I have a friend who told me he was thinking about giving his project managers a weekly pile of chips that could be redeemed for person-hours in meetings. So, to schedule firewalled, group face-time, the PM would need to cough up the equivalent number of tokens from her pile. Thus, one, long, all-hands meeting might require the whole week's stack. While, fewer, shorter meetings with smaller groups made the pile go further.

It was just an idea, and I'm pretty sure he never implemented it, but I think it's a fascinating concept. Why? Because I love the idea of re-introducing scarcity into systems that lack boundaries.

My pal, Penney, once told me that when she was a kid, and her family went on vacation, they would "drop the spoon" every afternoon. I knew this was a cousin of the disco nap, but I never knew it was a purported invention of Salvador Dalí, (according to QuestionSwap):

Lie down or sit in comfy seat holding a spoon in your fingertips. you should be holding it in a way that - when you loose consciousness (sleep) you drop it... the Clatter (put a big plate on the floor under your hand) will wake you.... and you get woken JUST as you enter the best "dreamy" bit of your sleep.

Related (though pretty insane, if you're asking me) is the notorious "Thomas Edison Nap," which, repeated through the day, is intended to stand in lieu of an actual solid night's sleep (and which seems to have partly inspired some of the polyphasic sleep nutjobs proponents). Edison is said to have naturally needed less sleep in a day, and seldom slept very much in a given stretch, claiming that excessive sleep was a sign of laziness -- and yet:

Daring Fireball: The Amazon MP3 Store and Amazon MP3 Downloader

Given the Amazon MP3 Store’s audio quality, prices, and user experience, I can’t see why anyone would buy DRM-restricted music from iTunes that’s available from Amazon. And given that Amazon is quite a bit cheaper than iTunes Plus, you might as well check Amazon first. I plan to.

I'm with Gruber -- this is a welcome and fan-friendly addition to the marketplace. And, frankly, I'm glad there's finally somebody out there who can really give Apple some competition in this area.

Updates from Google Docs and Google Calendar

Whoa, check this out:

The Google Calendar team, along with the mobile team, released an upgrade to the Calendar interface on the iPhone. It is now tailored for the iPhone, and you can now see your different calendars in distinctive colors. You can see the new Calendar interface by going to http://calendar.google.com on your iPhone browser.

As an iPhone user and recent convert to gCal: Daddy like.

I’m Ryan, and you can usually find me in the midst of my workday by following the trail of naked yaks. I fear that I’m drawn to arcane tasks not in spite of the fact that they are tangential to my ultimate goals, but precisely because they give me an excuse to avoid them. I don’t need to grapple with the big anxiety-evoking issues of how to make a new one of my companies make more money, for example, if I can instead focus on creating an elaborate triply-redundant, auto-rotating archival filing system for our Apache server logs (which we never look at.)

However, I recently encountered a weirdly tantalizing idea in Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek, which would ultimately disrupt my addiction to the extraneous. The book advocates farming out the more mundane tasks of your existence to outside firms and consultants, which Ferriss calls “outsourcing your life.” Probably because it would give me an excuse not to do something else more pressing, I decided to give this a go a few months ago. While I did learn quite a lot about outsourcing in the process, my experiments led me to a far grander epiphany about the way I approach life and work generally and helped me form a new set of habits that have utterly rocked my workaday world. I’m about to introduce you to the theory and practice of what I believe to be the forgotten Prime Minister of All Productivity Hacks: asking for help.

drawing by lonelysandwich

Tact Filters

In 1996, Jeff Bigler observed that there appeared to be a "tact filter" that was operated in different directions by "nerds" versus "normal people:"

MacBreak Weekly 58: Repeal the Nerd Tax

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Hosts: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, Alex Lindsay, and Chris Breen

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Chris reviews the new iPods, screen issues with the Touch, and the trouble with ringtones...

Here's a direct MP3 download of MBW 58.

Oh, brother, I was totally high on cold medicine when we did this episode. But, not so high that I couldn't recommend Flying Meat's amazing new Acorn, a stripped-down, and very inexpensive graphics app. It's one my favorite Mac programs of the year.

The Problem

GTD is all about rapid, intuitive selection of what you need to be working on now. Whip out your context list appropriate for the time-place-opportunity-space you are in now. Scan through it, then do.

For the longest time I was having a problem with this. I'd scan through my context lists and I'd see things like:

Very fun video by Matt McInerney -- what it would be like if Quicksilver came to life outside your Mac. I sure like it better than living in a YouTube thread.

Quicksilver in Real Life from Matt McInerney on Vimeo.

[via: tumbl.us]

• How to catch a mouse without a mousetrap - 43f’s designer, Chris Glass, shares his humane mouse mojo. “Set the fella loose at least a mile away from your abode. Postnote: It worked within the hour.”
• notes on ‘dancing monkey rss reader’ - “I would like an RSS reader with a button that says 'Gimme 5' and it loads only five posts people with similar subscriptions are reading within the last 24 hours.” I want something kinda related for email — show me exactly 5 messages that need a response (then, let me get back to work)
• Daring Fireball on switcher-come-latelies - “There’s a whole class of recent switchers who define ‘Apple fanboy’ as ‘anyone who’s been an enthusiastic Mac user since before I switched to the Mac.’”
• Name that Color - Chirag Mehta : chir.ag - “Being a typical guy, I have no clue what the colors Lavender and Mauve look like. You can show me Indigo and I won’t know if it’s more like Violet or Purple. So I made this little app where you can create a color on the screen (or copy-paste CSS hex# color) and find out the name of the closest matching color.”
• greys : Java Glossary - Me? I love me some greys, and I like seeing them all at once with their hex codes. Handy.
• A List Apart: Articles: The Perfect 404 - Seems like a smarter person than me could make a pretty nice “similar to what you searched for” using Drupal and Views Fast Search. Sounds like a job for the Lazy Web. Any takers?
• someecards.com - “When you care enough to hit ‘send.’” Hilarious ecards, nearly all in terrible taste, and outfitted with awful Reagan-era clip art. Pure gold.

