On time and attention

Ben Franklin famously divided his day up into sections, some for productive work, some for dining, some for letter writing and conversation, with a few hours left each day to sleep.

He knew that his time and attention were valuable. There were only so many hours in a day, and in order to have the maximum impact, his time was divided according to his priorities.

Many of us don't lay out our daily schedule in so systematic a way. We may have a to-do list or a day's worth of activities planned, but how many of us stick to so rigorous a timeframe?

Lately, though, I could use a Ben Franklin frame of mind. In the last few weeks, my life has become increasingly complicated, and too often I find myself with not enough hours left at the end of the day. And sleep? What's that?

Considering that I keep myself occupied enough as it is, throw in a part-time freelance job, an exercise regimen, a blog, a Pakistani neighbor, and a hobby or two, and time seems to be in short supply. It's no one's fault but my own, but it's a heavy burden to bear.

And still there are things I want to do. I want to learn how to make better web sites. I want to play my guitar. I want to mess around with my Macs. I'd love to do more writing. There are tons of books, magazines, and blog posts that I'd love to sit down and digest. Oh, and eating is pretty swell, too. I'd like to do that.

Which leads me to say there is only so much time, and therefore only so much attention I can pay to any one thing. The key is in prioritizing.

If I were to lay out my own Franklin-style daily plan, it would look something like this:



There seems like a lot of open space in there, but I have to be realistic. Things come up, I have a great new relationship, and there has to be time for relaxing and sponteniety. This is just the stuff I have to do.



I use several tools to help me manage all this. My first, and most essential, is probably my to-do list, which I manage with Google's wonderful (and ubiquitous, thanks to my iPhone) Tasks app. With Tasks, I can pop something on my list from wherever (home, work, out and about) I am. When something's done, I check it off. I prioritize when I need to.




Secondly, I keep my entire life - my budget, my writing, my necessary files - on a USB thumb drive. It's 128 megabytes of portable sanity, and I keep it around wherever I go. What's amazing is that all of the files I need can hang out on something that's smaller than a CD-ROM.

From my Lexar drive, I transport files, ideas, and pictures from computer to computer, but I make sure to back it up constantly. I've lost it before. If it was gone for good, I want to have a backup.

To manage everything online, I'm a huge fan of my Google account - a combination of iGoogle, Google Reader, Blogger, and my Gmail account.

iGood is like a heads-up display of all the news, weather, stock quotes, to-do list (Tasks), and e-mail (Gmail) that I need. I use Google Reader to keep track of my favorite blogs and sites, and Blogger helps me manage both my personal blog and my Recycling Jackson blog. I used to keep all my Newton Poetry stuff straight with an iGoogle Wordpress widget, but now that I'm self-hosting the blog, that option is gone.



My iPhone carries obvious benefits thanks to apps and bookmarks stored on my homepages. With Twitterrific (for Twitter), Facebook, Google Tasks, PocketMoney (for finances), and various blog/web site bookmarks (like my online banking), I keep everything I need on a daily basis confined to the first two screens on my iPhone. Everything after that is stuff I only check once in a while, like eBay and Flickr.

What works for me is to fill little pockets of time, like eating breakfast or waiting in line somewhere, with stuff I like to read and think about, and then have the tools I like handy so I can make sense of it all. When I think about it, I ingest a lot of data over the course of a day. They trick is to have a way to digest it all.

I gave up regular TV watching a long time ago. Now, there are just a few things I watch: "The Office," football, and now "Mad Men." Instead, I read when I eat - even during lunch at work. I write before work. I exercise after dinner. And I fill in random time slots with stuff on my to-do list, like having my laundry going while I cook dinner or do work.

There are big things in my life that get the lion's share of my attention, and deservedly so. Everything else gets taken care of when I have a free second. Lately, I have less "free seconds" to go around, but I make do.

The important thing is to, like Ben Franklin, have a plan. Even if you don't stick to it all the time, something is better than nothing.

The ol' Mac vs. PC debate - in a nutshell

From John Gruber @ Daring Fireball:

Microsoft looked at the PC market and asked, “How can we make the most money?” Their answer was to sell software to the business market, because that’s where the money is. Pure pragmatism: corporations are conservative, change slowly, and hold compatibility (and low prices) in high regard.

Apple looked at the PC market and asked, “How can we make something better than everything out there?” Their answer was the Macintosh. Pure idealism.

He goes on to say that Apple couldn't have had compatibility AND "insane greatness" at the same time. And it kind of goes along with the story that the Apple folks were a bunch of crazy hippies working on changing the world.

> via Daring Fireball

On good design, and good hard drives.

Maybe I'm a dork, but the instruction manual for Seagate's excellent 500 GB "FreeAgent" external hard drive is a hoot.

I originally bought one over the summer - $100 for 500 GB is a heckuva deal - because my former external hard drive was a piece of crap. It had Firewire, but that's about all it had going for it. The Seagate's hefty 500 gigs would be more than enough space to back up all of my Macs, with room to spare, and the plug-and-play USB is a cinch to use.

So when our network drive at work (the one that held every file ever created by our marketing department) took a dump, our IT department suggested we get an external drive to back up our M:Drive.

