Rogue Wolves

Merlin Mann of 43 Folders recently gave a great talk on common sense tips for managing todays bulging email inboxes. I've revamped my own email practices recently, but I think I'll adopt some of his methods. This is worth a watch, especially if you live by email and are having trouble keeping up.

His system is pretty simple, rather than "checking" email you process email and act on them as appropriate. He associates an action to each email he receives and carries out the action required. Make sure when you check email you process everything rather than just sitting on the emails and letting them pile up unprocessed. Also, he recommends doing email LESS not more and only at designated times (once per hour or whatever works for you).

Great quote from the talk:

The default state of your inbox should probably not be keep sitting here until I start weeping.

Actions he associates with emails are:

• Delete (or Archive): If it's junk or nothing important delete it. When done with emails, archive them. Keep your inbox as an INBOX, not a storage locker. (GUILTY!)
• Delegate - If this is for someone else, forward it and forget it.
• Respond - Keep responses terse and only respond to things necessary.
• Defer - If it's something you need to follow up on later then put in your calendar or in a tickler file to remind you later.
• Do - If the email is an action and can be done in five minutes then do it, otherwise schedule to do it when you have time.

Another good tip he mentions is using email templates to speed up responses. Good stuff!

Merlin also posted a good article on how to make use of a single email archive folder rather than a byzantine folder structure to organize archives.

For more on his Inbox Zero system refer to InboxZero.com

I must admit GTD lives up to the hype. It has definitely improved my workflow and helped me keep track of tasks. Several of the principles of GTD I was already doing but I didn't take it far enough or clearly organize them. I've found that GTD makes keeping track of things easy to do and easy to review to stay on track. I'm now a believer in the Cult of GTD.

The first day I did my collection was daunting. I had a room full of "junk" piled on the floor. Processing it took three days! Once I had finished, the feeling of having EVERYTHING filed away and organized was euphoric. I've never been so organized in my life. When I was going through my stuff I found tax information and other odd things from the early nineties. Stuff I had been carting around with me for over a decade and a half in an amorphous pile for no good reason. I never wanted to attack it before but this time I forced myself to. It's an almost spiritual event processing the first time. It turned into a trip down memory lane.

Here is my advice for those contemplating GTD: Just Jump in. Don't get caught up in making the perfect workflow or setup. You can tweak it as you go. You will figure out the tools you need as you become familiar with your new workflow.

Picking the right tools can be tricky. You want something reliable, simple and that works for your needs. Spend a bit of time playing with the various options, but to get started, just work with good old paper and then convert to digital tools later or pick a simple digital tool (note taking app or list maker) and dive in. I ended up using iGTD for OS X and while it started out a bit rocky the app has stabilized and has turned into a great tool.

For most software professionals home/work has fuzzy edges. I treat contexts not as physical locations but rather as mind sets (modes of operation). Home is when I'm focussing on things I want to do at home. Work is when I want to spend time getting things done for work. This has helped me make sense of my contexts and keep them contained.

I suggest the following starter contexts (add or remove contexts as you work out the kinks):

• Work
• Home
• School (if you are taking classes or working on a degree)
• Errands
• Shopping (could merge with Errands but I find its nice to keep them separate)
• Agendas
• Calls
• Email

Also, get religious about checking your hard landscape (calendar) every morning and processing your inbox periodically (once a week minimum). If you don't, you find things pile up and your brain starts to juggle things again. The point is to keep stuff out of your brain and in a trusted system so use it!

One last suggestion, always keep a capture tool with you at all times. This can be a pad of paper, journal, pda, or even call your answering machine with your cell phone and leave voice memos. Trust me it helps. You don't want to forget something you thought of when out and about. For me I commute an hour (podcasts are your friend) and I keep my Palm on the passenger seat in case I think of something and record voice memos that I process when I get to my office. I also keep a file folder in my bag that I put physical items I collect when I'm out. This is my "To Go Inbox".

Good luck with Getting Things Done.

I've decided to try out the FeedBurner StandardStats feature to keep an eye on various site statistics such as referrers, geographic location of visitors, browsers used, etc.

