Keep up to date with Doris
December 7th, 2009 by Demian Turner
I wish I hadn’t waited so long to install the ClickToFlash plugin, it totally improves the web experience. The idea is simple, all flash animations are paralyzed by default 
To view flash, including videos like youtube, etc, you have to click to play. A lot healthier for the laptop, no more CPU running at 100% nor mindless distractions when you’re trying to absorb valuable content.
November 20th, 2009 by Demian Turner
Thanks to Pam for the heads up about this new app in the app store, WorkSnug.
WorkSnug uses Augmented Reality to connect mobile workers to the nearest and best places to work in the city. We’ve visited and rated hundreds of workspaces, assessing noise levels, power provision, community feel, even the quality of the coffee. London has been launched first. San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Madrid and several other cities are on the way in the coming weeks
Covered recently in Web Worker Daily, check out the video to see the app in action.
May 22nd, 2009 by Demian Turner
multitasking
Quite an interesting article from the New York Times in which the author, whose life priorities were brought sharply into focus after being diagnosed with cancer, describes how important it is to rid oneself of distractions like facebook, email, twitter, etc in order to start being effective:
Ms. Gallagher advocates meditation to increase your focus, but she says there are also simpler ways to put the lessons of attention researchers to use. Once she learned how hard it was for the brain to avoid paying attention to sounds, particularly other people’s voices, she began carrying ear plugs with her. When you’re trapped in a noisy subway car or a taxi with a TV that won’t turn off, she says you have to build your own “stimulus shelter.”
She recommends starting your work day concentrating on your most important task for 90 minutes. At that point your prefrontal cortex probably needs a rest, and you can answer e-mail, return phone calls and sip caffeine (which does help attention) before focusing again. But until that first break, don’t get distracted by anything else, because it can take the brain 20 minutes to do the equivalent of rebooting after an interruption. (For more advice, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
“Multitasking is a myth,” Ms. Gallagher said. “You cannot do two things at once. The mechanism of attention is selection: it’s either this or it’s that.” She points to calculations that the typical person’s brain can process 173 billion bits of information over the course of a lifetime.
“People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”
During her cancer treatment several years ago, Ms. Gallagher said, she managed to remain relatively cheerful by keeping in mind James’s mantra as well as a line from Milton: “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”
Multitasking photo by Les Chatfield
May 20th, 2009 by Pamela Poole
There I was, after over a year and multiple failed attempts, still without a solution to my task management problem. So what did I do?
I went retrograde. Back to paper. But not Post-Its. For me, they’d gone the way of the dinosaur years before, when I got a laptop (those big monitors were good Post-It holders).
Once again, I had my trusty mini legal pad within easy reach, beside my computer. I’d completely given up.
Until I met Doris, that is.
Now I no longer have to write my urgent to-dos in giant letters with a Sharpie, scribble out completed to-dos, or flip back and forth through tattered pages to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything. I no longer have to kill trees. It’s all good.
With such an effortless system for managing tasks, my productivity has increased immensely. More importantly, my ability to concentrate is significantly greater, simply because I do not have random tasks floating around in my head distracting me and stressing me out. Doris is indispensable for productivity, but also for peace of mind—literally.
Still not a believer? Read the whole series of articles on my quest for the perfect task-management app:
May 19th, 2009 by Pamela Poole
Wondering at this point if I just had special needs that defied the limitations of the “simple” to-do list format, I thought maybe what I needed was a mindmap… The word kind of captured what I was looking for: a “place” to record and organize all the random stuff that was always cluttering up my head.
So I went mindmap shopping. First of all, they’re all ugly, and I don’t do ugly. And surprisingly few of them are free. The least horrible one I found was bubbl.us.
I spent several hours creating my map: color-coding things to group them, creating sub-bubbles and co-bubbles and bubble bunches and linking them with arrows… When I was done, it felt good to have all that stuff out of my head.
But it had been a very painful process (color coding, editing, moving bubbles—all very user-unfriendly), and the end result was barely adequate. The freeform layout made it hard to parse at a glance. There was no way to keep track of your history. And every time I wanted to go back to the map and add something, I’d spend five minutes attaching it to its group, color-coding, rearranging existing bubbles to make room and prioritize… All for one to-do.
Unacceptably inefficient. As a to-do list, at least, it was useless. So it never became part of my workflow either.
(It took me about 20 minutes to enter and organize in Doris all the info I’d spent hours putting into a mindmap. And it takes about 5 seconds to add something new. No brainer.)
After I gave up on the mindmap idea, I found a partial solution: a collaborative project management app that at least took care of the details of my two large, ongoing projects.
However, because I have multiple smaller, short-term projects going on all the time (personal and professional), with at least as many details to keep track of, I still desperately needed a solution…
Still not a believer? Read the whole series of articles on my quest for the perfect task-management app:
May 14th, 2009 by Pamela Poole
Yes, I’m mixing my stories up. But that’s the way our lives are these days, isn’t it? Kind of all mixed up, faster than a speeding bullet, generally wacky? Mine is anyway.
In my quest for personal and professional organization, I have tried a number of to-do options. They all sucked. Or at least they didn’t work for me. Too big or too small, too hard or too soft… I felt like Goldilocks.
Now, Forbes Magazine recently said that computers can’t kill Post-Its. (Clearly they hadn’t yet heard of Doris the Post-It Killer.)
So of course the very first thing I tried, a few years ago, was the official 3M Post-It Digital Notes desktop app. The obvious choice. I even paid for it after 30 days because I was convinced virtual Post-Its would work for me every bit as well as the cute little paper ones always had.
Wrong. Painfully slow to load on startup, cumbersome to work with (hard to edit, hard to read, hard to create, no way to prioritize or group). Impossible to organize (no button you could click to line them all up neatly the way you can desktop icons). And they took up way too much screen real estate. Very, very bad.
Many have tried to interpret the beloved little almost-squares for the computer. All have failed.
And what’s funny is that they all focused on the physicality of the Post-Its and failed utterly to grasp what it was about them that worked so well for all of us. Scribble, stick, unstick, restick on top, unstick, throw away, unstick, put in your wallet, on the fridge… I even sometimes stuck ‘em on my shirt. Very short term. (I hope I’m not the only person who ever did that…)
It was never about the squares. It’s about versatile and effortless and portable. That describes Doris.
Stay tuned for more of the saga of my search for the perfect to-do list!
Still not a believer? Read the whole series of articles on my quest for the perfect task-management app:
