Most recently, I’ve put videos on the internet about Markdown, TextExpander, and Eating Kale Chips.

Slightly less recently, I did a video about Squarespace.

Slightly less recently still, I did a video about Keyboard Maestro that got picked up by the blog for Stairways Software. Stairways Software are the, um, developers of Keyboard Maestro.

So yeah, that was a pretty big moment for me.

As part of a Super Secret Project for The TKast, Kai and I have to learn how to use screencasting software.

During the latest episode of GFL, he jokingly/semi-jokingly/not-jokingly asked me to do a screencast and teach him how to use Keyboard Maestro.

So I did.

Let this be a lesson to you all. If you want to learn more about the nerdy computer stuff that I use, ask me to do a screencast and you might just get a rambling 35 minute video.

I realized last night that I’m trapped in a co-dependent relationship with email.

Email is a fantastic invention.

In the days before the internet and email, if you wanted to talk to somebody outside of your local area code, it cost money. Either you would make a long-distance call, which cost by the minute, or you’d mail a letter or package, which cost postage.

If you were really lucky, you could send a fax, which cost less than postage but still cost money.

Then email came along, ensuring unlimited communication with everyone you know for only the cost of your internet subscription. This can be an extremely useful tool for staying in contact with friends, family, or co-workers in satellite offices.

Sharing photos of the kids with grandma and grandpa, catching up with high school acquaintances, or simply writing a pen pal is made easier with email. Its cheap, eliminating the monetary barriers of older communication mediums, and its easy, which allows everybody to do it.

Email is awesome. That is, until, just like anything else it gets abused. And email is super mega easy to abuse the shit out of.

Its one reason spam is so prevalent; email offers an essentially free method of communicating offers and deals (and scams) to limitless human beings simultaneously. Its so cheap that one buyer can represent a break even, and two represents a profit, despite an audience of thousands or millions.

Now think about your own friends and co-workers. How many times in the last 5 years have you gotten a chain email, multiple emails in rapid succession from the same person with a single different funny picture attached, or the exact same email sent twice in a row?

How many times have your co-workers hit “Reply All” by accident?

When people like me say they are frustrated with email (or, in my case, “I fucking hate email”), what they’re really saying is that they’re frustrated with the people sending them emails. Because people sending you emails, generally speaking, are soulless, terrible human beings that thrive on your pain.

Or something like that.

So what’s the solution here? One big problem with email is that you’re susceptible to getting shitty emails from literally anybody on planet earth who can trip over a keyboard and accidentally type your email address and click “send”. When the problem is other people, you have to come up with a solution to your own email system.

Because - and I’ll be honest here, because this is fucking important - if you’re reading this, you suck at email.

If you are a living, breathing human being, the odds are pretty high that you suck at sending email. The odds are even better, unfortunately, that you suck at RECEIVING email, which is a problem since, as we’ve established, anybody on Planet Earth is capable of tripping over a keyboard and hitting “send”. Being bad at sending email is bad enough; its a great way to alienate co-workers and get a lot of “lost” invitations to family reunions and events, but being bad at receiving email?

That’s where the pain lives.

So you need to get better at email.

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The first thing you need to learn about email is that it works like any other thing you do that you’re good at. Just like you needed to practice hitting a golf ball, throwing darts, saying the alphabet backwards, or reciting Pi to 500 digits, you have to practice to get good at email.

And like those other things, you need to get a system. For golf, its developing and practicing a swing that will allow you to make solid contact on a round ball with a thin, semi-flexible, awkwardly weighted stick. For getting better at email, its about developing an organizational system that works for you.

I subscribe to the Inbox: Zero school of email management. There’s been some hagiography about it, which I’ve done a lot of, and its been twisted by idiots on Twitter to emphasize the “Zero” aspect (if you enjoy self-flagellation, do a Twitter search for “Inbox Zero” on a Friday afternoon; its crazy-making), but at its core, Inbox: Zero is about processing information every time you collect it.

Second, you need to learn that email is a communication medium, not a communication repository.

If your email server went down 5 minutes before you got in to work, would you be able to get your work done? Would you have all the information you needed to do your job?

Would you even know what you were supposed to be working on in the first place?

If you answered “no” to any of those questions, you are begging for trouble. You might as well get in your time machine, go back to 1987, and call Mike Tyson a sissy. It will hurt less.

When you get an email on Monday updating the time for your Friday meeting, don’t leave it in your inbox until Friday as a reminder of your meeting; open up iCal, Google Calendar, your day planner, or whatever calendar you use, make a note for Friday about the change in time, and then GET RID OF THE EMAIL. Doesn’t that feel better? You have one less email to sift through in your inbox, making it easier to process the next batch of emails (because you don’t have to sift past this one; this one is already processed). Additionally, and more importantly, if Friday is Email Doomsday and you can’t get your email, you still, at the very least, know when your meeting is.

People who are really good at email? They make notes about things like what the meeting is about, who will be there, who is running it, and any questions they have, and they do it as far away from their email inbox as possible.

Know why?

Because people who are really good at email understand that email is a communication medium and not a repository. It is designed to share information, not store it.

Third, you can’t fix other people. You can, however (and in the industry, we call this “burying the lead”, so pay attention), fix their expectations of the email medium.

Because other people suck at email, they do dumb things like check for new mail every five minutes, leave their inbox up all day, set a growl notification, and then expect everybody around them to do the same thing.

