Monday, February 25, 2008

Keeping it Short and Simple

Often things in life seem overwhelming. Sometimes it is because we have overloaded our platter by taking on too much at once. Other times we seem to feel overwhelmed by less then others seem to be able to run with easilly. Why is that?

I believe we often make things appear more complicated and bigger then they really are. I cant be sure about this but I think its residue from our schooling, where a longer text was taken more seriously than a short text. Where the more complicated and wordy the thesis, the more respect it commanded. Of course this isn't entirelly true, quality of the work is also a major factor, but it's no coincidence that business men who write about running businesses and professors and doctors who write textbooks are in two vastly different division as far as number of pages go.

My impression is that in the academic world there is a constant competition for tenure where it mostly comes down to: "Ha, ha. My latest publication was thicker (and therefore better) than yours! I'm the better Doctor/Researcher/Professor." Now I know that I am probably being very unfair with that statement and do apologise to anyone I might have offended.

What I'm trying to say is that people who are successfull in business, who are successfull in managing their own lives all understand the art of Keeping It Short and Simple (KISS, or as some would have it: Keep It Simple Stupid.) What does that mean in everyday terms? When you get an asignment to do something you might feel overwhelmed because a tiny part of you is still stuck in that academic mindset where quantity trumps all. So you feel like you have this huge task that has to be done better than anyone else.

What you need to do is take a few deep breaths and take a step back. Then look at what you actually need to accomplish. What is the minimum that has to have happened to be able to call the task done? Then break that down into simple steps to get there. List all the demanded material, the demanded competence and then start looking at where you can find it. Maybe someone else has a skill that makes them more suited to do part of the task. Se if you cant outsource that part to them etc. etc. The bottom line here is to keep things simple. Complicated != Better.

No one will reward you according to the amount of work you put in. They look at the result and reward you accordingly. How you came to that result is not interresting to them. So why not do it the simplest and most efficient way possible?

Well in order to not be a hypocrite and make this an overly long post I will end here for now. Good luck out there.

Friday, February 22, 2008

Review: qOrganizer 3.1


Welcome to a new section of my blog. While working with personal habits and productivity we use a lot of tools. Some of these are software tools. There is a vast array of different software for different platforms that are supposed to help our productivity, but how good are they really? I will occasionally bring up a software title here and express my experience with and opinions of it. Since I am an avid Linux (specifically Ubuntu) user most of the software I review will be found on that platform. If you havent already given Linux a try I suggest you do. The days of it being a complicated system fit only for computer nerds are long gone and who knows, It might just prove to be what you have been looking for. (If you are going to try out linux I suggest you get one of the more user friendly distributions such as Ubuntu, Mandriva or PCLinuxOS, though the last one doesnt have a lot of support) Now onto the review:

qOrganizer 3.1
qOrganizer is a simple little lightweight program that has a lot of promise but isnt really there yet. Despite it being version 3.1 it has a few glaring omissions that make it not reach up to its full potential. But I'll get to that in a second.

1. Installation
Like most Ubuntu software install is a basic click and run affair. It can be found using the Add/Remove programs option in the main meny, if however you want the latest version you need to get online and look for it. The latest version can be had at the project website. However the website isnt very userfriendly and might put of the not so tech savy. Lucky for us it can also be found over at getdeb.net. Download the file, doubleclick and click install. Couldn't be simpler.

2. Features - or lack thereof

Calender view
If you are running Ubuntu you will find qOrganize under Application > Productivity. When starting the application you are greeted by the calender. This view (as can be seen in the included image) includes a basic monthly calender view, an event list and a journalpage. Its simple enough to use. You pick a date in the calender and then type in any scheduled events that day and add any notes necessary on the journal page. Now here is my first and most major beef with this program: Thats all you can do in that view. I like to have my calendar constantly accessible, which is why I use an online calendar (specifically Google Calendar.) Most calendar applications will allow you to automatically synchronize with various online calendars, not qOrganize. The events are of the extremely simple type. So forget about recurring events and multiday events. The journalpage does however redeem the calender a little as I haven't found any good equivalents in any of the software I have previously used.

To-do list
The to-do list view if fairly simple and straight forward. You type in your task, deadline, priority and how far along you are. The procentual gaude of progress is decidedly more flexible then the usual checkbox, but its clear that the person who developed it isnt familiar with the action centric way of doing things. The gauge is better fitted for the project level, and that brings me to my next complaint: What about categories? There is no way to asign tasks to categories (or projects if you will) this makes any to do list become a mess as there is no way to sort your tasks by location or project. And again exporting or importing to and from an external source such as an online list or a PDA is impossible. There is, in the settings, a way to synchronize with an FTP server, but if you don't have one of those you are SOL.

Timetable
The timetable view is my first clue as to what kind of people have been developing this software and for what market segment. What you have is a fairly standard 5 day school schedule. My guess is that this is where all recurring events go. In their defence you can add and take away any columns you like and reformat it into any kind of table you need. Still, the lack of any ability to download a weekly schedule from a centralized location tells me that this software is not geared towards the enterprise or even the college student. For someone in juniour high or high school on the other hand, it might fit the bill.

