Gearing Up with the Daily Grind List

If you manage a to-do list to keep track of your tasks, I'd like to introduce a technique I've been using that you may find useful. Think of it as an alternate take on "parking on a downhill slope."

If you don't know that term, it refers to stopping just shy of completing a task at the end of the day, such that, in the morning, you can effortlessly top it off. Having thus begun with accomplishment, it will be easy to keep rolling. Inertia and such.

My alternate technique is a list I call the "Daily Grind". I use Things to manage my tasks. (Possible neologism: "I'm a Thinger"). One of my favorite features is the ability to go through next actions, and hand-pick the ones to be done today. These then appear in a pre-set list.

A recent build of Things added repeating tasks and projects. So it's possible to create a project full of tasks, and schedule a copy of that project to appear in the Today list automatically.

I made myself a list of stupidly easy tasks, the sort of things I usually do anyway, but sometimes don't. For instance, I sometimes forget to check for new episodes of The Daily Show, and I sometimes forget to update my podcasts. Sometimes I leave my power adapter at work.

I gathered this random assortment into one list, and set it to show up each morning. About half the tasks are start-of-day tasks, and half are end-of-day. All of the tasks can be completed every day.

There are two benefits to this practice. Much like normal downhill-slope planning, the grind offers you an easy win with which to start the day. The geek in me gets a little thrill every time a box is checked, but many of the tasks I work on can take days to reach the check-off point. The daily grind gives me a chance to score a little victory right away, every day.

Even better, taking the ten seconds to mark off those tasks puts you into the to-doing state of mind. Accomplishment becomes the order of the day, and in visiting your to-dos, you can now review the other items.

Secondly, a central tenant David Allen hits on with GTD is the need to put everything in your trusted system, and then trust the system. Everything means every thing. Each time I forget to pack the power adapter, not only is my computer time curtailed, but I also lose a dab of trust in my system.

By concretizing these stupid little tasks, I'm preventing that loss of trust. I can feel increasingly comfortable with my system, which means I can spend the rest of my time on more interesting topics.

The Warm Glow of Twitter

There's a topic of discussion making the rounds in the twitterverse: How do we explain twitter to other people? This is not a new topic. Indeed, there is a very very common pattern for joining twitter.

FAIL

Everyone tells you to try it, so you do, and you use it, and you post a message something like "Everyone says I should use twitter, so I am. Trying to figure out what the deal is." And then: Nothing happens. Because none of your friends use twitter.

If you're lucky, some of your friends join, and you pull through, and everybody loves it. Or you find out about some famous people who use it, you follow them, build up your following list, and you see the light. But it takes time, and for everyone I know, there's a stretch where it's not working and you just don't get it.

Call it The Twitter Gap.

Answering the Wrong Question

Once you're in, you want everyone you know to be in. There is a direct correlation between percentage of people you know who twitter, and the pleasure you get in using it. So you give them the Pitch. You tell them how to use the service, how it works, and then you do the little song and dance where you compare it to other services. It's a mini-blog. It's like a forum. It's like a series of IM away messages. It's like public SMS. Whatever.

None of our analogies are convincing. We are talking about How It Works, and nobody cares about How It Works. Most of us who use Twitter right now are technical people. Understanding and discussing how technical systems work makes us all happy inside.

The Right Question

But what normal people want to know is "How will this make my life any better?" There's nothing obvious about publicly available 140-character messages. Nothing that screams "You must use this thing!" Nobody buys a car because it contains an internal combustion engine that drives four wheels, can be steered, and may have a radio.

People buy cars because cars make them feel free. Or because they can go to anything, in any weather, at anytime, with little effort. People own cars because it connects them to the people, places, and things they care about, without the physical strain.

LIkewise, nobody uses Google because you type a set of words into a text box and you get back (hopefully) relevant web pages. People use Google because at any time, you can access any information you can think of. Any question can be answered in about 10 seconds.

So the real question is: Why do we use twitter?

How It Feels to Use Twitter

We use twitter because of how it feels.

Let's assume you pull through The Twitter Gap. You have a healthy set of people you follow, and you are comforted to know that a bunch of people follow you. Most people using Twitter these days are pretty plugged in. So they probably have twitter on their phone and thus post and read regularly.

The end product of twitter is a long list of short messages from people you know, like, love, and/or admire. Think of the hundred little moments on your own on a normal day. Standing in line at the grocery store. Waiting for some form of transportation. Pausing at work. Waiting to meet somebody. Waiting for the S.O. to come back from the restroom. Waiting for a meeting to begin.

Now take those lost moments, and inject perhaps half a dozen comments, some witty, some interesting, some utterly boring, from the people in your life. Whether the comments are worthwhile or meaningful is secondary to the fact that they're there at all.

Further, no one is jostling for your attention. No bells ding (unless you want them too.) There's no phone to feel guilty for not answering. There's no email to carefully craft. There's no IM to coordinate. Twitter just sits there. When you're ready, it sends along your snippets of text.

Queue the Sappy Music

Twitter is a button you can push at any time that reminds you that there are wonderful people in the world doing wonderful things, some of whom you know and care about, and who care about you. It's like the notes your mother would leave in your lunchbox. You find the note, and you think of mom, and you think of her kindly assembling your lunch. And you feel Good.

Now imagine those little notes dropping in at any moment of the day, but only on command, and from everyone you know. It's like a sinewy thread, weaving through the day, connecting the moments between actual connection with little reminders that the connections are there.

So that's my twitter pitch. I think that nice little feeling is why we twitter users are always bugging you about it and blogging about it, over and over and over.

I promise not to blog about this again. If you're interested in tuning into Radio Andre, you may do so here. You don't have to join to follow along. It just makes things easier.

The War On Legibility

Your browser contains two useful commands: Zoom In (or Make Text Bigger), and Zoom Out (or Make Text Smaller).

Question: When is the last time you opened up a web page and decided to Zoom Out? When was the last time you opened a web page and thought to yourself, "My god, this text is just too goldarn big."

I'm going to guess never, or at the most, rarely. I'm going to guess you only zoom in. Why? Because web developers like to make text small.

There are consequences to this fetish of the nano, and none of them are good news for the reader. Obviously, smaller text is harder to read. Even worse, small text tends to lead to long lines of text. It's much easier to read text when there are fewer words per line.

There is no reason for this nonsense. Both larger text and shorter lines are wins for the reader. It's time to get over Tiny Text Syndrome. Make your font size bigger.

A Web Interface Proposal

I would like to propose an interface rule for the web: Under no circumstances shall the mouseover event modify the layout of a web page. Period.

Moving the mouse about is a natural, indeed, an essential activity on a mouse-based GUI. The idiom is move around, click to act.

But on the web, this rule is regularly flaunted. We have our mouse over action, and we can do anything with it. When it comes to layout, this is a Bad Thing.

I'm particularly thinking of insidious dropdown navigation tools. Example: Inc. Magazine. Dropdown navs are particularly horrible because of how common it is to be at the top of a web page, wanting to move to the content area, but needing to pass through the navigation zone. So you trigger the nav, and content appears under your mouse. If you want to click a link under the resultant menu, you must zoom around, then return to do complete the task.

This is just awful.

I feel pretty silly writing this post, because the horrors of the design seem so manifest to me. And yet mouseovers flourish. I think it's time we as an industry band together, and consign layout-altering hovers to the dark, tawdry place where blink tags and scrolling marquees now live.

One notes it is still fair game to change cosmetic attributes on hover. But layout changes are for clicks.

Ha-Ha-Habari

Hey, look, it's my navel. Just a quick note for the interested that this weblog has made the move from WordPress to Habari.