I’ve been doing well the past week or so, getting lots of good work done. Then all of a sudden, today happened. I broke a whole bunch of my hack rules, and look, it’s 7 p.m. and I haven’t accomplished a lick of work yet.

What went wrong?

1. I didn’t start strong. I had an appointment today, about an hour’s drive away. I got up, drove to the appointment, went through the appointment, and 2.5 hours later, there I was. I had a choice to make. Stay in town and go through the rest of my day, but I wasn’t feeling well, and there was supposed to be a snow-storm, and and and. So, I came home, another hour’s drive. When I got home, did I immediately take the opportunity to work? Nope.
2. I didn’t really plan ahead. I had no firm plan for what work I wanted to accomplish today - no plan seems to equal no work.
3. My Computer distracted me. When I did get home, I immediately read the news, my mail, and all of my RSS feeds. Twice. Plus played a bit of game. Nope, no work done here.
4. I didn’t turn off the TV. In fact, on the way home, I stopped at the video store and picked up the Battlestar Galactica mini-series. Why? A podcast I listen to was going on and on about how good the current TV series is. I figured, what the heck, I’ve been doing such good work, I could afford a few hours to watch some episodes. Who knew it would all be in one day ;)

Upshot?

The upshot of today was that as soon as I decided to play hooky, I kind of knew that I was going to fall down on the work front. So, I attempted to do a bunch of other stuff, in order not to feel too guilty. I did some errands I had been putting off. I did some housework. Visited with neighbours, etc. etc. Not work related by any means, but hopefully giving me some good karma.

The Take Home Message

It seems to me that I have to have a plan, an idea of exactly what thing I need to accomplish the next day in order to get anything done. If I just say to myself, “Self, let’s just see how the day goes, and go with the flow”, it’s not a good thing. Sometimes I don’t need a plan, but that’s when I’m working on something long-winded and it’s still sitting on my laptop when I get up the next day. But when I actually manage to reach a natural breakpoint, all heck breaks loose.

The Disappointment

The big disappointment I had today was that it seems that all of my favourite bloggers are actually busy doing work - there weren’t that many feeds to read ;)

I’ve had some people asking about my week view calendar, that I showed cased in My Procrastination Hacks.

It seems people are fascinated by it. It’s actually very easy to create, assuming you use Outlook. In this case, Outlook 2003. All you do is play with the page settings in the print… menu. Here’s what my settings look like for this particular calendar:

On the other hand, the colouring is all mine ;)

Several days ago, I received an email, inviting me to try out the new Vitalist, “perfect for anyone needing to Get Things Done”. I tried it out, asked some questions, saw some feedback, and am now here to tell you about it. The surprising thing is that I haven’t seen anyone else blogging about it, yet. Of course, that might just mean that my stable of blogs doesn’t cover it ;)

Feedback Works

First, let’s start off with why I think you might want to try out Vitalist. To me, the most impressive feature is that its developers listen. When I tried it out, there was one version, costing $9.95/month. I questioned the sense in this, since there are other sites out there (Remember the Milk, Scrybe, Backpack, to name a few) that offer comparable service for nothing. Then, lo and behold, when I went to check out the site today, I noticed that they now have two plans, free and premium. What’s the difference? Well, premium offers a few more bells and whistles, but the free version is quiet adequate for GTD needs.

Another point of feedback I had concerned the inbox. I found it useless, because it only allowed me to fill in the action, due date and notes fields. There was no way to assign a context to the item. In fact, if I wanted to quickly create an action, and I was accidentally in my inbox, I would have to finish creating the inbox item, and then edit it/process it to turn it into an action, so that I could then assign a context. However, I see today that they’ve improved this functionality as well. Now, you can quickly create an inbox item, but on the same form, you have the option of turning it into an action (or someday, or reference). One quick click and you have access to the additional fields.

My Take on Features

Now, you can check out the tour and the feature list yourself. I’m just going to discuss a few of them, and what I like/dislike.

