Matthew Lang

Capturing. It’s an action that I repeat every day. Although I don’t have exact figures for it, I probably manage about fifty captures a day depending on the context of the capture. Bookmarks, snippets, thoughts, images, posts, code and more. They’re all captured into various places and then reviewed, read or actioned on at a later date. Here’s a few examples of the things I’m capturing during the day.

Thoughts and ideas

I’m now getting into the habit of journaling about four times a day. Through the day I’ll capture ideas, thoughts and challenges that I’ve faced. I might come across an idea for a small application or I’ll make a note about a bit of work that needs to be automated. It like a private social feed back to myself. At the end of the day is my review of the day. I do this every day.

Web pages

Web pages get captured in three places at the moment. The first place is Evernote. Anything that’s interesting on App.net is starred. I have a recipe on IFTTT that reads my favourited posts from my timeline there and posts them to my Evernote account.

The second place is the Safari Reading List. I moved for this from Instapaper a few weeks ago. This tends to be for posts that I’ve found interesting in Feedbin and would like to look at later on.

The third and last place is my private bookmarking application. A couple of months back, I decided to roll my own bookmarking application. It’s far from complete but it serves it’s purpose for the moment.

Actions

Actions are still a work in progress. Previously I would capture all actions in TaskPaper and then during my weekly review, assign them to a list. For reasons I mentioned in another post, I decided to switch to Todoist for all my list management needs. Anything that requires actioning is added here to the inbox list so that I can assign it to a project or folder during my weekly review.

Emails

This wouldn’t be a capture post unless I wrote about my inbox. I tend to keep my inbox fairly clutter free. I carefully vet email subscriptions on a monthly basis and I use a lot of rules that shuffle emails about to various folders. I don’t think of my email as multiple inboxes, I tend to view as just one. I have the keyboard navigation pretty much memorised so that I can switch from one folder to another and read and organise emails as I need too.

Most of the emails I do receive are either deleted or filed away on folders, but for a small percentage of them though I forward them onto Evernote. After losing a few important emails a couple of months ago, I’ve decided to invest in Evernote as a place for important information that I can’t afford to lose.

Still too many inboxes

One thing that has become clear from these captures that I do the most is that I still have too many inboxes to maintain. All in I’m sitting at five inboxes at the moment. That’s still too many for me.

In a perfect world I would have one inbox that is connected to all the other products and services that I use and lets me move and organise items according to their context, but that’s an idea for another day.

At the moment, I think the best I can do is identify a place where I capture the most items and make it integrate with other inboxes with some kind of automated workflow. I can do this easily enough with the tools I have on my MacBook Pro possibly using scripts, but the challenge will be making this work on my iPhone or iPad.

Mark your calendars for next year, Patrick Rhone is proposing a new holiday for journal fans everywhere, Journal Day (December the 9th).

There are many ways to celebrate or traditions one could keep to mark the day. For instance, this might be the day to take out previous journals and reflect on where you were then versus where you are today. Another tradition may be to let someone you trust read one you have kept and get to know the “real” you.

— Journal Day by Patrick Rhone

Column space is a prize piece of real estate in a newspaper. In a medium that is restricted by physical size and print run, editors need to select the stories that will interest readers and will of course sell more newspapers.

Unfortunately the same can’t be said for a newspaper’s modern incarnation, the website for the newspaper. Pages are cheap to put together and publish. News stories ranging from the headline news of the day that affects the whole world to celebrity spats on social media. It seems as if there is no check in place to say whether a story is worthy of being published. All too often, even the most ridiculous of stories get published.

I’m writing this because people that comment on whether a story is worth the column space on a newspaper’s website tend to forget or not know that website pages are cheap when compared to the printed word on a dead tree.

Newspapers are restricted to a set number of pages and for a limited time. There’s also the printing costs and shipping costs in getting all these newspapers around the country. Even the smallest of stories have to justify their worthiness to be printed in the final edition of the newspaper for the following day.

Now look at a news website. Technology today can now scale websites to millions of visitors a month on platforms that are readily available to many. A typical news website will be continually updated throughout the day. Every hour sees the addition of more news stories and existing ones being updated with new information if they are still relevant.

Even news with the smallest confirmed information is published with breaking news on a story being published so that so that news website can say, “Yeah, we’re investigating this story too”.

As more details on these stories come through, they are quickly expanded into more details pieces with links to other related stories and sometimes even interactive maps or graphs are added. There is simply no limit to the column space that a news website has. It’s is always growing as along as it is relevant.

Then there’s the column space on the front page of a newspaper. Reserved only for the big stories of the day, it was once the coveted part of the newspaper where many journalists want to see their story being published.

The news website is a little less precious though about what makes front page news or in this case, home page news. The home page has become a carousel of stories that are always in a state of change. Developing stories are pushed to the top portion of the page, with other stories eventually tailing off to the bottom. Where newspapers in the past only published a handful of stories on their front page, news sites can easily accommodate over 50 different stories on their home page.

