I finished chapter eight of the novel that I’ve been working on for… Oh? Way. Too. Fucking. Long. And you want to know how I’m even comfortable asserting that I’m done with the initial draft of Chapter 8? I wrote an entire scene from Chapter 9 without saying “wow, I need another scene in Chapter 8 so that the story works out.” Because I’ve finished Chapter 8 at least three times, but this time I’m pretty sure. There are a couple of interesting, or at least quasi interesting factors that I think are worth some attention.

For starters, I made some progress on the novel. I know that I don’t have endless time to write fiction, and in addition to a day job that requires a bunch of my time and brain cycles, I write the blog, and work on other side projects: fiction, programming related things, the Cyborg Institute, dancing, singing, and occasionally sleeping. These are all projects that are important to me, and I think create value for me (and I hope in their own ways, you as well) so I don’t want to sound as if I’m complaining about being too busy and overextended (perhaps I am), but as a result I think I’m being pragmatic to accept a slower pace of development.

At the same time, damn I need to finish this thing. It’s good, I’m finally back in a place where I don’t hate the story, but at the same time I’m very aware that I’ve learned a lot.

And perhaps that’s the problem with taking so long to finish novels. Not so much that writing is a race, but if you aren’t able to pull it off in a reasonable period of time, say 12 months, or so by the time you get to the end, you know so much more about the way you work about how to put together stories, and how to write, that creating a cohesive work becomes an actual challenge. At least for me, the thing I probably want more than anything right now, is a chance to work on other fiction projects, to take the lessons that I’ve learned from writing this story and apply them to writing other projects. I have a great idea for a new story laying around in a text file, but I’m not touching it yet.

The two most important things about being a writer, as far as I’m concerned, are actually writing things (done!) and finishing things (at which I think I get a middling B). So just starting new projects at whim, isn’t exactly an option either. So in light of all this, what’s my strategy? Fairly simple…

I’ve set a recurring task in my org system to write 100 words a day on the novel. Just 100 words. And if I know it’s not going to happen I can mark the task as “skipped” or do it “late.” But the truth is that 100 words is the kind of thing I can do in only a few moments, so it’s not only a regular reminder to write, but also an eminently reasonable goal. Not only do 100 word segments add up (in a way that 0 word segments never do,) but the real trick is that in my mind I’m not trying to write very much, just enough to get started. If I don’t, at least I’ve made a little progress. If I do, then all the better.

In addition to the regular writing task for the fiction project, I’ve also started keeping a journal using this method. I’ve also created a recurring tasks for keeping the journal, and I find this method tends to have a positive effect on my productivity. To-do lists are great for remembering and prioritizing tasks when you have a lot of balls up in the air, but they often fail at tracking real life in a reasonable way. The journal provides a good way to keep track of, and recognize the importance of all the things that we spend time doing, but that don’t often have an opportunity to be captured into the to-do list before they get done. I think of it as a sort of inverse-to-do list.

It doesn’t always work, of course. There are days when I don’t get to either one of these tasks, and there are some days where I catch up on one or the other of them. But it’s a good practice, and I focus on the things that are important: actually producing something and then also building and maintaining a habit.

Because I don’t know how else things get done. Not that I’d be unwilling to listen if you have a better solution. See you in comments…

I’ve not written here about time management and productively very much recently. I’m a pretty busy guy, I work a lot, I live an hour away (minimum) from my social life, and I have a lot of things simmering in various stages. While I might accept the challenge that I’m spreading myself a bit too thin (I’m working on it!) I feel like the largest challenging isn’t that my attention is too divided, or even that I don’t have enough time to do the things I want to do.

Rather, I think my biggest challenge at the moment is that I’m not particularly good at using very short blocks of time to get things done. The twenty minutes of free time I have in the morning before work, the time after work when I’m too tired of looking at words to write, but not tired enough to go to bed. One of the great things about having lots of projects is that they’re all in different stages and require different kinds attention.

