Buckle down. Knuckle up! Getting back on schedule.

Okay, no more joking around. I’m nearly six months into working on a product and its time to tighten the belt. Why? Because I’ve become fat. Somewhere in the transition from service to product design I forgot all the best things I learned about efficiency and productivity. I went off track because working on a new product is fast paced crazy town and my normal process was out the window.

Thankfully Jamin Jantz (our Project Manager) and the leads on our Product Team have been working on refining our process, and its inspired me to think about my daily personal process again. So here goes. This is what I’m going to try:

Personal Daily Process

The day before Every good day starts with knowing what I need to do the day before. We’ve started trying out Flow App from the folks at Meta Lab for our product design team, and it will help me know what I need to accomplish for the current day and the day ahead.

Old Man Schedule With a 10 week old baby and posting to Tumblr at 3am after a bottle feeding, the OMS is right out, but don’t worry, it’ll be back soon, and a few times a week I manage to be up at 6am and off to the gym to start the day.

8:30am start with a plan I will come into the office and make my double coffee on our super fancy CoWork espresso machine, and promptly sit down and work for one hour on an interface or any other product design task that requires productivity. NO Email. NO Twitter. NO RSS. NO design surfing.

9:30am cut off the head of the dragon You have to answer email sometime, and there may be important things you need to check on from the day before or night before if you work at Zaarly. Email is endless though, and so I’ll only do this for 30 minutes.

10:00am Mandatory fraternization with the natives Tweet, micro blog, chat, say bad words, watch Charlie the Unicorn again, and get a drink of water. Oh, and get my butt outside for a quick walk.

10:00 - 12:00am Pomodoro style spurts of productive digital work and Creative Direction. The great thing about working on the East Coast when so much of your team is in San Fransisco on the West Coast is that you have over three hours till they start asking for your attention.

12:00pm Take a real break I don’t love lunch like I love other meals, but I’m realizing again that I need to take a real lunch. Maybe I need to just go have a real sit down and a lunch coversation in our CoWork Greenville kitchen?

1:00pm - 5:00pm Creative Direct, Meetings, and Work I’m not going to be able to schedule my whole day. I know that now, but I might be able to schedule a portion of it, and then make the latter half of the day a reasonably scheduled stock of work. I need to set an email timer for 2 times for 30 minutes during this period. Anymore is insane it will eat me alive. I get 150+ emails a day, and that doesn’t count the type site email newsletters!

9:30pm Nighty Night I will keep going to bed at a reasonable hour or none of this will work. Also, I promise not to blog about any of this kind of thing at 3:00am anymore, I should have just gone to bed after Lucy drank her bottle, but I had too many ideas on the brain.

With that. Goodnight!

Events, To-do’s, and Notes with Three Distinct Apps

Using Google Calendar, Teux Deux, and SimpleNote to take over the world.

For the last couple of years I’ve tried to figure out how to use technology to help me stay organized and out of trouble. I’m not a naturally organized person. I am not a manager personality, but I move at a speed that requires some management. I’ve delegated the job of project management for Squared Eye to Jamin, but I still have some personal responsibility over my own tasks, events, meetings, notes, and ideas.

I was hoping the the augmented robot brain would be ready by now, but sadly is still too clunky to have installed without jailbreaking my head, and potentially bricking it, so I’ve settled on three applications that are helping me maintain some sanity.

Keeping it separate

First, I have tried to find some magical all in one solution. Some app that is only just enough for what I need and no more. I prefer applications that do half of what I need, to those that do far more than what I need. I want events that are easy to create, move, repeat, share, and delete. I want tasks that relate to days and dates, but aren’t static, and move along with me when I’m human and don’t get everything done. I want note taking that gets out of the way so I can quickly write stuff down. I want syncing so I can access these things on any computer, any mobile device, or from any robot brain.

I have not found this amazing kung fu awesome sauce in one application, and until I can stop the time-space continuum and just build **exactly** what I want, I am quite happy with using three separate but strong applications to handle distinct parts of this productivity trio.

