Collaborative Note Taking - SubEthaEdit

SubEthaEdit is a tool that allows several people to take notes simultaneously in the same document.  While it doesn’t work in every situation, it can be a surprisingly good way to capture everyone’s point of view quickly and without interrupting the flow of the meeting.

The example above shows SubEthaEdit being used to write a program with multiple people contributing at the same time.  Each person’s changes show up in their color and you can see the changes they are making in real time. 

SubEthaEdit is designed to create plain text files, so you can’t do any fancy formating, but for large groups of people this helps keep the documents consistent.  The newest version allows you to save out a file as HTML with tooltips that tell you who wrote each part of the document.

SubEthaEdit is free for non-commercial use, so you can try it out for free.  It only runs on OS X.  You can find more information on the product website.

Social Glass Ceilings

If you want to reach your full potential you must constantly evaluate yourself.  There are always obstacles.  Sometimes it might be a lack of skill, so you go back to school.  Sometimes it might be interpersonal skills that you need to develop.  However, one of the biggest hurdles is something that doesn’t get much attention.  I’m going to call it a social glass ceiling.

Whether we admit it or not, our ideas about what we can accomplish are very much related to the capabilities of the people we are around.  It is as if we have an internal bell curve that we use to compare our performance with our peers.  If you outperform everyone around you in a certian area, it is going to be difficult to reach your full potential.

I’ve been in classes where I was the top student.  I don’t mean I was in the top 10%, I was hands down the best student in the class.  It would take me 15 minutes to complete the tests that were scheduled for 60 minutes where most of the other students would run out of time. 

In another class I was not the best student.  In fact I had serious doubts as to wether or not I could even pass the class. I loved the material, but everyone else seemed so much further ahead than me.  They could grasp the concepts easily that required so much effort for me. Halfway through the class I dropped it because I was having such a hard time and took it again the next year. I studied very hard and still ended up with a B with which I was absolutely thrilled.

Of these two classes, the second one pushed me closer to the limits of my potential than the first.  That push resulted in greater growth not only in that area of study but in my general abilities. Obviously I did better in the first class from a grade standpoint, but from a personal development standpoint the second class made me push myself further than I had ever been required before.

To really challenge ourselves we must be surrounded with people who are better.  It is said that your salary is usually equal to the average the salaries of your 10 closest friends.  This is a good general rule for everything–not just finances.  The capabilities of our friends average together to create a social glass ceiling.  Even if you work hard and break through the ceiling, it will still exert constraints on your progress.  If you want to truly push the limits of your potential, the people with whom you interact must be people who significantly challenge you in the areas where you want to excel.

Optimal Sleep

Sleeping is something we don’t usually think much about, but if you could do something to convert just 90 minutes of each day from sleep time into productive time that would give you and extra 10 hours each week.

Steve Pavlina discovered that he could reduce the amount of sleep he required by an average of 90 minutes each day by getting up at 5 am 7 days per week. He only goes to bed when he is tired enough that he will immediately fall asleep. You can find more about his experience here and here.

Polyphasic sleep is a drastic method of changing your sleeping schedule. Basically you try to train your body to enter deep sleep immediately by taking a 20 to 30 minute nap every 4 hours. In this way you only require 2 hours of sleep per day. For most people this would translate into an extra 40 hours per week.  Lifehack has some comments on an article by someone who uses this sleeping method. There is also a blog that is following someones current attempt to convert to the schedule.

Of course even if you can get by with less sleep there may be other harmful side effects. An article in Nutrition Action Health Letter (Jul/Aug 2005, Vol. 32 Issue 6) discusses some research from Europe into the causes of obesity in children. The researchers expected to find a link between the amount of time children spent in front of the television and obesity. Instead they found that children who slept less weighted more. Another study in Wisconsin of middle-age government employees found a similar correlation.

Several people who are using the polyphasic sleep method mentioned that they require a lot more food. It seems reasonable that the body would need more food if it is more active, but polyphasic sleep could impede the body’s ability to regulate it’s own weight.