As a result, I’m taking the following strategies in an effort to use time a bit more effectively:

1. Stub out projects during binges, fill in the gaps in the interstitial time.

One of the problems with writing in short little bits and pieces throughout the week, is that writing is often a game of momentum, and it’s hard to really build up speed and absorb yourself in a project, however big or small in a few moments. In most cases, the hardest thing to do in writing is figure out “Okay, so what do I need to write here.” Given this, it’s incredibly easy (at least for me) to become enchanted with the successful binge and the ability to bury myself in a long writing session for hours on end; because that tends to work well, I’m prone to just not trying to write in the interstitial moments.

My approach, recently, and one that I need to pay a bit more attention to maintaining, has been to use binges to start projects, to do a lot of free writing and note taking, and then with things mostly sketched out and “stubbed out” (to borrow a term from the wiki world), it’s easier to write things during the week.

2. Work on keeping the “to do” list more populated.

I suppose this is really an extension of the above, but I sometimes find myself avoiding adding items to my todo list if I’m close to “clearing the decks” (OCD much?) and I sometimes fall out of the habit of really using my todo list as a method for planning my day and week out. Todo lists have three main purposes that I can see: first they help with remembering things that you might otherwise forget. That’s not something I struggle with in any major way. The second is to do some organizational work up front so that big and hugely imposing tasks seem much more manageable when you sit down to work. Finally, they should all but moot the question “what should I work on now?”

In any case, a todo list is completely useless when left unmaintained, and underpopulated. There’s always something that needs doing, and there’s often time to do something. Todo take the thought out of figuring what to do in those spaces, and they can’t really do that when they’re not kept up to date.

3. Get away from the computer when I’ve lost the ability to concentrate.

When I’m tired or bored (or both) and don’t think I could muster the ability concentrate on a sentence, I rarely muster the courage to get up and do something else. Instead, I usually tab into a web browser and doddle away the evening doing something like refreshing Facebook endlessly, or some-such. While there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of harmless perusal of the Internet, it’s too easy to get sucked in and then not get other stuff done. I think of this as the “cut your looses strategy.” I’m not terribly good at it most of the time, but when it works I’m pleased.

4. Read more, particularly when I’ve “run out of words.”

At the end of a day, I sit down on the couch with my laptop, and I find whatever emacs buffer open that I’d been hacking or writing away on in the morning (or the previous evening), and I think “Dear god, I couldn’t possibly write anything more,” which is a fair feeling: I stare at emacs buffers and hack away on words all day as it is, coming home to do more of this, even if the topics are a bit different, is sometimes difficult. I enjoy writing a bunch and find it to be a very rewarding experience so this isn’t always a problem, but when it is, it is.

My goal is to avoid waisting time because I’m bored or tired and using this time to read instead. I tend to find reading to be refreshing and I feel like I don’t have enough time to read as it is, so this solves a few problems. I think if we look honestly at our days and our goals, most of us might be able to find a way to get the more things done that we want to get done, with such a strategy.

We’ll see how that works.

There’s an issue in tiling window managers, that I think a lot folks who are used to floating window managers never expect. I wrote a post to the Awesome listserv a while back explaining this to someone, and it seems to have struck a chord (I saw the post linked to last week). I thought I’d write a brief post here to explain what’s going on in a more clear and general way.

The Problem

When tiled, windows don’t seem to take up all the space that’s available to them. This creates weird “gaps” between windows. But only some windows: Firefox is immune to this problem, while terminal emulators like xterm, and urxvt, and gVim, and emacs get all funky.

What’s Happening

The application that are affected by this draw their windows based upon a number of fixed width columns. We’ll note that terminal emulators, as well as GUI versions of programmer’s text editors like vim and emacs, all used fixed-width fonts and often allow you to set window sizes based on the number of columns (of characters).

As a result, these applications are only able to use space on the screen in increments of full characters. Most of the time, in floating window managers, we never really notice this limitation.

