”

The Intuitive Life is experimenting with listening to Executive Book Summaries as a way to quickly get the main idea of a lot of business books without having to try and read them all:

“My hope is that I’ll hear summaries of business titles that will be so engaging and interesting that I’ll buy the full-length work, either as an audio book (and I’m a big fan of audio books, as anyone who knows me can attest) or as a physical book to read at my leisure.

Just as much, I expect I’ll listen to 20 minute summaries of books that I’ll feel were better left unwritten, and save myself the expense of having purchased the title just to be disappointed.”

I’ve listened to a few summaries and found them to be so abridged as to be almost obtuse, but I may not have given them a fair chance. What are your experiences?

George Bush reveals that he doesn’t carry a PDA (not even a Hipster PDA), in fact he doesn’t carry anything:

“He doesn’t need any cash, since his staff takes care of buying anything he might need. He carries no cell phone, either, since he is surrounded by aides who take care of dialing his calls. And why would he need keys since every door is held open for him and his car comes with a driver trained by the Secret Service?”

He does however wear a watch! This supports the Theory of Minimal Keys which states the less keys a man carries the more powerful he is.

Discover has this interesting article which, among other things, highlights a new experimental program from Microsoft called BusyBody which detects how concentrated you are when you are using your computer.

If you are really focused then it can decide to allow interruptions (like IM and email notices) through or to block them when you are highly focused on the task at hand:

“Computers can learn to detect different levels of concentration on their own. That‚Äôs the premise behind BusyBody, a new software package under development at Microsoft. The software is designed to sense the ‚Äúcost of interruption‚Äù at any given point in a user‚Äôs interaction with the machine. When you‚Äôre surfing idly through the blogosphere, the cost of interruption is low. When you‚Äôre cramming to finish a report, fielding 10 different instant messages from friends might be too costly.
 
BusyBody learns these states by watching multiple levels of activity: everything from the number of mouse clicks per minute to the number of windows open and the time of day. Microphones allow the software to sense when you are engaged in conversation. At the outset, as BusyBody monitors shifting behavior, it occasionally queries you about the interruption cost at that particular moment. Then it looks for telltale patterns in all the data and determines your focus mode on its own.”

So long as it doesn’t send a report to the boss, this sounds cool!

Ever wonder why it is sooooo hard to permanently stop a behavior that you have identified as “bad”? A new study from MIT suggests that our brain literally gets programmed with the habit and although we can overpower the program with our will, it remains dormant until just the right stimulus comes along to re-ignite it:

“Habitual activity–smoking, eating fatty foods, gambling–changes neural activity patterns in a specific region of the brain when habits are formed. These neural patterns created by habit can be changed or altered. But when a stimulus from the old days returns, the dormant pattern can reassert itself, according to a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, putting an individual in a neural state akin to being on autopilot.”

This crude little flash movie is both odd and fun.

It’s based on the paradoxical notion that anarchists have to be more organized than average if they don’t want to depend on power structures, and presents some ideas on how to kick the boss habit.

Umm, I love clocks and timers and alarms but the Digital Ear Alarm from Trymax is dubious at best.

Via Gizmodo.

This is a service that will send flowers to your mate on a regular but semi-random basis. You seem to be thinking about her all the time while in reality you just have to setup your account and forget about it.

Oddly it seems the service makes no effort to hide the fact that she is not getting flowers that you ordered that day. From the FAQ:

“Will she be upset if she knows I’m using this service?
On the contrary, most women we have talked to love the idea! Many have even said, “Tell my husband/boyfriend to sign me up!!”. Initially this was counterintuitive to us too, but then we did some research and here is what we learned: Women love getting flowers. They also know you well enough to recognize you are busy and may not be great at stuff like this, and the fact you are finally taking control and making an effort is a big, big deal. “

It seems that everyone saw Basecamp and was inspired to create their own web-based GTD tools. The latest contender, Remember the Milk is a solid app that does one thing extremely well - list management.
As anyone who has struggled to find the perfect tool knows, there are usually one or two things that make electronic tools hard to live with. After all, this is your life writ in pixels and that’s very personal.

I’ve just started with RememberTheMilk, but so far it looks very polished and it has some must-haves from my own wish list inluding:

• Simple due dates (just enter Friday 5PM for example)
• Time Estimates
• Postpone with One Click
• Undo!!

Give it a try and see how it compares. It’s free (for now anyways).

MyTicklerFile is a new web based application that aims to solve the problem of handling an electronic version of your GTD Tickler File.

The Tickler is the ingenious idea from David Allen’s book to have 43 file folders (1 folder for each of 1 through 31 - days of the week - and 12 folders, one per month) where you can stash things you need to deal with later. So if you know you need to get your oil changed in 3 months you jot down a note on an index card and shove it in the folder 3 months from now.

Each morning you simply grab today’s folder and dump out anything inside into your Inbox.

The beauty of the physical inbox is that you can use it to store physical things - tickets, hotel reservations, shoppings lists and so on. And for recurring items you get to take a moment and decide when the next recurrence will be. Will I go to the dentist again in 6 months - no wait I’m in Aruba that month - make it seven. This affords the physical system a flexibility that no computer can match.

Having said all that, MyTicklerFile is a beautiful implementation of an online reminder system in which you can add items either through the web or by sending an email to your account (a la Backpack).

What’s missing tho is an easy way to reschedule (ie: to push the tickle item forward by a short or long period with minimal clicking).

Check out the excellent movies demonstrating it and sign up for a free account.