Below you will find pages that utilize the taxonomy term “Productivity”
I have been on quite the hiatus, making this more of a readings of the month edition. Sorry!
I have been pretty busy lately, and although reading doesn’t stop, my writing sometimes takes a hiatus.
Data engineering, adtech, history, apple. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
This is how I handle the dreaded GTD (Getting Things Done) weekly review when using Things 3.
Down into some net rabbit hole, I stumbled upon a review of Work Clean. I chuckled: a productivity book, philosophizing about how cook’s approach to preparation (mise en place) would fix all our problems? Bring it on, I have a long commute.
I am trying to make these posts a tradition (even if a few days late). I thought 2016 had been a really weird and fun year, but 2017 has beaten it easily. And I only hope 2018 will be even better in every way. For the record, when I say we, it means Laia and me unless explicitly changed.
A couple of days ago I attended (first time I managed in almost 6 months) the London chapter of the Emacs Church (also known as the local meetup for emacs lovers). In this event we were shown (John Stevenson was the presenter) how to use emacs effectively for Clojure development (using Cider) and I saw in real life Spacemacs.
In case you don’t know, Spacemacs is a “distribution” of Emacs prepared (is open source, of course) to be easy to setup, and somehow specially prepared for former Vim users to move to Emacs.
Just in case you don’t know, vi is an advanced text editor, drting back from the same era as emacs was developed (emacs started slightly earlier). Sort of the Jekyll to emacs’ Dr Hyde. Emacs users despise vi users, and vi users mock emacs users. This is what the editor wars are all about: “Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping” versus “vi has two modes: writing and beeping”. If you have been long enough in this blog, you know I’m in the emacs side, but you also know I’m curious enough to delve into the other side.
Taken from Flickr
In case you have not realised it yet, I’m a pretty prolific reader. Online reading (and having an iPad) have slowed down the number of books I read in a given year, and I don’t go to the lengths of my girlfriend (who is about to reach her goal of reading 102 books in this year,) I’m nevertheless a frequent reader.
This year I’ve read several good books that I’d like to share with you, after all, if you are reading this probably our tastes overlap.
Working on the go with an iPad, a Bluetooth keyboard and a 6sync account
7 minutes read | 1465 words
Some of the links in this post are affiliate links. As usual, I only recommend what I’ve used and like
Inspired by a post by Mark O’Connor from Yield Thought (my frequent readers will have already read something from him from my link collections), I have been working remotely for a week. His set-up is an iPad 2, Apple wireless keyboard, the iSSH app and an account in Linode.
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When do you have your best ideas? If you are anything like me, I have my best ideas when I can’t act upon them. While I’m falling asleep or while I’m taking a shower. And a lot of them get lost forever, I always think I’ll remember it next morning, something that never happens.
Snickerdoodles!
Do you have problems to keep motivated? Is your usual to-do list filled with great hopes of accomplishing 20 things? Do you dump it when you are wasted at 11 AM after finishing just the first 5 things? Of course, you are not alone. This is a very common thing, from freelancers to researchers, or to almost anyone managing their own time. But this can be due to eating radishes instead of chocolate chip cookies.
Yesterday I did nothing. Absolutely, really nothing.
And it felt great. Before yesterday, my usual weekend was filled of what I thought was doing nothing, but far from it. I wrote posts, programmed, read a lot online and caught up with what was going in the A-List Blogger Club forum. Did some laundry, folded the clothes. All this (well, except for the laundry part) under the assumption that doing what you love does not tire you.
Since I can remember, I’ve always tried to bite more than I could chew. Every time I’m stressed, or overworked I end up adding one or two new projects. I don’t know how. I try to pick up a new language, or start to play go again, or decide it is a good moment to learn stenography. These days, for example, added to my usual schedule are a new blog about meditation, I finally started the series on our road trip to Iceland and I am fighting my schedule to learn Gaelic.
This is the notebook where I keep my to-do list, like the one you can see in the picture in Book Review: Do It Tomorrow. A quick and cheap way to have a small multi-page notebook you can keep always with you. Of course, calling this origami is a small lie, as you have to use scissors.
I read a very good post about going the analog way (How analog rituals can amp your productivity) and this was my tool.
From morguefile
It’s Friday afternoon after a long day and a long week. You board your train and are lucky to find a seat, soon it is crowded with people standing and chatting. You feel tired after the day, and think just about taking a late afternoon nap upon coming home.
But you plug your earphones, turn up the volume just until you can’t hear the train sounds and you are in another place.
From
The Design of the Emacs Logo
As you may already know, emacs is more than a (cross-platform) text editor. Some say that it is like a whole operating system (and some devil worshippers say that it lacks a good text editor…). For the next 30 days (starting December 1, 2010) I’ll check it as well as I can. I will work just with emacs.
You can check the challenge updates below:
If you are looking for the sample ebooks, open the post and scroll down a little.
This week I’ll be in a workshop on Complex Dynamics in Warsaw, and will present a poster titled Approximating bifurcation loci by zeros of functions. This is heavily based on a poster I presented last year in Copenhagen (titled Sets approximating regions of instability). The underlying work in progress has changed quite a bit since then, but this does not show in the poster. I just solve some problems in the exposition, from the questions I got back then.
