So, either I forgot about sending out a lot of requests to receive press releases or, more likely, an extraordinary number of people have suddenly decided I should be talking about their product on this site. Lucky me.

My mitzvah to you once and future senders of PR comes in the form of these million-dollar tips for promoting your product. Before you send email to (or, God forbid, telephone) Z-list bloggers like myself, please consider these friendly tips for not coming off as a complete tool:

Fresh Starts & Modest Changes

Earlier this month I began a short series of posts and podcasts called "Fresh Starts & Modest Changes." It was meant as an antidote to the pressure that many of us feel to upend our lives with poorly thought-out new year's resolutions. The idea was to get you thinking less about the unlikelihood of success in mounting sudden, ginormous change, and more to suggest some subtle adjustments for making life just a bit more pleasant, productive, and your own. Tweaking as you go, instead of trying to treat your mind like some kind of a microwavable corn dog.

We're getting to the end of the month now, so I wanted to wrap up with a few thoughts on the value of small changes, but I'd also love to hear about any of your own fresh starts and modest changes -- particularly hoping you'll share the ways you've had the best success keeping on track with the adjustments you've chosen to make.

This is technically more of an OmniOutliner Pro tip than a strictly kGTD trick, but it's so useful that I wanted to make sure my fellow fans are aware of it.

The beauty of kGTD lies in its single-minded focus on managing your tasks in the context of the projects with which they're associated. Add too much else (or get lazy with your level of commitment to what you've added) and the system starts to fall apart. And yet it's so useful to have easy access to the people, websites, and documents that you'd like associated with your tasks and projects. OS X to the rescue, because OmniOutliner makes it very easy to drag and drop virtually any kind of Mac data object into a given OO document -- and, consequently, to keep the non-task corners of your world never further than a click away.

Association for Psychological Science: 'To be or, or ... um ... line!'

Given my own undependable memory and the hand-hewn props I rely upon to shore it up, I was intrigued by this article/press release from last year on how actors are able to remember their lines (via BB):

According to the researchers, the secret of actors' memories is, well, acting. An actor acquires lines readily by focusing not on the words of the script, but on those words' meaning — the moment-to-moment motivations of the character saying them — as well as on the physical and emotional dimensions of their performance.

Modest Change: Honor Thy Energy

43folders.com - Learn the times you're most energetic and productive, and adjust your schedule and your work accordingly. Also: please just let the teenagers sleep, for God's sake.

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More at Odeo.com...

BBC NEWS | UK | 'I don't like Monday 24 January'

A "part-time tutor" in Wales has derived a formula which suggests that today (January 24th) is the empirically most depressing day of the year. Spake the science:

So my question, for you Mac developers in the house: I'm curious to learn more about Full Screen mode and how hard it is to make it a part of Cocoa applications. I've gotten the impression that Cocoa has "hooks" in place to hide the Menu Bar and claim all the screen space with a given document's front window, so I'm curious whether it's something that's difficult to implement. I'd love to request it in some favorite applications of mine (Hi, again, Allan!). _What do you guys say? Piece of cake or pony? _

The randy clusters of zeroes and ones which power the index cards which run the servers which make the 43 Folders blog come to your home computer set have apparently decided to unionize without telling anyone. Consequently, I suspect a wildcat strike may be behind a lot of the unreliable site behavior in the last day or so. So it goes.

I’m on it. I have bought the zeroes and ones an ice-cold keg of Miller Lite to keep them occupied while I’m upgrading to WordPress 2 and spinning the giant wheel that decides which of the 1400 or so plugins I have are now incompatible with each other. Yay, Wednesday! I rule.

Anyhow, I’ll post again here when I get things straightened out, but things are very likely to break intermittently (read: a lot) throughout today, so it won’t offend me at all if you want to go take a nice walk, do a bit of correspondence, or perhaps teach a small child how to make a pirate hat out of a newspaper. Of course, you can still drop by the wiki, the board, or the store; they’re still non-unionized, work for hard candy, and are just happy to have a warm place to sit.

See you on the other side. One hopes.

Edit 2006-01-18 08:42:58: Oh. And apparently MacSlash linked here this morning, too, I now learn. I think I need more coffee.

Edit 2006-01-18 11:40:15: OK, I think things are mostly stabilized for now. You'll still hit little problems, but we're steadily up. Special thanks to Bryan and Ben at A2 Web Hosting. They continue to rule. More soon.

Edit 2006-01-19 10:58:50: Huzzah. We're 90+% back. We now return you to your regularly scheduled life hackery (with thanks for your patience with our awkward growing pains).

Benjamin Franklin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Father of Life Hacks was born 300 years ago today in Boston, Mass. As a writer, inventor, politician, postmaster, latter-day abolitionist, smartass, horndog, and paradox, he is, in my opinion, without peer among his countrymen.

Tricorns are doffed to Ben -- and to the tireless wit and ingenuity he taught a snot-nosed democracy how to flaunt.

I've received a minor surfeit of email since yesterday asking me to talk a bit more about Path Finder and why I think it's so swell. Here's a few fast reasons for my own affection.

Path Finder 4
Originally uploaded by merlinmann.