In tiling window managers you do notice, because the window manager forces the windows to use all available space, except in some windows it leaves these weird gaps at the bottom and right of the window. Sometimes the gaps end up in the window, as unusable buffers, and sometimes they end up between windows. It looks funny, pretty much no matter how you slice it.

What You Can Do About It

The truth? Not much.

The Awesome Window Manager, by default shows the gaps between the windows. I always found this to be the “more ugly” option. You can alter this behavior by searching your configuration file for size_hints_honor and making the line look like this:

c.size_hints_honor = false

This tells Awesome to ignore windows (client’s) when they say “I want to have these dimensions.” It doesn’t fix the problem but it does get rid of the gaps.

The real solution is to tweak text sizes, fonts, and any buffering elements (like a status bar, mode line, or widget box), and window borders so that the windows aren’t left with extra space that they don’t know how to cope with.

By real solution, I really mean “only option:” it’s really impossible to get all of your fixed width applications to have exactly the right number of pixels. You can get close in a lot of situations, and I’ve always found this to be much less annoying than using floating window managers.

The Original Post

Just for giggles, I’ve included a quoted portion of what I posted original to the listserv on the topic.

The one big of information that might be important: The urxvt terminal emulator, when not “honoring size hints,” is unable to really properly draw the “extra space” with the proper background. I suspect this is a bug with the pseudo-transparency system they use. As a result there are often a few pixels with the background in an inverted color scheme. Same problem as above, but it looks funny if you’re not used to it.

What’s happening is that urxvt (like many terminal emulators) can only draw windows of some specific sizes based on the size of the characters (eg. x number of rows, and y number of columns.) So while you may have larger and the equivalent of say 80.4x20.1, urxvt can’t do anything with this extra space.

If you honor size hints, the windows will end wherever they can, and use as much space as they can, but leave gaps between windows if the total space isn’t properly divisible. If you don’t honor size hints, the windows themselves take up the extra room (but they can’t do anything with the extra room, so they just leave it blank, and sometimes the transparency is a bit wonky in those “buffers”).

So there you have it. I hope this helps!

For a few days last week, in between the time that I wrote the Personal Desktop post and when I posed it yesterday, I had a little personal computing saga:

1. One of my monitors developed a little defect. I’m not sure how to describe it, but the color depth suffered a bit and there was this flicker and I really noticed it. It’s not major and I probably wouldn’t have noticed it, except I look at a very nice screen all day at work and I had a working display right next to it, I saw every little flicker.

2. I decided to pull the second monitor, and just go back to one monitor. While I like the “bunches of screens” approach, and think it has merit, particularly in tiling environments, I also think that I work pretty well on one screen, and with so many virtual desktops, it’s no great loss. Not being distracted by the flicker is better by far.

3. I pulled the second monitor and bam! the computer wouldn’t come back from the reboot. Shit. No error beeps, nothing past the bios splash screen. No USB support. Everything plugged in. Shit.

4. I let things sit for a few days. I was slamed with stuff in other areas of my life, and I just couldn’t cope with this. It doesn’t help that I really like to avoid messing with hardware if I can at all help it. Fellow geeks are big on building custom hardware, but the truth is that my needs are pretty minimal and I’d rather leave it up the to the pros.

5. On Friday, I sat down with it, pulled the video card that I’d put in it when I got the machine (an old nvidia 7200 series), and I unplugged the hard drives and futzed with the ram, and after re-seating the RAM it worked. I’m not complaining, and I figure it was just some sort of fluke as I jostled the case.

6. So now I’m back, with one monitor, no other problems have been fixed from the last post, but I can live with that.

As I was fretting with the implications of having a computer die on me like this, and thinking about my future computing trajectory. I realized that my current set up was deployed (as it were) under a number of different assumptions about the way I use computers. I got the desktop with the extra monitors when I was starting a series of remote jobs and needed more resources than I could really expect from my previous setup (a single macbook.) I also, in light of this downgraded my laptop to something smaller and portable that was good for short term tasks, and adding mobility to my setup, but that really didn’t work as my only computer for more than a day or two.

