A few weeks ago, I bemoaned the state of my personal data. While I’ve only made inroads on that front since then, thinking about my data problem, and how to solve it, gave me cause to look at my task management system, and the piles of crap and cruft that have built up within. Part of the problem I have with task management, along with notes and bookmarks, is my desire for a universal solution. I want something I can load in all my personal projects, my work projects, my day job projects, my writing… and I’d settled a while back on OmniFocus, the 800-pound Gorilla of Task Management.
OmniFocus is a fine piece of software, and well worth the price. However, it wasn’t working the way I needed. The problems I had with OmniFocus as a task management system were as follows:
My day job forces me to use Windows, so the only way to view my OmniFocus data at work is to either lug my iPad in, or use my iPhone. Neither of these are elegant, easy, or look great in front of the boss.
So much of my day job work is cranking out widgets. A task comes in (by email), and often needs to be done that day. if I’m not already working on something, I tackle it immediately. There are some projects that are longer in duration and scope, but not many. Either way, the pain in the butt of entering those tasks into OmniFocus, even with MailDrop, is too much.
OmniFocus is absolutely crap for creative tasks that don’t have well-defined “Next Actions.” Something like “Write blog post” is too vague, “Write 500 words” is too specific. It’s a pain in the butt, and no good for tracking my progress on many creative tasks.
Then, Nick Wynja turned me on to Trello. I’d used Trello (very) briefly while working for The Startup, and it didn’t click with me. Something about the UI, the multi-dimensional scrolling piles of lists, and the general visual chaos of the office Trello boards left me scrambling for another solution (OmniFocus, natch). With Nick’s praise, I decided to give it another try, and after a day or two of experimentation, I found Trello to be perfect for my day job, and pretty good for tracking my writing.
I use Trello like a simple Kanban board. At the day job, I keep one list of cards for Future tasks, and stuff I’m waiting on. I keep another for stuff I need to do today, and another list of whatever is done. When something comes in to my inbox that needs doing, I either create a new card, or just forward the email to Trello. At the end of each day, I archive the cards on the Done list, and add whatever upcoming stuff needs doing to the “Today” list so it’s ready when I get to my desk. For my writing, it’s even simpler: A list of idea cards, a list of works in progress, and a list of what’s done.
What Trello sucked at, at least for me, was letting me manage any other sort of task. This left OmniFocus for just tracking day-to-day todos, and that seemed… excessive. I played around, first with Reminders. When that proved too simplistic, I went back to Things, enticed by the Mac version’s gorgeous Yosemite update, and the iPhone version’s new UI as well. A week and a half of using Things reminded me exactly why I switched away: Things doesn’t work the way I work. I like the ability to view things by project, or by context, and Things just doesn’t have that. The path was clear.
Saturday, I launched OmniFocus, selected everything, and deleted it all. I grabbed my notebook and pen, pulled up the “Trigger List”, and scribbled away all the stuff I need and want to do. I came up with new contexts, and I set them up. I loaded all my tasks, projects, and (non-day job) professional obligations into OmniFocus, built them out, and now I’m starting with a clean slate. Whatever was important carried over, but that’s because it was still on my mind. The majority of stuff I thought I needed to do vanished into the digital ether, and if any of it should become important again, I’ll know about it.
There’s a lesson I’m opting to take away from this experience. It’s never a bad idea to audit yourself. Thinking about the tools I use, and how I use them, gave me insight into where I was falling down, and helped me put together something better suited for what I do and how I think. I’ve been trying to cram square pegs into round holes when it comes to just keeping track of what I need to do. It’s true, one should never focus on the tools over the work, but it was worth the disruption to figure out what works best for me. We’ll see if this sticks, of course.
Darius is on to something. When we hear successful people talk about what made them successful, our instinct is to follow their lead. The thing is, there’s no magic formula. It really is about luck. And the bigger the success we want to model our careers upon is, the more luck it takes.
Spike, a comic artist I’ve long followed, posted an excellent 24-hour comic for aspiring cartoonists called “This Is Everything I Knowâ€. If I had to single out one page, it would be this one. Once you buy your lottery ticket, getting to that point is just luck. End of story. Why, then, do we keep sucking down someone else’s success stories, and trying to model our careers on them? And why does it hurt so damn much when success doesn’t come after putting in the work?
Part of the problem is survivorship bias. When all you see is the people who succeeded, talking about how they succeeded, and all you try are the things people did to succeed (in implementation, at least), and you don’t succeed—what then? When I worked for The Startup, I saw this sort of thinking play out on a monthly basis. Someone—usually the founder—would come up with a new feature that would drive user growth and revenue, and the technology side would rush to get it together. And, universally, these ideas were almost always something another, popular Internet Company in an adjacent space was already doing. They often didn’t get traction, and soon we were all distracted by the next shiny object. Looking back, this was the technology equivalent of buying scratch-off tickets.
For two years, my friends and I did a podcast that I was quite proud of. We pushed it to our friends, and we did our damnedest to make it great. In the end, we had double-digit download numbers, and eventually I sunsetted the whole darn thing when it was clear that the work of making it wasn’t worth what I was getting out of it. That was a lottery ticket, and it lost. Instead of trying to win the Podcast Lottery, I’m trying to take the money I spent on those tickets and am using it to buy more tickets in the Blogging Lottery. So far, it’s worked out better, and doing it is a lot more enjoyable.