• The interface is quiet pleasant. Nice icons, nice colours, seems smooth. Also, it does allow dragging and dropping, e.g., for sorting actions in a list.
• Designed for the “Getting Things Done” mentality, with inbox, actions, projects, ticklers, somedays, etc.
• Not quite GTD, but you can put a recurrence on actions - this is a feature I don’t often find. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out exactly how the recurrence works. My test, i.e., create an action with a deadline, mark it done, look for an action with a new date, failed. (Note: the help function could use a bit of help itself.)
• Ability to do iCal and RSS feeds, as wells as email and SMS reminders.
• Let’s you keep a separate Waiting For list. Me, I just make a context @waiting, but this is nice too.
• Stores all completed actions, and lets you search through this archive. Strangely enough, you can’t search for something that’s not yet complete. However, I guess the idea would be that you never have that many incomplete actions/ticklers/somedays to look through.

My Beefs

There Can Be Only One

When you’re looking at your action lists, e.g., sorted by context, you’ll see all your actions. If you were to click on “next action”, the list would be filtered. There would be exactly one action per context that’s deemed to be *next*. How do they determine which one is the *next* next action? Why, it’s whatever one is at the top of the list! Fortunately, the drag/drop functionality lets you move things around.

Unfortunately, this paradigm does not match with my view on GTD. I have many next actions, sometimes even for the same project, definitely for the same context. Limiting me to one next action per context is just too, well, limiting. I posed the question to the developer, whose response was

The Next Actions view is a feature that we had several requests for
in our Beta testing. While I can admit it needs some work, it is mainly
there to allow you only to see what you need to do right at that moment
(next), which is why only one action will show up.

Now, if you’re into very sequential processing, this might be for you. But I’m sorry, I have up to a dozen next actions per context in my life. That said, nothing says you have to click on the “next action” button. You could just look at all of your actions, sorted by context.

Someday != Tickler

I love the fact that you can have someday items. I love the fact that you can have an actual tickler. What I don’t love is the fact that they are actually the same thing, it’s just that the tickler has a date. So, if you got to the Someday tab, you’ll see

I’m uncomfortable with marrying somedays and ticklers. To me they are philosophically different. A tickler item is something important, and important on a particular day. A someday item is something that you want to look at every now and then, but it’s guaranteed not to be important *right* now.

Cool Things

In addition to the aforementioned neat features, there are a couple of cool things that I really like.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Mouse be damned - the keyboard rocks. Vitalist has some keyboard shortcuts that you can use to get really fast.

Mobile Edition

Something I noticed today on the feature list was the Mobile Edition to “use Vitalist on your Palm, Windows Mobile, or Blackberry smart phone to stay productive on-the-go”. Hmmmm, and it’s included in the free version. This could be breakthrough technology for me. Let’s look into it.

Oh, there it is. Buried in the help page. “Point your browser to www.vitalist.mobi on your mobile device.” Siiiiiigh. My Palm doesn’t do the Internet. Oh well. The functionality is still cool - that would be the ultimate in ubiquitous capture if you could have it with you all the time.

Premium Version

I’m very pleased that Vitalist is offering a free version, as well as the premium. What might be in the premium that would be worth $9.95/month, you might ask? Well, not having the premium version, I can only give you what’s on the web:

• SSL Encryption
• File Attachments
• Collaboration
• Calendar (coming soon)

The concept of file attachments is very cool, and might be worth the $$$. And a calendar? Well, now we’re talking. I’m always on the lookout for an all-in-one GTD tool that allows me my hard landscape, as well as my lists of NAs, sorted by context and/or project.

Conclusion

I think that Vitalist is setting itself up to be a contender to Scrybe, one of the most-touted new productivity webpages out there right now. Scrybe is not designed to be a GTD tool, although it’s reasonably easy to mash it into the right shape. Vitalist has the potential, when they get their calendar up and running, to beat Scrybe at the GTD game. Of course, it would then cost you $9.95/month; however, who all thinks that Scrybe is going to stay free forever? Show of hands?

I’ve been thinking alot about procrastination. It’s a bad habit of mine. I’ve always wanted to write a series of posts about it, but I’ve kept putting it off. No irony intended.

But this week, there were a couple of posts (here and here) that caught my eye, and basically kicked me in the ass. Instead of discussing the perils, pitfalls, problems of procrastination, I’m just going to give you the hacks that I use to combat it. Day after day. Some days are better than others.

