43 Folders
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| Last updated Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:46
A bunch of tricks, hacks & other cool stuff. A weblog by Merlin Mann
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The Wire: Writing Into Your Arc
| Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:46
Important While this article about The Wire deliberately contains as few actual spoilers about the show as possible, it does contain numerous links to pages with information that will tell you critical spoiler information about the stories and fates of the show’s characters. The article also contains language and links that are very much not safe for work. Please proceed with caution on all fronts. In the time since I gallantly announced what makes a good blog, I’ve had time to think more about the qualities of work that endures. Not thinking just of personal blogs here, or solely...
43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work
| Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:14
[“what is this?”] Here’s something I wrote last week for this site’s new “About” page: 43 Folders is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work. Call it a motto, or a charter, or — if you have to — a “mission statement.” But, for both of us, it’s a stake in the ground that keeps me focused on what I feel best suited to do for you with this site right now. I want to help you identify and remove any obstacle that keeps you from making things that you love. And then I want...
| Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:25
[“what is this?”] Four years ago last Monday, I started 43 Folders with a TypePad account and no idea what I was doing. The obsessions that brought me here struck me as fascinating and under-reported — if almost entirely unrelated, one to the other. And, talking about the stuff I was really bad at often made me feel less awful about it. Sometimes it even helped me to rehabilitate the triggering, sucky behavior. On a number of levels, this felt really good. Even though I never really knew where I was heading, I tried to remain candid that the primary reason the site existed...
43f Program Note: The Week Our Gears Shift
| Mon, 08 Sep 2008 13:09
Reserve Reading: kung fu grippe - “Better” In light of some new directions I’m taking with my work, 43 Folders is changing focus and approach from being the “blog about productivity” that many readers may view it as today. So, this week, I’ll be presenting a few articles that touch on where I’m heading with this stuff, and why. By way of prologue, if you’ve been enjoying the stuff I’ve had to say over the past few weeks, I think you’ll find the course adjustments wholesome and useful. If you haven’t so much cared for that stuff,...
| Fri, 05 Sep 2008 23:20
A very simple guide to leaving here quickly so you can get back to making something awesome. Ask yourself… Why am I here right now instead of making something cool on my own? What’s the barrier to me starting that right now? This is not an insult or put-down. It’s a useful question. Please, think about it, then search the site to see if we have anything that might inspire you to make something awesome today. What Sucks? Looking for specific answers to what sucks for you today? “My email sucks.” “My attention management sucks.” “My...
Recap: 43 Folders' Corvette Summer
| Tue, 02 Sep 2008 13:41
Welcome back, friend. Per what I wrote in your yearbook back in June, I hope you had a nice summer and stayed sweet and cool. You look great. Did you lose weight or something? Somewhere along the way over the past few weeks, I seem to have got my game on again here at 43 Folders. I wrote a few items that I’m proud of and that lots of people seemed to enjoy. I’m once again posting about stuff that means a lot to me, and I’m feeling good about the site and where it (and I) will be heading over the next year. (More on that soon) But, if you were tanning on Ibiza or building houses...
"Right Now, What Are You Doing?"
| Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:18
Right Now: What Are You Doing? I’ve started to become a lot pickier about where my attention goes as I observe what it means to my work when it drifts. But, I still have a long way to go. Long way. Like a lot of people I have a bad habit of CMD-Clicking tab sets in my browser, which then spawns a dozen or more new panes of potential distraction, pointless horseshit, and 10,000 excuses not to focus on what I really want to be making right now. I whipped up this (rather plain and inefficiently coded) page this morning, and stuck it into every tab set that I tend to abuse: as the first tab...
Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive Heuristics
| Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:42
People send me lots of books, so I have to decide rather quickly whether one should be added to the ambitious pile of stuff I already really want to finish reading. On the off chance that you care or find it useful in developing your own filtering, here’s my insanely reductive, mean-busy-guy way to make a 90-second decision on whether to read a new non-fiction book from an author I’m not familiar with. It does not matter whether you agree with these; that’s how you know they’re personal heuristics. Also, they are almost uniformly unfair and unkind. So. For each question,...
Ubiquity: Firefox Gets its Quicksilver On
| Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:37
Aza’s Thoughts » Ubiquity In Depth Take a few minutes this week to look at the Ubiquity plugin for Firefox. So far, I’ve spent just enough time with it to have my mind blown by the Quicksilver-like interface it wants to bring to web browsing. Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo. And, like our favorite OS X launcher, Ubiquity also has an ambitious mission: to move beyond onesie-twosie key shortcuts by using user-extensible commands to intuitively hook together bits of information like model train cars: Ubiquity’s interface goal is to enable the user to instruct...
