I’ve never really figured out how to do work with anything less than a full computer. I’ve tried everything: Palm Pilots and Pocket PCs in the early 2000s, laptops, and eventually I just settled on just dragging a (smaller) laptop almost everywhere circa 2005. I get the feeling that, most people who have been thinking about mobile technology and productivity assume that the only impediments to mobile productivity are better hardware and software. Contemporary (multi)touch screen devices are the current embodiment of this theory.

I’m convinced that the theory is wrong.

Having better and more powerful technology doesn’t hurt anything. I’m a huge fan of the smaller, integrated, and more powerful devices. Software written specifically with mobile users in mind does improve the potential for productivity. These technological improvements, however, make the underlying problem more apparent.

The challenge of getting things done when mobile has little to do with the capabilities of the mobile platform, and more with the way people think about and plan work when mobile. Not only is this hugely frustrating to users, but technological capability that people can’t use threatens the ongoing development and adoption of new technology.

Using Mobile Technology More Effectively

The solution, here, I think is two-fold:

Fully Integrated Applications

Let’s develop integrated applications, not just integrated devices with different applications. Just as we didn’t need separate devices for every mobile function: telephony, music playing, book reading, mobile internet, and so forth. We don’t need different applications for every function: calendaring, messaging, email, contact management, notes, reading, and so forth.

At the very least applications need to be highly interoperable, so that users can send data between application functions easily, and synchronize data back to desktop and web portals seamlessly.

Task Planning Strategies for Mobile Productivity

I don’t think that the “user stories” for mobile technology are really fully developed, and as a result any interaction with a mobile device that isn’t responsive (i.e. there’s an alert of a new event, and people respond to it,) is either “twiddling nobs” (i.e. non productive,) or entertainment focused (i.e. playing music, video, or opening a book.) Perhaps that’s enough for some uses, but these this kind of workflow covers a small percentage of what people do with computers.

If mobile technology is going to replace a general purpose laptop, ever, even in limited situations, we need to figure out how to work in different ways. I know that I am loosing a great deal of time, when I’m using my phone switching between the notes app, the reader, the task list, and the calender. This task switching gets in the way of doing things to a much larger extent than similar behavior does when using a conventional computer. I would even posit that, the cost of context switching is inversely related to the size of the interface.

Better application integration will help this, but I think the real solution is providing a method for people to organize their mobile time more effectively. The task list that we build for ourselves when we’re doing “conventional” work (i.e. things that we need to remember to do, open projects, open issues,) aren’t particularly useful or usable when we’re looking at a tablet or a phone. If we don’t know what we ought to be doing, it doesn’t matter what the device or software is capable of in theory.

There are probably a dozen or more solutions to this problem, but here’s my first stab at it. What if there was a way to “forward tasks” to ourselves when we’re on the run, but have a few moments? We all loose time waiting in queues, or waiting for trains, and these seem like ideal phone times. If we had a way to queue things for ourselves, so we could spend the time doing something. Even better, would be software that would not only collect and display the queue but would also connect with the application where whatever needed to be done was and then record the results and send the back to our desktops when we were done.

Thoughts?

Just about everyone keeps a task list of some sort, or has at some point. To the casual observer, task list management might seems like a simple problem that could be augmented with a little bit of automation for great effect. Fire up your nearest “app store” and I would bet money that you’ll find a at least a few developers that have had the same thought.

For such a seemingly simple engineering problem there is an inordinate amount of really bad software. While this might tempt us to reassess the complexity of the task management problem, I don’t think this is really true. What happens, I’m convinced, is that people (i.e. cyborgs) make lists of tasks to solve different problems in their realities, and these different lists often require different automation. So while there are 10-20 basic task management applications, the number of distinct usage profiles exceeds that by several times. That’s the theory at any rate.

Archetypes

Allowing for large amount of diversity, there are still a few generally useful task list “archetypes” that we can use to characterize how people use task lists. I just want to enumerate them, here for now. I might move them out to another page, and you should feel free to edit the page (it’s a wiki!) if you think I’ve missed anything!

