Productivity and Self-improvement by Gutata

Argh, I haven’t been posting here as much lately nor working on Squinto, mainly because I had to get some things done at work before taking vacation. I need to set a goal to work within time constraints, do as much as possible in that time, and not bring it home. Parkinson’s law - “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” - can only be ended by discipline.

Don’t worry though. I’m still working on Squinto and plan to write more frequently.

I just released a new Squinto API for remote access to your lists. Take a look at the announcement in Squinto Support. I’ll post some official documentation, but for now, enjoy!

There have been a few updates to my todolist application Squinto and I’ve posted about them in Squinto Support so that they don’t clutter up the entries here. Squinto is becoming pretty stable and highly recommend that you try it if you’re looking for a way to better organize your tasks, travel plans, strategies for taking over the world, life, etc. I haven’t been posting much on productivity or self-improvement because I’ve been busy fixing and adding features to Squinto, but don’t worry, I’ll put out some articles soon.

Argh, sorry again everyone! I deployed some fixes and new features that will make Squinto great, but ended up breaking the site. Things are fixed now. Enjoy and have fun creating todolists.

Sorry guys, I broke Squinto when I updated Django from version 0.96 to 0.97. It’s fixed now and you can continue to make todolists and make your life more efficient.

The reason I updated Django was to get the newforms library and use it for Prrice.com, which itself has been updated to list the best sales for this shopping season. So before you go out shopping, check Prrice.com to see if there’s a deal or a sale happening.

Jerry Seinfeld has an interesting strategy for boosting productivity. When coming up with jokes, he made sure to write one every day. He would cross out that day on a calendar with a bid red “X.” Soon, he had a “chain” of days that were crossed out. He pressured himself to maintain the chain.

“Seinfeld understands that daily action yields greater benefits than sitting down and trying to knock out 1000 jokes in one day.”

Have trouble sleeping on a plane? Here are some tips to help you sleep.

Tags seemed to gain popularity from del.icio.us. According to blink’s founder, tags were the reason for del.icio.us’ success where blink and possibly others failed. There is no doubt that when it comes to organizing information, tags are here to stay.

The problem I have with tags is the terminology. Why do we have “tags” when we have “categories?” Google calls them “labels.” For a long time, Outlook has called them and still calls them “categories.” I think most people would understand “category” and fewer would understand tags and labels. So unless you’re short on space and/or need shorter terminology, let’s stick with categories and try not to confuse our users.

Now this is a company that carries out a 37Signals philosophy with great success. Their tagline:

15 employees. 150,000 paying customers. 72,000,000 photos.
We’ll always be smaller than the photo-sharing divisions of giant companies.
Which is a very good thing.

Pretty amazing how well they’ve done with their streamlined photo site that does just a few things well.

I’ve missed some cool announcements while on hiatus:

1. 37Signals released their book Getting Real for free in HTML!
2. Adrian and Jacob’s Django book has a title and can be pre-ordered.
3. Geocoding has never been simpler.

I must sound like the biggest fan of 37Signals’ philosophy, which stresses simplicity. I think you should do what works. There is no right way to do something and there are always trade-offs. Finding the right balance between trade-offs is a challenge when making any decision, especially when running a business.

What 37Signals has to say seems to make sense and works for me. Microsoft’s new leader Ray Ozzie seems to be a fan too, as evidenced by his views on complexity. The funny thing is that 37Signals wrote a foretelling blurb about this. I’m sure they’ll post a follow-up linking to Ozzie’s views and predicting the impending changes at Microsoft.

When developing your applications, you need to feel the pain of your customers. While your application may benefit customers, their problems are ultimately because of your app. If you don’t feel their pain, then your application’s quality will suffer.

This idea can be applied to other areas. In design, designers need to feel not only the pain of their designs from their customers but the pain in implementing them. It is far easier to draw pictures than to implement user interfaces with code. For web application architecture, architects too need to feel the pain of their designs. While they think they’ve come up with a brilliant plan for modularity and system cohesion, it still may be difficult to implement.

Based on the average number of hours spent watching television, shopping, and surfing the web, it is probably safe to say that consumers outnumber producers. It is much easier to be a consumer. There’s nothing easier than being idle and watching the world go by. Try your best to be a producer and make something. It is harder in the beginning but much more rewarding in the end.

Here is a Business Week article that summarizes 37 Signals’ philosophy when it comes to product development. In short, focus on simplicity, build fast, get customer feedback, and iterate. Paul Graham advocates this process not just for software development, but for writing too.