Setting aside the fact that checking your email every 5 minutes allows for the possibility of 24,000 potential interruptions during your work-year, and setting aside that leaving email open all day with an audible or visible notification system turns your inbox into a defacto chat system, the worst thing this does is create an expectation that everybody else does this too.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this before, but most human beings have trouble putting things in context outside of their own experience; when your experience is checking email every five minutes, its very easy to acquire the expectation that everyone in your team is doing the same thing. So you need to break that illusion for your friends and co-workers. How?

By telling them.

At this point, everybody who emails me regularly knows the following items are true:

1) I process my email every time I check it.
2) I check my email no more than 4 times per working day.
3) I will do everything in my power to avoid sending an email longer than 5 sentences.
4) In the event that I cannot fit what I want to say in 5 sentences, I will ask to schedule a call to talk about it.
5) Do not ever forward me a chain email.

They know this because I have told them. It took 5 minutes and we never have to talk about it again. It is just understood that this is how I use email.

Admittedly, when you’re on a team, this can be tricky. When one person on the team is using the tool differently, that can cause problems. To that, I would say “hmmmm, yeah, why don’t you carve out the time to talk it over with your team and come up with some best practices for email communication in your team?”

The response, because I’ve said that exact thing before, is usually some combination of stuttering and mumbling and grudging agreement.

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Email is fucking hard. I know it is, because I’m pretty good at it and I still struggle with it. For instance, I only just realized that when I need to defer¹ an email, I can use Trello for that. That’s actually the thing that set off my tweet spree last night.

Yup, even the email pros have trouble with this sometimes. But we’re here to help.²

Thanks for reading.

I appreciate you

So about a week ago, I got worked up about ubiquitous capture. I can tell you’re shocked that I got worked up over something that you feel is innocuous, but here’s the thing…it isn’t innocuous. Its the furthest thing from innocuous.

If you are doing creative work of any kind - whether professionally or during your free time - not having a system for capturing ideas, in real time as they come to you, is instant death for your ability to do your best work.

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The source of my annoyance (this time around) was a Facebook post by a good friend of mine. In it, they bemoaned the feeling that writer’s block only ever occurs when they sit down to write. As I have, believe it or not, many friends who fancy themselves “creatives”, I was not surprised. This, or something similar, comes across my Facebook or Twitter feed at least once a week, which is super frustrating because I have talked to all of them at one point or another about capturing ideas for later. The problems they are describing used to affect me, so I can certainly empathize (although, at this point, I literally have zero sympathy).

What changed? Ubiquitous capture.

Ubiquitous capture is the practice of capturing your ideas as they come to you, no matter where you are or what you are doing. It is the single most important tool at the disposal of creative-type people.

If you have ever, ever, ever been unable to recall the nut of an idea when you sit down to develop it, if you have ever, ever, ever forgotten a name, place, date, or thing that is in any way important to you, or if you have ever, ever, ever felt like your work was not up to its usual standard, then ubiquitous capture can help you.

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One of the things that afflicts creative professionals is the need to be creative in an on-demand environment. When your boss gives you a deadline for a design or a writing project, they are placing constraints on the creative process. Those constraints give focus to projects; they also, more commonly, hinder the process and lead to things like creative blocks.

You don’t always have your best ideas between 9am and 5pm, and you aren’t always in a position to fully flesh them out when you get them. Sometimes you get them in the shower. Sometimes you get them in line at the grocery store. Sometimes you get them while playing with your kids, or while walking pets.

Being able to get your best ideas literally anywhere is the beautiful part of creativity, but as any creative can tell you, it is also one of the most frustrating. This is why you need a system for ubiquitous capture.

Personally? I never go anywhere without my Hipster PDA. I carry a pen and a stack of ~50 index cards held together with a binder clip everywhere that I go. I do not leave the house without them. I go through something on the order of 1000 index cards every month, and everybody who has spent more than an hour next to me has seen me take my HPDA out of my back pocket and scratch out a quick note.

This does a pair of important things. First, it allows me to capture the nut of every idea, no matter where I am or what I’m doing, especially when I’m not in a position to do something about that idea.

So when I get an idea for my book and I’m, say, in line at Robdogs buying Nacho Cheese Hot Dogs, I can quickly write down the bits of my idea that I absolutely am not allowed to forget about and remember them later when it comes time to fully develop that idea into a book section. It takes 30 seconds, and now I won’t forget about investment and atrophy when it comes time to write that part of my book.

Those 30 seconds have just saved me at least an hour of agony and frustration when I can’t remember that thing I was thinking about when I was buying hot dogs. Seems like a fair trade.

Second, it is an active system; it forces me to physically write out ideas, projects, goals, tasks, next steps, etc, giving me instant investment in attending to them and seeing them through.

I’ve found that when I type stuff into a digital capture system, I’m much more liable to forget about them. Why? Because there’s no investment there; its a passive system. I type upwards of 10 or 12 hours a day, both on my computer and on my iPhone/iPad. Any additional typing, for ideas/projects/etc, is just that: additional typing. It is no different in weight from any of the other words I type throughout the day.

True, I have “written down” the idea, but I haven’t fully captured it, since there’s nothing to differentiate it in my brain from the rest of the words I type. That’s what sucks about passive systems.

Physically writing it down, though? Those words have instant weight to them, and having a stack of index cards in your back pocket will unbalance you slightly every time you sit down. Its very hard to forget they’re back there. I can forget a file on a computer, but I can’t forget a stack of index cards jabbing into my ass.