• Collaboration Facilitation: Teams need systems to keep track of and work on shared issue queues. These are “bug trackers,” and are totally essential when items or “issues:” take a significant time to complete, require the effort/input/awareness of multiple people, and need to be created or added by a number of people.
• Memory Enhancement: People create todo lists when they’re working more things than they can comfortably remember at any one time. The lists tend to be ephemeral, the items can be quickly resolved, but we make these lists so we don’t have to remember a long list of things while working. Think post-it notes.
• Obligation Management: These lists bring us close to calendars, but we keep them to make sure we remember to do required tasks. Often these lists are helpful in helping people make sure that they’re “caught up,” so that they can enjoy and use free time without interruption or nagging.
• Task Prioritization: When time is limited, a list of tasks is useful in organizing an order, and making use of available time, so that it’s possible to keep track of all open tasks, while also being able to allocate effort and time to tasks in a smart way that accounts for available time, importance, and deadlines. The goal is to get the most crucial things done while also never wondering what one could be doing with a few free moments.
• Progress Tracking: These lists are less to track things todo and more to track have done. When working on a number of long term and short term projects, a list of what’s open, what’s been finished, along with a status of where things are is useful to avoid loosing track of projects and tasks.

Based on this, I think we can distill a number of overriding qualities of task lists from these five archetypal use cases. That working list is:

• item granularity,
• project-level organization,
• scheduling and deadlines, and
• use of priority markers. ## Personal Case Studies

When I had an epic commute my issue was that while I had free time, it was all in 20 or 40 minute segments on trains. The challenge was to be organized and focused enough to really use this time. It was early and while I was awake enough to get work done, I wasn’t always awake enough to figure out what needed my attention. And I didn’t have enough routine minutia or enough other free time to be able to spend these blocks of time doing minutia. I needed a task list that told me what to do and when to do it. I needed Task prioritization with a little obligation management or something close to that. I chopped every task into the smallest actionable items, which is annoying in creative projects and often not very useful, and then scheduled items out so that I could do 6 or so things a day, and anytime I opened the laptop there was a list of things I could jump into. It worked, more or less.

Now, I have free time. I even have a few hours strung together. The issue is less that I need help filling in every little moment with something to do, and more that I have too much that I could be working on, and I need help figuring out what the status is of ongoing projects are and where I ought to things are and what needs my attention the most. Progress tracking, more or less with a little task prioritization but in a very different way than I’d been doing. it. I’ve got a lot of things, and I need to be able to see where projects, and what needs attention now. I’ve not figured out the best solution, but I think less scheduling and bigger conceptual task objects is more the way to go.

Does this way of thinking about things make sense to other people?

A few weeks ago we moved the furniture around. The biggest objective was to get some desk space setup in a more usable fashion. I find myself doing this a couple times a year. It’s easy for me to get in the habit of having everything a certain way without realizing that the chair I like to sit on is always in the sun during the mornings when I like to write, or that I never put the dishes away, because the cabinets were arranged backwards. The same sort of thing happens with computers and the way we use technology.

Matt Lundin and I were talking about this a couple of weeks ago. I think at the core of the issue is that the kind of work we do with computers, changes subtly: either what we do actually changes as a result of our progress, or we learn more about what we’re doing and what we ought to be doing from completing work. Like the furniture, it’s easy to get accustomed to doing things in one particular way and not realize that there’s a better way.

It’s useful then to spend a little time every now and then to do a little bit of digital spring cleaning. There are two major parts of this process:

3. Figure out if “what you do” has changed significantly. As our projects grow the work we do changes, sometimes in ways that make it hard to continue to organize our efforts and tools in the same way.

4. Looking for new tools that you can use to do what you do. This includes flat out new tools of which you weren’t aware, little automations that you may be able to build, and tools that solve problem domains that you’d previously ignored. It’s also sometimes useful to look at your tools and figure out what is more trouble than it’s worth. Ideally these don’t all change annually, but it’s worth doing a review.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that you’ll find a solution to any issue that you come across but you might. You might also be able to gain new insights into issues that have nagged at you by approaching a number of issues and pain points all at once. It’s also, I’m pretty sure, more productive to spend most of your time doing stuff (writing, coding, etc.) even if your world isn’t perfectly optimized, than it is to spend all your time tinkering with things.

And the sofa really does look better over there.

Onward and Upward!

Org-mode is great. Org is this super-task management package that merges outlining and structured document editing abilities with task management glue. It sounds like a weird combination at first, when you realize that it means that you can effectively do work and organize your work in the same set of files without needing to “switch modes,” between a planning/task list interface and a “doing things” interface, the effects are amazing.

