#getting things done

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tabs give me superpowers

Berliners: Otherland has added a second date (Jan 28) for my book-talk after the first one sold out - book now!

"Lifehacking" is in pretty bad odor these days, and with good reason: a once-useful catch-all for describing how to make things easier has become a pit of productivity porn, grifter hustling, and anodyne advice wreathed in superlatives and transformed into SEO-compliant listicles.

But I was there when lifehacking was born, and I'm here to tell you, it wasn't always thus. Lifehacking attained liftoff exactly 19 years and 348 days ago, on Feb 11, 2004, when Danny O'Brien presented "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks" at the 0'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (aka ETCON). I was there, and I took notes:

https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt

O'Brien's inspiration was his social circle, in which people he knew to be no smarter or better or motivated than anyone else in that group were somehow able to do much more than their peers, in some specific domain. O'Brien delved deeply into these peoples' lives and discovered that each of them had merely ("merely!") gotten very good at using one or two tools to automate things that would otherwise take up a lot of their time.

These "hacks" freed up their practitioners to focus on things that mattered more to them. They accomplished the goal set out in David Allen's Getting Things Done: to make a conscious choice about which things you are going to fail to do today, rather than defaulting to doing the things that are easy and trivial, at the expense of the things that matter, but are more complicated:

https://gettingthingsdone.com/what-is-gtd/

One trait all those lifehacks shared: everyone who created a little hack was faintly embarrassed by it, and assumed that others who learned about their tricks would find them trivial or foolish. O'Brien changed the world by showing that other people were, in fact, delighted and excited to learn about their peers' cool little tricks.

(Unfortunately, this eventually opened the floodgates of overheated posts about some miraculous hack that turned out to indeed be silly and trivial or even actively bad, but that wasn't O'Brien's fault!)

I'm one of those people whom others perceive as very "productive." There are some objective metrics on which this is true: I wrote nine books during lockdown, for example. Like the lifehackers O'Brien documented in 2004, I have lots of little hacks that aren't merely a way of getting more done – they're a way to make sure that I get the stuff that matters to me (taking care of my family and my health, and writing books) done.

A lot of these lifehacks boil down to making your life easier. There's a spot on our kitchen counter where I put e-waste. Whenever I go out to the car, I carry any e-waste out and put it in a bag in the trunk. Any time I'm near our city dump, I stop and throw the bag into their e-waste bin. This is now a habit, and habits are things you get for free: I spend zero time thinking about e-waste, which means I have more time to think about things that matter (and our e-waste still ends up in the right place).

There's other ways I use habits to make my life easier: after many years, I learned how to write every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/22/walking-the-plank/

For longer-form works like novels, I "leave myself a rough edge," finishing the day's work in the middle of a sentence. That way I get a few words for free the next day, meaning I never start the day's work wondering which words I'll type:

https://locusmag.com/2014/01/cory-doctorow-cheap-writing-tricks/

One of the most powerful habits I've cultivated is to have a group of daily tabs that I open in a new browser every morning. The meat of this tab group is websites I want to check in with every day, either because they don't have RSS feeds, or because I want to make sure I never miss an update.

This tab-group habit started before RSS was widespread, when most of the websites I wanted to check in on every day didn't have feeds yet, and for many years, this group was just a set of daily reads. But over the years, I started throwing things in the tab-group that I needed to stay on top of.

My daily tabs are in a folder called "unfucked rota" (they were originally in a folder called "rota," which got corrupted and had to be reconstructed in a folder I called "fucked rota," until I finally took a couple hours off and got it in good running order, hence "unfucked rota"). As I type this, "unfucked rota" contains more than a hundred websites I visit every morning, but it also contains:

The edit-history pages for four Wikipedia entries I'm watching;

Chronological feeds of my books on Amazon and Audible, to catch counterfeits as they are posted;

The parent notification portal for my kid's school;

The mileage history for the airline I flew on yesterday (I'll delete this once the flight is posted);

The credit card history for a card I reported a fraudulent charge on (I'll delete this once the refund is posted);

The sell-pages for three products that are out of stock (I'll delete these once the products are in stock and ordered);

A bookmarked newest-first Ebay search for a shirt I like that has been discontinued by the manufacturer;

The new-survey-completed pages for my last two Kickstarters;

The courier tracking page for an item being shipped sea-freight to me from Asia.

The tail end of this unfucked rota changes all the time, but as you can tell, it's got a lot of stuff that would be time-consuming to build a whole new system to track, but which has a web-page that can be easily added to a daily, habitual check-in and then removed when it's not relevant anymore.

