Matthew Lang avatar

Matthew Lang

Family guy and web developer

I'll be honest, I'm not a completely confident person. For those that know me personally this will come as no surprise. Right from when I was a kid, I struggled with answering questions in class, school debates and generally making my voice heard. Even after over 15 years of education and many different job and roles in the workplace, those confidence jitters still get to me. When it comes to public speaking, I avoid it entirely if I can.

It doesn't get any easier when I'm writing either. As I type this, my hand is itching to select all I've written and delete it.

When I am working on a post to publish, I just don't have the courage of my convictions. I've tried in the past numerous times to put my thoughts together on a number of topics but in the end I've just deleted the post and looked for something else to write.

Half the battle I face is actually articulating my thoughts into words, written or spoken, so that they present an argument or reasoning that others will not react with offence. The other half of the battle is following up those words with replies or explanations to others. If you're going to voice your opinion on a topic then you need to be able to back that opinion up and explain it.

It's only in the last couple of years that I've managed to start making progress on building up my confidence when it comes to public speaking. My stint in an agile development team done wonders for my confidence. I found that daily stand ups and retrospectives were great opportunities to voice my thoughts within a group. I'm still not there when it comes to public speaking, but I'm gradually chipping away at it and building up my confidence.

Am I ready to do a talk at a conference? Hell no.

A local meet up or user group? Maybe.

As for the writing side of voicing my thoughts, it's definitely easier than speaking. I do find it much easier to just write. Whether those words get published is down to me and whether I feel confident publishing those words. I'm happy for the moment to let just a trickle of my writing find its way here on my blog. It might only be one or two posts a month that test my confidence but with each one I'm raising the bar slightly.

Goodbye Taskpaper, Hello Todoist

This week I migrated my master list over to the Todoist service. I've been using Taskpaper for most of the year but one thing that is evidently missing from using this is that I have no way of easily reviewing the past week's completed tasks. I could put together a script that would count the number of completed tasks on each day in the archived section, but I keep putting it off. The other half of the problem is the synchronising conflicts I was getting from syncing my master list to Dropbox.

In the end I decided that it was definitely time to try something else. That's when I noticed Todoist while browsing the App Store. Unlike many cloud based task management services it does track the number of completed tasks for you while you work. As the end of the week draws near I am looking forward to seeing a healthy number of completed tasks for each day of the week.

Like Taskpaper, Todoist does support the concept of labels and projects which I still need. One last feature which is really nice is the templates feature. When you frequently do the same tasks over and over again, Todoist lets you export tasks as a template so that you can import them again.

It's fair to say that I've given Taskpaper a fair go but my needs have evolved over the last few months. I'm hoping that Todoist fits my needs for the foreseeable future.

Sharpening the Saw: Shortcut Keys

I managed to catch up on my queue of podcasts this morning and one of the topics on discussion on the Ruby rogues podcast was that of sharpening your saw. I know the term from Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. What it means is the continual act of making yourself better but it can also apply to other things like the tools you use.

It made me realise that of all the applications I have I have yet to learn the basic shortcut keys that make these applications easy to access from anywhere. The first thing I did after listening to the podcast was create a note in Evernote with a list of all the shortcut keys for the applications that I use.

Over the next week I'm going to familiarise myself with a few shortcut keys at a time. This little habit is only saving a few seconds at a time, but over the course of a year, all those little seconds and keystrokes add up. I'm not trying to steal time, I'm just trying to make more efficient use of my time.

For programmers, there's two tools that they will use everyday. A terminal and a text editor. For writers it might be a text editor and a knowledge management tool like Evernote. What I'm trying to say is that for everyone there's a number of tools that you will use everyday. What about those tools in the background, the ones that you will use everyday, but do the little tasks in the background?

Here's a complete list of the background tools that I use daily:

  • 1Password - The best password manager out there and also means that I don't need to remember my passwords anymore.
  • Alfred 2 - Application launcher and automator. Used daily, Alfred is my first point of interaction to all my applications and their actions. New blog posts, searching, programming docs, colour codes and more are all taken care of by Alfred.
  • Anvil - As a Rails developer, it's great to be able to manage applications I'm running locally. I use POW to get my development applications running locally, but Anvil provides a nice interface on top of this from the menu bar.
  • Broom - Disk space manager. Great for identifying large files and folders.
  • Divvy - When it comes to my desktop setup, I'm very set in my ways. I have my laptop screen split into two panes. Small area apps like Kiwi, occupy the left pane, about 30% of the screen in terms of width, and other apps sit on the right pane. I've had it set up this way for months. Using Divvy makes this super easy as I have keyboard shortcuts for putting windows in these panes as well as 50/50 splits and using the full screen.
  • Fantastical - Fantastical is my gateway to my calendar. Using a shortcut key, I can add meetings and appointments to my calendar on any day without having to reach for the mouse.
  • f.lux - Keeps my screen easy to read depending on the time of day and my location. Great for early morning coding.
  • PopClip - I'm a bit of a newcomer when it comes to PopClip, but having that popup when you copy and paste stuff is such a timesaver. When you select text PopClip appears with a number of actions depending on the application you are using. I've only added a couple of custom actions so far, but it's already proving to be very useful.
  • RSS Notifier - I already use Feedbin for my RSS subscriptions, but RSS Notifier takes a special set of RSS feeds that are related to my job. I use it to get get updates on hosting platforms, service levels and outages. Having this run with notifications means that I can see if any of my clients will have any technical problems with the hosting of their sites and applications.

