Use the hell out of your Someday/Maybe lists.

I don’t think it’s advertised anymore, but Merlin Mann’s great 43 Folders site has a companion Google Group. These days it doesn’t get much traffic. I’d actually forgotten it existed until I saw this question in my inbox.

My answer explains a small nugget of GTD wisdom I’ve been able to distill over the past few months, and I’d like to share it with you here.

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On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 2:20 PM, DerekS wrote:

I have been on and off the wagon several times with respect to GTD and have finally noticed that all the things I want/need to get to are just floating around and making my head spin.

I go in cycles as well, and every time I get a little closer to something truly maintainable. Let me give you a tip from my latest go-round:

Use the hell out of your Someday/Maybe lists.

Before you put something on an action or project list, ask yourself: when I find myself in the context to take action on this, am I really going to do it? Do I really care? Have I actually committed to doing this, or is it just something which seems like I might want to do? If you’re not truly committing to doing it as soon as you’re in that context, put it on your Someday/Maybe list.

I keep a few S/M lists:

1. Someday Soon: Things I’ve pretty much decided I’ll do, but I haven’t decided to start working on yet. I consult this weekly.
2. Someday Perhaps: Things I’m not sure I’ll want to do, but which I don’t want to forget about. I consult this one weekly too, but with a different mindset.
3. 40,000ft Options: Basically career paths which I might like to shift to one day. I don’t consult this one much, but it’s good to have a place to put those ideas.
4. Way Out There: Crazy ideas I’ll probably never do, but which, again, I feel better for having written down.
5. Movies to Watch, Books to Read, etc: a series of lists of media I’d like to consume. I consult these when I’m looking for a good book, movie, etc.

All this means that my project and action lists have no noise. They’re all things that I’m ready to do at a moment’s notice.

For this to work, the Weekly Review is critical. If you don’t trust that you’ll see these things as often as you feel you need to see them, you’ll instinctively put them somewhere where you will. That will probably be your action and project lists. Once those become cluttered with things you haven’t actually decided to do yet, you’ll stop trusting them, and then you’ve got nothing. I’ve been through that cycle numerous times.

I used to put off my weekly reviews for all sorts of poor reasons. Just schedule an hour or two every week at the same time and check your lists for inconsistencies. You don’t even have to think very hard. If you just read over your action, project, and S/M lists, your brain will tell you when something’s in the wrong place, or out of date.

You can get better at the Weekly Review over time, but only if you actually do it. It’s far more important to do it than to do it well.

I'm joining Pivotal Labs!

I am elated to announce that as of Monday I will be joining Pivotal Labs!

If you don’t know, Pivotal Labs is an elite ninja squad of developers, trained in the art of Ekusupidō (also known as Extreme Programming). Pivotal, based in San Francisco, is growing their new(-ish) NYC office, and I’m proud to be joining the wonderful group of Pivots who work there.

Yesterday was my last day at drop.io. I worked there for just over a year, and it has been a wild and hugely valuable experience. When I arrived at drop.io, fresh out of college, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I thought I knew what I was doing, but I didn’t. A year later, I know what it’s like to accidentally bring down a popular website and rush out a fix. I know what it’s like to be clever with my code and confuse the hell out of my coworkers. Most importantly, now I can (usually) recognize when I’m about to do something stupid, and decide not to.

I owe drop.io a huge thanks. Thanks for taking on someone with so little experience, and thanks for letting me experiment while I found my dev-legs.

Yesterday, the team threw a little sendoff party for me. There was pizza, beer, and stories aplenty. Then Mike and Pete scurried off. When they came back, they were holding these:

I’m bowled over, guys. That is the best present ever. Though, as someone pointed out, it raises the question: can you wear a shirt with your own face on it?

A big thank-you to everyone at drop.io. I’ll see you on Twitter, I’ll see you on Foursquare, and hopefully I’ll see you at an upcoming Wet Sox game.

(Apologies if this post was a little inside whiffleball.)