Google Calendar for Events

Events help me know when I have meetings, lunches, and deadlines that pertain to specific times on or spanning specific days. Tasks do not go on the calendar. It would be like putting raw fish in your breakfast cereal. Don’t do it.

I don’t love Google Calendar. But it works amazingly well in two simple ways. I can make events, and Jamin can make events for me. These events of course, sync, they  are shareable, moveable, delete-able, etc. Using Google’s sync setup I add to my calendar through Apple’s calendar app on the iPhone.

In general I have a distaste for Google apps. The design has improved but is still lacking , it uses small text at times, and is never truly enjoyable to use. But it gets the job done. It will suffice.

Teux Deux for Tasks

I put tasks like “Send Email about CoWork day-rate promotions” or “write .Net Focus On article” into the correct day in Teux Deux. I can place the task in today’s column, or in a column down the week. My tasks need to be short titled since there’s a character limit based on the width of the fluid columns, a constraint I appreciate.

Why Teux Deux makes me pump my task fist

• Automatic task movement: if I don’t complete my tasks Teux Deux simply moves the task to the next day.
• Five day week: The app focuses on my work week, and softly suggests that not looking at my tasks over the weekend might be a good thing. Well done Teux Deux.
• Multiple accounts: I actually don’t use this yet, but I think I could get behind this. For one it allows me to have a personal task list and a work task list, but it also allows Jamin to have a task list for himself and I can give him my credentials to login to my task list and add tasks for me. #highfive.
• iPhone App: Having a syncing iPhone app was an absolute must for me. It helps me get tasks down during meetings quickly.
• Someday: I have a five column structure to add tasks that need to get off of the weekday view like “write that article about Grok” or “get armband tattoos”

Visually, Teux Deux isn’t a traditional Apple style and at first I wasn’t sure I could get behind the SwissMiss sparse simplicity. After using the app for a couple weeks now I can say that although I might add a few pixels padding to things on the web and iPhone app, I actually really appreciate the pairing down that is required to get the interface to be this refined.

I’d heard people rave about this very witty little app from the duo of Swissmiss and FictiveKin, but until I began using it myself I didn’t realize how perfect it is for my particular flow, but I can imagine there are a host of people who its never going to work for. There’s no tagging, no syncing with basecamp, no project based management. This little app doesn’t try to be anything but it’s simple self.

SimpleNote for Notes

I see notes as lists of ideas, or threads of thinking, thoughts on a project, etc. I need notes to just get this stuff out of my head. If its not actionable then I don’t put it in Teux Deux.

Why I want to be more like SimpleNote

• Simple: This app is so freakin’ simple. Just write something down and the first line becomes the title.
• Tagging: To help with sorting of large amounts of notes.
• Sharing & Publishing: by tagging a note with an email address I can share it with that person, or I can even publish the note to the web so others can see my thoughts.
• Syncing: SimpleNote has Web, iPhone, and iPad applications, and they all stay thoroughly up to date.
• Searching: quick searching is one of the best features of this little app. I can find notes on anything with a few quick touches and a keyword.
• Focused Interface: The minimal interface gets out of the way. The constraints like no text styling make you think hard about how to get stuff into the app in ways that keep you focused on just taking notes.
• API: I have no idea what you would do with this, but dang it a note app with an API?! That’s forward thinking guys. Nicely done.

Putting Everything in a Site Specific Browser

Lastly, I put all this stuff in a Site Specific Browser using Fluid App. This helps me keep these things as separate apps in my workflow. I’m not into using Chrome with a million tabs open. I use Chrome for browsing, not for working. I do wish Chrome would come out with a clone of Fluid Apps which is presently run through a Safari style webkit.

Specifically for SimpleNote I use a UserScript called SimpleNote Restyled that helps the app get ultra clean and look & feel like an iPad app, which I adore.

Summarize It

This is my flow. I have no idea if it would work for you, but for me this has been a great leap forward. Separation is key. I suppose there could be one app that did these things in some kind of magical integrated way and yet remained simple enough to get out of the way - as of yet, that app doesn’t exist.