I've become an ardent Google Documents fan over the past few months -- especially as its support for Safari has improved (didn't say perfect; just improved). I use it for collaborating with clients and 43f guest authors, as well as for managing small projects and keeping various small teams organized. Personally, I find it simpler than a wiki and a lot more powerful than using a static .doc.

My favorite use right now is to use a single shared document as a common space that 4 or 5 people have access to and that they can use to give each other to-dos, ask questions, etc. I know stuff like Basecamp does this better and certainly with more sophisticated features, but I'm really attracted to the simplicity of the one-document approach -- especially for informal, remote teams.

I think my gDocs cincher was the first time that it occurred to me to see if I could even look at my documents on my iPhone; I was gob-smacked to see that it actually worked. Obviously it's not optimal for doing lots of editing, but you can see and perfunctorily edit your documents without a laptop, and that's just pretty mind-blowing to me.

Ok, it's Friday, and the team and me are pooped from several weeks of site-making. No profound tips today. I'll just leave you to your weekend with a wonderfully timely video.

This afternoon we're (softly, gently) rolling out a new version of 43Folders.com. Here's some of the new stuff that's happening.

Without going into extreme amounts of nerd detail, 43 Folders now runs on a content management system called Drupal that lets us do a bunch of neat stuff I've been wanting to do for a while now...

One of the coolest changes with the new 43f is the introduction of free site membership. Signing in with your 43f account gives you the ability to comment on articles, post to the forum, and more (actually much more soon, but let's not get ahead of ourselves).

Here's more detail on signing up, or -- if you were already a member of our previous forum (board.43folders.com) -- here's info on how to sign in using that existing account.

Legal Stuff & Disclaimers

Tedious junk that it’s still important to mention and get out of the way.

Very cool announcement to share -- Ken Case, Ethan Schoonover, and I will be doing an after-hours demo of OmniFocus on September 27th at Tekserve in Manhattan:

Not only will you get a sneak peek at the forthcoming OmniFocus software, but Merlin Mann from 43folders.com, a popular site about personal productivity, will be here to lead a discussion on personal organization and life management.

Pete the Tekserve Guy says seats are filling up fast, so be sure to register for free now if you're planning to attend.

This should be really fun -- and we'll all be hanging out after the presentation to talk, hang, and meet you. I'm pumped. It's my first trip to Manhattan since 1989 (and, no, I won't have a tragic mustache and a Meat Puppets shirt this time. Sorry.).

I do a lot these days to get pickier about where my time and attention go, and keeping unnecessary phone calls at bay is near the top of the hit list. For years now, I've pled for "Spam Assassin" or something like regular expressions for my phone. GrandCentral may not be that smart yet, but it's years ahead of the options I've seen from landline carriers.

The features of Google's recent acquisition are many and powerful, but a few of my own favorite bits bubble up in this screengrab I took this morning (from a robot UPS phone call, alerting me to a signature-required package that's out on the truck).

I can't imagine going back to typical phone options after having access to:

• alwaysBETA » The Tale of the Mechanical Virus - Fascinating -- Never heard of this happening before. At least now you can accurately announce there's a Mac-only virus spreading at the Google.
• Gary Voth Photography: The Forgotten Lens - "The 50mm lens is called a 'normal' or 'standard' lens because the way it renders perspective closely matches that of the human eye." Just bought one of these, and I totally love it. Lots to learn, but I'm working on it.
• Most Useful Mac Software | Tech Magazine - Good collection of Mac apps that non-power-users may not be familiar with. Recommended reading for taking your game to the next level.
• deadmoviestar: Lucky Luciano - My pal, Steve, recalls a memorable encounter in Miami with the late Mr. Pavarotti.
• Footnote - The place for original documents online - Share your own knowledge and research about historical documents. Stuff like Footnote makes the internet what it should be -- an affordance for collaborating on stuff you would never in a million years be able to do by yourself. Crowdsourcing at its finest.
• Jonathan Coulton: Fake Female Me is Busted - JoCo reports on a makebelieve internet sensation who had actually been signed by a label all along. Blechy. "The saddest thing of all is that she could have done this all by herself without the label and avoided all this negative reaction."
• Back in the saddle - I've missed Mr. Kottke, and it's swell to have him back up on The Wire. Although, I confess, I am also a huge fan of his and Meg's little interruption.
• Rands In Repose: The Laptop Herring - You and everyone you know needs to read this article twice. Now. "If you have no role in a meeting and stop going, or if you remove someone from a meeting, you’re going to create a conflict with whoever believes that you (or the other someone) should be in that meeting. This is great. This is the discussion you want to have: 'Frank, I’ve been to this meeting 12 times and I’ve no clue what I’m doing here. Please advise.'" - [via Daring Fireball]

Quicksilver: Universal Access and Action

A1c0r demos and discusses Quicksilver at the Google, including a good overview of why he chose to build the app in the way he did.

Alas, the jig is up for poor Nicholas. Now you all know that he does not, in fact, have flippers, and that he is actually astonishingly good-looking.