So now when I sit down to work, instead of wasting time trying to re-summon an idea, I have an index card outlining everything I wasn’t allowed to forget. This gets me immediately working on the idea, even if the idea came to me in line at the grocery store the night before and not between the hours of 9am and 5pm.

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I’ve been evangelizing about ubiquitous capture for more than a year now, and given how well it has worked in my life I simply do not understand the resistance on the part of my friends and colleagues. My intuition is that it is rooted in the idea of carrying index cards around everywhere. People don’t want to look like a nerd.

You work in creativity, the nerd ship sailed a long fucking time ago, but ok, I’ll indulge that.

Get a different system.

Problem solved.

There are any number of methods for ubiquitous or semi-ubiquitous capture. AquaNotes makes a water proof notepad designed specifically for capturing your ideas in the shower. You can take this idea even lower-fidelity and use a grease pencil.

Carry a notebook. It has the benefit of not being a stack of index cards.

Use the voice memos app on your phone and get really really fucking good at emailing voice notes to yourself before you close the app.

I have a buddy who makes a quick mneumonic device for each new idea and then writes the abbreviation on his arm. Its more effort than index cards, but it works for him.

And that’s kind of the point. Whatever capture system you choose, whether its index cards, voice memos, notebooks, or these beautiful Capture Cards made by Aaron Mahnke, choose the system that works best for you.

And then fucking USE IT so that I don’t call you a dummy anymore.

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Thanks for reading.

I appreciate you.

I really hate a lot of things, so when I find stuff I like, I love sharing it with my friends.

In that spirit, I’ve identified my five favorite things across a number of topics. Because I love them, and I love you, and I want to set the two of you up on a date. I think you may really hit it off with this stuff.

Books

• Predictably Irrational: Dan Ariely is really awesome, and discusses a lot of the ways we make decisions that run contrary to rational economic thought in repeatable, predictable ways.
• Open: Andre Agassi will always be my favorite tennis player, even more so after reading his book.
• Getting Things Done: David Allen wrote one of the single most important books in the realm of personal productivity.
• The Wages of Wins: David Berri (no, not the funny guy) examines sports economics using basketball as the backdrop. Turns out shooting the ball lowers your odds of winning a game of basketball.
• The Complete Works of Gilbert and Sullivan: Because fuck you if you aren’t down with Pinafore or The Mikado.

Podcasts

• You Look Nice Today: This picture is all you need to know about the Journal of Emotional Hygiene.
• Harry and Jake Speak Politely: I have a question, and its very important. What’chu watchin’?
• Mike & Tom Eat Snacks: Ed co-stars Michael Ian Black and Tom Cavanaugh eat snacks and talk about them. Awesome.
• Back to Work: Hi. Can I aks you a queshun? Do you like funny stuff that’s helpful? Before you answer, let me aks you another queshun. Hi.
• Build and Analyze: “Welcome to Build and Analyze, a weekly discussion show about the world of iPhone, iPad, iOS, coffee, and BMWs.”

Tumblrs

• Mom Effect: A dude plays Mass Effect while his mom makes all the decisions and provides commentary.
• Animals Talking In All Caps: Photos of animals captioned hilariously in capslock.
• Screenshots of Despair: Our interconnected lives can sometimes be very incredibly lonely.
• Text From Dog: Text messages from a Dog.
• Clients From Hell: True stories from the people who have to deal with shitty clients.

Apps

• Trello: Trello is an organizational and collaboration tool for teams and solo freelancers.
• 1Password: One of the best password managers available today.
• Quicksilver: Quit surfing through applications folders and Finder to locate your programs and files.
• Grand Perspective: Map your hard drives, manage your file systems, and locate ways to free up space.
• Contacts Cleaner: Your phone’s contacts are probably a fucking mess. Contacts Cleaner un-fucking-messifies them.

Alcohols

• High Spirits Distillery: Arizona’s premiere distillery, producing gin, single malt whisky, and vodka.
• Buffalo Trace Bourbon: Probably my favorite bourbon. Super mixable, super smooth, super flavorful.
• Boca Loca: Cachaca is awesome, and Boca Loca is one of the best.
• Bluecoat Gin: Probably the best of the new school of American Dry gins that have invaded the marketplace.
• Wyborowa Vodka: Listeners of The TKast will wonder why I’m putting a vodka on this list, but ice cold shots of vodka are a guilty pleasure of mine, and this is my favorite.

Music

• Camp: One of my current favorite albums.
• WZRD: I’m a huge Kid Cudi fan, and this album is a fantastic departure from his normal brand of hip-hop while remaining accessible and familiar to fans.
• Ninja Academy: Ninja Academy released their new self-titled album under the pay-what-you-want system, making it ostensibly free. I paid $15, though, and it was worth every penny.
• Born to Run: I have 5 different versions of Born to Run on my computer right now. The rest of the album is really, really, really awesome too.
• White Pony: I’ve been listening to a ton of Deftones lately, and its usually the White Pony album when I do.

Movies

• Protégé: A kind of Donnie Brasco-esque Hong Kong cop drama. Really strong performances throughout the cast; nobody was actually bad in this movie.
• Haywire: For an action movie, its still very Soderburgh, which is convenient since he directed it. Gina Carano was suprisingly good, especially acting against a cast full of heavy hitters.
• Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol: I might be in love with Paula Patton. This was the second most fun I had at the movies last year, behind only the time I got totally blitzed on 120-proof bourbon at Fast Five.
• Redbelt: David Mamet wrote and directed an MMA movie that isn’t at all about MMA. Gun to my head? Its my current favorite movie.
• Glengarry Glen Ross: This is the only other legitimate contender for my top spot. Not a single weak performance.