Note: This is something the Drupal logs could do a much better job at. A nice dashboard similar to what StandardStats gives you with pretty graphs, etc.

The FeedBurner instructions to integrate StandardStats into your site didn't work well for me. There are Drupal specific instructions, but they fail to mention which template file you should put the code into. Here is the code FeedBurner suggests:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/YOURFEEDNAME?i=http://www.example.com<?php print $node_url ?>" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

You will need to change YOURFEEDNAME and www.example.com to your site specific info. After some reading I found that $node_url is only available in Node.tpl.php and not in Page.tpl.php so the code must go into Node.tpl.php. At first I thought it was working but then I noticed that for anonymous users (the majority of site visitors) the script was not showing up in the html. After a bit of head scratching I realized this must be a cache issue. Now how to clear the Drupal cache? I thought there used to be a button on one of the admin screens to do this? I can't seem to find it (if it ever existed) so I had to clear the cache the manual way: I truncated the cache_page table in mysql. Bingo! Things were working now.

Note: Drupal really should have an admin feature to clear the cache.

After some more testing I noticed a problem with this technique. Using the Node.tpl.php will cause the FeedBurner script to be repeated for every node that is on the page. For node view/edit pages there is only one node so this is not an issue, but for the front page or a node list page (term pages, etc) the script will be included for each node. This means that if a user visits the front page of your site in FeedBurner StandardStats will report the user visited every node listed on the front page. Needless to say this will skew your stats. I'd rather be more accurate and know that they visited the front page.

To fix this behaviour I decided to not put the script in Node.tpl.php. Instead I put code in Page.tpl.php so there is only one notification to FeedBurner StandardStats: whether the user is on the front page or on a particular node page. Since the $node_url variable is only applicable to Node.tpl.php I needed a new technique to report the node url. My first attempt was to add this code to the Page.tpl.php:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/YOURFEEDNAME?i=http://www.example.com/<?php print $node->path ?>" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

This script worked for logged in users, but mysteriously $node->path always returned blank for anonymous users. After some digging on Drupal.org, I found this bug report about $node->path returning null for anonymous users. They have a good work around: Use url("node/$node->nid") instead of $node->path

My working script is as follows:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/YOURFEEDNAME?i=http://www.example.com<?php if ($node->nid != "") print url("node/$node->nid"); ?>" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

The if ($node->nid != "") will only append the node url if we are currently on a node page. This isn't a perfect solution, since this will only return a specific node url or your root url (ex: www.example.com). A better solution would always return the actual URL being visited whether it is a search page, term page, node page, etc. Consider that a future enhancement...

I also wanted to mention Dave Ried's new FeedBurner Module. I have not yet tried it out but it sounds like it has great promise and will eliminate the need to do much of this kind of stuff manually:

Integrates Drupal with the services provided by FeedBurner. Currently this module provides the means to redirect requests for your site's feeds to user-specified/created FeedBurner feeds. Special user agents, like FeedBurner and Feed Validator (this can be customized) are still allowed access to the direct feeds so there is no need for any special .htaccess hacking.

Update: Here is a link to another way you can integrate FeedBurner StandardStats.

Here is great video created by Lee Lefever of Common Craft. It's a non-technical explanation of the benefits of RSS/ATOM in an easy to understand and entertaining manner. If you want to convert any of the non-technorati people in your life to the joys of RSS readers, this is a great video to point them to.

We made this video for our friends (and yours) that haven't yet felt the power of our friend the RSS reader. We want to convert people and if you know someone who would love RSS and hasn't yet tried it, point them here for about 3.5 minutes. If you'd like to share this video, please do! Grab the code here.

Also, if you enjoy this video you might want to subscribe to Common Craft's new show where they plan to post more videos on technology in this style:

The Common Craft Show:

The Common Craft show is a new series of videos done in a format we call "paperwork". Our goal is to make technology easier to understand for the less geeky people of the world.

Update: Fixed video so it will now play embedded in the webpage.