Posts Filed Under ‘People’
Inc. magazine's "The Way I Work" feature profiles Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress, the software that runs this site. Even though the article byline was "by Matt Mullenweg," Matt says the reporter actually wrote the piece--so he rewrote it, in his own words, on his blog. (I love this.) Matt's workday sounds perfect to me. He says it includes:
- No computer or email for an hour after he wakes up (not to an alarm clock)
- No meetings before 11AM
- Working from home six days a week, even though his office is a five-minute walk from his home
- Going out for long lunches (and having meetings over food)
- Batching his tasks to avoid context switching: all his meetings in one day, all coding TODO's in another, all his errands in another.
Interestingly, he uses RescueTime to monitor what applications he spends his day in, and also uses both a Mac and PC connected with Synergy (like I do). This whole article is worth a read, but get it in Matt's words on his own blog: The Way I Work, annotated. Photo by Andrea Beggi.
What I love most about my friend Penelope Trunk's Twitter feed (and all her writing) is that it's raw, personal, and hilarious. But I imagine getting served with legal documents that involve a printout of it wasn't so hilarious.
iPhone and Mac Talk on Copper Robot · Had a blast last night on Mitch Wagner's Second Life interview series, Copper Robot, where TUAW's Mike Rose, ArminasX Saiman, Mitch and I got to chat about Apple's new iPhone and Snow Leopard announcements last week. Thanks to Mitch and my co-panelists for having me; if you missed the event in-world, you can watch and listen to the video here. I also posted a couple of screenshots from the event on Flickr. · June 15th, 2009
Comedian Chris Hardwick theorizes that the essence of having confidence is having options. That is, confidence is knowing that if this one thing you really really want doesn't work out, you've got a safety net. That net makes you less desperate for that one thing to happen, more chill and composed. Makes sense. But how does one create these options? Hardwick says you've got to get good at something you love--then everything else will be better.
When you’re learning how to do something you enjoy and ultimately doing it well, that becomes mental currency that you can use as armor for a variety of seemingly unrelated situations, and therein lies the cool mind sorcery of it all: the options you create DO NOT have to relate to the situations in which you want to be confident. You don’t have to be an ace with the ladies to pick up more ladies—you can excel at something entirely different and still get the action you so richly deserve. The key is for you to feel safe and comfortable.
This rings true to me. My line about this whole writing thing is "whatever, if it doesn't work out I'll go back to being a programmer."
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Google Wave, Bing, and the Future of Newspapers on TWiT · Had a blast yakking with Leo Laporte, Don Tapscott, Jeff Jarvis and his son Jake Jarvis on today's episode of This Week in Tech. We covered much ground, from gushing over/being cautious about Google Wave (first take the time to watch this, then read this), to the flailings of the newspaper industry (read this), to redesigning the goals and methods of the modern university (listen to what 17-year-old Jake has to say about that). This was my third TWiT, but it was the first one nerves didn't get the best of me--felt comfortable, chilled out, and quite chatty . Thanks to Leo and the rest of the fabulous panel for putting up with me. Here's the episode page; MP3 available for download. · May 31st, 2009, 2 comments
Artist Jorge Colombo drew the image that graces the June 1st cover of The New Yorker magazine with Brushes, a $4.99 iPhone app. Virtually "finger-painting" an image like this onto a tiny iPhone touchscreen seems insane and inconvenient, but Colombo has good reasons. The New Yorker reports:
He discovered an advantage of digital drawing on a nighttime drive to Vermont. “Before, unless I had a flashlight or a miner’s hat, I could not draw in the dark.” (When the sun is up, it’s a bit harder, “because of the glare on the phone,” he says.)
Drawing on the iPhone also offers the artist anonymity. Colombo stood in Times Square for an hour drawing this image on his iPhone and no one gave him a second look. Unlike if he had been painting with an easel, passersby just assumed he was checking his email.
Surely sales of the Brushes app will go through the roof this week as aspiring artists scramble to replicate Colombo's work. Of course, Ken Rockwell was right when he asserted that it's an artist's eye, patience, and skill that makes a good image, not the tools he or she uses. See a video of this drawing come to life below.
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I've got my own pie chart of how I want to spend my time, so it was fun to hear that Jim Collins, author of bestselling book Good to Great, also has a similar breakdown, pictured right. The New York Times reports:
That, he explains, is a running tally of how he’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do.
Collins is a whole lot more diligent about tracking his progress than I've ever been, though.
