Start checking your e-mail less. Once an hour or less is where you should start.
The first time I read about minimizing e-mail checking, it hit me like a ton of bricks. Why didn’t I think of this before? And, this makes so much sense. But reading about a thing sometimes doesn’t have as much impact as hearing about it, which is why I was happy to run across Merlin Mann’s tech talk at Google on something he’s calling Inbox Zero. Merlin (of 43 folders fame) is advocating getting your inbox to zero to the point where he’s writing a book on the subject! It’s based on GTD (Getting Things Done). Get the book if you haven’t.
My experience with processing e-mail in this manner and checking it less frequently has probably mirrored other GTDers. It made an immediate impact on my productivity (and sanity), and while I still struggle to stay on top of my e-mail, I think that’s more so because I get too much and need to cut that down. Keep in mind that getting too much e-mail may just be a symptom of a bigger problem you have, like you’re overbooked.
My other experience with it has been trying to convince my employers that not checking e-mail is a good thing. So many companies have come to rely on e-mail to the point where I think it makes most of them less productive, not more. It will probably be many more years before it becomes more commonly acceptable to be an e-mail minimalist, and/or to wear getting 100s of e-mails a day as a badge of honor. Until then, hopefully more Merlins come along to help us mend our ways.
Anyway, watch the talk. It’s only 30 minutes long, it goes by quickly, and you can stick around for the next 30 minutes to hear the Q&A with Googlers.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone really, but in a measure, we’ve created technology that over taxes the abilities of our primitive brains. This article at the NYTimes uses a particularly ‘plugged-in’ family to demonstrate how many of us now live as well as how it affects us.
I can’t help but fixate on the multitasking issue (previous blog entry):
While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.
And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.
Bottom line: try focusing on a single thing, multitask less and unplug from time to time.
Sometimes, technology begets technology. Hand a hacker/creative/smart person some cool technology and watch them take it apart and/or create something new out of it. In this case, researcher, CMU Ph.D. student, Johnny C. Lee, has taken a Wii remote (Wiimote) and used it to create a desktop virtual reality head tracking system. Words don’t describe this as well as the video, so watch the video already. Obviously, this is the future of video games and possibly a precursor to immersing entertainment.
There sure are a lot of talented people out there with a lot of time on their hands. Owen Grace is one such gentleman, who decided to turn his Guitar Hero controller into something that could really play music, and taking it to its ultimate conclusion by forming a band (The Guitar Zeros) that plays gigs.
Owen didn’t electronically/electrically modify the guitar itself (although he put a cool Eddie Van Halen design on it), but mapped out the signals from the various buttons and then wrote a computer program that would interpret the keys and send them through a synthesizer to produce the sounds.
Take a look at this video where Owen explains how he did it and demonstrates playing. Obviously, he’s expanded the capability of this seemingly simple device a lot. In this picture, he looks like he’s playing some hammer-on/hammer-off or other advanced guitar technique.
Oh yes, if you want to do this yourself, Owen has put up complete instructions on the Web and made the software (called FretBuzz) open source.
I was prompted finally pushed to write about this after running across a couple of articles on specific hardware that you could use as your main data storage. The question of how best to store data at home has become a growing one in the past few years as more people have broadband Net connections and have been filling their hard drives up with downloads (mainly videos and music). Having 500GB of capacity in a household is not a surprising thing any more. I’m already starting to think that the 1.5TB array that I chose in Dec for my new rig isn’t going to be enough.
Onto our products… Last year, one of my friends (who knew I was spec’ing out a new box) asked me if I knew any good external RAID enclosures, but I was lazy and didn’t go looking. Recently, Jeremy [LiveDigitally] blogged about his next choice of storage – a ReadyNas NV+ from Infrant. This is a device that you stick on your network (it’s not directly connected to a single computer), and while they have multiple models, this one holds 4 SATA drives and uses RAID to ensure data redundancy. Infrant even has something unique they call X-RAID that claims to let you dynamically add disks as you need them.
Next up is the Drobo [via Gizmodo] which is connected to a single machine via USB 2.0. Watch the demo video – it’s pretty impressive. It automatically handles data redundancy (they don’t say how), and you can hot swap in any sized disks into any of the 4 slots. Drobo also monitors your drives for issues and moves data around automatically. At $700, it’s a little more pricey than just a RAID enclosure, but could be well worth it for the convenience factor. I’ll be really interested when they produce a networked version of this box.
March 14, 2007 at 10:22 PM · Filed under Computers, Tech
This is a fantastic 6 minute video that just hits you with stat after stat about how quickly the technological world is advancing and gives you a clue as to how it may affect you. I wonder if people living in the early 20th century looked at the introduction of cars, airplanes and telephones and marvelled at how quickly technology was progressing and then wondered whether it was moving too quickly.
Some of my favoriate stats: a week’s worth of the NY Times is estimated to contain more information than an 18th century person was likely to come across in their lifetime. It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 1018) of information of unique information will be generated this year (an exabyte is 1000 million times a Gigabyte (GB)). That 1.5 exabytes is estimated to be more than in the past 5000 years.