It is interesting to note that there seems to be very little research into polyphasic sleep. It has also been called Uberman’s sleep schedule and Dymaxion sleep. If you do a search through scientific journals you’ll find many references to polyphasic, but very few of them are talking about fully replacing our regular sleeping pattern with 4 hour phases. Most of the time they are just referring to taking a several naps in addition to the main time you sleep.

One of the main people to write about this type of sleep is Claudio Stampi. In Particular he wrote a book called “Why We Nap”. It sells for $155 on Amazon so it isn’t something you can just pickup from your local bookstore. If anyone knows of some good research regarding this method of sleeping (especially how it impacts your health), please leave a comment.

Other random pieces of related info:

There was a study done on truck drivers printed in Biological Rhythm Research 2003, Vol 34, that talks about polyphasic sleep. In that research they found evidence of a natural rhythm lending to taking several naps during a day. They also mentioned that if the naps are irregular it could throw off the body’s sense of timing.

The November issue of Scientific American mentions unpublished research where a drug known as CX717 was able to improve the performance of sleep deprived humans. Previously the drug was given to sleep deprived monkeys. The monkeys were then given memory tests (which usually degrade with lack of sleep). With the drug the sleepy monkeys were able to perform at the same level as well rested monkeys. However when the drug was given to rested monkeys, they performed better on the memory tests, so the drug may be more related to improving memory than to suppressing the need for sleep.

Arshad Chowdhury of Metronaps is trying to cash in on people people who need more sleep. He invented a “sleep pod” that you can pay $14 to take a 20 minute nap. At the end of 20 minutes the bod vibrates to wake you up. The pods have a type of dome to cover your head and he has them installed in the Empire State Building and the Vancouver Airport. The Metronap pods might be the perfect thing for someone who wants to try to use the polyphasic sleep method, but don’t have an office area where they can take the required short naps during the day.

Effective Web Browsing

Most people have a collection of sites that they like to check every few days.  Unfortunately, checking a few sites can turn into several hours of pointless surfing without any real benefit.  Here are some strategies that will let you maximize your productivity while using the web to stay up to date.

1. Set aside time to visit your favorite sites.  If you don’t create space for it, you’ll end up opening your browser everytime you are faced with a task that you want to procrastinate on.  Avoid this by setting up a specific time.  This can be in the morning before going to work, at lunch time, in the evening.  It doesn’t matter when it is, but setup a time and get into a schedule.
2. Set a time limit for browsing.  By giving yourself a resonable time limit, you’ll keep yourself focused on things that are really important to you instead of following every random tangent hyperlink.
3. Use a tabbed browser.  If you are reading an article and see a link you want to open, use another tab.  That way you can finish reading the current article before moving on.  You can open multiple pages in this manner without losing you place on the current page.  Usually you can get the option to open a site in another tab by right clicking on the hyperlink.
4. Use bookmarks.  I have a list of 4 or 5 sites that I check regularly.  By putting these all into a single bookmark folder I’m able to open them all in tabs with a single click using Firefox or Safari (IE doesn’t have this feature yet).  This way they all load and I can click through skimming each one without loading each one individually.
5. Use a bookmarking service.  Services like del.icio.us allow you to bookmark interesting sites using tags.  A tag is a single word identifier and you can attach multiple ones to each page you book mark.  You can then search through your bookmarks looking for specific tags or combinations of tags.  When you know that you can retrieve something later, it takes some of urgency away from reading it right now.  When you know that it will be categorized with other similiar sites that you’ve found, it makes it even easier to wait to review–you know you can concentrate exclusively on the subject when you have time to invest in it.
6. Use email services.  I enjoy Dilbert, but I don’t find it very productive to visit the site everyday.  Instead I signed up for the daily email.  Each day when I check my email, I have a cartoon in my inbox.   You can also use email services to notify you of news events or new sites on the web.  Google Alerts offers this service. 
7. Use RSS readers.  RSS readers allow you to subscribe to a website feed.  They show you all the sites you’ve subscribed to and indicate which ones you’ve read and which ones you have yet to read.  By putting the content of all the sites you are interested in in one place, you can easily scan the headlines looking for things of interest. 