I’ll leave “the awesomeness org-mode” to other people and other posts, and spend time here focusing on why “org-mode is awesome but won’t do your work for you,” and “if you’re new to org-mode you will probably want to do things in a certain way, but don’t” issues. Org-mode is great and it can be even better if you avoid developing a few bad habits.

Use `org-capture <http://orgmode.org/manual/Capture.html>`_ as much as possible. Org-capture is a quick interface within emacs that lets you open a temporary buffer, take a few notes, and save the notes into a file. It has advanced features for more complex data entry features and data types. The temptation is to use it as a “quick entry” tool for task list items, but don’t just use it to capture new tasks. Capture links and bookmarks, store notes and important information, If org-mode is your outboard emacs-based brain, then org-capture is it’s main input device. Fighting it, means that your org files end up being less useful.

Avoid using org-mode as a simple task list, and particularly avoid constructing the content in your org files to “game” your agenda view. The agenda compiles a working task list for your actionable notes, working backwards from this means your notes are less than useful things can get lost and all of the really cool things that org lets you do aren’t accessible to you.

This may just be the application of a good general information management practice, but: distribute information evenly throughout all levels of the organizational hierarchy of the file. Use the org-narrow-to-subtree function to focus your current work on a specific portion of a file, and don’t bury information or have it sitting around in one big unorganized pile.

Hope this helps!

I wish there was a good way, in the context of a blog post or some other convenient digital media, to regularly say: “I’ve done some things, you may be interested in them,” and “I’d like to do some things, here are some notes of what I think I’d like to be working on in the next little bit.” I’ve yet to find a good way to get in the habit of writing this kind of post.

My instinct is to have something that I can template and automate pretty strongly so that I can mostly focus on doing things rather than writing blog posts about doing things. Or as is presently the case, blog posts blog posts about doing things. Oy. Ideas and suggestions on this topic would be most appreciated.

So what have I been up to? Well…

• I got back into writing fiction this week after several weeks away. I was in a difficult part of the story and life got very… full… and I stopped writing regularly. These things happen, but it’s good to be back at least some.

  After the work I did just last night, I realize that I’m much closer to the end of this novel than I had thought. Even if things go very slowly for the next few months, I think I’ll be able to get this thing done by the end of May. I just have to write about a thousand words to finish Chapter 11, and there are three to four little vignettes in chat per 12 to wrap the whole thing up. And it’s going to be awesome.

  I’m super excited to be done with this project and to be able to spend some time cleaning it up and making it an awesome text, but also being able to work on making other things I’ve written better, and to be able to write new things, with my undivided attention.

• I’ve updated the /posts/anti-rodentia and the associated discussion page with some changes that I think make the system work much better.

• I’ve upgraded to Firefox 4, which I really like a lot: it’s much faster, it’s much more minimal (visually) which is great. Also all of my plugins and extensions work without issue. Good job!

• I went through a blast from my past when I pulled together the queer theories page, which does some--at this point utterly redundant--definitional work about what it means to be queer, and potential limitations on queer identity/politics in the era of a broadly defined queer.

• I’ve started adding recurring tasks to keep me on track with writing and posting entries to this post. This means I don’t end up posting things months after I write them. As was the case with Mutt Sucks Less, a post I wrote many months ago and posted with some revisions last week.

• I made a folk page for frequent comm enter and discourse participant Matt Lundin that includes a snippet which makes a list (and RSS feed!) of all pages that link to “madalu” or are tagged with “madalu” (his handle). You can see this by editing the page, and use it when making your own folk pages. Which you should totally do.

Have a good weekend!

I use a mail client called mutt. The quality of this software may largely explain my opinion this post on the continued relevance of email

I think mutt warrants a bit of extra attention for two reasons. First, because I think there are enough people out there who don’t use mutt who could and perhaps should, and I’d like to do a little encouraging; and second,like all fundamentally wonderful pieces of software, mutt can teach us something important about what makes technology great and pleasurable to use.