Social Networks: The Case for a "Pause" Button
| Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:40
Jason Kottke (via Rex, via TechCrunch) points to a new feature on FriendFeed that allows users to “fake follow” people: That means you can friend someone but you don’t see their updates. That way, it appears that you’re paying attention to them when you’re really not. Just like everyone does all the time in real life to maintain their sanity. As duplicitous and sad as “fake following” sounds — and let’s be honest: the whole idea’s pathetic on a number of levels — for a certain kind of user, I can see why there’s a desire...
Quote of the Week: On Multitasking
| Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:33
My quote of the week comes from a comment by Eideteker in this Metafilter thread on multitasking: Multitasking is the art of distracting yourself from two things you’d rather not be doing by doing them simultaneously. And, for what it’s worth, here’s what I had to say about the myth of multitasking a few years back: powered by ODEO ”Quote of the Week: On Multitasking” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 22, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?" ...
43 Folders: Admin: Why a Footer in 43 Folders Feed Items?
| Thu, 21 Aug 2008 13:40
Why a Footer in 43 Folders Feed Items? We’ve added a footer to items that appear in the 43 Folders RSS feed. Here’s why. The 43 Folders feed is a popular way for people to keep up with what’s happening on our site. If you’re not sure what we mean by “feed,” we’re talking about things like “Atom” and “RSS,” which are open standards that allow you to subscribe to a syndication feed that displays the headline and full content of every story that appears on our site. And, then, you can use apps like Google Reader or NetNewsWire...
Attention & Ambiguity: The Non-Paradox of Creative Work
| Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:40
Psychology Today: The Creative Personality [via delicious.com/huxant, w/a reminder by Jack Shedd] Some days, I can’t decide how I feel about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (say: “chick SENT me high”). He’s written some great stuff, but, sometimes, he mixes Big-Word academicspeak with anecdotal observation in a way that smells a little hokey to me. So, although I’m trying not to audibly roll my eyes at a pop-psychology Top 10 list about creativity’s “dialectical tension,” I definitely am interested in one of his observations about the “paradox”...
| Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:14
My friends at Six Apart recently asked me to make a list of blogs that I enjoy. I think they’re planning to use it for their new Blogs.com project. Unfortunately, I’m late getting it to them (typical), but if it’s still useful, I’ll post it here in a day or four. As I think about the blogs I’ve returned to over the years — and the increasingly few new ones that really grab my attention — I want to start with, ironically enough, a list. Here’s what I think helps make for a good blog. Good blogs have a voice. Who wrote this? What is their name?...
Closed Doors and Casualties in the "Coup d'attention"
| Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:37
Last night, I got home from a lovely one-day trip to do some speaking, and I was catching up on a couple emails before I went to bed. One of the messages was a thoughtful note from someone who works in the US Government (and whose name, job, and identifying elements I’m changing to protect his or her privacy). “Sally,” I’ll call her, likes the 43 Folders stuff, but has legitimate concerns about how all this “attention management” stuff might send a wrong or hostile message to her colleagues. It’s a great point. As is so often the case, I ended up...
Cooking for the Creative Beast
| Fri, 15 Aug 2008 10:46
Guest post Guest blogger, Matt Wood, learns how to feed his creative side (without giving it a big gut). 'mdm Earlier this summer, I was in the kitchen, trying to cook dinner. I had a pot on the stove and a fire going on the grill outside. I was fumbling with a bag of frozen peas when my three-year-old started shouting at me to fix one of his toys. “Hold on a second, son,” I said. “I can’t do two things at once.” He looked me, dead serious, and said, “But you have two hands, Daddy.” Too Many Pots on the Stove My life usually feels like...
Time & Attention Presentation: "Who Moved My Brain?"
| Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:52
Who Moved My Brain? Revaluing Time & Attention (slideshare.net) Thanks to my pals, Dara and Shawn, I’ve been preparing for a return visit with the folks at GoDaddy to deliver a couple talks on Inbox Zero and Time and Attention. As I’ve been going over my slides for the Time & Attention talk, I realized I hadn’t shared how the material has evolved since it premiered at Macworld in January. Which is to say, “Kind of a lot.” So, I’ve posted the updated deck. Of course, the irony of making cool, unbulleted slides is that the decks you create won’t...
