Since last Friday, my life has seemingly been consumed with thinking about what happened at Sandy Hook elementary school. Maybe it's the just horrific nature of the event. Maybe it's that I'm a parent of two small kids, and I haven't been able to stop hugging and kissing them and thinking about how lucky I am that they are alive. Maybe it's the utter complexity of the cultural issues surrounding guns, most of which I've honestly been unaware of, that is just fascinating as something to think about. Maybe it's the massive attention my colleagues in the tech community have been giving this issue. Maybe it was President Obama reading out the names of the six-year olds who were shot to pieces last week. Maybe it's the outpouring of emotion from the dad's I'm on an email list with - so many of whom were brought to their knees by this event and are struggling to process it at all. I'm not sure. I know guns are one of the most polarizing issues facing the US. But for some reason, I have hope that -- despite where the lines have been drawn and dug in deeper over the last decades -- there's an opportunity here to find a way of looking at this that transcends those lines. Maybe I think that's possible because of the Internet, and the way it "unbundles" everything. Whereas in the past you were either a Democrat or an NRA member -- because those were the easiest way to organize people in a pre-networked era -- now it's possible to be a gun owner *and* in favor of regulations that make sense. And it's possible to be on the left and understand why people like guns. Perhaps that is a wildly naive idea. But if there's anything I live for, it's the hope and belief that the web can help us find new solutions to old problems. So I am sticking with that outlook for now. A web-wide moment of silence Since the weekend, I have been part of a conversation within the tech community about how to respond here. What started as a few emails turned into a mega conference call, and has since turned into a lot of independent and creative efforts to draw attention to this issue. I'd like to thank Ken Lerer and Ron Conway, in particular, for taking the lead on organizing the collective energy of the tech community around this. What I've been helping organize is a web-wide moment of silence -- an effort to get as many websites as possible to "go silent" on Friday morning during the national moment of silence a week after the shootings. At 9:30am ET tomorrow morning, this website, and the hundreds of other websites who are participating in this effort, will go dark for 5 minutes. It will be a moment to pause, respectfully, and remember the 20 young children and their teachers who were murdered last week. And perhaps, to reflect on the collective power we may have to help make such things happen less in the future.
I have had a hard time finding the perfect to-do list system.
I am a light implementer of GTD -- I haven't read the whole book, but I get the basic idea -- capture; focus; do. Stop working from the top of your inbox. Amen. A few years ago, I started using Things for Mac, which is quite nice. But I got frustrated at how long it took for Things to roll out over-the-air sync between desktop and mobile (it took them 2 years), and so I switched to Wunderlist. But Wunderlist didn't quite feel as nice as Things, and I always wanted to switch back. Finally, in 2012, Cultured Code released Things 2 which solved the sync problem. Woohoo! Sync worked great, and they even added a really thoughtful new feature called the Daily Review. Daily Review helps you manage your list of "today" tasks by automatically bumping them off of the "Today" list at the end of each day, and then asking you whether you wanted them to go back to the "Today" list, or go into the "Next" list (where tasks are parked for later review). Basically, forcing you to proactively re-build your Today list at the beginning of each day. It turns out that this very subtle feature was the difference between me engaging with my todo list on a daily basis, and getting overwhelmed by a todo list that just kept getting longer and longer every day, which ultimately just made me lose faith in the todo list system.
There is a practically non-stop flow of threats to the Internet. That's because the Internet is fundamentally empowering and therefore also threatening to those whose power is diminished. This week, there are two big things on the forefront, which my colleague Albert has written up today. Both issues -- how the US protects (or sacrifices) individuals' privacy on the web, and how the internet is fundamentally governed -- are super important. In particular I am concerned about privacy -- I suspect that most people really have no idea quite the extent to which companies and governments are tracking their every move. And I suspect that this issue is going to go mainstream in 2013. It's an issue that both governments and the private sector need to really get right -- on the private side, in order to earn the trust of customers, and on the public side in order to ensure a free society. Vanishingrights.com does a great job describing what's at stake with privacy reform (in this case, the Electronic Communications Protection Act). This quote particularly stood out to me:
So, I encourage anyone reading this to think about both of these issues and why they're so important, and take a moment to call your representatives. Separately, with the help of the inimitable Mike Masnick I have started a hackpad to keep track of "networks under threat" - a timeline history of public conflicts between new networks and the incumbent hierarchies they threaten (think: Coursera being banned in Minnesota, AirBnB being banned in NYC, etc.). Feel free to hack on that with us!