Working with any new kind of software is always a challenge. It is unfortunate that “features” and “functions” are the currency by which we judge software. Which is unfair to both the technology and ourselves, as the utility and quality of these features/functions depends on a number of subjective/individual factors. That said, with regards to mutt, my list is as follows:

• Mutt is agnostic on the editor question. I suspect the fact that I could use any text editor I wanted to write email was probably my original reason for switching to mutt in the first place. It’s amazing what a sane editing experience can do for the overall experience of writing emails.
• Support for PGP/GPG encryption. Signing and encrypting emails with PGP is probably only a minor advantage, and of limited actual utility, but I think it’s important and valuable to have this capability in your email client. After all, the success of PGP depends on a crowd effect: if it’s easy, sign all your email and hope that others will join you. Mutt makes this easy, which is a good thing indeed.
• Mutt operates independently of mail transmission protocols, which are universally flawed. In many ways, by not including support for mail transmission, mutt is more useful and more flexible than it would be if it was designed to handle mail transmission. Having said that, recent versions of mutt have internal support for IMAP/POP/SMUT. Not that I’d use it or recommend that you do use it and I suspect most mutt users don’t either.
• Mutt operates independently of mail storage format: you can maintain complete control over your mail data, and store email pretty much however you like. While this may be a burden to some, I’m somewhat controlling when it comes to data storage and preservation, and I think email archives are incredibly important. And I’m a weirdo about email storage.
• Mutt’s “sidebar patch” isn’t even a part of the core of the software, but it’s absolutely crucial to my experience of the software. Basically it gives you a heads-up-display of your mailboxes and tells you at a glance: if there are new messages and how many messages (new, flagged, read) are in an mailbox. While it eats into some screen real estate, it’s generally unused screen space and it’s more than worth the expenditure of pixels.
• Mutt runs on console and can be compiled on pretty much any contemporary UNIX-like system. Chances are there are packages for most operating system. So I feel pretty confident that I’ll pretty much be able to use mutt no matter what kind of system I end up using. Also console apps generally run pretty well in screen, which makes them accessible (and persistent) across the internet.

Onward and Upward!

This is a post about mobile technology in an unconventional sense. I think I’m probably an extreme “mobile” technology user: I ride a lot commuter rail and use my laptop extensively on the train. Then, I work on a laptop all day. In the evening, I often do at least a little additional work, again on the same laptop. There is, after all, always writing (like this post!) to fill any remaining free time.

I’m not a terribly typical mobile user. My main “mobile device” is a little ThinkPad (and sometimes a larger ThinkPad,) running Linux and a lot of Lisp (emacs and otherwise.) It’s not ideal for every situation: there are times when I just can’t bare to open the laptop again or it’s unfeasible (and there’s always the Kindle for times like those.) Most of the time it works well.

It’s hard to omit discussion of the “tablet” and the iPad. For me, the fact that tablets are not general purpose computers is a huge deterrent. This is probably not the case for everyone, though there are lots of shades to this debate. I think the more interesting question is not “do people need general purpose tablets?” and more “how will more ubiquitous embeded-type systems effect the way people will approach ‘general purpose’ computing environments” from here on out? Honestly, this in computing practice has already happened, but I think it will continue to pose important questions for users and developers as it continues.

The struggle, for me, revolves less around the question “how do I work remotely?” and more around “how do I also work when I’m at a desk?” The adjustment can be hard: For a while, I was so used to working on the train, and in random chairs, that I had a hard time focusing if the computer wasn’t actually on my lap. Bad ergonomics is only the start of this.

The current solution is to set up desks and workstations that use the same laptops and systems so that I’m not perpetually switching between fixed computers and mobile computers. I’m also keen for these desks to have their own appeal: bigger monitors, nice keyboards, and easy to attach power cords. I’ve also attempted to tie together all of the “I’d like to switch between laptop-mode and desk-mode,” functions (e.g. network connection, monitor attachment, window layout) into easy to trigger operations, so I can get started more quickly. Nice. Seamless. Efficient.

The lessons: There are many ways to maintain technical (cyborg) coherence despite/during geographical movement and sometimes that technology isn’t particularly cutting edge. Sometimes the best way to break yourself of a habit you don’t like is to play a game with yourself where you establish a more attractive option. Finally, a very small change or automation can be enough to take something difficult and make it much easier or something unpleasantly and make it workable.

I hate computer mice. A lot.