That's it. All the tools that I view as background tools that support my day to day working. These apps are always lurking in the background doing something to help make my day easier. Apps like this usually have a single purpose that they do really well. They might have other features as well, but as long as they do their primary function well, I'll keep using them.

I've read lots of articles about being productive, but what I have yet to see is actual results. Measured results of a person's work and how they arrived at the fact that this method makes you more productive. I'm guilty of this as well with my Grass Roots Productivity series. There was no results to backup my how this made me work better.

So where's the evidence to support all these productivity recommendations then?

Well there isn't any really. I've yet to read about a technique or method that will make you work more effectively and efficiently with evidence to support it. The thing about being productive is that it's down to you as an individual. It's all about trial and error. What works for you personally isn't what will work for others and vice versa.

Once you find something that works, you'll know.

Trying out TextExpander

One tool that I have yet to fully embrace in my day to day work is a text expander. Back in my days as a .NET developer, AutoHotKey was my preferred choice of text expander but since moving to the Mac, I haven't invested too much time in searching for a text expander tool. Now though I'm starting to find that it would be of benefit to me if I was able to automate a few keystrokes here and there.

My email is the first place I would start. For a while now I've been unproductive when it comes to emails. Sometimes I find myself sending the same email a few times a week to different clients. Rather than searching for the previous email and copying and pasting the body I would like to store the body of the email in a text expander and just have it show in the email when I type in the snippet code. Another place I would like to automate things is legal documents for clients. I could store the template of a contract in a snippet.

There lots of other places as well I could be using a text expander like inserting the header of my blog posts, code snippets for my programming and of course the humble email signature. I know that all these examples could be solved by other means but each case requires a different way of setting it up and retrieving it. Having shortcut keys on hand to do this would be so much easier to implement and remember. Also, all my snippets would be in one place.

I started today with a trial of TextExpander for my MacBook. The reason I picked this is that it's name keeps coming up when I'm browsing the preferences of the apps I'm using. I'm going to be using it over the next few weeks. We'll see how I get on.

It's not often that I have days like today.

Days where even the best laid plans are completely scuppered. Days where events happen that make you have to completely reset your day. Days where your schedule is simply turned on it's head. Days where you can't salvage anything you intended to do.

When it does happen though, I just admit defeat and reset my task list for the following day. You can't win at being productive every day, but you should be able to recognise those days where it's simply pointless trying to catch up. Today was such a day.

There's no problem with admitting defeat. It's just a day. Tomorrow is another day. Surely the universe can't hit me with a second completely unworkable day?

Limiting Your Social Networks

Many of you will know through my posts that I'm a big App.net fan. It's my goto place when I want to drop in on conversations, strike up news ones with others and also just as a place to post what I am doing. It's also the one public social network that I participate in.

I've never been interested in creating a Facebook account as I simply seeing as being too much of an overhead to maintain. I also deleted my Twitter account this year. It was coincidental that the timing of this action happened at the same time as Twitter were enforcing new rules on the use of their API. I just felt that I wasn't getting anything back from Twitter in terms of value.

Since switching to a single public social network, I've noticed a number of positive things that have occurred as a result of my limiting action.

No more drowning in micro-information

The first thing I immediately noticed was that I was no longer constantly checking my Twitter timeline. Looking back I wonder now why I even had an account there in the first place. It's a social network for micro-updates that only offers limited information in each post. I did find it interesting hearing what other people were working on, but Twitter's post limit of 140 characters seriously limits the amount of context you can put on a post.

Less apps and services to use

With just one social network to my name, I have less apps on all my devices. It's a minor thing but having less apps on my devices means less time updating them, searching for new ones and of course less time checking them. I also work with a 'one in, one out rule'. As much as possible I will try and keep the number of products and services I use down to a minimum. That means that more often than not, I will replace older apps with new apps rather than running two at the same time.

Less of a digital footprint

I like keeping a small digital footprint. Nothing to do with trying to stay under the radar in terms of the government spying on you, but more to do with my own data and it's safety. As soon as I stop using a product or service I try and delete the account I had with that product or service. I do this because I don't want my login details lying around on another companies database when it doesn't need to.

It's not for everyone

Limiting yourself isn't for everyone, but it was amazing to see how little I depended on Twitter after just a couple of weeks of deleting my account. I used to think of social networks as places to find more information on topics, but the truth is that I find everything I need in the form of blogs, newsletters and podcasts.

I now see social networks as more of a place for conversation. Fortunately App.net does this aspect of interaction very well and I'm happy to remain a paying subscriber to it.