Since last Friday, my life has seemingly been consumed with thinking about what happened at Sandy Hook elementary school. Maybe it's the just horrific nature of the event. Maybe it's that I'm a parent of two small kids, and I haven't been able to stop hugging and kissing them and thinking about how lucky I am that they are alive. Maybe it's the utter complexity of the cultural issues surrounding guns, most of which I've honestly been unaware of, that is just fascinating as something to think about. Maybe it's the massive attention my colleagues in the tech community have been giving this issue. Maybe it was President Obama reading out the names of the six-year olds who were shot to pieces last week. Maybe it's the outpouring of emotion from the dad's I'm on an email list with - so many of whom were brought to their knees by this event and are struggling to process it at all. I'm not sure. I know guns are one of the most polarizing issues facing the US. But for some reason, I have hope that -- despite where the lines have been drawn and dug in deeper over the last decades -- there's an opportunity here to find a way of looking at this that transcends those lines. Maybe I think that's possible because of the Internet, and the way it "unbundles" everything. Whereas in the past you were either a Democrat or an NRA member -- because those were the easiest way to organize people in a pre-networked era -- now it's possible to be a gun owner *and* in favor of regulations that make sense. And it's possible to be on the left and understand why people like guns. Perhaps that is a wildly naive idea. But if there's anything I live for, it's the hope and belief that the web can help us find new solutions to old problems. So I am sticking with that outlook for now. A web-wide moment of silence Since the weekend, I have been part of a conversation within the tech community about how to respond here. What started as a few emails turned into a mega conference call, and has since turned into a lot of independent and creative efforts to draw attention to this issue. I'd like to thank Ken Lerer and Ron Conway, in particular, for taking the lead on organizing the collective energy of the tech community around this. What I've been helping organize is a web-wide moment of silence -- an effort to get as many websites as possible to "go silent" on Friday morning during the national moment of silence a week after the shootings. At 9:30am ET tomorrow morning, this website, and the hundreds of other websites who are participating in this effort, will go dark for 5 minutes. It will be a moment to pause, respectfully, and remember the 20 young children and their teachers who were murdered last week. And perhaps, to reflect on the collective power we may have to help make such things happen less in the future.
I have had a hard time finding the perfect to-do list system.
I am a light implementer of GTD -- I haven't read the whole book, but I get the basic idea -- capture; focus; do. Stop working from the top of your inbox. Amen. A few years ago, I started using Things for Mac, which is quite nice. But I got frustrated at how long it took for Things to roll out over-the-air sync between desktop and mobile (it took them 2 years), and so I switched to Wunderlist. But Wunderlist didn't quite feel as nice as Things, and I always wanted to switch back. Finally, in 2012, Cultured Code released Things 2 which solved the sync problem. Woohoo! Sync worked great, and they even added a really thoughtful new feature called the Daily Review. Daily Review helps you manage your list of "today" tasks by automatically bumping them off of the "Today" list at the end of each day, and then asking you whether you wanted them to go back to the "Today" list, or go into the "Next" list (where tasks are parked for later review). Basically, forcing you to proactively re-build your Today list at the beginning of each day. It turns out that this very subtle feature was the difference between me engaging with my todo list on a daily basis, and getting overwhelmed by a todo list that just kept getting longer and longer every day, which ultimately just made me lose faith in the todo list system.
There is a practically non-stop flow of threats to the Internet. That's because the Internet is fundamentally empowering and therefore also threatening to those whose power is diminished. This week, there are two big things on the forefront, which my colleague Albert has written up today. Both issues -- how the US protects (or sacrifices) individuals' privacy on the web, and how the internet is fundamentally governed -- are super important. In particular I am concerned about privacy -- I suspect that most people really have no idea quite the extent to which companies and governments are tracking their every move. And I suspect that this issue is going to go mainstream in 2013. It's an issue that both governments and the private sector need to really get right -- on the private side, in order to earn the trust of customers, and on the public side in order to ensure a free society. Vanishingrights.com does a great job describing what's at stake with privacy reform (in this case, the Electronic Communications Protection Act). This quote particularly stood out to me:
So, I encourage anyone reading this to think about both of these issues and why they're so important, and take a moment to call your representatives. Separately, with the help of the inimitable Mike Masnick I have started a hackpad to keep track of "networks under threat" - a timeline history of public conflicts between new networks and the incumbent hierarchies they threaten (think: Coursera being banned in Minnesota, AirBnB being banned in NYC, etc.). Feel free to hack on that with us!