Why Do *I* Procrastinate

There are many books/websites/etc. that discuss why people procrastinate. Here’s why I do it, I think:

• The task is just too damned big. I’m working on my PhD. Enough said.
• I’m afraid of failure. In fact, I’m afraid that it’s going to suck horribly and I’ll never be able to pass my defence. This issue may be wrapped up in the whole “imposter syndrome“.
• I might even be afraid of success. What? That makes no sense. But if I succeed, then I’m going to have to look for a job, and move away from the spousal unit for a few years. Yeah, success will suck in a couple of ways.

Am I Lazy?

Hell no. I can work like gangbusters, when I’m doing some easy, routine, bite-sized, non-taxing, etc. etc. I can work 20 hour days, and have been known to. I can work work work, when the deadline is tight, the mission is important, etc. etc. (used to be military, can work my ass off). But when it comes to reading academic articles (yawwwwwn), or working on my thesis research, well, something seems to happen. I spend days looking at procrastination web sites. Weeks finding the perfect GTD system. Months agonizing about how much work I’m not doing, and yet not getting work done.

Where’s the Hacks?

There are severy things that I do to help myself combat procrastination, i.e., get my ass in gear. Not all of them work all the time, but odds are good something will help. The key is to keep changing things up. It’s like working out or dieting - when you reach a plateau, do something different. So, here’s a list of tools, techniques, tips I keep in my little bag of tricks:

• Turn off the TV. I always thought I could work with the TV on. Nope, it’s a fallacy. I can do mind-numbing things, like paying bills, or recreational surfing, but I can’t do anything serious. It’s true - I cannot actually multi-task, no more than my single-processor does true concurrency. I am a one-processor machine - I can do exactly one thing at a time. True, I might be able to switch quickly between tasks, but only one thing at a time has my focus.
• Techno Kicks It. I love listening to music when I work. At home because I can, without headphones on, and at school because having headphones on is the only way to survive in a computer lab environment. I actually switch between 80’s and Techno/Electronica. 80’s because it’s the stuff I went to high school on, and it tends to fade into the background, while making me bouncy happy. Techno because it tends not to have distracting vocals, and the songs last forever, putting me into an excellent writing/coding groove.
• Keep Track of Time. I need to keep track of time. Not because I necessarily need to be somewhere, but keeping track of the passage of time helps when I’m avoiding work.

• For instance, I use a clock widget (Yahoo Konfabulator’s default Digital Clock, or the Mini Version) that dings every 15 minutes. So, when I hear the dig, I salivate. Actually, no, I check to make sure I’m doing something productive. Typically, I’ll start surfing, blogging, whatever, then hear the ding, and try to force myself to stop dicking around and get some work done.
• I’ve had limited success with the 10+2*5 dash concept. I think there’s a resistance here because I find it takes me too long to context switch. For example, if I’m actually writing for 10 minutes, I’m not going to want to stop. Besides, how much fun can you actually have in 2 minutes? But if you want to try it, there’s even a Mad Dash tool for Windows.
• I occasionally make use of a timer to keep track of how much work I get done during a day. I used to actually be pretty specific and break it down by task, but now I just turn it on when I’m being good, and turn it off when I’m being bad.
• I’ve had good success with some of David Seah’s awesomely designed productivity forms, specifically the Emergent Task Timer and Emergent Task Planner. I’ve even made my own hack of the latter. In addition, there’s an online version of the former, which can also ding you every 15 minutes.
• Finally, the thing that I’m having the most success with is the “Unschedule”, described by Neil Fiore in his book “The Now Habit“. The point is to look at a week’s worth of schedule, with only certain things written in. Then, when you’ve accomplished half an hour worth of work, put it in. I use it to keep track of what I’ve been doing during a week (think of the Task Timer/Task Planner sheets, but for a week at a time). I also use pencil crayons to colour (there is some inner child satisfaction there.) You can see my current week below. Green is good, i.e., research. Blue is required, but not research (like GTD phases, appointments, etc.). Purple is enjoyable surfing. Yellow is breaks/lunch/household stuff. Red/orange are for special things (in this case, a trip to the Bookstore and workout). Black? Well, black signifies the black hole of lost time. Time I will never get back again. Basically, black means that I fell off the wagon and probably couldn’t even tell you what I accomplished in that time frame. In this case, I lost Monday because my computer was misbehaving, so I tried “repairing” windows. 12+ hours later, I had done a fresh reinstall and had to reinstall every fricking program. Yup, definite black hole. Oh, if only I hadn’t tried to repair it. Oh, if only my task bar hadn’t gone insane in the first place!

