Got a Book in You?
Here's a good place to start.
Good Advice ...
We should re-read some of our favorite books from childhood because adult life also has trolls, knights, and the occasional pirate.
— Random Thoughts by Execupundit
... and more from Michael Wade.
Fixie Friday - Andy Ellis' Makino
Bricks anyone?
A festive idea for your kids or those just pretending to be kids.
Exploring Alternative User Interfaces for Journalong
I'm exploring alternative user interfaces to the standard web form for Journalong. In the quest for something simple, there's an obvious answer.
The simplest user interface is no user interface was a common theme in web design about a year ago. It's misleading right away because without any user interface how are we supposed to interact with our product? There's a problem with this statement because there's always a user interface, it can just take many forms. In building Journalong I've tried to keep to a simple user interface but what would be even simpler than this is a user interface that already exists elsewhere.
One of the most popular user interfaces has to be email. Lots of products and services provide interaction through email and it can be effective. All devices provide some form of email client and it's easy to regardless of your experience with technology. When using to interact with other products and services you just need to know what information goes where in your email. With just a subject and a body this can be easy to remember.
This simpler interface is something I'm keen to explore using Journalong. Being able to write journal entries should be easy for anyone to do but the web user interface for it is something I find distracting. I've built a few forms around different ideas but nothing so far has offered the simplest method of using an alternative user interface like email.
Maybe I'm wrong and the best user interface to use isn't email. There's only way to find out and that's trying it out for a few weeks with some users. The option to use a form will still be available, but I'm keen to see how people will choose between using email or the form. Either way, I'm off to brew some coffee and crack open my text editor. I've got some code to write.
How I Use Labels In Todoist
I've already mentioned how I use projects in Todoist. Well this time it's the turn of the humble label.
The label. This is Todoist's context tag that can be applied to any task if you need to organise them by more than just their priority. Let's get something clear before we start. Colour coded labels are a premium feature in Todoist. If you're using the free plan on Todoist, you can still use the labels suggested below but not the label colours.
Having decided that tagging tasks with labels would give me more flexibility I started tagging everything in my list with labels. It quickly turned into a nightmare with inconsistent labels, labels with typos and even obscure labels that didn't end up making sense to have. I needed a strategy, so I took the advice of Mike Vardy and started using labels in a more structured manner.
Looking at the range of colours available I started to setup label groups by colour. First off I created six labels for my six personal compass points giving each compass point its own colour. This is the basic categorisation of labels regardless of where they are in Todoist. Almost all tasks get labelled with a compass point.
Next I took the groups that Mike Vardy suggested. Using the colours for these labels I grouped them under time, event, person, location and energy. What I eventually ended up with was a wide range of labels for different contexts as well as having a couple of free colours left over that allowed me to have labels that could be used for general purposes.
Labels are also useful with Todoist's email feature. As well as emailing tasks to your inbox, you can append labels in the subject or the body of the email and they will be added to your task when Todoist receives it.
So what's the point of labelling everything then?
Well, aside from the fact that it provides some meta-information on the task, it also allows you to search for related tasks. Do you want some low hanging fruit to pick in the morning? Search for the @5mins and @low labels. Kids birthday coming up and you remember taking a note of their preference for a Minecraft book. Search for @birthdays and your kids owns tag using their initials.
You can search for individual tags, combination of tags, tags in a project, tags due on a specific day. There are lots of possibilites to using this and Todoist keeps a nice count of how many times each label has been used so that you can weed out the ones that are unused or break down a label if it's being overused.
All this now means that I can quickly filter and sort my master list according to labels that provide context. This leads on to next week's post about filters. Be sure to check back for this and see how you can utilise labels to group tasks together using filters.
Fixie Friday - Ryan's Leader Kagero
Effective communication isn't about how your message gets to your audience, it's about the message itself.
I rely on an business to keep me up to date with events and updates happening within that business. I pay this business for services that I use on a monthly basis. I'd rather not name and shame them as that doesn't benefit anyone, so if you don't mind I'll leave them as anonymous. They have a website that supports both an email newsletter and a RSS feed. They also have accounts with both Twitter and Facebook. You would think that with all these outlets there would be a steady stream of information being sent out. Well, there isn't. I don't have the exact reason why this business isn't using these more frequently, but what I do know is that they're ignoring a chance to communicate effectively with their customers and potential customers.
Effective communication means communicating clearly and frequently. It's such a simple rule to follow but is ignored in a lot of cases.