Text Editors

• Byword: I write almost everything on my Mac in Byword now. Also has an iOS app.
• nvALT: Brett Terpstra forked Notational Velocity and its pretty fucking rad.
• Nebulous Notes: I write almost everything on iOS devices in Nebulous Notes. TextExpander support and Dropbox connectivity is sweeeet.
• PlainText: PlainText is pretty nice for a free iOS app. Connects through Dropbox, supports TextExpander.
• TextMate: I personally don’t need a lot of the things that TextMate brings to the table, but Bundles are pretty awesome.

And that’s it for the innaugural edition of Stuff Toku Likes. I hope you find this useful, helpful, or - at worst - not totally masturbatory.

Thanks for reading.

I appreciate you.

I’ve been wanting to write about Trello for awhile now, especially considering how much I’ve been evangelizing for it. My evangelizing finally hit Reddit, I received the following question/comment:

I’m starting to get into GTD— do you mind showing a screenshot of your Trello setup as some inspiration?

—Reddit user dysuke

Instead of posting screenshots, I decided to actually write this blog post instead.

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So, before I get into my Trello setup, I need to talk about my work setup. My work setup often involves managing large amounts of written information, and its not uncommon for a pile of index cards that looks like this:

Because of the sheer volume of index cards involved in my day-to-day life - I’m going through something on the order of 1000 index card a month these days - a fair number of them need to be digitized. Omnifocus didn’t really work for me because I don’t have the iOS version, and I need my digital information with me everywhere. Creating separate notes for each card in something like Nebulous Notes or Simple Note would work, but its annoying to sift through them to find what I need because its hard to organize the number of collections I need stuff for and I’ve never been big on tagging.

I’m not a big fan of Evernote period, so that’s out.

The thing that makes Trello so attractive to me for this purpose is that it is essentially digital index cards. They’re organized in columns by heading, and you can create a new collection of index cards for each project you have. Admittedly, the universe makes sense to me through a narrow lens, but digital index cards make a ton of sense to me.

I use Trello on iOS, as well as on OS X. I use an app called Fluid, which takes webapps and runs them as an OS X app. The paid version of Fluid creates dedicated browser windows for each instance, so I never have to actually log into Trello in Chrome. When I’m working at home, I use the 2nd monitor as a dedicated full-screen Trello window, occasionally watching TV over the top of it.

Now that the administrative stuff is out of the way, let’s dig into how I get stuff done with Trello.

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I have relatively few boards compared to other Trello setups I’ve seen, but this number encompasses everything I need Trello for. I use Trello to manage personal projects, and it has allowed me to replace the 37 Signals suite of apps (Highrise/Basecamp), acting as my client relationship manager & collaborative project platform (when necessary; it isn’t necessary right now).

My CRM board is setup a little differently, but most of my boards look like this (redacted, when necessary):

No matter how many headings I have on most of my boards, I don’t even bother with the default “Doing” column, opting only for the project heading and the “Done” column. I’ve never had a need to actively track the stuff I’m “Doing”; I know what things I’m working on vs. stuff I’m waiting for next steps for.

But let’s say that I’ve found a loveseat that I like on Craigslist and I’m waiting for next steps on it.

After you input the note, it will show on the board that there is a note there.

So for a board like this, where I’m tracking Uncompleted Projects and thats it, this particular setup works very well. I only see uncompleted projects (every item on the board) and stuff with next steps (anything with a note icon). As soon as a project is completed, I drag it over to the “Done” column and immediately archive it so that it disappears from the screen.

In this heavily redacted screenshot, you can see my Action Items board:

It has the same basic layout, except I moved the “Done” column over to the far left to prevent myself from having to scroll to find it. Each heading is a different client, each card is a different item for that client. Things with notes are still things I’m waiting for next steps on, and everything that’s done isn’t visible, because its been archived in the “Done” column.

The only board that’s different is my CRM…which I won’t screenshot because I’d literally have to redact the whole thing. It has 2 columns:

• Client Phone Numbers - Each card under this heading is a different client, and each card has the names, numbers, and email addresses of everyone I might conceivably need to talk to at each client.
• Client Contact Notes - Again, each card is a different client, and each note on the card describes each point of contact; who I talked to, when I talked to them, and what I talked to them about.

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In terms of actually getting things done with Trello, here’s my system:

1. I process my email to zero 3 or 4 times a day. Usually 4 on Mondays & Wednesdays (typically higher volume email days for me), and 3 on Tuesday/Thursday/Friday (lower volume email days).
2. After I process my email to zero, I look at each of my “open” index cards and process them to zero as well; I ask myself if anything I just learned from email allows me to get rid of any index cards (if yes, I tear them up and throw them out), or if any cards need to be deferred, or if any of them have become mission critical.
3. Twice a day (usually after the first and last email/index card batches), I process Trello using the same outline as my index card process. If a card can be deleted, I delete it; if it needs a next step, I add it; if I need to do it ASAP, I move it to the top of the column.

One of my favorite things about index cards - aside from the ubiquitous capture, versatility, agility, and miniscule cost - is tearing them up and throwing them away. It gets old information out of sight and out of mind, helping reinforce the ideas behind Inbox Zero, where its not about how much email is in your inbox, but rather how much of your brain is in your inbox (especially when you don’t want it to be). Archiving Trello cards services the same idea; it gets them out of sight and out of mind, allowing your brain to focus on the Next Thing that needs to be done.