• Start Strong. I’ve noticed that if I start the day by checking my mail, then the newspaper, then, oh, just a couple of RSS feeds, I’m lost. I spend a couple of hours surfing, dicking around, organizing, whatever, and then I can’t get motivated to actually get any work done. After all, I’ve already frittered the day away, why bother starting now? Sad, but true. My best days seem to be when I don’t check email/news/rss first thing, but instead, leave the computer off and read an article. Or start writing something in particular.
• Plan Ahead. Going along with the previous item, I need to end the day with an idea of what I want to start working on tomorrow. You’ll notice I didn’t get any good work done this morning - that’s because last night, I finished working on something and submitted it. But I didn’t really think about exactly what I wanted to do this morning - I left it in general terms, “start coding”. Yeah, not specific enough, therefore, not enough to get me going in the morning. So, at the end of the day, decide what thing you want to be working on first thing the next morning. Leave any supporting material sitting on your desk, in plain site.
• Do It Tomorrow. I’ve done some reading online about Mark Forster’s book, “Do It Tomorrow“. One idea that I really like is the idea of a closed list, i.e., you write a list of things you’re going to do tomorrow/today, and you stick to it. Nothing new gets added to that list. It’s a fascinating idea, and I want to explore it more (as soon as my bookstore has his book in stock again). Because I tend to get sidetracked with stuff, e.g., I’ll decide that some program needs tweaking, so I’ll just tweak it now, but then that can snowball (say, into completely reinstalling Windows). But, if I had written a new NA for it, and put it on tomorrow’s list, it wouldn’t have screwed up my entire day. It also give you a day to think about some things, maybe there are next actions that don’t really “need” to be done.
• Your Computer is a DistractionThere’s a cute post over at LifeHacker that discusses the concept of a “monitor curtain” that can be used to block your monitor. It highlights the fact that sometimes, you just don’t want to be distracted by your computer. In my case, I find my laptop very much fun, there’s always something to tweak. But it can be too distracting. Take reading. I need to read academic articles. I prefer to read them on dead trees, because there are no bells and whistles in dead trees. But I don’t have a laser printer, and I refuse to print out 60 page documents at home. So, I read them on my laptop. But I have to make Adobe go to it’s full-screen look, turn off the sound (no chiming while reading, please), even go so far as to hide the taskbar. Then I force myself to think of my laptop as nothing more than a piece of paper with no additional functionality. Sounds screwy, but it works for me. (I take notes in a notebook, instead of highlighting the pdf.)
• Your Desk Can Be A Distraction. I spend a lot of time at my desk in my home office. I’m working from home, and I can be here for a good 12-14 hours per day. It’s where I work and play, and sometimes the fact that I play here distracts me from the fact that I need to work here. It’s the same logic that applies when they suggest that you don’t put a TV in your bedroom. So, if I want to do something that needs focus, specifically, that dreaded reading, I’ll take myself down to the dining room table. It’s got a nice view of the backyard (very soothing), and not much else. The chair’s also pretty comfortable. Even if I have to bring my laptop down to read from, I focus much better at the dining room table. And there’s lots of space for spreading out papers, notebooks, etc.
• Pretend You Don’t Have Wireless. Going along with the previous couple of posts, wireless access can be a disaster when you’re trying to work. I used to go to the library to get serious work done, before there was university-wide wireless. However, the last time I went, I fell into a black hole, because I checked my email. Even at home, if I start using wireless in the dining room, I can lose hours of time. Instead, I pretend that I don’t have wireless access in some places. I’ll even go so far as to turn off the network card. That way, I can be in a self-imposed blackout region and get some work done. There’s a recent post on Jim Gibbon’s blog that discusses this very concept.