Some of these things have email notifiers or RSS feeds, but those are too easy to lose in the noise. I generally delete email from ecommerce sites unread, since 99.99% of the messages they send me are unsolicited marketing nonsense, not the "notify me when this is back in stock" message I do want to see (same goes for my kid's school, which sends me fifty unimportant messages for every message that I must reply to).

Most of the internet is still on the web, which means it can be bookmarked, which means that it takes me one second to add it to the group of things I'm staying on top of, and one second to remove from that group. I get up in the morning, middle-click the "unfucked rota" item in my bookmarks pane, make a cup of coffee, and then sit down and race through those tabs, close-close-close.

It takes less than a second to scan a tab to see if it's changed (and if I close a tab too quickly, the ctrl-shift-T "unclose" shortcut is there in muscle-memory, another habit). The whole process takes between one and 15 minutes (depending on whether there's anything useful and new in one of those tabs).

Tabs, like lifehacks, are also in bad odor. Everyone stresses about how many tabs they have open. It's even inspired Rusty Foster's excellent newsletter, Today In Tabs:

https://www.todayintabs.com/

But this is a very different way to think about tabs. Rather than opening a window full of tabs that need your detailed, once-off attention later, this method is about using groups of tabs so that you can pay cursory, frequent attention to them.

In a world full of administrative burdens, where firms and institutions play the "sure, we'll do that, but you're going to have to track our progress" game to get out of living up to their obligations, this method is a powerful countermeasure:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

My little tab habit is so incredibly useful, such a powerful way to seize back time and power from powerful actors who impose burdens on me, that I sometimes forget how, for other people, tabs are a symptom of a life that's spiraling out of control. For me, a couple hundred tabs are a symbol of a couple hundred tasks that I'm totally on top of, a symbol of control wrestled back from others who are hostile to my interests.

This isn't how tabs were "meant" to be used, of course. It's an example of the kind of "innovation" that comes from users repurposing things in ways their designers didn't necessarily anticipate or intend.

This is what Jonathan Zittrain meant by "generative" technology back in 2008, when he published his incredibly prescient The Future of the Internet: And How To Stop It:

https://memex.craphound.com/2008/07/22/zittrains-the-future-of-the-internet-how-to-save-the-internet-from-the-internet/

For Zittrain, "generativity" was the property of some technologies that let its users generate new, useful tools and solutions for themselves (this is very different from "generative AI!")

Zittrain described how "curated" computing systems, like mobile devices that relied on apps that couldn't be adapted by their users, were dead ends for generativity. 15 years later, the dismal world of apps has proven him right:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/24/everything-not-mandatory/#is-prohibited

To the extent that "lifehacking" is about doing more, rather than being more deliberate about what you accomplish, it can be harmful. I am not immune to the failure modes of lifehacking:

https://locusmag.com/2017/11/cory-doctorow-how-to-do-everything-lifehacking-considered-harmful/

But overall, using tabs as something I close, rather than something I open, is a source of comfort and calm for me. For one thing, ripping through a group of tabs every morning means that I don't have to worry about missing something if I go too fast. I'll get another chance tomorrow:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/27/probably/

Decades ago, Dori Smith dubbed her pioneering blog her "#Backup Brain":

https://web.archive.org/web/20020120231027/http://www.backupbrain.com/

At their best, our systems – be they physical, like a spot on the counter where the e-waste goes, or digital, like a tab-group – are "congitive prostheses." They allow us to move important things from the highly contested, busy and precious space between our ears and out there into the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

Like those lifehackers that O'Brien studied for his presentation in 2004, I confess to feeling a little silly about telling you all about this. For me, this habit of decades is so ingrained that it feels trivial and obvious. And yet, when I look at people in my life struggling to stay on top of a million nagging administrative tasks that could be easily watched through a morning's flick through a tab-group, I can't help but think that maybe some of you will find a useful idea or two in my unfucked rota.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/25/today-in-tabs/#unfucked-rota

#pluralistic #productivity #life hacks #mozilla #firefox #open web #systems #getting things done #externalized memory #outboard brain #generativitiy

[lynnswirld]

#the end of the day #satisfaction of #getting things done

[diaryafterdark]

Today is a gloomy day

Free nudes to whoever wants to clean my car for me 💘

#casual #comfort #fashion #style #me #sneakers #ootd #outfit #gloomy days #running errands #getting things done #thick babe #thick legs #short girl #trd #sports cars #girls who like both #bd/sm switch #findom humiliation #findom paypig #findom brat #findom drain #findomslave #findom goddess #i sell noods #daily noods

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Bill Day

* * * *

Wow! You can’t make this up!