The closest I’ve gotten to liking a pointing device is an acquiescence to the TrackPoint on the laptops I use. That’s the little red dot in the middle of the ThinkPad keyboards. My problem with computer mice is the context switch between “typing-mode” and “mousing-mode.” Moving between the modes is jarring and inefficient. I’ve been using StumpWM and other similar window managers for years now and as my need for the mouse decreases my irritation with needing to use a mouse increases.

I’ve been struggling for a few months with a bit of a problem: Several months ago I got a new bigger ThinkPad, a T510, while it has my beloved TrackPoint there is also a TouchPad. After years of only using laptops with the red dot, this was very disconcerting. How did I keep from triggering the touchpad with my wrists? Couldn’t I just turn the damn thing off?

I did, and everyone who tried to use the computer after that was dismayed, and I didn’t care. Except, I found out that, apparently, disabling the touchpad also disables all non-TrackPoint pointers. So when I plugged the laptop into the docking station, the external mouse didn’t work.

Blast.

The solution to disabling and enabling the mouse on the fly, that follows isn’t as pretty as I’d like, but it works.

UPDATE: Turns out that my original procedure only appears to work. I’ve made the following modification to the toggle-mouse script, using a stock xorg.conf file.

File: /usr/bin/toggle-mouse

#!/bin/sh

TOUCHPAD=`xinput list | egrep “TouchPad” | sed -r ’s/.id=([0-9]).*$/1/’`

if [ [xinput list-props “$TOUCHPAD” | egrep -o “[0-9]$” | head -n1]{.title-ref} -eq 0 ]; then xinput set-prop “$TOUCHPAD” “Device Enabled” 1 elif [ [xinput list-props “$TOUCHPAD” | egrep -o “[0-9]$” | head -n1]{.title-ref} -eq 1 ]; then xinput set-prop “$TOUCHPAD” “Device Enabled” 0 else xmpp-notify “Your mouse is probably screwed up somehow” fi

Test the output of “xinput list | egrep "TouchPad" | sed -r 's/.*id=([0-9]*).*$/\1/'”, and inspect “xinput list” to make sure that the value of $TOUCHPAD is the xorg id of the touchpad (or other device) that you want to disable.

I’d actually recommend not putting this in /usr/bin/, but just so long as it’s in the path. Then run toggle-mouse at the command line. You may need to run this as root-suid, for your system system is configured. Tweak the TOUCHPAD variable as needed.

If you have a better solution, I would be terribly interested in hearing about it.

Although I haven’t used LaTeX much in the past few years, it was one of the primary tools that hastened my shift to using GNU/Linux full time. Why? I’d grown sick of fighting with document preparation and publishing systems (e.g. Microsoft Word/Open Office), and had started using LaTeX on my Mac to produce all of my papers and documents that needed to be output to paper-formats. Why switch? Because after a certain point of having every tool you use be Free software (because it’s better!), it becomes easier and more cost effective to just jump the gun and by commodity hardware and use a system that’s designed to support this kind of software (managing a large selection lots of free software packages on OS X can become cumbersome).

So why LaTeX? What’s the big deal? Why do I care now? Well…

LaTeX is a very usable front-end/set of macros for the TeX typesetting engine. Basically, you write text files in a particular way, and then run LaTeX (or pdflatex) and it generates the best looking PDF in the world of your document. You get full control over things that matter (layout, look and feel) and you don’t have to worry about things that ought to be standard (titles, headlines, citations with BibTeX, page numbering, hyphenation). The best part, however, is that once you figure out how to generate a document correctly once, you never have to figure it out again. Once you realize that most of the things you need to output to paper are in the same format, you can use the same template and be able to generate consistently formated documents automatically. There’s a “compile” step in the document production process, which means changes aren’t often immediately recognizable, but I don’t think this is a major obstacle.

Word processing and document preparation is a critical component of most common computer users. At least, I’d assume so, though I don’t have good numbers on the subject. In any case, I think it might be an interesting project to see how teaching people how to use LaTeX might both improve the quality of their work, and also the way that they’re able to work. It’s advanced, and a bit confusing at first, but I’d suspect that once you got over the initial hump LaTeX presents a more simple and consistent interface: you only get what you tell it to give you and you only see the functionality that you know about. This might make the discovery of new features more difficult, but it doesn’t limit functionality.