I’ve received a request from Jim:

I see you mentioned Clipmate, as I think you did once before. Your software reviews are so thoughtful. Can you write up some of your thoughts around Clipmate? I have been looking into demoing it, but since it is buy-ware, I’m hesitant to pull the trigger unless there is some proven utility over EN’s Universal Clipper. Itseems very developed and feature rich, but are all those things very useful. What’s the story say you?

Interesting question Jim, glad you asked. Here are my two cents on ClipMate. Keep in mind that anything I say here is influenced by the fact that I’ve been using ClipMate for years and it is firmly ingrained into my system. These items are in no particular order:

Long on Functionality, Short on Looks

It’s ugly. Forgive me, but it’s true. The UI is old and ugly. So ugly that I’m occasionally tempted to replace it with something pretty, web 2.0-y, ajaxy, or anything that wasn’t so damned ugly.

Keep Everything You’ve Ever Copied

• It lets me keep a gazillion clips. Copied something yesterday, like a URL, path, chunk of text, image? Zip through Clipmate to find it and use it again. I cannot tell you how often this has saved my bacon when some other program goes belly up before I can save. Actually, when I’m on a typing roll, I’ll often just copy something I’m working on, say in Blogger, just in case something goes bad.
• I don’t know if you can actually keep everything; I tell Clipmate to just keep the last week’s stuff.
• There’s even a backup functionality, to backup your clipmate database. I don’t bother.
• In addition, you can organize your clips into folders. There’s also something called a “safe”, which lets you have clips that you can’t accidentally delete. I thinking that you could put sensitive things there. I was using the safe for keeping html tables for use with EverNote, but I lost them on a computer refresh and haven’t bothered putting them back.

Hot Hot Hot

It lets me assign a hotkey for “regions screen capture”. As soon as I hit F11 (or whatever key combination you like), I get a cross-hairs on my primary monitor, which I use to select a rectangle. That clip gets tucked into Clipmate, for pasting now, or later. I wish it would let me use the crosshairs on my secondary monitor too, but the Universal Clipper doesn’t either, so maybe it’s got something to do with the deeper meaning of screen clipping.

Use the Magic Hat to Clean Up

The magic hat is an icon that lets me clean up text. For example, let’s say I copy something out of a forwarded forwarded forwarded email. You know, the ones with all the > or | marks at the beginning of each line? Well, Clipmate will let you clean up garbage like that in text. Here’s a look at the options you can play with for cleaning up text:

Export, eh

It lets me export clips. For example, let’s say I take a bunch of screenshots for a particular blog post. In the Clipmate Explorer, I select the appropriate items, then export them. Each clip gets to be its own jpg. I could also export text clips, but I’ve never found that particularly useful.

Miscellaneous Functionality That I Do Use

• Something called Power Paste is pretty cool. Turn it on, then you can paste a bunch of things from the list, one after the other.
• There’s also the ability to glue clips together.
• Spellcheck when you’re looking at text. In fact, you can clip text, then edit it, before pasting it somewhere else.
• You can print clips, excellent for keeping track of screenshots of settings, etc. You can format the header/footer, etc. of the clip

Everything And the Kitchen Sink

The problem I see with clipmate, besides the fact that I think it’s ugly, is that there is just too much functionality. It tries to be (and does, very well, I think) everything to everbody. I figure I only use something like 25% of its feature set. It can be a little daunting to look at when you first open it. For example, I’ve never been able to figure out the difference between Clipmate Classic view and Clipmate Explorer, except that I prefer the latter. But I don’t know what the former is for. I definitely don’t use half of the menu commands.

My Recommendation?

There are other clipboard tools out there. There are other screenshot capturing tools out there (SnagIt anyone?). There’s even the new Universal Clipper for EverNote users. You need to think about what kind of functionality you need.

A few months ago, I looked around for other clipping tools, in the open source area. I tried out a few that seemed to do some things, but nothing did everything that Clipmate would do for me. I can’t remember which one feature ClipMate had that nobody else beat, but it was either the hotkey screen region capture, or the clean up text, or the export to file, or the printing. Well, you get the idea. I was willing to pay for ClipMate because I *need* to have these functionalities. (This is also why I won’t switch to the Universal Clipper, because it only does the one thing, not the rest).

So, think about what you need from a clipping utility. If your list matches up with my list above, then ClipMate is for you. If you need less functionality, then you might be able to get away with a freer application.