March 21, 2024

ROBERT B. HUBBELL

It’s hard to believe that the dysfunction in the Republican Party could get worse, but Wednesday saw new heights (or depths?) of chaos in the GOP. You are undoubtedly interested in hearing how the GOP impeachment hearing directed at Joe Biden produced damning evidence—against Donald Trump! But first, let’s look away from the GOP car crash to view the important work that President Biden is doing on behalf of the American people. (You’re welcome!)

As Trump and the GOP were entering panic mode at warp speed, President Biden was delivering on his promises to the American people. The Biden administration began the day by announcing a rule that would accelerate the production of hybrid and all-electric cars. See NYTimes, Biden Administration Announces Rule Aimed at Expanding Electric Vehicles. (This article is accessible to all.)

Per the NYTimes,

The Biden administration on Wednesday issued one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history, a rule designed to ensure that the majority of new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States are all-electric or hybrids by 2032. Nearly three years in the making, the new tailpipe pollution limits from the Environmental Protection Agency would transform the American automobile market.

Accelerating the transition to hybrid and electric cars will deliver enormous economic and health benefits to the American people. Again, per the Times, the new regulation will

avoid more than seven billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions over the next 30 years . . . That’s the equivalent of removing a year’s worth of all the greenhouse gases generated by the United States . . . . The regulation would provide nearly $100 billion in annual net benefits to society [including] $13 billion of annual public health benefits thanks to improved air quality. The standards would also save the average American driver about $6,000 in reduced fuel and maintenance over the life of a vehicle, the E.P.A. estimated.

As the new “tailpipe emissions” standard was being announced, President Biden announced a massive investment in an Intel chip fabricating facility in Arizona. See Politico, Biden boosts Intel with massive CHIPS payout in swing state Arizona.

Per Politico, Biden said

“We will enable advanced semiconductor manufacturing to make a comeback here in America after 40 years. It’s going to transform the semiconductor industry and create entirely new ecosystems.” Biden said Intel would also invest “over $100 billion” across the country, in facilities in Arizona, Oregon, Ohio and New Mexico. Those investments should put the U.S. on track to produce roughly 20 percent of the world’s leading-edge chips by 2030, Biden said. He added that Intel’s new projects are expected to create 30,000 jobs nationwide in construction and manufacturing.

Beyond creating tens of thousands of jobs in the high-tech sector, the CHIPS and Science Act protects US national security. Recall that during the COVID pandemic, supply chain issues disrupted the flow of semiconductors into the US, hampering the manufacture and sale of hundreds of consumer products that rely on microprocessors. Manufacturing the chips in the US serves as a hedge against that future risk.

For most presidents, the Intel announcement and new tailpipe admissions standard would be the year's crowning achievements. For Joe Biden, those announcements were known as “Wednesday.” Biden gets stuff done. Tell a friend.

[Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter]

#Robert B. Hubbell #Robert B. Hubbell Newsletter #CHIPS #semiconductor manufacturing #jobs #CHIPS and Science act #Biden Administration #getting things done

[adulting-help]

You're allowed to do it "wrong"

Growing up, Mom had a lot of rules that were totally arbitrary and had no basis in safety or proper care of the things the rules were about. A couple examples:

Towels had a "correct" way of being folded. And they could only go in the closet when they were folded that way. I once folded a towel wrong and got cussed out for it.

To be "cleaned off", the coffee table top could only have coasters, the remote control, whatever book Mom was currently reading, and maybe a scented candle. Anything extra constituted "clutter", even if it was the book I was currently reading.

But, the other day, I watched a friend fold my towels. They didn't do it the way I do it, which is the way Mom demanded. And I...let it go. Someone else was folding my towels for me. Who cares so long as they get put away?

I keep multiple remotes, coasters, and other things on my coffee table. To make it look tidier, I try making sure everything ends up in a tray on the table. I clean up trash and dirty dishes of course (not as often as I would prefer though). Mom would have told me the tray "just contains the mess" and doesn't mean it's tidy. However, getting everything into the tray looks better than having it all strewn about and lets me keep what I think belongs on the table on the table.

Those are just two things I do wrong now. I also take showers wrong (I use a shower stool to help my back, hips, knees, and ankles). I make my bed wrong. I sometimes load the dishwasher wrong, or run my clothes wrong.

You're allowed to do it "wrong", especially if "wrong" is how it gets done without being unsafe. (In other words, don't do electrical work or use a ladder wrong. But totally use improper technique to paint your wall if it works better for you.)