Now things look different. I’m not doing the same kind of remote work that I got the desktop for, and I have a killer machine at work that I’m only using a portion of (in a VM, no less). I have a VPS server “in the cloud” that hosts a lot of the “always on” infrastructural tasks that I needed from my desktop when I first got it.

I’m not sure what the solution is. Make the desktop at home more “server-y” (media files, downloading stuff + writing) exchange the laptop at some point for: a 15" notebook that would be my primary machine--particularly useful for long weekend trips, un/conferences and so forth, and some sort of small netbook-class device, for day-to-day portability.

It’s a thought. Anyway, on to more important thoughts.

Cheers!

I wrote a series of posts about setting up my new work computer as a way to avoid blathering on and on about how the movers lost the cushions for my couch, and other assorted minutia that seem to dominate my attention. What these posts didn’t talk about were what I was doing for “tychoish” and related computing.

About a week and some change, before I moved, I packed up my desktop computer and started using my laptop full time. It’s small, portable, and sufficient, if not particularly speedy.

I can do everything with the laptop (a ThinkPad x41t, which is a 2005-vintage 12" tablet) that I can do on any other computer I use, and while I often prefer it because small screen means that it’s really easy to focus intently on writing one thing at a time. This, inversely, means that it doesn’t work very well for research intensive work, where I need to switch between contexts regularly. It’s a fair trade off, and I did OK for weeks.

But then, having been in town for two and a half weeks, I decided it was time to break down and get my personal desktop setup and working. And it’s amazing. The thing, works just as well as it always has (which is pretty good,) and it’s nice to have a computer at home that I can do serious writing on, and the extra screen space is just perfect. I’ve been able to be much more productive and comfortable with my own projects since this began.

There are some things that I need to address with this computer, that have been queuing up. In the spirit of posting my todo lists for the world to see…

• I need to get a new keyboard. My “fancy” “Happy Hacking Lite 2” keyboard is at work, as I’m comfortable with it, I do a lot of writing at work, and I set up that keyboard first (and the current default Mac keyboard sucks.)

  I’m thinking of either, getting another Happy Hacking keyboard, or more likely at this point, getting a das keybaord ultimate because how could I turn down blank keys and variable-pressure mechanical switch keys. And writing is what I do, so totally worth it.

• I need to install Arch on this computer. I feel like cruft is beginning to accumulate here, I’ve never quite been happy with the ubutnu experience, and there are some things that I can’t get to work right (namely mounting of USB-mass storage devices) My concerns are that getting dual monitors setup on this box was a royal pain. But that might have been ubuntu related. I’m not sure.

• My current thought is that I’ll buy a new (small) hard drive (eg. 80 gigs) to run a clean operating system install on (arch) and then use the current drive as storage for the stuff that’s already there (music, video). But I might just get a larger additional drive and do it in reverse. I dunno. The current situation isn’t that bad, and I think that I’ll archify the laptop first.

Annnyway…

I’m writing this post for all of the wrong reasons. I’ve had this “write a post about pitfalls of org-mode,” on my org-agenda for weeks, with a list of “ways I’m not doing things right in org-mode.” One of those pitfalls, the main one in fact, was “you’re living too much in the agenda view, and not thinking of your org-files as working documents and outlines onto themselves.”

And because I’m living too much in the agenda view, I’m writing a post (that I need to write, but have been hesitant to write for a while) mostly to get it off my todo list.

This is certainly an acceptable way to work, and I think todo lists mostly exist in order for their items to be completed and checked off. At the same time, I’ve said (and I keep saying) the beautiful thing about org-mode is that it allows you to plan and process your projects in a way that makes sense for project planning without centering your process on “actionable items,” which is good for doing things but less good for planning things.

And so I’ve been failing at keeping the “planning” and the “doing” as separate thought processes. Note to self: do better with this.