I’m not sure that this post is the right space to begin a lesson or series on getting started with LaTeX, but I think as a possible teaser (if there’s interest) that the proper stack for getting started with LaTeX would consist of:

• A TeXlive distribution. You need the basic tool kit including pdflatex, TeX, Metafont, LaTeX, and BibTeX.
• A Text Editor with LaTeX support: emacs, TextMate, etc. Plain text can be difficult and cumbersome to edit unless you have the right tools for the job, which include a real text editor.
• Some sort of macro or snippet expansion system. TeX is great. But it’s also somewhat verbose, and having an easy way to insert text into your editing environment, both for templates but also for general operations (emphasis, notes, etc.) is incredibly useful, and reduces pain greatly.
• A template management system. This probably needn’t be a formal software system, but just something to organize and store the basic templates that you will use.

And the rest is just learning curve and practice. Onward and Upward!

This post is inspired by Cory Doctorow’s Inventory about the technology he uses for his work and ongoing personal angst and gadget lust.

For the past six months or so I collapsed my entire computing existence into one, single, computer. It’s a nifty Thinkpad x200, a small laptop with just the right balance of usable screen space, sufficient computing power, and great build quality. And when I say “everything,” I mean it. I hook it up to a monitor and keyboard at the office and do my day-job (technical writing/sys admin stuff) on this system, I have a similar “desktop” situation at home, and I write fiction, do all of my email, write and blog posts, off of this system. I even have development web servers running here.

In a number of ways it’s great, and I wouldn’t trade this for the world. Everything just works the way I want it to, and I never have to worry that I’ve left some important edits to a file on a system elsewhere. Everything is always with me.

Now to be fair, I have additional computers. My old(der) desktop at home keeps backups of files, plays music, and does a number of other tasks. I have (and use) the server that this and other websites run on for some tasks, and I have another instance at the office that manages some work functions, but despite their varying physical distance from me at any given point, my interactions with these computers is always as if they’re remote. When I use a computer, it’s this one.

Now there isn’t a real problem here, except that from a workspace and mindspace perspective the context switching can be somewhat complicated and frustrating. While I’ve got most of the kinks worked out of the docking (monitors and keyboards) process figured out, it takes me a few moments to settle into or out of “laptop-mode” or “workdesk-mode” or “homedesk-mode.” While not having to worry if my files are all up to date, it’s also somewhat distracting for all my different projects to be open all the time. The article I’m working on for work is always open and a few key presses away from the novel I’m working on or the latest in-progress blog post.

Again, this isn’t a really huge issue, but it means that when I get somewhere and want to begin working I have to take a deep breath, and spend a moment or two getting going again. These do fit into the category of “first world problems,” and I’m not sure if there’s a really easy solution. I’ve toyed with a number of resolutions to this angst:

• Distribute my existing machines such that I have a machine that lives at work and a machine that lives at home so that I can just sit down at a desk and start working without shenanigans. Given the available hardware, this might mean that I’d spend most of my time using systems that I’m not particularly fond of.
• I’ve toyed with having a “tycho writing laptop” that wouldn’t have a web browser installed, for more distraction free writing. I’ve got my old laptop set up to do this, but I’m not likely to take it anywhere (i.e. for the commute,) so it might make sense to get a little netbook for the train for this function, but that seems like overkill.
• I might redistribute more of my workload to servers rather than doing everything on the laptop. I’m thinking about having the terminal sessions that I use for email primarily live in screen sessions elsewhere.
• I’ve thought about getting a second laptop, (like my main system at the moment,) both for redundancy and to help reduce the cost of switching between various contexts.

As I’ve been toying with this, I’ve been making a number of tweaks to my work flow to help address the pain of context switching, most of which are too trivial and too specific to outline here. Mostly I’ve been tweaking some customizations, improving how I use virtual desktops. While these tweaks have improved things greatly, better internal system management doesn’t solve the underlying issues: it takes time to reconnect to networks, to close tabs in the web browser, to get to the relevant files open in emacs, and navigate to the proper desktop. All the while other contexts (other files, other virtual desktops,) lurk nearby.

And figuring out how to solve this problem involves a certain amount of “head game” for me: avoiding having “the old laptop” be the primary computer for a given task, making sure that I don’t need a network connection for essential tasks. Assorted other weirdnesses.

If anyone recognizes features of this angst that in their own work they’ve managed to resolve, I’d love to hear about your setup.