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And so that’s how Trello helps me get stuff done. Its a very lightweight solution to a problem I’ve had for a couple of years now, and at this point its hard to imagine myself using anything else. It fully replaces Omnifocus, Highrise, and Basecamp, and mostly replaces Nebulous Notes/Simple Note for a lot of my notetaking needs.

It is absolutely a must-install app for me, and is one of the seven apps that I absolutely cannot live without (the others being TextExpander, Quicksilver, 1Password, Keyboard Maestro, Byword, and Chrome).

Thanks for reading.

I appreciate you

I’m broken.

As creatives, we are often broken, and we are often accutely aware of our own flaws. Often, its what drives us to create. But you don’t often hear creatives admit it out loud in those terms.

Instead, we play it off as quirks, or insecurity, or being crazy. We go out of our way to avoid calling ourselves broken, but it is so disgustingly liberating and reassuring to do so.

I am broken. Severely.

Where to start?

Am I physically broken? Yes. I have a pair of bad knees, a bad back, bad shoulders, and pre-arthritis in my hands. I walk around in severe pain basically all the time. So yes, I am physically broken.

Am I emotionally broken? Very much so, yes. I am emotionally selfish, and I don’t enjoy other people. I lack an emotional availability for things I don’t care about. I can be incredibly self-destructive, and I don’t appreciate the advantages I’ve had.

I am a severely broken human being, and saying it out loud was my first step to recovery.

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I’ve been taking a lot of walks recently. Long, rambling walks, often for no other reason than to get out of the house.

I swear I’m actually 70.

I like two things about long, rambling walks, and neither of them are the exercise. I like the way it clears my mind, allowing me to focus on individual creative ideas and let external stimuli wash over me.

The other, more important, aspect of long, rambling walks is the ideas of walking one more step. I’ve walked 23 miles in the last 9 days, which is remarkable to me considering the state of my body.

Walking away from home forces you to come back. It gives you no other choice but to come back, no matter how far away you are, no matter how exhausted you are or painful it is.

You have to get home, and you have to use your feet.

Its not a coincidence that my best creative work has occurred in the last 9 days, either. Not only have I had a lot of time to consider my work, but I’ve had an opportunity to confront a portion of my brokenness and begin to overcome it.

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I haven’t written extensively about my divorce. This has been on purpose. I know what happened, I know what didn’t happen, and that’s enough for me.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about emotional availability and my own failings in this particular area. Whether or not my ex-wife cheated on me is irrelevant (she did), and whether or not I cheated on her is irrelevant (I didn’t).

What matters in this particular context is that I was a shitty husband when it came to being emotionally supportive.

One of my many dysfunctions is a difficulty caring about things that other people care about, and try as she might, she could not get me to care about marching band. Try as I might, I could not get her to care about a lot of things that were important to me, but that’s her dysfunction and it isn’t important.

I realized that my problem stemmed from an interest deficiency. I just wasn’t interested in things. I took a kind of sick pride in not reading things, in not giving a shit about stuff.

My creative work suffered. Like you wouldn’t believe. I faked it for years, but there was no blood going to it at all. It wasn’t until I got divorced that I found a solution.

Interest.

I got interested in stuff. I got interested in people.

I got interested in me.

And the blood started getting to the work. I’m not just reading books on purpose, I’m writing one. I’m getting better.

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Recognizing that we are broken isn’t the hard part; its proactively taking the necessary steps to get better.

I may be broken, and I may always be broken, but I don’t have to stop working on it. I’m going to keep walking too far, I’m going to continue being interested, and I’m going to keep searching for more solutions.

Not just because its the root of good creative work, but because its the root of being a functional human being.

So I’m writing a book.

I’m writing a self-help book.

Its a self-help book in the sense that I’m aiming to help myself, and not in the sense that I want to give you 20 Tips For Always Having Everything Go Perfect Without Working At It. That’s not a book I would want to read, and its not a book I think would be useful, and its not a book that anybody would find helpful in any way, shape, or form.

So that’s not what my book will be about.

My book is about an index card.

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If you hang out with me for longer than an hour, I will probably, at some point, talk about index cards. I love index cards. I love them so much that I run my entire life on them, and indeed have a filing system for them called 44 Folders. In the 44th folder, the “permanent” folder, there is an index card that I have titled “Modus Operandi”. This card is my statement of being, and on it are the 10 things and ideas that I want my life to be about.

The contents of this card change periodically - every 3 or 4 months or so - and I have found that the changes that I make are, more often than not, based on new realizations about old phenomenon. Something that happened to me last week is not likely to be on this card; I understand that I am, perhaps more than most, a product of my experience and history, and as I gain a fuller understanding of that history, I put it on the card.

For instance, Point #7 right now is Live in the Service of Others. I realized that I wanted my life to be about other people as I contemplated my passion for helping people communicate with each other and discovered that it stemmed from my father and I not communicating effectively with each other until I was in my 20s.

Essentially, Live in the Service of Others is about the relationship my dad and I had when I was 10, and not about something that happened last week. And now I feel compelled to explore the rest of this card and write a book about it; where the ideas on this card came from, and what they mean to me.

If you feel like you can take something away from it, that’s awesome, but that’s not why I’m writing it. I write for me.

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One of the ideas I’m most recently fascinated with is the idea of being your own biggest fan.