The second pitfall is in the “org-refile” functionality (C-c C-w), which allows you to send items and subtree’s to other parts of your org-agenda files. I think part of the problem is that I don’t really get how it was intended to be used, and as a result when I try to use it, it doesn’t work. (I tooled around in customize, after I wrote this and found: that the following bit (in custom-set-variables) to help, bunches:)

'(org-refile-use-outline-path (quote file))

When I want to refile something, I think to myself “it should go to x file, under which heading, hrm… lets see what’s there…” And my options are presented to me in [Heading]/ (filename.org) format. The problem is that org is thinking backwards from me, and as a result I end up miss-filing things, or not using the refile as much as I should because it doesn’t really work for me. Hrm. Not sure how to hack this.

In anycase, back to working.

I’ve been (slowly) upgrading to the latest version of the Awesome Window Manager. Since Awesome is a pretty new program, and there was a debian code freeze during development for a huge chunk of the awesome3-series code… it’s been hard to install on ubuntu. Lots of dithering about, and then compiling by hand. For the uninitiated, ususally installing new software on a Debain-based system (like ubuntu; and many GNU/Linux systems are this way) is as simple as typing a single command. This hasn’t really been the case for awesome.

In any case, with the latest release candidates for awesome 3.3 in sid (debian unstable) I added a sid repository to my ubuntu system, updated, installed awesome, removed the sid repository. Breathed a huge sigh of relief, and then got to getting things setup again. I have the following responses to the new awesome:

• I really like the fact that if you change something in your config file and it doesn’t parse, awesome loads the default config (at /etc/xdg/awesome/rc.lua) so that you don’t have to kill X11 manually and fix your config file from a virtual terminal.
• If you’re considering awesome, and all this talk of unstable repositories scares you, the truth is that awesome is--at this point--not exactly adding new features to the core code base. There are some new features and reorganizations of the code, but the software is generally getting more and more stable. Also, the config file has been (and is becoming less of) a moving target, so given that it’s pretty stable and usable, it makes sense to “buy in” with the most current version of the configuration so you’ll have less tweaking in general.
• The new (default) config file is so much better than the old ones. I basically reimplemented my old config into the new default config and have been really happy with that. It’s short(er) and just yummy.
• I did have some sort of perverse problems with xmodmap which I can’t really explain but they’re solved.
• If you’re use a display manager (like gdm) to manage your x sessions, I know you can just choose awesome from the default sessions list, but I’d still recommend triggering awesome from an .xinit/.Xsessions file so that you can load network managers and xmodmap before awesome loads. Which seems to work best for me.
• I’d never used naughty, which is a growl-like notification system before, and now that it’s included by default I am using it, and I quite adore it.

More later.

I wrote a series of articles nearly two years ago to rethink the GTD system, which I think is worth revisiting again. Not the essays, which were from when I called the website “TealArt” (don’t ask) and were before I really discovered free software and open source in a big way; but rather, I think two years out from my original article and even further out from the heart of the GTD fad, I think that it’s worthwhile to explore GTD again.

For those of you playing along at home, GTD (Getting Things Done) is really a “personal productive methodology” designed by David Allen that swept the geek community a few years ago. It’s good stuff, and while it’s certianly not a one-size-fits-all miricle cure for umproductive and overwhelmed folk; it promotes (to my mind) a number of goals that I think are quite admirable:

• Have a single system, that integrates across all aspects of your life. One place where systems can fail is if you’re using different “databases” (in the non-technical sense) to store information and tasks, and you have a piece of information that might fit in either system: when you go to look for it later (or need to be notified by it later) the chance of you missing the task because it’s on the wrong list is much higher if you have more than one place where lists might be.
• Think about tasks and projects being broken into “actionable items,” and have actions be the unit of currency in your system. As you assimilate information be sure to record anything that needs doing and keep it in your system
• Attach two pieces of metadata to your action: project (what larger goal does the action help you acomplish; you’ll likely have a list of these projects), and “contexts” (where do you have to be in order to do the action, things like “phone” “office” “erands”) are helpful for focusing and making it easier to move your projects forward.
• Do regular reviews of the information on your todolists, and spend (an hour?) once a week making sure you’re not foregetting things and that you’ve checked off all the actions that you’ve actually done and so forth.

