Tech secrets of overprolific alpha-geeks

Cory Doctorow’s running notes from Danny O’Brien’s presentations:

here, here, and here.

Covers habits many of us seem to have picked up: Using shells, using plain text, using one app (JWZ’s law), private blogs for organising stuff, those embarrassing scripts in ~/bin.

The third is more high-level:

The thing everyone wants to know how to implement this [GTD] and not
get trapped putting things in folders all day long.

“Improved focus can be achieved through activities such as meditation, yoga and turning off Instant Messaging” – Ulrich Mayr, U Oregon.

I use a proxy that replaces all my web-sessions after 10 min with a page that says DO YOU REALLY WANT TO LOOK AT THE WEB OR DO YOU HAVE WORK TO DO.

the tragedy of the task bar where sixty apps all try to tell you your wireless card is working.

One day I’ll get more coherent…

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Internet addiction

Kathy Sierra posts on it. Knuth doesn’t read email.

Idleness, leisure, procrastination

Here is a very interesting article called Quitting the Paint Factory by Mark Slouka. Although, of course, I’m the one who needs it the least.

Anyway, at least it led me to the Wikipedia article on procrastination (nothing great there) and to discover that there is (at least currently) a separate article on academic procrastination!?

Reading Aaron Swartz’s essay today, I learnt that rewards and punishments do not work.

There are a lot of myths about productivity — that time is fungible, that focusing is good, that bribing yourself is effective…

He also quotes Alfie Kohn, who has written books and articles on related ideas, and especially quotes one particular article. Others agree: Wanting to do the tasks is most important. Even David Allen thinks so. There’s also Paul Graham’s essay, in which he points out that having a to-do list and doing the things on it — the minor, unimportant “errands” — is also actually a form of procrastination that avoids doing the really important things, and that most of us use the errands as an excuse, and make sure we don’t have time to do the important things.

Ubuntu/Debian have a nice small useful package called gtimelog.

There is also planner mode for Emacs, and Timeclock, and they can be used together. There is a step-by-step tutorial here.

, but I think I’ll check them out some other day and actually do something useful now, for a change. There is also org-mode; screenshots in the tutorial and manual here. Orgmode homepage, another howto, debian package?, and Sacha Chua’s unbiased comparison with Planner.el.