I was listening to Childish Gambino a few weeks ago, getting ready for the concert I’ve had tickets for since December. His latest album has a song called “Bonfire”, and one of my favorite lines on it is this semi-rhetorical question about why black actors always release a rap album.

Man, why does every black actor gotta rap some? I don’t know, all I know is I’m the best one.

It hit me maybe a couple of days after Bert Sugar died. Bert Sugar is one of my five favorite writers of all time, and if you know me at all, you know I’m obsessed with lists. So I started to flesh out my list of favorite writers, and I was finally able to vocalize something I’ve felt since I was 10.

I’m my own favorite writer.

That’s maybe the most conceited thing I’ve ever written, but its so unceasingly true. I joke about stuff sucking, but I love everything I write. I love the stuff that doesn’t work, I love the stuff that fails, and I really, really have a boner for the stuff that works and succeeds.

More importantly, I don’t understand how anybody who calls themselves creative can NOT feel the same way without going totally crazy.

Many, if not most of us - whether we write, sing, draw, paint, act, or make music - have bought into the image of a tortured artist. We are drawn to art and creating as a means to working through our pain, because its the only way we’ve found to express it. And so we buy into this tortured artist ideal and it becomes what we are.

The problem is that when you spend all your time engulfed in your own pain, it becomes very hard to get away from it. The art stops being about working through pain, and starts being the source of it. Even within our lifetime, we don’t have to look far to see what happens when artists can’t escape the source of their pain.

The things I created for almost 20 years were almost exclusively about that vicious cycle of the things I make to escape the source of my pain becoming the thing I was trying to escape. I’ve been there. Recently.

But here’s the thing: I’m never going to let it consume me ever again. Once I realized that I was my own favorite, I never had to statisfy any standard but my own. I don’t have to write like Bert Sugar or Gilbert & Sullivan or Dan Ariely to be happy. I won’t ever be able to write like them, just like I was never going to be able to play like Agassi; its a finish line I can never cross.

But holy shit I’m really good at writing like me.

I can live with that.

---

So I’m writing a book. And its going to be the book that I’ve wanted to write for 5 years and not known how to. And its going to be my favorite book. Ever.

Until my next one.

Thanks for reading.

I appreciate you

Last week, there was a lottery drawing you may have heard about.

The $640 million drawing, a record, was everywhere; every other post on Facebook was about it, it was all over Twitter, it was in all media. It was EVERYWHERE. There was an unparalled level of attention to the idea of 6 random numbers being drawn.

There were even blog posts on well-known sites warning of the dangers of winning six-hundred million dollars.

It was, in a word, ridiculous.

But then something interesting starting happening. All manner of companies, usually radio stations, started posting pictures of their company lottery tickets on Facebook and Twitter, with messages that went something like this:

“If our ticket wins the Mega Millions drawing, we will split it with everyone who Shares/Likes/RTs this photo!”

Huh.

This isn’t new. Companies have been doing giveaways for a few years now based on social media shares/likes/RTs. But this felt different.

It felt incredibly, irreparably stupid.

As a marketing tool, the idea of inducing social media interaction as a means of entering contests has some weight behind it. On Facebook, it can be very difficult to actually Unlike a page; once they like your page, there is a very high probability that they will see the rest of your updates.

ASIDE
For the purposes of this conversation, we only care about people who can’t figure out the Unlike feature on Facebook, and not consider people who maintain the “Like” status of a page but simply hide updates. The odds are good that if they can figure out how to Unlike your page, they can probably also figure out how to hide your posts, so we will group those people together. The difference between the two only matters for companies running fairly in-depth analytics, which is not the norm on Facebook.
END ASIDE

So for normal marketing giveaways, inducing social media interaction is awesome. It offers an exceedingly low barrier for entry with fairly high stickiness. So why, in this case, is it stupid?

Because you are literally obliterating value hand over fist.

The drawing on 30 March had an annuity value of $640 million. But for a company offering this giveaway, they have to take the cash option, unless they have an EXTREME amount of cash on hand (in which case they don’t need to offer this giveaway), the value of which was $462 million.

Not bad.

But that’s not what the company will walk with. The government will withhold roughly 40% of the jackpot for taxes, making the walk value somewhere in the neighborhood of $280 million.

Still awesome.

Until you have to split it.

A lot of these photos have been shared FAR north of 25,000 times, but let’s just go with that as an average.

$280,000,000 split 25,000 ways = $11,200

$11,200 from $280,000,000 is a pretty drastic drop-off and perfectly represents how bad social media can be for companies who use it poorly. It also completely ignores the very extremely real possibility that the jackpot will split more than 1 way; there are 3 confirmed winning tickets for this drawing, which makes this kind of value destruction even worse. Outside of this specific example, no social media strategy will cost an average (read: companies without a billion-dollar-plus market cap) company $280,000,000, but there are very real monetary consequences to pursuing an ill-conceived strategy, even considering the extreme low monetary cost of social media.

Consider the following social media giveaway, phrased in a much better way:

“If we win the Mega Millions, we will throw a $10 million party! Like/Share/RT this photo to be invited!”

A $10 million party sounds expensive. And it is. But its significantly less expensive than breaking off 25,000 equal shares of your jackpot, and is effectively the same exact thing. Except you, as a company, get to walk with two-hundred-seventy million more dollars, bankrolling future awesome giveaways and promotions, not to mention more effective marketing efforts.

Instead of going out of your way to destroy value with an ill-conceived social media strategy, ask yourself the following four questions:

1. What’s the value to the company by persuing this course of action?
2. What’s the risk?
3. Is there another, perhaps more obvious, method of achieving that same value with less risk?
4. What’s the thing I’m not seeing?