Where We Came From

I had many favorite books when I was growing up, but one has always stuck with me. The book is The Cartoon Guide to Computer Science by the great Larry Gonick. It traces the history of computer science and explains how logic gates work, why a computer subtracks by adding, and why sloths count in binary. it’s as good as David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work which is, after all, the greatest book ever written. (The Way Things Work rates slightly higher, on account of its sheer inexhaustibility.)

When I arrived at Bard College as a freshman, I wanted to study Computer Science History. I had stories of Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing bubbling in my mind. I wanted to learn more about where it all came from. What happy accidents and brilliant insanities had built on top of one another to construct our modern computational world?

No one would teach me the history of computer science, so I settled for what I could pick up on my own. Soon I discovered the computational pioneers of the modern era. I learned how Alan Kay created Objects; how his GUI at PARC inspired Steve Jobs and Apple to create the Macintosh, which in turn inspired Windows and set the standard for computer interfaces; how his Smalltalk inspired Objective-C and Ruby, which was also highly influenced by John McCarthy’s Lisp. I learned how Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman built the two great empires of Free Software, Linux and GNU, living in symbiosis, and leading the way for the Open-Source Movement. I learned of giants, gods, and titans, and I learned that they were my ancestors. And then I realized something:

These people are still alive.

This still boggles my mind. These are great men and women of history, and they’re not dead yet. We can still go ask them questions. We can even work with them, learn directly from them. How lucky we are to live in an age of such rapid change that our Great Old Ones are still among us!

May we young grasshoppers be wise enough to seek their wisdom.

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Corey Haines is touring the country pairing with all sorts of great programmers. As he’s travelled, he’s filmed a series called “Road Thoughts”. In his latest entry, Corey discusses the importance of learning and remembering our history. I think he’s absolutely right.

tracker_chat 2: Chat Harder.

I’ve updated the tracker_chat script. Now you can:

• Drag a story to the chat. Its URL will be added to the chat input box so you can say something about it.
• Click a story URL someone has posted to the chat. That story will be revealed in Tracker without opening a new page.

Hopefully these changes will make it easier to discuss Tracker stories in chat.

To install tracker_chat, install Greasemonkey in your Firefox 3, and then click here: Install tracker_chat

Pivotal Tracker & drop.io chat, together as one.

My Tracker has chat built in, and so can yours.

At drop.io, we’re in the process of moving from Lighthouse to Pivotal Tracker. Lighthouse is great for storing bugs, for searching them, and for maintaing a threaded conversation on each one. It works well for the open source development model. That’s basically what we used to do.

Now we’re moving to an Agile model. We create and deliver many small amounts of customer value, we work in an iteration-based rhythm, and we work together as a team, or at least we’re aware of what everyone else is working on. Tracker is perfect for that workflow. But this isn’t a post about how awesome Tracker is. This is a post about how I made it a little more awesome.

We all sit in chat all day, and naturally we use drop.io as our chat service. It works really well, because when it doesn’t, we fix it. I usually keep it up on my laptop screen while I work on my external monitor.

But Tracker updates itself in real time, so it’s nice to keep it up all the time too. So now I want to have it on my laptop screen.

Now I have both.

Requirements

• Firefox
• Greasemonkey

To Install

1. Navigate to the script.
2. If you haven’t created a drop to chat in, create one at drop.io. (One click, no signup.)
3. Go to your Tracker project.
4. From the Views menu, choose “Chat…”.
5. Give it the name of your drop.
6. Enjoy!

GreaseKit

Unfortunately, tracker_chat doesn’t work perfectly in GreaseKit. The chat will appear in Tracker, but with the full chrome you’d see if you viewed the chat normally. In Firefox/Greasemonkey, extraneous chrome is hidden to save as much real estate as possible.

More Info

Check it out on GitHub at http://github.com/Peeja/tracker_hacks.

Update on Tuesday, June 9, 2009 at 2:26PM by Peter

I’ve added some new features to tracker_chat. The installation instructions above have been updated to point to the new version.