Previously, I had been backing up our files on to CD-ROMs, but that's a slow process, and you can't fit much into the 700 MB on the disc. When our network drive crashed, we had to recover files from individual CDs, and my co-workers couldn't all use the same CD at the same time. It was a hassle.

Enter the Seagate. I recommended it after having such a good time with mine: its throbbing orange light mimicking my own sleeping iBook's, its sleek form factor, the way I keep it plugged into my Airport wireless network at all times, accessible from any room in the apartment - plus you can't beat the cost.

Smart people backup their computers, as my experience at work showed. I've been lucky at home: I haven't had to recover any files from my backup plan. No lightning, no acts of god, no thefts - but that doesn't mean I don't backup on a regular basis. Carbon Copy Cloner makes a full, bootable copy of my hard drive, and Apple's own Backup application makes incremental backups of my music, documents, and personal settings. If - Don forbid - something were to happen, I could make a full restore of my entire system.

It's not Time Machine, but it'll do.

When I got the Seagate, I couldn't help but giggle over the design choices the manufacturers made. A little sticker that says "hello" keeps the little cord baggies closed, and when you first open the box a message tells you "If only this box held as much content as your FreeAgent desktop drive." It's the little things.

But the manual is my favorite. It tells you, confidently, that "This won't take long," then keeps track of how many seconds it takes to set the components up. Taking everything out of the box and packages? Thirty-nine seconds. Plug the thing in? A minute. Plug the USB cable into your computer? A minute eleven. The entire thing, according to Seagate, shoudl take 1:36, and its pretty accurate. "Please enjoy" the manual concludes.

How fun!

Good design is not only a joy to behold, but communicates effectively - and, if we're lucky, with humor. The manual does both.

Now I get a spanking-new FreeAgent to play with at work. I'm going to name it "M:Drive 2.0" because I'm a dork like that, and one teammate suggested we burn incense and say prayers to it, just for security's sake. I think it's a great idea.

All hail FreeAgent.

God isn't dead; he's us

Imagine making love to yourself.


No, not masturbation. I mean a clone of yourself. Imagine talking to yourself, touching yourself, going to concerts with yourself.

Imagine looking yourself in the eye.

It's creepy to think about, isn't it? Would he/she have the same personality as you, having grown up under different circumstances? What would be the same, besides looks?

This is all stuff I've been thinking about for a short story. Ray Bradbury-like, but with more sex.

But what got me on all this was that "Mediated" book I just finished by Thomas de Zengotita. In it, Zengotita talks about the "mediated" self, and how flattered we are in today's hyper-media culture. His conclusion is that we are so self-loving that someday, when cloning is possible, we won't hesitate at creating a copy of ourselves to perpetuate us forever. Imagine raising an exact copy of yourself from childhood. Imagine the soccer games, Zengotita says - you think parents are competitive now.

Today, an article on Salon.com talked about nanotechnology, and how it will actually be living, chemically-controlled pseudo-organisms - not the little robots we think about, zipping through our bloodstream zapping cancer cells.

We'll have created living beings created from nothing but chemicals and matter - the same stuff we're made of (Carl Sagan called it, poetically, "starstuff").

We'll be godlike.

Alan Goldstein, the article's author, says that:

What this all means is that within a generation, biology will face its ultimate identity crisis. Researchers in the field of nanobiotechnology are racing to achieve the complete molecular integration of living and nonliving materials. We will hack into the CPU of life in order to insert new hardware and software. The purpose is to extend the capabilities of biology far beyond the limits imposed by evolution, to integrate the incredible biochemistry of life with the equally spectacular chemistry of nonliving systems like semiconductors and fiber optics. The idea is to hard-wire biology directly into any and every part of the nonliving world where it would be to our benefit. Optoelectronic splices for the vision impaired, micromechanical valves to restore heart function. But the moment we close that nano-switch and allow electron current to flow between living and nonliving matter, we open the nano-door to new forms of living chemistry -- shattering the 'carbon barrier.

Some, like Ray Kurzweil (whose book "The Age of Spiritual Machines" is next on my to-read list), say that all this will happen faster than we think.

And that got me thinking (I wrote about this earlier) about how, in the span of about 70-80 years, we went from horseless carriages to Apollo 11. Imagine what we can do in the next 80 or so years.

Well, we don't have to imagine. Others have done it for us.

Imagine, for instance, if nano-bots began replicating as bacteria do, consuming everything in their path and taking over the world. Not so out-of-this-world, considering some have already thought of it.

Since the Enlightenment we've given the stuff God has given us and totally remade our world in our own image without thinking about how far we should go.

So cloning, and nanotechnology that is actually living organisms made out of nonliving material, are just logical steps in the path we're already traveling. If we're told from childhood "you can be whatever you want to be" - well, why not just start over if we don't like what we've done so far? Why not create a self that is our idealized version of our own self? Why not create, from scratch, beings that will fix everything that's wrong with us from the inside?

I'm skeptical of any "forecasts" of the future. We don't know what could happen in May, let alone 2020. But the givens are there, right in front of us.

I think about "The Matrix" and "Jurrassic Park" when I start reading this stuff - how we've already dreamed up nightmare scenerios where machines (or artificially-created life) take over their masters, Frankenstein-like.

But the things that take over won't be lumbering, hyper-muscular Terminators. No, they might be beings we can't even see with the naked eye.



Who's ready for lunch?