Archive of July 2004
Organizing To Do Items..
..is, quite frankly, something I suck at. For a long time, my problem was the typical one: no idea how to prioritize, never bothering to write myself reminders, and so on.
Lately, however, I seem faced with a different problem. Having learned from Danny O’Brien that the easiest way to keep track of tasks is with a simple ASCII ‘todo.txt’, I have found that works better for me than any other time management tool I’ve tried to use (don’t get me started on Outlook). Now I’ve got a few problems with using my simple To Do list:
- I suck at keeping it current, i.e. adding items as needed, and removing or flagging when complete.
- I work on several different machines, so there are synchronization problem, keeping the current copy of todo.txt available locally, or even deciding which copy is current.
- Even given a consolidated To Do list, I don’t have the habit of reviewing it regularly and attending to the tasks listed.
I was trying to keep a master copy of todo.txt up on my web host, and rsyncing from or to there from laptop or home box as needed, but this proved more difficult to do appropriately than I imagined (even with shell scripts all set up in advance to handle the syncs), and can leave me with a stale local copy for periods when I’m off the net–;more of a problem than I anticipated. And even at best it did nothing to help w/ issue #3 above.
On the Mac, I found that xPad really did the trick. I could keep each item as a separate note, so I’d get a high-level list in the drawer, with detailed notes on each page. I still use it that way for certain notes that are strictly home-related, but of course it doesn’t help with Windows-based work
For the time being, I seem to have hit on an answer that seems to work better for me. Given a new personal or professional task, I send an email to myself at my gmail account, always keeping the term ‘note’ somewhere in the subject. I have a filter set up that labels anything with myself in the From header and ‘note’ in the Subject as a ‘note’ and stars it. To check my list, I look under the ‘note’ label in gmail. I can unstar items as I complete the tasks. This offers a number of advantages:
- I’m more likely to review my list, as I’ll be checking mail in any case.
- Any task can be summarized in the subject, and have more detail behind it in the body of the message, or even attachments
- It’s handy that’s it’s so readily searchable.
The big disadvantage, of course, is I have no offline access to it. Hasn’t been a problem so far, but it could become one. It’s also a bit of a pain to have to open a compose window and mail myself whenever I want to add a note. But it’s working okay. I like the star/unstar way of checking things off. Over time, I may be able to work up a richer system than just ‘note’ for classifying these things, too. And there’s that beautiful searchable searchiness.
Still, if anyone has any brighter ideas, or would just like to share how they manage their task lists, I would love to hear it. Thanks.
12:03 | 0 CommentsKids and travel
So, my post below about my recent vacation seems to have generated comments on this here blog for the first time in several weeks (controversy! neat!). The key issue seems to be my remarks about children and travel. Since this was a side issue, I thought it better to frame a sort of reply here, rather than continue that thread.
The first thing I should say is that, not being a parent myself, I have no idea what I’m talking about on this issue, and should not be trusted. I realize that. Anything I say for the rest of this post should be taken with a boulder of salt. Secondly, anyone who took away from my ealier remarks that I was complaining about the children’s behavior (as if!) is missing the point. Let me be very clear about this: the kids were all little angels, and I enjoyed their company immensely. Someday when she’s older, I will personally thank Cleo for the story about the miniature pink gorillas which regularly escape from the zoo and plant flowers in people’s yards.
So and but anyway–;here’s another way to maybe put what I was trying to get at: Do yourself a quick Google search for traveling with small children, and what you will find is hundreds upon thousands of tips about what to pack, (what to pack, for chrissake!) and how generally to avoid making the child a nuisance to people around you. It is nearly impossible to find any information about how the idea of traveling might go over from the child’s perspective, or how to help them with it. Now, let me be quick to say, that I don’t think my friends neglected in any way to consider this question–;I just want it clear that my earlier remarks had to do with my regard for the child’s point of view, rather than my own. (It was a grumpy post, made on 17 hours’ driving and 4 hours’ sleep, I can see where I might have come off as selfish.)
I’m aware that it’s hard being a kid wherever you are; I don’t expect parents to be able to preserve their children from all discomfort. I have bad memories of traveling when I was little; I was undoubtedly projecting these onto the kids around me. But there is an important question here of looking at all sorts of adult situations that children get pulled into, where I think looking at it from the child’s point of view is crucial and all too often neglected. I do not mean to suggest that anyone I know personally has failed in this regard, or to judge anyone’s particular parenting skills, I just wanted to bring the question up in this forum, which is, after all, just a goddamn weblog.
21:47 | 0 CommentsBest. Bloggage. EVAR.
Or, at all events, pretty damn close. What’s got me all excited is learning via Steven Berlin Johnson that both of the New Yorker’s regular music critics have personal blogs. Alex Ross’s “The Rest is Noise” is already in my blogroll at right, I will be adding Sasha Frere-Jones (previously a member of Ui? who knew?) as soon as possible. At this point, I am obliged to quote from Mr. Frere-Jones verbatim and at some lengths, even doing my best to include his hyperlinks (but, as usual, I advise you to go read for yourself):
Eric Clapton says that he shot the sheriff. This is odd, because it seems like he probably has dinner with the sheriff and summers with the sheriff and, of a Saturday, motors down to the high street and shops for synthetic waffle-stitch Nike hooves with the sheriff. But maybe something went wrong with that whole insurance deal and Erick [sic] simply had to shoot the sheriff, though he would advise the young and impressionable not to follow his lead, were he given the chance to clarify his position.09:31 | 0 Comments