‘Tis the season for the Google Santa Tracker. I’ll be enjoying this site with the kids this year. They’re finally old enough to appreciate it.
Category: Blog
Business card mockup
I started working on a simple business card for myself the other day. It’s more of a calling card since I don’t have a business to go with it. And it’s not really a calling card either, since there’s no phone number on it. It just has an email address, URL, and Twitter handle1.
It’s a design inspired by this minimalist business card that I posted to my blog a few years ago.
I don’t need a business card at all. I’ve rarely had a reason to give one out, and I’m a terrible correspondent. But it was fun to design.
- It’s not my hand in the picture. The image comes from Vistaprint. ↩
Polyphasic sleep mask
Intelclinic launched a Kickstarter project to fund the creation of a polyphasic sleep mask.
NeuroOn is the world’s first brainwave – monitoring SLEEP MASK that allows you to switch from monophasic to polyphasic sleep. That means you can sleep less and more efficiently.
Adopting a polyphasic sleep schedule isn’t practical for me now, but it would be an awesome experiment to try and a cool way—if it works—to add more hours to the day.
Why I bike to work
One of the reasons I bike to work is so I don’t have to use as much gas as the rest of the country.
Sitting in traffic is an expensive activity.
The Pixar Theory Timeline
Jon Negroni’s Pixar Theory has some holes, to be sure, but this timeline, gives a good summary of what the unified Pixar universe is all about.
Asana · Apps & Integrations
Asana is an incredibly useful task manager. It’s my main to-list app on both my phone and computer. They have recently added a number of integrations to make the app even more useful.
I have not done much with this beyond the Google Calendar integration, but I’ll be keeping an eye on this page to see what developers end up doing with this API. I hope IFTTT adds an Asana channel. Connecting my to-do list to the rest of the web could introduce some interesting possibilities.
School project
One of the fun things about having a school aged kid is getting to help him with special projects. This is my favorite so far. I’m not saying I’ve never been prouder of anything else I’ve made. I’m not saying that at all. But this comes close.
The Rise of Twitter Bots
The New Yorker has an interesting look at the robotic side of Twitter and the challenges the service will face as it becomes a bigger business.
As a service, Twitter’s greatest strength is that its users have total control over whom they follow and what they see. As a business, Twitter’s greatest opportunity is in violating that control with advertisements.
Delete guilt tasks
A few items on my personal to-do list had lingered, untouched, for more than a month.
I just deleted them.
Those tasks did nothing but make me feel bad about what I had yet to start doing. They were guilt tasks. Maybe, now that they’re gone, I’ll be able to work on them again.
You don’t need guilt from your to-do list. You need encouragement. That encouragement often comes from the checked off items. That’s why I typically write things I’ve already finished on my list, just so I can check them off. I recently discovered doing that isn’t odd.
So what are some of the signs of a guilt task? A guilt task is any task that:
- has stayed on your to-do list for more than a week with no action
- you’ve kept updating the due date without any progress toward completion
- obviously doesn’t need to be completed (if it did it would be done)
- is not a priority (although it’s taking up mental priority)
- you have a mental block towards that task that’s kept you from starting
Rewarding tasks get done, because you see the payoff, feel the positive feedback that accompanies checking the item off the list. Guilt tasks offer very little in terms of reward, even when completed. Finishing a guilt task is seldom a relief. If anything, checking it off the list will just make you feel guilty about how long it took you to get started. They only succeed in making you feel bad about the things you’re not doing.
But guess what…there’s tons of stuff you’re not doing now, you won’t do soon, and you may never do. Feeling bad about all the things you’re not doing doesn’t help you get any closer to finishing the tasks that actually matter to you. Feeling bad about guilt tasks doesn’t help you do the real tasks.
So pull up your to-do list, and delete (or, if you’re not ready for that, archive) everything from your list that is bringing you down or that you will not start in the next week.