There’s no rule now in saying what makes the cut for published news. The idea of column space is dead. News now moves at such a frantic pace that news sites change every minute depending on what’s happening around the world. News websites just want to be seen to be reporting the news that happening now rather than reporting the news that is relevant or important.

What if there was a news website that respected the fixed number of pages they had available and only reported on the news that mattered? What if it remained static for 24 hours and only updated once a day? Would you read it?

That’s the problem though, no one wants a news website like that. The majority of us expect the news to be updated on a minute by minute basis and within easy reach on any one of the computers or devices they happen to be near at the time.

Column space was once treasured, but sadly it has been replaced by the rule that a story can be published if that story is relevant or might bring more visitors to that newspaper’s website. It’s that last part that irks me, as it appears to be the guiding factor on many published news stories that are just not relevant with what’s happening in the world today.

I’ll sign off now, as I’m running out of my column space of 750 words.

My blog archive goes as far back as 2009. A single post on a suggestion for Google Reader is all I can show for that year. In 2010, I wrote two posts, then in 2011 I wrote some more. My early blog posts might have lacked content and aim, but it was a start. It’s crossed my mind today that many of these posts are no longer relevant or readable and therefore could be deleted.

Should I delete any posts just because I thought they were inferior?

Absolutely not.

My blog archive is my digital timeline, it’s not a complete history, but I’m getting more and more consistent with my posts and I’m frequently writing from a reflective angle. My archive is me through the years. A scrapbook of my thoughts on various topics. I might not have liked what I wrote in the past but I leave it there as a reminder. When I compare what I am writing about today with what I wrote about in the past, it lets me see I am getting better at putting my thoughts into words.

Proof that technology and search companies are not the only corporate bullies when it comes ‘brand protection’.

Just disgusting Specialized, and yes, the actual Roubaix cobblestones are what first come to mind when I hear the name. Not your bike.

I’ve read quite a few articles about teaching kids how to program and write code. There’s the argument that the world has embraced technology to such an extent that it’s hard not to have your life touched by technology in some way. Some advocates of teaching kids to program say that it should be part of the school curriculum from a very early age.

I agree with teaching kids about technology and how to control it, but I believe this should only start at a point where reading and writing have been mastered. The point where kids can read basic instructions and write about their experiences.

I think my oldest son is at that point. So next year, I’m going to start teaching him how to write code. It won’t just be about writing code though, I aim to educate him about basic terminal commands, show him how computers work and how their used all over the world in different ways.

I’ll be blogging about it along the way, maybe one post a month, with a guide to what he has been working on. It should be fun, and it will be nice to get to spend time with him as well.

Resistance is a natural response when you’re faced with a big challenge or project. It can be all too easy to simply shrug off the challenge and look elsewhere for something else to do. I have to admit, there have been a few days over the course of this year I did exactly that. Looking back, my reasons for resisting to step up to the challenge were varied.

Decisions

We make hundreds of decisions everyday, but when a decision is part of a long term commitment, it can be difficult to sometimes make that decision. What if I make the wrong choice? Can I change my mind at a later date?

The details of decisions cost me a lot of time this year. The decisions I was making were not huge decisions, they were simply decisions that would have a small effect on the outcome of a project.

I should have shrugged of the resistance to not making a decision and just committed to a choice, an outcome. If I made a mistake then it’s just time lost in finding the right decision. We can’t make good decisions all the time.

Confidence

Or should I put it as lack of confidence? Despite having worked on many software development projects over the years, my confidence isn’t 100% when faced with a challenge or a problem.

As a kid I would rarely put my hand up to answer a question in class for fear of getting it wrong and looking stupid. It’s weird because a couple of weeks ago at my oldest son’s parents night at school, the teacher told me that my son lacked confidence in answering questions in class. Bit of a family trait then.

Anyway, regardless of the size of the challenge or problem, I started to see that the way to build confidence when faced with a challenge is to do it a little bit at a time. Just a few small wins can do wonders for your confidence, and as long as you’re making significant progress, any bumps on the road will only knock your confidence slightly, which is easier to recover from.

Small steps

And that leads me onto steps, or small steps in this case. When faced with a challenge, it can be easy to view it as one challenge, one step, one action if you will.

One giant step can make most people think twice before committing to a challenge. However, breaking this giant step down into smaller steps can make it look more manageable than the action of one massive step. As I said previously about confidence, taking something and breaking it down into the smallest bits you can manage can make that giant step look much more easier to accomplish.

I resisted for so long on a couple of projects this year due to the above factors, but having worked through one of these projects, I was surprised to see that I could make it work. Overcoming those factors that contribute to resistance can all of a sudden make that death-march project look more appealing and doable.