When to Buy a Faster Computer

Computers are so closely tied to our efforts to be productive that it is valuable to take some time and think about how to maximize our use of these complex devices.  There are many factors that impact one’s productivity with these machines.

• The speed of the computer. (the raw ability of a computer to do tasks)
• The configuration of the computer. (settings, memory, physical placement, etc.)
• The software being used. (wordprocessor, spreadsheet, email, etc.)
• The training of the user. (informal, formal, software training, etc.)
• The maintenance performed by the user. (removing spyware, keeping things organized, doing backups, etc.)

Each of these areas deserve their own post or two, so for now I’m going to concentrate on the first–the speed of a computer.  For most users, this is the least important aspect of productivity.  This is because on almost any computer purchased in the last 4 to 5 years, if everything else is equal the speed of the computer has the least impact on productivity for most users.  Obviously this isn’t what you are going to hear from anyone who is paid a commision to sell computers, so let me say it again.  For most users, the speed of their computer is the least significant factor in their productivity.

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Working Effectively with a New Assistant

Most successful and efficient people will eventually come to a point where they at least consider hiring an assistant.  It seems like a very logical step.  If some of your work can be handed off to someone else, then you can concentrate on the things that can only be done by you which will increase your personal productivity.  Unfortunately many people hire assistants and end up in this type of situation:

Lets say you are a mad scientist out to destroy the world.  You can spend more time thinking up doomsday scenarios if you had an assistant to study gauges and push the buttons that simply must be studied and pushed to keep your diabolical lab running smoothly.  So after a careful search you locate an assistant who seems to be perfect for what you need.

After a week, you’ve discovered that hiring an assistant doesn’t give you the increased productivity you were hoping for.  Instead of having many more hours to plan you next death ray gun, you constantly interrupted by Igor who is trying to understand which buttons need pushed and which ones will initiate the labs irreversible self-destruct sequence.  Not only are you getting interrupted, but your new assistants is making many mistakes that you have to spend time fixing.  Why just yesterday he misunderstood you and fed one of your genetically enhanced telepathic rats to the man eating plant specimen and now it won’t eat anything but cheese.    Worse yet, your new assistant seems to be developing a large hump on his back.  You aren’t sure if this is due to stress or if he mistook the nuclear cooling liquid pump for the water fountain. What is a self-respecting insane mental giant as yourself to do?

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The Noguchi Filing System

Link: The Noguchi Filing System is a way to organize the paper in your life without requiring that you categorize it. Basically you use “pockets” to hold everything and place them vertically on a shelf. Whenever you need something from a pocket, you remove it from it’s place and place it back on the shelf as the leftmost pocket. This means that over time all of your frequently used pockets will be on the left and the least used pockets will be on the right.

This probably won’t work for everyone, but it can be an interesting way to organize information so it is automatically sorted based roughly on the propability that you will need to view it.

Five Time-savers

Logging into and navigating voice mail.

Of course you have to check your voice mail, but there are some things you can do to keep it from interrupting your day. Personally I find that navigating voicemail menus is a huge waste of time. I have set my voice mail system to send me an email with the message attached as a .wav file whenever someone leaves me a message. This centralizes all my messages to the same place (my email box) and doesn’t require that I navigate using the phone keypad.

Reading emails.

Here are several tips for streamlining your email reading:

• Make all your emails come to one place. If you have to log into several different accounts to read email you are wasting time. Most mail programs can check multiple accounts and show them all in the same or adjacent mailboxes.
• Don’t check your email every few minutes. It is easy to let email be a form of procrastination. (Whenever you don’t feel like doing something you immediately check your email looking for an excuse to do something else.) How often you check it will depend on your particular job, but if you are checking it more than once every 30 minutes you’re probably not being as effective as you could be.
• Turn off email notifications. Unless you get very few emails, having your computer beep, play music, talk like Homer Simpson or whatever, isn’t going to help make you more productive. If your email interrupts you just like the phone, you are going to have a much harder time concentrating on other work.