If you can’t identify an answer for all four questions in less than a half hour, don’t pursue that strategy. If you’ve thought out your strategy, these answers will come naturally to questions that come up during your planning; if you haven’t, you are chasing value with unknown, and potentially unacceptable, levels of risk.

Thanks for reading.

I appreciate you.

I bought some sweaters today.

This may not seem particularly noteworthy, so let me restate it.

I bought some sweaters today.

This may not seem particularly….just kidding.

My love affair with sweaters is a relatively recent one, going back only a few months. The previous 28+ years of my life had been spent carefully avoiding sweaters; painstaking measures were taken to make sure I never had to wear something as ugly as a sweater.

The exact circumstances leading up to the drastic reversal of my point of view will remain unknown probably forever; while it is easy to say that I am getting older and more mature in my taste in clothing, I find that explanation to be little more than reductive hand-waving. To me, the interesting part of this change in my point of view is not the circumstances leading up to it, but rather the catalyst itself.

I woke up one day and decided that I liked sweaters.

This is important to me for a few reasons. First, it means entire sections of clothing stores are open to me that I never would have ventured towards before. Second, and more importantly, it was another opportunity to observe a phenomenon I’d noticed several years ago.

———

There was a point in my life when I drank to get fucked up, and there was a point in my life where I drank to experience great beer.

During the first phase, I was young (early high school) and didn’t know any better. During the second, I was a total douche, using words like “experience” in the same sentence as “beer”. However, amongst that douche-i-tude was a fear; being old enough to process how shitty hard liquor made me feel during the first phase, I remember staying as far away from hard liquor as I could during the second phase.

Then one day, I woke up and decided that I liked gin.

It wasn’t that I’d had some gin the night before and realized it was awesome, like a child swearing off peas before finally trying some. It was that I just made a decision that I liked gin.

And sure enough, I tried some gin and I loved it.

Similarly, it isn’t that I wore a sweater yesterday and realized that I look good in them. I just decided that I liked sweaters. Sure enough, I tried on some sweaters and *boom*, I felt and looked great and now I own sweaters.

———

So what does this mean for us as human beings?

Dan Ariely wrote a lot about a related concept in his book Predictably Irrational. In talking about choice, Ariely describes several situations which highlight how little control we often have over our choices.

I’m paraphrasing, but essentially Ariely argues that because we don’t know our preferences very well, we often simply choose the most convenient of the choices presented to us. For instance, countries with an opt-out form for organ donation at the DMV have substantially higher rates of participation than countries with an opt-in form at the DMV; whichever way the default choice goes, the vast majority of people go as well.

The ability to self-direct our lives, and the perceived power of choice that we hold, is one of the central tenants of what makes us human. Our ability to operate at a level that is not purely instinctual is often what separates us from animals, and yet we fail repeatedly to avail ourselves of that ability. Often, those default choices run our lives for us.

We allow this to happen for a few reasons. First, it is easy. It can be exhausting, not to mention unnecessary, to form strong opinions on every topic. This ease and convenience can lead to complacency in decision making if left unchecked.

Second, it happens because we don’t know it is going on.

My situation with sweaters and gin highlights the remarkable ability of the conscious mind to control the subconscious mind. We often think of the subconscious as this inscrutable machine and to an extent that is right. The subconscious exerts extraordinary influence on the conscious mind, “forcing” us to do things for reasons often beyond our comprehension, but we rarely consider that it can be a two way street.

In my case, simply deciding a preference on two things my subconscious had virtually zero frame of reference for was enough to craft a positive impression.

Think about the power of that idea in your own life. How many sweaters are you not wearing for reasons literally passing understanding? How much gin are you not drinking?

Identify those times when preferences are important and decide for yourself, instead of defaulting. Whether its sweaters you would have never worn, gin you would never have tried, work you would never have done, or things you would never have created, understanding your preferences is one of the foundations of a happier, more fulfilled life.

Find your sweaters. Find your passion.

I appreciate you.

or, “How I Hacked the 43 Folders System to Work Better With Index Cards”

——-

People who know me know that I love severely. It has gotten me into trouble at times, but I really do feel like it is one of my best qualities. Might even be my single best one.

One of my more recent loves is the Hipster PDA.

When I started carrying a Hipster PDA back in April, I immediately got a lot of shit for it at work. I would always be fishing a stack of index cards out of my back pocket, obsessing over “dumb” things like ubiquitous capture, but I never let it phase me. As a high-functioning obsessive-compulsive, letting a stack of 3x5 cards run my life made a lot of sense. If something was important, it had space on a card. If something was really important, it had an entire card to itself.

Then when stuff got done, I could throw away the card. This was the real killer feature for me, because I found my life constantly weighed down by stuff I didn’t need anymore, worrying about stuff that had already happened. Throwing away index cards was a physical way for my body to recognize that something was “out of sight, out of mind”, and it made my life instantly lighter.

My Hipster PDA was great. I used it for important notes, stuff for podcasts, personal statements…once, I even spent an entire day posting to Twitter with it. I tried different configurations and a few different taxonomical systems with colored index cards and different priority levels based on where they were placed in the stack.

Eventually, it just got really fucking messy. So I quit it in favor of douchey Italian writing notebooks. My affair with notebooks lasted only a couple short months, just long enough to realize that I actually really do love index cards and I’m sorry for every straying.