Anyway, on Things 2 Everything was hunky dory and I was *super* productive Then, I switched to Android. Which has been great. However, Things is mac / iOS only. No support for Android (by comparison, Wunderlist is completely cross-platform / html5). So, once again, I was on the market for the perfect lightweight todo list system. Here's the set of requirements that I was looking for:
Nice desktop experience on Mac (either through a native app or a single-site browser via Fluid)
Seamless syncing between desktop and mobile (for me, mac + android)
Really quick drag & drop reordering / prioritizing (desktop & mobile)
Create a task by email (in my case, by fwding an email thread for follow up)
An easy way to do "Daily Review" as created by Things
Turns out it is hard to find this combination of features, packaged in a UI that feels nice (simple & quick for the most frequent tasks). I tried everything. Any.do, Do.com, Asana, Producteev, Wunderlist. I'm sure there were more. Nothing did everything on the list above just right. What I really wanted -- but just couldn't have -- was Things 2, but with an Android client. So, I figured maybe there was a way to hack one of the existing Android options to get what I wanted. My first stop was Do.com -- Do is pretty good, and even has an API that lets you hack on it. The mobile client is decent (has drag & drop to reorder, which Wunderlist doesn't, sadly). The web / desktop UI is more complex than the others, to a fault (IMHO). But I applied for an API key and never heard back, so so much for that. In the end, I hacked Wunderlist to be more like Things -- specifically to make work for the Daily Review / Today / Next workflow. Here's how it works:
Use "Lists" to create buckets for Today/Next/Later/etc, including one for Daily Review.
Create a shell script that will take all of my "Today" tasks and move them to the "Daily Review" folder. I am thankful that, despite there not being a public API for Wunderlist, there is at least some documentation, and the underlying database schema is really straightforward (this script makes edits directly to the Wunderlist Sqlite database).
Every morning when you're starting your day, run $ today to initiate the script. Then, work through your daily review list, moving today's tasks to the Today list and everything else elsewhere.
This is clearly janky, and won't work for everyone (especially if you use "projects" within Things), but for me it's doing the trick so far. Here is the code on Github, with detailed instructions. Hooray for hacking!
Anyway, on Things 2 Everything was hunky dory and I was *super* productive Then, I switched to Android. Which has been great. However, Things is mac / iOS only. No support for Android (by comparison, Wunderlist is completely cross-platform / html5). So, once again, I was on the market for the perfect lightweight todo list system. Here's the set of requirements that I was looking for:
Nice desktop experience on Mac (either through a native app or a single-site browser via Fluid)
Seamless syncing between desktop and mobile (for me, mac + android)
Really quick drag & drop reordering / prioritizing (desktop & mobile)
Create a task by email (in my case, by fwding an email thread for follow up)
An easy way to do "Daily Review" as created by Things
Turns out it is hard to find this combination of features, packaged in a UI that feels nice (simple & quick for the most frequent tasks). I tried everything. Any.do, Do.com, Asana, Producteev, Wunderlist. I'm sure there were more. Nothing did everything on the list above just right. What I really wanted -- but just couldn't have -- was Things 2, but with an Android client. So, I figured maybe there was a way to hack one of the existing Android options to get what I wanted. My first stop was Do.com -- Do is pretty good, and even has an API that lets you hack on it. The mobile client is decent (has drag & drop to reorder, which Wunderlist doesn't, sadly). The web / desktop UI is more complex than the others, to a fault (IMHO). But I applied for an API key and never heard back, so so much for that. In the end, I hacked Wunderlist to be more like Things -- specifically to make work for the Daily Review / Today / Next workflow. Here's how it works:
Use "Lists" to create buckets for Today/Next/Later/etc, including one for Daily Review.
Create a shell script that will take all of my "Today" tasks and move them to the "Daily Review" folder. I am thankful that, despite there not being a public API for Wunderlist, there is at least some documentation, and the underlying database schema is really straightforward (this script makes edits directly to the Wunderlist Sqlite database).
Every morning when you're starting your day, run $ today to initiate the script. Then, work through your daily review list, moving today's tasks to the Today list and everything else elsewhere.
This is clearly janky, and won't work for everyone (especially if you use "projects" within Things), but for me it's doing the trick so far. Here is the code on Github, with detailed instructions. Hooray for hacking!
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