Writing checks

For regular bills, it just doesn’t make sense to sit down and write a check each month. Regardless of how fast you write, this is time that you can spend doing something else. Most banks offer some form of online bill payment where you can make both one time and recurring payments. Once your payees are setup, it is a simple matter of typing in the amount and when you want the bill to be paid. Online bill payments also reduces the amount of paperwork involved in record keeping and balancing your checkbook each month.

Watching Television.

I’m not going to try to talk you out of watching TV, but with normal broadcast channels, one-third of your time will be spent watching commercials. DVR’s like Tivo allow you to fast forward through commercials and give you the ability to watch the programs you want on your own time table instead of being forced to fit your schedule around the television. If you don’t have a DVR consider investing 15 minutes learning how to program your VCR to record shows that you want to watch.

Personally I’ve found that I prefer watching movies to watching television. Blockbuster and NetFlix offer subscription based services where they mail you DVDs. Their selection is much more than what you’d find at a typical video rental and you keep the video’s until you are through watching them.

Browsing the internet.

It is easy to waste a great deal of time aimlessly browsing the internet. Here are a few ways to make your browsing more productive:

• Use a feed reader. This is a tool that subscribes to any site you find interesting as long as it has an RSS feed. This means you can go to one place and see anything new that has been posted on any of the sites you subscribe to. You don’t have to visit each site individually and you are less likely to miss something important.
• Use bookmarks for frequently visited sites. Even if you type fast, a single click to bring up a site is faster.
• Use tabbed browsing to load sites. Most browsers (other than IE) will allow you to open several sites all at once in tabs. If have a list of sites you need to use each day consider opening them in this way. Since they come up all at once you don’t have to wait for each site to load individually.
• Use tabbed browsing to view related pages. When using the web it is easy to follow a link and lose track of what you were reading on the original page. If you come across a link that you want to follow, but you also want to finish reading the current text, just open the link in a tab. That way it will be there when you finish what you are currently reading without requiring you to hunt down the link.

Links and Tools Roundup

This is is a roundup of some of the useful articles and tools I’ve run across in the past few weeks. Checkout the sidebar for other links on Productivity and Organization as well.

• Kinkless is an OmniOutliner document that lets you manage things using the “Getting Things Done” methodology.
• PocketMod offers an easy way to print your own personalized organizer.
• LifeHacks has a great post on how to clean almost everything and once it’s clean you can follow Real Simple’s plan to keep it clean with only 19 minutes of work per day.
• Some tips on using Tracks and a molskine notebook to create a system based on “Getting Things Done.“
• A good article on how to write an effective todo list from 43 Folders.
• Working Smart has some tips on how to keep track of what you’ve delegated by email.
• David Seah has a method to keep himself focused on important tasks that is inspired by video games.
• This article has some tips on using Automator and Spotlight to improve your organization on your Mac.
• Giles Turnbull tried organizing his life by putting everything in a single plain text file and 43 folders explains why this is such a good idea.

Office in a Bag

Over the past four years, I haven’t had an office at my job.  The organization I was working for was running out of space, so I volunteered to go without an office and let the space be used for other things.  I would work from wherever I could find space.  Sometimes this was an empty office, the desk of a co-worker, or even sitting on the floor.  Since I was rarely in the same spot, I had to keep everything needed in my computer bag.  In addition to roaming with-in the building, I spend a good amount of time traveling.

In time I refined what I  needed in my bag down to the items that I found made me most productive wether I’m working from a quite spot I found on the floor in a hallway, riding in a plane, in cyber cafe in Mexico, or visiting in-laws.  Since I moved around a lot one of my requirements was to make it as easy as possible to packup and move.  I accomplished this by using wireless technology wherever possible.  I’ve seen many people setup their "mobile office" and it takes 15 minutes to get everything plugged in.  I can usually be up and running in 2 to 3 minutes.

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