#life advice #doing it wrong #getting things done

[dailyrandomwriter]

Day 548

When I was little my dad always told me that if I did what I had to do first, then I had all the time leftover to do whatever I wanted. This was in reference to homework, because homework was an issue when I was a child.

I never quite forgot this fact, which is probably why when I knew I had to do something and for whatever reason couldn’t bring myself to do the thing, I would just stare off into space (probably daydreaming) instead of just doing anything. Like, it would have been more productive for me to (at that point) go and do what I wanted to do, if I wasn’t going to do what I had to do.

Not the best way to live one’s life.

My dad’s advice floated through my brain today as I was cleaning the kitchen. It’s not a piece of advice that I disagreed with, in fact as a child I tried to follow that advice whenever I could. It’s been so many years I don’t know how successful I was, but I’d imagine I wasn’t that successful in following that piece of advice.

My mom came in to grab something from the freezer chest at my place while I was cleaning. She was delighted that I was cleaning on a day off. I wondered if I should have told her I’m delighted that I am cleaning too because it means I can do other things with my time.

Like play video games, so many video games…

#getting things done #now time to write other things

[euesworld]

"Good morning, may you possess the strength to get everything done that needs to be done this week.. and may the days be gentle on your soul."

When Monday rolls around, you know things need to start getting done - eUë

#monday #good morning #morning thoughts #early morning #in the morning #morning #possess the strength #strength #inner strength #get it done #getting things done #do the dishes #clean the house #do laundry #be gentle #gentle #life #life quotes #good vibes #good energy #spilled ink #spilled thoughts #spilled words #love quotes #love #love quote life quotes #love quote for her #quoteoftheday #romance #romantic

[the-re-farmer]

A bit more updating

A bit more updating

I think the outside cats are very happy the roof is done! I think I actually counted 28 this morning, including two of the bitties that were under the cat house! We have been having almost rain, almost snow, lately. Many trees look like they’re covered with hoar frost, but it’s actually a layer of ice. Something I had to deal with when switching out the memory card on the gate cam! The entire…

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#Critters #dealing with elderly parents #getting things done #ice #kittens #our vandal #outside cats #roof #salvage #trail cam

[knode-garden]

hello i just discovered the power of voice recordings as a way to keep up with my AuDHD brain and i think this is going to radically change my life

#actually autistic #audhd #pkm #productivity #getting things done

[onlymingyus]

Sorry loves. I have been working on some stuff off of tumblr for the first part of the day. I am going to get a couple of these drabbles out and maybe one of the 1k drabbles as well tonight. ♥ We will see how much motivation I have in me.

If you wanna keep me company my asks are open as always.

#mars.rambles #getting things done #super secret stuff too #exciting

[postalninja]

Phew! My taxes are DONE! :D Figured I’d mention it since I’ve complained so much about doing them, but that’s definitely a weight off my shoulders.

#getting things done #after endless procrastination #it's the postal ninja way

[mun-akoon]

Anyone applied the GTD system in their lives? I'm new to it but really looking forward to it especially as a friend recommended it

#personal #GTD #getting things done

[reyarmenteros]

In the Studio

#webcomics #webcomic #dialogue #expressionism #surrealism #underpainting #Rey Armenteros #acrylic painting #acrylic drawing #fine art #art studio #painting process #figurative art #figure drawing #getting things done #paint skins #artists on tumblr

[nighthawkes]

I must sleep. Sleep is the mind-healer. Sleep is the big-life that brings total ability to fucking do anything. I will face my bed. I will permit the blankie to pass over me and snores to pass through me. And when sleep has gone past I will turn the outer eye to greet the new morning. When the sleep has gone there will be everything. Energy and will to live will remain.

#having a come to Jesus with myself about trying to work late #sleep is the only path to productivity. rest is the only thing that lets me get things done. #litany against not laying down

[thrivetrend]

Strategies for Getting Things Done

Procrastination is a widespread challenge leading to stress and reduced productivity. Overcoming it involves identifying root causes, setting clear goals, developing a structured routine, and using time management techniques. Combatting perfectionism and

Introduction Procrastination is a common challenge that many people face in their personal and professional lives. It refers to the act of delaying or postponing tasks, often leading to increased stress, decreased productivity, and missed opportunities. However, overcoming procrastination is possible with the right strategies and mindset. In this comprehensive guide, we will explore various…

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#asthetic #break tasks #fear of failure #getting things done #health #lack of motivation #manageable chunks #overcoming procrastination #perfectionism #pomodoro technique #poor time management skills #positive work environment #priorities #procrastination #recovery #set clear goals #strategies #stress management #structured routine #time blocking #time management techniques #yoga