Booklet
This view is sort of a tell all. Here the student can keep track of all his absences and marks. I dont think any further treatment is necessary for our purposes.

Other Features
For being such an incredibly simple piece of software it decides to become very advanced when it comes to storing the info you add. It gives you re options of Text files, MySQL and SQLite databases. I'm guessing that if your school does have a central database accessible by FTP then these options might come in handy, but for the lone user wanting to keep track of things in his/her own life this feature is fairly useless. There is no help feature but then again I didnt come across anything that was even remotely complicated (other then the posibility of using databases and FTP)

Summary
As you might have guessed I initially had high hopes for this application. It looked like it might do a good job but it dissapointed me on every count. Any shortcoming it has might have been mitigated if it would have had a plugin interface but it does not. You might say that with this software what you see is what you get, literally. There is no depth in functionality at all. So unless you are a highschool student looking for a way to keep track of your classes you might as well move along. The only redeeming feature is the journalpage, which other programs could do well to take after. I give qOrganize 3.1 a score of 2 out of 5.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Procrastination

Months ago I promised to eventually write an entry on procrastination. Well I have procrastinated long enough and have now finaly decided to face my procratinating demons and write something. The Wikipedia entry on procrastination starts with this paragraph:

"Procrastination is a type of behaviour which is characterised by deferment of actions or tasks to a later time. Psychologists often cite procrastination as a mechanism for coping with the anxiety associated with starting or completing any task or decision." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrastination

Procratination can also be seen as an attempt by the procrastinator to lighten the immediate workload by putting off work to a later date. This is proof of the fallability of our minds as procrastination, while slightly decreasing the current workload, dramatically increases the percieved and real, future workload.

On some level we all know this and this knowledge makes us go into a spiral of self loathing and stress whenever we start procrastinating something. This causes us to shy away from the whole subject of the procrastinated task since even approaching the subject causes all the guilt and anxiety to float to the surface. So we keep putting it off, thinking that someday we will have time and energy to deal with it.

In the mean time under the surface the guilt and stress keeps growing and expanding. Every once in a while some of that guilt reaches the surfaceand we are reminded of the thing we have been procratinated. The surfacing stress and guilt however, while reminding us, also overwhelmes us causing us to, in a kneejerk response, push it back down.

Eventually a deadline of some kind approaches and we are forced to digg the task up and get it done. So there we are, the night before deadline, digging our way through our own guilt and stress, now with an added flavour of panic, doing the best we can with the limited time left in a panicked frenzy of work, all the while wowing to never procrastinate again. But we all know we will.

So how do we get out of this cycle of procratinating thing? Like with anything awareness is key. The answer to the question why we procrastinate may also contain the recepie for beating it. Lets look at what has been written on the subject:

John roth over at www.getrichslowly.org writes this on the subject:

"I am a procrastinator. I always have been. It’s a character flaw, and I admit it. I’ve tried all sorts of things to beat the habit — Getting Things Done, e-mail reminders, dozens of list systems — but the only thing that seems to work is to:

Never underestimate the power of Doing it Now. In earlier posts I have mentioned the benefits of doing now.

  1. You still have a clear Idea of the size and scope of the task. As the procrastination routine progresses the task that is being put of tends to grow and transform in the mind of the procrastinator. While the task is the same it is now percieved as imensely larger and more complicated then it was originaly.
  2. No drama attached. There is no guilt or stress attached to the task, the latter assuming you used good judgement and only accepted tasks you could reasonably be expected to be able to do. As you procrastinate the guilt and stress increases and blocks your progress.
  3. No time to back out. The mind can sometimes be quite independent and it is my belief that we are all slightly schizophrenic on some level. It we simply go from thought to action imediately then we have no time to talk ourselves out of it. If we wait then the internal comittee meeting on the relevance of the task and if we shouldn't go do something else will start. If we let this discusion go on in our minds the majority will shift towards not doing the task, causing procrastionation.
  4. Define the task. Nothing causes procrastination faster then having a nebulous undefined task that we know will take up a lot of time but we dont quite know how to get started with. Break it down. Not the whole thing but the beginning. Do you need some reading material to get started? Then make that the first task. Any smaller task that leads to getting the bigger thing rolling is good.
What if you are allready trapped in a procrastination cycle? Deadlines are coming up and you havent quite gotten started. What to do? Merlin Mann over at www.43folders.com has this to say:

"My favorite tonic for procrastination—which I have mentioned in passing previously—is what I call a dash, which is simply a short burst of focused activity during which you force yourself to do nothing but work on the procrastinated item for a very short period of time"

Bring in point 4 from above, define a smaller task, then do it. Dont worry about working a very long time. Give yourself a lifeline, like a 10 minute timeframe or a certain unit count (I will read 15 pages in that book. I will spend 10 minutes sorting through my old bills.) When the time is up or the pages have been read you might feel like continuing. Go ahead! Knock yourself out! But dont feel guilty if you after 10 minutes decide to move on to other things, you gave yourself that option to make the task seem bearable and shoud not feel bad for using it.

This is in no way an all encompasing treatment of the subject of procrastionation, but it is a few pointers. (And I'm afraid that if I would give an all encompasing description you would be bored out of your mind reading it) Good luck in fighting procrastination everyone!