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Stanford graduate Ramit Sethi's personal finance blog, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, is one of Lifehacker's most-quoted sources of financial advice, so I was honored when Sethi asked me to contribute a bit to his new book, also entitled I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Sethi's direct, authoritative style (evidenced by the blog and book title) may put you off at first glance. But on closer inspection you'll find he's an approachable, sensible guy, not some jerk trying to sell you a "foolproof" make-a-million-dollars-a-month system.
In fact, the I Will Teach You To Be Rich book, which went on sale today, is an excellent graduation gift for the college students in your life who are venturing out into a horrible economy steeped in student debt. To get a taste of what it's like, download the introduction PDF for free.
When you do get the book, you can find my contribution on page 134, a short piece on how I automate my week-to-week transactions in order to set and track long-term goals. Here's a full reprint.
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On This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte · I had the pleasure of joining Leo Laporte on his mega tech podcast TWiT yesterday afternoon, alongside Kevin Rose, Jason Calacanis, David Prager, and Dan Patterson, plus a couple of fun surprise drop-ins (like Geordi!). Here's the downloadable MP3 of the episode: TWiT 187: So Say We All. · March 23rd, 2009, 2 comments
Got a case of the Mondays this morning? Techie Andre Torrez says he loves Mondays because:
It's the start of the week. You get to see what ideas that were so important on Friday stayed important until Monday. [...] Mondays are a fresh start. They're like a reset button for the doldrums of your Wednesday afternoon meetings where two people are going on about something the other eight people in the room don't even understand.
I need to work on an attitude like his. Here's to appreciating the weekly reset button. The full post from Andre: I heart Mondays.
You've got to wonder what makes a guy who builds 3D printers which also ice cupcakes tick. Apparently it's an obsession with getting things done. Maker-of-crazy-cool-things Bre Pettis posts his and Kio Stark's manifesto for the "Cult of Done," 13 edicts about finishing. Here they are, bolded bits mine:
1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you're done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.
Check out the cupcake-icing, 3D-object printing MakerBot here. Here's The Cult of Done Manifesto, with two posters you can download and stick to your wall to stare at while you procrastinate. Image by spatulated.
In the depths of email overload desperation last week, I wished email messages had an 140-character limit like Twitter updates do. In response, two people recommended doing what Kevin Rose does: Set your desktop email signature to "Sent from my mobile phone."
It's a white lie that makes you look less rude for being short. It's annoying to have to fib (and embarrassing if you get caught somehow--of course all of Kevin's friends now know his "secret"). But for someone who gets more than 100 messages per day, this technique may be a matter of survival versus just saving time. Haven't set this up myself yet, but if I wind up at the bottom of another email mountain getting ready for a processing marathon, I just might.
Sundry Appearances About the Interwho · Had a fun week flitting about various online outlets, and I wanted to share the carnage I left behind. Over at Harvard Business, I get all Stephen Covey on your ass and published a post on how to mitigate the urgent to focus on the important. The Blog Herald interviewed me about my transition from Lifehacker to Smarterware. Then Leo Laporte and Sarah Lane were very kind to me on this week's episode of the net@night podcast. I had so much fun chatting with Leo I agreed to get in on this Sunday's episode of This Week in Tech (TWiT) alongside Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing and Ryan Block formerly of Engadget. You can watch it live at 3PM Pacific time right here. Update: Here's the MP3 for download and listening. That is all. Have a great weekend! · February 20th, 2009, 4 comments
Anyone who makes things for a living should watch author Elizabeth Gilbert's 20 minute talk at the TED conference this month (full video below). Gilbert published the mega-Oprah-bestseller Eat, Pray, Love which is soon to be a movie starring Julia Roberts. In this talk she explains one way she's found to quell the anxiety that comes with following up after a big commercial success. Namely, she's gone back to the ancient idea that creative inspiration is an entity separate from us, which speaks through us: the muse, as it were.
It's not a popular idea these days.
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60 Minutes interviews Coldplay's front man Chris Martin about how he writes hit songs. Being "openly neurotic," Martin makes sure he captures song ideas the moment they strike him--even if it means scribbling them onto his piano with a Sharpie. He's got a marker holder mounted to his whitewashed piano for just that purpose, as shown. In the video below, reporter Steve Croft asks about it.
Croft: You have notes written on the piano?
Martin: Yeah, look, but this is just the beginning. In six months, this will all be covered.
Croft: And you have to repaint the piano?
Martin: Yeah. When we finish something, we repaint.
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