Cocoatech: Path Finder 4

I'm very happy to share that PathFinder 4 is now out and available for download at Cocoatech's site. I've been beta-testing this badboy for a couple months now and can happily confer upon it my official okey-dokey. It's one badass Finder replacement that power-users will find pretty foxy.

I may try to do a longer review in the next week or four, but I wanted to be sure and spread the word -- the tabs, the search/filter by string, the improved interface widgets -- dang, there's a lot to like here. Turn on as many or as few of the drawers as you need, and make yourself a happy little MacBatcave. Life inside a single Finder window is closer than ever. Great work, guys.

Be patient if the Cocoatech site is a bit slow -- I predict people are going to be downloading and buying the crap out of this.

blackrimglasses.com » My So Called Digital Life Pt 1 - The Environment

My pal and occasional partner-in-crime, Ethan Kaplan, has begun a series on how he keeps his astonishingly overstimulated life together. The first installment mostly covers his environment and setup for home, work, and mobile computing.

Feed2Podcast

Technically providing the opposite of what some folks have asked for on 43 Folders (jump to 4:04 or so), Feed2Podcast turns your garden-variety RSS feed into a series of audio files, which can then be subscribed to like a podcast.

AdBrite (43 Folders Text Ads)

Just a little administrative note. I've had a lot (a lot) of requests from folks wanting to place text ads for their company on 43 Folders, so I'm giving AdBrite a spin. Hop over to their site to get more information or place your own ad.

43 Folders Board - Powered by vBulletin

This is just a quick programming note to let you know that the 43 Folders Board just got a posh new upgrade to vBulletin. In addition to being much easier for me to maintain (and much more scaleable, searchable, AJAX-inated, blah blah blah), vBulletin's also got some spiffy features for users. For example, it should now be much easier to navigate threads and keep track of where new and interesting stuff is happening. (Like it needs my endorsement, I'll just say vBulletin is far and away the most powerful and feature-rich messageboard I've used).

My question to you: what's exciting on the show floor this year? Anything I shouldn't miss? Any exhibitors want to make a case to the Bay Area (and out-of-toen) geeks reading this? Beckon us unto your booth (and do feel free to offer free schwag and discounts to 43F Geeks in the bargain :)). NB: the usual admonitions on self-linking are lifted for this one -- provided they're tasteful and do indeed point to info on your exhibiting company (yes, I'll check).

If you don't have one already, draw up a list of all the projects that are on your radar screen right now -- all the active or dormant projects that will require some kind of task work (or even just mental bandwidth) by the end of this month. If you're doing Getting Things Done, you probably already have a list like this, but it might not hurt to just grab a piece of paper and do a fresh "mini-dump" of all the obligations and outcomes that are squatting on the edges of your brainpan.

Study your list, and think about the real value of everything you've theoretically undertaken. Any of these apply...?

• something I feel obligated to do (but have no real interest in ever doing)
• something that stalled long ago and could easily be removed
• something that takes massive amounts of fuss for consistently annoying results
• something I haven't seriously thought through yet
• something potentially interesting that's very poorly defined right now
• something I can't really do anything about for a while
• something that's been on my lists so long that I just keep it out of sentimentality
• something I could, quite frankly, just not care any less about

Got it? Good. Surprised at how much you actually have on your mind? You ain't alone, sister.

Okay, so now set that list down, and grab a fresh sheet of paper.

Without thinking too deeply about it, start jotting down all the things you'd love to be starting right now. Be reasonable; this isn't about fantasies of unassisted flight or basement alchemy so much as garden-variety growth, development, and fun. What are the things that, given the proper focus and time, would bring you the most satisfaction for the time you spend on it -- or could serve as a bridge to achieving higher aspirations you've been smacking down because you're "too busy" with other stuff?

Good candidates:

This is something I've mentioned before, but since it's worked so well for me I think it deserves a place in our Modest Changes series.

I've had a habit over the years of allowing myself to get so busy that "no" becomes my default answer to practically every question -- this has been especially true when it came to helping with friends' projects or doing non-paying work for worthy causes.

Obviously, in many ways it's healthy to learn how to say no; you avoid over-committing by ensuring that you've thought through all the work on your plate and then never take on new commitments without knowing there's room to spare.

The good news is that there's actually an even healthier middle path between "Sure. Anything you say" and "No way. Never." I call it "the qualified 'yes.'"

Our first modest change is to cancel something.

Think about all the things you've invited or allowed into your life in the past couple years (check all that apply):

Like a lot of the best fresh starts, this one's a total psych-out; also, like most of the best ones, you won't believe how well it works until you actually try it for yourself.

1. Open your email program and create a new folder called "DMZ"
2. Go to your email inbox and Select All
   • You might alternatively choose all email older than n days
3. Drag those emails from your inbox into the DMZ folder
4. Go, and sin no more.

43 Folders - As an antidote to the surfeit of New Year's resolutions, we'll be looking into smaller, less dramatic adjustments (that don't require a drunken promise or a pointy paper hat). Our series starts Wednesday.

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Questions and Answers--Thich Nhat Hanh

Thich Nhat Hanh on mining unexpected pockets of mindfulness in a busy world:

Zencast [Zencast 33 - Basic Buddhism 1]

The very swell Zencast podcast series' latest entry is on Basic Buddhism. Just listening to it right now, but so far it seems like a good introduction.