There are other details, precise methods which GTD people focus on, talk about, and provide in their software applications. Frankly I’ve not read the book and I’m by no means an expert on the subject. I continue to have objections to the system: it assumes large tasks and quickly and easily be broken down into smaller tasks (which isn’t always true), and that projects follow linear and predicatable sequences, which I find to be almost universally false. While the reviews help counteract these sorts of assumptions about projects, I have always tended to find GTD a poor solution to the productivity problem:¹ both for myself and in my observations of how other people work.

At the same time, I think the notion of a single system that comes to the mainstream via GTD and of weekly/regular reviews, another artifact of GTD, are both really helpful and powerful concepts for organizing ourselves. The other aforementioned “features” are helpful for many, but I feel that very often organinzing the “GTD list,” and our lives to fit ino a GTD list is often too much of a burden and gets in the way of doing things.

I’m interesting in finding out how people these days are talking and thinking about GTD these days. I think the fad has died down, and I’m interested in seeing what we’ve as a geeky community have learned from the experience.

Interestingly, I’m probably doing something much closer to what GTD recomended these days than I ever have before. org-mode is (among many other things) a capiable GTD tool. I think it’s successful not simply because it supports GTD, and the task-management features seem to have grown out of an emacs/writing writing platform rather than a calendar platform. The end result is that I’ve found the GTD way to be quite effective, though its largely unintentional.

I’m interested in hearing where your own systems are, and how you feel about GTD these days:

• Do you use GTD or GTD based methodologies for your personal organization?
• If you only use some which, and why?
• If you don’t use GTD, what system if any do you use?
• If you once used GTD but stopped, or have considered using GTD and then didn’t, I’m particularly interested to learn why you came to these conclusions?
• What current factors influence the way that you organize your work?

I hope that covers everyone. I’m particularly interested by how creative folks work, but i think in the right light that covers most of us. I look forward to hearing from you?

Cheers, sam

I have a confession. I last week (briefly) considered getting a Nokia N810 so that I could sync and use org-mode when I was away from my computer/laptop. The N800/810 is a small tablet that runs a Debian based operating system, which means it could run emacs, and I could write little clickable scripts that could do all of the syncing and awesomeness that I’ve grown accustomed to.

Then I realized how absurd this is, and cast it aside. My laptop is really mobile, and if I needed it to be lighter or more mobile, I could buy a new battery for it. And it has a full sized keyboard.

This is a sickness right?

I’m working on a longer post on the topic, but the past few days have seen me spend a bit of extra attention trying to develop some way of doing a “fact file” inside of emacs. Basically what I need is some way of storing information (links, quotes, text) along with bibliogrpahic information (where I got it, when I accessed it) and some sort of meta-data (tags, categories, search index) so that I can find things again. Largely, this data isn’t for any specific project, but it is a way to record general notes on the information that I consume in an effort to make that data more useable in the future.

As I firm up the solution, I’ll write more about it, but I’ve discovered something about the software targeted at this domain (generally, “personal information management,”) that’s worth sharing: there are a lot of notebooks and databases around, but they’re all very much alike: anything that’s structured as a database is generally desgined to store addresses, contact information and other “CRM” data, which is nice, but not what I’m going for at all. There are also a lot of notebook applications that are modeled on wikis (too unstructured) or outliners (ok, but hierarchical). Interestingly, it seems every kind of personal information management package that isn’t an address book (for emacs, but I think this is to some degree generalizable) has grown to a point where it can manage and extrapolate todo-lists from your notes.

Once upon a time, emacs itself was critiqued (and still is) because it has the ability to send and recieve email, and that this feature (email sending) was a sign of “feature bloat,” becasue after all, sending email with a text editor. That’s a bit a field. I’ll let you decide how history has dealt with the email issue. I in the mean time am going to write, and figure out some way of doing a better job with this information.