Be Clear
Effective communication means communicating clearly. It's not hard to do. Don't use 50 words when 25 will do, avoid technical jargon and business speak and outline summaries using lists. These are just some of the things you can do for long form communication. For shorter forms of communication it can be more difficult. Twitter only allows 140 characters in each tweet, so even if it something quick you want to say, you need to be sure that what you want to say can be conveyed using this limit. It just takes time, but keeping it simple is the first step, and if you follow this then you're already winning.
Be Frequent
When communicating, being frequent with your messages is the best way to keep your audience up to date and informed. It's not rocket science. Agile software methodologies promote frequent communication between customers and programmers. The reason this is encouraged is because when we programmers keep our customers in the loop, we are keeping them involved and they can see what's happening from day to day. This limits the chances of the programmers going in the wrong direction building an application that the customer doesn't want or need.
The same goes for communicating. When we communicate frequently we keep our recipients informed and up to date. If we maintain this we foster interest from our audience and then we can expect a decent return of interest and participation from this audience when events or meetings are announced.
The Mistake
A common mistake for many businesses today is that they have more than one outlet for their outgoing messages and therefore think they already are communicating effectively. Unless you frequently use these different outlets though, you're not going to reach anyone. Having a website with an email based newsletter that is sent out regularly can be just as effective as a website that has multiple social network accounts. In order to be effective we just need to ensure that we are communicating clearly and frequently.
All the social networks under the sun aren't going to get your message across to your audience unless you're clear about your message and those messages get sent out on a regular basis.
This business in question might not be aware of it, but they're already lagging behind other competing businesses in the area who are doing a much better job of keeping their customers involved and up to date. As a paying customer my loyalty is waning. I just want to be kept up informed. Is that too much to ask?
In what must be my longest period of habitual change, I'm still in the process of rebooting. It is changing me for the better though. Here's a few changes that have come out of this period of rebooting.
- I've cemented a habit of reading a chapter from a non-fiction book every weekday. By reading from a variety of books I keep things from getting stale.
- I'm capturing everything in Todoist, and I mean everything. I'm using it to keep a track of errands, notes and even urls to check out.
- I've made the jump to a new text editor and I'm learning new shortcuts about it everyday. It's taken me a few tries to make a successful transition but this I worked through the days of frustration and now I'm working quite well versed with the comamnds that I need to use daily.
I've got a few changes coming over the next few weeks that are more career orientated, but I'll report on these when the reboot process for these is complete. There's still room for improvement which is why the reboot process is still ongoing. Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day.
How I Use Projects in Todoist
Inspired by Mike Vardy's series on using Todoist, I thought I would share how I use Todoist and the benefits I get from using it. In this post we're going to look at the projects feature of Todoist.
Todoist's projects are a fairly standard feature. It's a place where you can bring together related tasks. However that's where the similarity to projects ends. Where you might be expecting a start date and an end date for the project, there aren't fields for this in Todoist. A project is just the name and the colour that you've chosen to assign to it.
Keeping this simple means that projects can be used in different ways. I try not to think of them as projects and instead think of them as lists. Lists can expire, be completed or be allowed to run on forever. The idea of a list triggers a more flexible collection of tasks than a project, which is why I always think of projects in Todoist as lists. I have a number of projects that behave more like lists then projects:
- Reading - All books that I plan on reading in the future. Fiction, programming and career and some others as well.
- Writing - A list of writing ideas for my website. It starts with scheduled ideas planned for the near future and graudally moves down to ideas that I might one day use.
Home - I have a list for everything related to family life. Golf coaching, birthday parties, shool activies, days out. They all go here. - Sharpen The Saw - Recently I started capturing things I didn't know about the tools I was using. Everyday I pick one of these off and find out more about it. It's a quick way of learning more about the tools I'm using.
Todoist has a feature where you can indent projects under one another. I try to avoid doing this. In the past I did indent a number of projects but quickly I ended up with three level deep projects and it made getting a top down view of my list more difficult to read. I try to use the indentation of projects as a last resort and even then it's only a temporary measure until I can find a better place for a group of tasks.
I use Nicholas Bate's idea of a personal compass as a basic grouping for tasks. Six compass points that represent six aspects of my life. It's a fairly easy way to ensure that you can group things sensibly and that you're not allowing one part of your life to have an adverse affect on the others. Using this I give each compass point a colour. When a project is created it is assigned the colour of the compass it closely relates too. This makes tracking my progress on different compass points easy to do since I can only ever see six colours of my compass points in the productivity trend window of Todoist.
That's it for how I use projects in Todoist. Nothing should surprise anyone here as most people must use similar ideas. Projects in Todoists are simple but flexible and can be used to group your tasks accordingly. Next week I'll discuss labels in Todoists and their use.
Update - You might want to read my thoughts on deciding if a project is in fact a context.