Task Times, The Planning Fallacy, and a Magical 20%
| Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:00
Overcoming Bias: Planning Fallacy Via The Guardian, via Chairman Gruber, comes this post from the new-to-me blog, Overcoming Bias. It discusses the research behind a common cognitive bias known as The Planning Fallacy, which is a repeatable, documented error in thinking that apparently explains why we all tend to “underestimate task-completion times.” It’s summed up nicely by Gödel, Escher, Bach author Douglas Hofstadter’s Law regarding the time it takes to do anything: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account....
Gmail Outage or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love GTD Contexts
| Tue, 12 Aug 2008 13:46
Like thousands of people yesterday, I was annoyed and inconvenienced by Gmail’s unexpected 2-hour dirtnap. But, wow. Apparently, it just irrevocably hijacked the whole day for some folks. And even sent a few into a Dark Afternoon of the Soul that most 19th-century Romantic poets would have found a bit histrionic. Now, as a user, polemicist, and nemesis of Apple’s MobileMe problems, I’m not here to criticize the frustration about a broken cloud service; I know that feeling all too well and have the dents in my wall to prove it. But, I do want to talk about some strategies...
Ideas, Execution, and the Rare Auteur
| Mon, 11 Aug 2008 14:03
ideas are just a multiplier of execution - O’Reilly ONLamp Blog Derek Sivers’ short blog post from 2005 has been making the rounds lately — it came to me via Chairman Gruber — and I have to say, I can’t stop thinking about it. I think this is really profound thinking around the fundamental misunderstanding many people have about the value of ideas. In a nutshell, Derek says ideas are valuable only inasmuch as they can be multiplied by execution. So, if you remember your 3rd grade arithmetic, you can figure out the product of even the most fantastic idea when it’s...
Berkun's Game-Changer: Disruptive, Breakthrough Essay on Transformative Jargon Utilization.
| Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:18
Why Jargon Feeds on Lazy Minds - Scott Berkun Scott Berkun, writing on how buzzwords cheapen language, dull meaning, and enfeeble our thinking: If I could give every single business writer, guru or executive one thing to read every morning before work, it’d be this essay by George Orwell: Politics and the English Language. Not only is this essay short, brilliant, thought-provoking and memorable, it calls bullshit on most of what passes today as speech and written language in management circles. And if you are too lazy to read the article, all you need to remember is this: never use...
Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking
| Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:47
The other day, I was talking with someone who is trying to encourage a Getting Things Done-like work approach amongst the people on his team. We started talking about which parts of David Allen’s GTD system appear to have the greatest long-term impact on the people who have adopted it and who ultimately stick with it for years. When asked to distill everything down to its most powerful concepts, I came up with three, and here’s how I’d summarize each: Outcome-Based Thinking. Articulating in the most specific terms possible what a successful outcome looks like for any...
Making Time to Make: One Clear Line
| Thu, 07 Aug 2008 05:10
This article is Part 3 of a 3-part series about attention management for people who do creative work called, Making Time to Make. Previously: Part 1, Bad Correspondence Then: Part 2, The Job You Think You Have Could an email recluse like Neal Stephenson just cowboy up by agreeing to a monthly chat session or the occasional visit to a fan forum? Sure, he could. Could a volunteer intern scan Neal’s email once a week for particularly wonderful notes? You bet. Could he even conceivably just drop all the blast shields, open a chat room, “livestream” from...
43 Folders: The Monthly Pimp: August Edition
| Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:12
Here’s the latest stuff Merlin’s been up to, here and abroad. Huh? “Monthly Pimp?” Meta: New experiment. Everybody hates endless self-promotion. I know I do. So, except where called for by amazingly useful exception, I’d like all “Yay Merlin” stuff that makes it to the content well of the 43f home page (including recent interviews and podcasts, new projects, as well as recent and upcoming appearances of possible interest) to be ganged into a single monthlyish post. Nota Bene: I’d also like to encourage all my friends with blogs to try...
| Thu, 07 Aug 2008 10:12
Guest post from our pal, Brian, on how one of my favorite poets of the 60s captured interstitial time to make art. —mdm At the late late party after party we were talking about how you know if you're a writer. I suggested that actually writing routinely was the tip off. Then someone had a better idea: that writers are those who feel guilty about not writing. A first-world problem, to be sure, but if you know any working writers, one of their most beloved hobby horses is that they just don't have time to write. Students, money, speaking engagements, lint, bacon, the Cubs, morning...