Instead of success stories, I want to hear from people who failed, especially if they failed by doing the “right†thing. We have more to learn from those who lost the lottery than we do from those who won. I suppose, in the meantime, the self-aware stories from folks like Darius, and to a slightly lesser extent, folks like Justin Hall who succeeded by some measure, and then failed. That’s where the true lessons lie, not about success, but about life. One lesson I have learned, however, is to keep buying lottery tickets, and this is my latest one.
While checking my RSS feeds during a little down time at work, I had a realization—I don’t give a flying fuck about the “business” of technology. I don’t care about who sold more phones, made more profit, raised how much funding, or has more leverage in some market. None of it interests me. Maybe if I had more of a financial stake in a company beyond owning and using their products, it might matter to me more, but the financial outlook for any tech company only matters insomuch as it allows them to stay in business while I own and use their products. That’s it.
Few of us, have more than a token financial stake in the companies that make our tools. It’s all emotional. A company’s finances, sales numbers, market share—they’re all just ways to keep score and define a winner in a pointless game. It’s another factoid we can use to root for our side in the miserable factionalism of technology fandom. The impact of the numbers on how and what we can use our tools for is negligible, at best.
I’m opting to tune as much of the financial crap out of my feeds as I can. If the bottom falls out of Apple, or some service I like gets bought out and sunsetted, I’m sure I’ll find out on my own. Money and numbers are always going to be the background chatter of any business. It’s unavoidable. At least I have the power to turn the volume down and focus on what matters to my life and work: good tools, and ways to use them to make better work.
It seemed to strike a nerve. It was even retweeted by Marco Arment, which is officially a point of pride in my life on Twitter.
The only reason tools like this aren’t in the arsenal of social networks and their users, is that fighting online harassment isn’t a priority. Companies hire contractors to sort out porn and violence, but simple analysis of posts to identify users causing trouble and violating the terms of service is not a priority. Even more frustrating is that, as I’ve mentioned before, content analysis tools already exist on most social networks, they’re just used to figure out what ads to display.
Moderation for porn and violence is also for the benefit of advertisers over users. No company wants to see their promoted tweet or Facebook post next to someone’s engorged genitalia. The brands don’t have to worry about being attacked, so all the angry young men threatening women with rape can hide in the shadows, while Twitter identifies them as being more interested in seeing ads for Nintendo. The liability risk is greater if some unsuspecting minor sees naked people and severed heads (or both) than if someone commits suicide from abuse on social media.
Sure, Facebook is trying to “create empathy among [its] users”, but instead of coming at it after the fact, why not use all this data to stop it at the source? If you can identify a post as containing threats, or harassment, don’t allow it to be posted. Force the user to take a time out. Read their post aloud back to them. Do something, anything, to change the balance of power on social media away from the abusers and harassers, because anything is better than what we have now.
What we failed to appreciate was the passivity of most of humanity and its inexhaustible appetite for consumption, entertainment and “infotainmentâ€. The spread of high-speed broadband connections did not liberate human creativity but instead created Couch Potato 2.0, a creature that sees the internet mostly as zillion-channel TV. In that sense, it’s no accident that the corporations which now dominate network traffic are outfits like Google and Netflix, beaming YouTube and movies to you in the comfort of your own settee.
If the dream of the Internet was for everyone in the world to start making stuff, then the dream was far too big. Most people are passive consumers of media, and it’s been this way since the dawn of media. More people watched plays in Ancient Greece than wrote them. In the late 19th and early 20th Century, music instrument ownership was common, but how many instrument owners wrote music, and how many just learned to play popular songs? Instrument ownership is way down from that peak, but there’s certainly more people making new music today. If there’s not more people making it, there’s at least more people putting their music out in the world.
True, a lot of what people are creating is distributed though the centralized networks of Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, Soundcloud, DeviantArt, and Instagram. It’s not quite the same as the corporate domination of previous media revolutions. An ordinary person couldn’t expect to get their idea for a TV show on NBC without a lot of work and a lot more luck. Now, you can film a TV show pilot on your phone and post it on YouTube. If the stars align, you might not even need a network deal to get the audience, and the money, to make more of it. Most of these centralized clearinghouses for (ugh) “content” don’t exert more than the bare minimum of editorial oversight, so anything goes. It’s not the open, democratized, everyone controlling their Internet Identity that some of the technologists dreamed of in the late 90s, and perhaps we should bemoan that. Still, you can’t deny that these centralized services take a lot of the pain out of making new things.
There are more people making things than ever before. But they’re not the majority, and never will be. No matter how easy we make it to make things, put them on the Internet, and find them, it’ll always be something pursued in earnest by the sort of people who want to make things, the sort who always have. Beyond that, even creators take their time to be passive and watch Netflix, too. Naughton admits that “the internet of our (utopian) dreams hasn’t ceased to exist. It’s just that it’s becoming a minority sport.” Problem is, making stuff has always been a minority sport. The minority is getting larger, but it’s always going to be a minority. Even in the Star Trek future, not everybody’s writing Holonovels, when there’s planets to explore. To create isn’t divine, it’s just human, but it’s not the only thing that makes us so.