——-

I’ve long had my eye on the 43 Folders organizational system. I hate friction in my life, so a simple, lo-fi organizational system that doesn’t create unnecessary friction is perfect. The problem was always two-fold.

1) I don’t really have a lot of papers going in and out, so full-size folders don’t make sense.

2) I don’t really have a place to store a box of full-size folders.

I wrestled with this for months. I was Odysseus, and the file folders aisle at OfficeMax my Sirens. I’ve had boxes of folders in my shopping basket dozens of times, only to snap back to rationality moments later.

Then one night a few weeks ago, I was at BestBuy picking up a new wireless mouse, and I saw that OfficeMax was having a sale on file folders. Everything I’d need for 43 Folders would only cost like $5, so I said “fuck it, The Sirens win. I’m crashing on the rocks.”

Thankfully, enough other sailors had shipwrecked, and there weren’t actually enough folders.

But it got me to thinking. The two limiting factors had always been my usage volume and the size of the system. At the time, I was still using notebooks, but when I was using index cards to run my life, I had plenty of paper going in and out. And index cards are small, so if I could find a way to tailor the 43 Folders system to index cards, storage size wouldn’t be an issue. So I hit the index card aisle, poked around for 2 minutes, and had my solution.

Here’s what I came up with:

http://cl.ly/BIWu

http://cl.ly/BJKT

For about $15, $10 of which was invested in the index card box itself, I had a complete 43 Folders system. I took some plastic, lettered index card dividers, flipped them around, and wrote on the tabs with metallic sharpie. I ran out of yellow and orange, hence the green tab for 31. I may go back and buy another pack of dividers, just for the one extra orange divider for 31, but I can live with it for now.

This thing is immensely satisfying. It is simplistically, and functionally, beautiful to me. The whole system fits in my laptop bag, so I’m virtually never with out it. It works perfectly with index cards, and is just large enough to fit my douchey italian writing notebooks for permanent safekeeping.

It was exactly the excuse I was looking for to get back on the index card standard, and I don’t think I’ll ever look back. I’ve eliminated the taxonomical nightmare of colored cards, back to plain, lined white index cards. I couldn’t be happier.

Thank you for reading.

I love you.

——-

PS - The title of this post refers to the number of folders in my 43 Folders system. I have always had perpetually important notes, so I added a 44th tab labeled, simply, “Perm” to the very back of the system. This tab houses my notebooks, important business cards, personal affirmations, and other longer-term notes that don’t fit in the 43 Folders taxonomy.

I was apprehensive about adding a Perm tab, because I do worry that it will turn into a general repository of stuff I don’t want to throw away. As long as I’m mindful, this shouldn’t be a problem.

I have a new Tumblr that I will be updating in addition to this one.

It is called Smart People Talking About interesting Things.

SPTAIT for short.

In it, I will post videos of smart people talking about interesting things. I may also link to articles about interesting things written by smart people.

There’s a running theme, but I’m not sure what it is.

I will post, hopefully, once a day. Possibly as many as twice a day.

http://sptait.tumblr.com

aka, “Toku gets asked to make abstract art for the light shelf in his mom’s preschool classroom.”

So yeah, these are marble slides and yeah they have goofy shapes. After making a couple of these, I decided not to connect any of the major structures to one another, because I felt that learning about feeling completely isolated in a complicated world was a good thing to teach four year olds.

Having read and listened to a lot about important skills for maximizing time and attention, I’ve had to sift through a lot of material that is, frankly, bullshit. Personal productivity has been made into a career by a huge number of hucksters, and a much smaller number of people actually interested in helping people make stuff, and like just about anything else, so much of it is in the service of making, or trying to make, the writer rich.

Instead of being in service of, you know, helping people be more productive.

Where productivity and motivation are concerned, the most important, and effective, skill I’ve learned in the last year is how to identify, and stay committed to, your parameters. Being able to figure out when you are out of scope and refocus your attention, by force if necessary, is the guard tower at the borders of your work-life sanity.

Read More

So we didn’t do as well in February as we did in January.

It turns out, getting rid of stuff is hard. I did make a pretty significant amount of progress, and it really just is down to figuring out where some of this stuff will wind up.

I just took 3 giant trash bags out to the dumpster. I have to go through my clothes and books, as well as actually take the weekend and run the paper shredder non-stop.

So almost got there. Not quite. Needed a couple extra days (fuck you, February!).

I did get a few questions about process for this goal. Here it is:

This is an example of how I used to organize things. I had drawers and boxes like this throughout the apartment on January 31.

So basically, I attacked this problem the same way for each section of stuff:

Step 1) Dump out all the stuff
Step 2) Divide it into 3 piles (Things, Stuff, Shred)
Step 3) Execute each pile (put away things, get rid of stuff, turn on the paper shredder)

Looks a little like this in-action:

Things on the left, stuff in the middle, shred on the right.

I repeated this piling process for more or less every area where I kept items. Seemed to work ok, and now I have significantly less stuff.

Not quite no stuff though, so I’m calling February a half-successful month.

Which brings me to March. My goal for March is to get to bed at or before 1 am on a consistant basis. Success will be gained if I am able to accomplish this feat 25 times. I am allowing 1 cheat per week, plus 1 cheat for my birthday and 1 miscellaneous cheat.

So we’ll see how this one turns out.

Progress
January: Complete 100 Crossword Puzzles COMPLETE
February: No More Stuff PENDING THE WEEKEND
March: Go to Bed Earlier IN PROGRESS