Lately my pile of papers to read has been growing steadily, and I’ve done very little to read all that stuff marked with “will read someday”. It had to come to an end, and it did with my previous Task Bankruptcy.
Reading research papers can be a huge waste of time… Or end up in forming big piles of To be read someday. The problem is, usually someday never means today.
Office mess. Yes.
That’s a Julia set in my wall
A pile of papers to read on the side. A stack of notes for several unrelated projects. Assignments to prepare. Questions to answer by email. Inbox full of unclassified mails. Lectures to prepare. Cluttered office desktop. Cluttered computer desktop.
A few weeks ago, Friday, this was what I saw when I looked at my office desktop. And I decided it was too much to bear and filed my first Task Bankruptcy.
From Yassin Hassan@Flickr
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Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett
One may say that to be a winner you have to be disciplined, commited, hard-worker, have a thirst for the win. But what a winner has almost always behind are countless failures, terrible defeats and fatal blunders.
The topic for this post has been jumping on and off from my mind for a few weeks, and what prompted me to finally write it was a very recent post by Gabriel Weinberg, web entrepeneur and CEO of the alternative search engine DuckDuckGo.
Disclaimer: For each sale that is made through the purchase links in this post I get a small commission (that does not affect your final purchase price!). Of course, I’d love if you bought any app through these links, but I have tried my best to make my review faithful. I don’t want anyone to come later at me and say they were tricked into buying any app and the review was unfaithful to the application.
Hey! Look! A squirrel!
GillesGonthier@Flickr
A few weeks ago I realised I was procrastinating too much. I tend to work in cycles, and it looked like my productive cycle was over and my procrastinator half had just kicked in the worse possible moment: lectures had just begun.
It looked like there was no solution. My timeboxing strategies went nowhere, will-do lists (litemind.com) had no real meaning, carrot-and-stick solutions didn’t work.
Stairs to Macchu Pichu,
courtesy of Shanidar
I just realised why I procrastinate in some tasks. And it may also be why you do, read on! It is not because they are boring, hard or repetitive. They may be. Hard tasks are a measure of your strength, boring and repetitive tasks, of your stamina. No, the problem is another.
Some projects are just tombstones. There are certain huge projects, with hardness and boredom along the way that when they are done, they are dead.
Two weeks ago it was the beginning of this years lectures. Currently I’m solving problems in the blackboard, 2 hours per week and take care of one computer lab (programming in C, but they have already done a C programming course and another course of numerical computations with C), all for our Numerical Analysis course (7th semester). This is the same schedule I had 3 years ago, also last year I had one computer lab each semester.
What? Biology and time management? Limiting factors? Okay, take it easy. First, let’s read this Wikipedia entry:
A limiting factor or limiting resource is a factor that controls a process, such as organism growth or species population, size, or distribution. The availability of food, predation pressure, or availability of shelter are examples of factors that could be limiting for an organism. An example of a limiting factor is sunlight in the rainforest, where growth is limited to all plants in the understory unless more light becomes available.
Disclaimer: For each sale that is made through the purchase links in this post I get a small commission (that does not affect your final purchase price!). Of course, I’d love if you bought this book through these links, but I have tried my best to make my review faithful. I don’t want anyone to come later at me and say they were tricked into buying the book and the review was unfaithful to the book.
A nice warm Sunday afternoon, I wanted something cold to drink and a good book to read in my garden. I glanced at my pile of books beside the door, the books I grab to read in the train to my office, a pile of 8 books. Then I remembered I had a few books in the library I wanted to read, another pile, 10 books. As I went down and put them all over the table, I realised I had a few books more in the computer room, 3 books.
A month ago, Oscar del Ben posted an interesting tip in his blog to take power naps when you are feeling tired, How to Get a Quick 5-10 Minutes Nap Without Using an Alarm Clock. His idea is simple: pick a spoon on your hand. Once you fall asleep, your grip will relax, the spoon falls and you awaken with the sound. I found it amusing and interesting, as I am one of those types who feel really well after a 10 minutes nap.
Three months ago Oscar Del Ben posted an interesting post in his blog, FreestyleMind. In it he said that he saved (quite) a lot of money and a lot of back pain with a special office chair: he uses a gym ball.
The gym ball in question is the one used in yoga or Pilates training. They come in two sizes, 65 cm 75cm (diameter). I had recurring back pain, and decided to give it a try at home.
Don’t miss the latest posts Learn to Remember Everything: The memory palace technique or Remembering Facts: USING Mental associative chains
If you are an avid self-improvement reader, you know already what timeboxing is. But maybe you don’t harness all its potential For the rest, timeboxing is a time management technique focused on time spent, not tasks done. Therefore, you will need to set aside some project tracking system to have a clear idea of what you are working on.
A week without writing here. A week with little thesis related work done. But it has also been a week with ideas and things and such. You know, two weeks ago I was in Dresden for a conference. Lots of parallel sessions, and quite a few time to think. This post is mostly a digest from my life bookmarks for these two weeks.
Several complex dynamic ideas: Unrelated to my thesis, but I’ve been thinking about them these days.
Life logging, journaling… what now? The idea behind this post grew from an insight I had, two months ago. I realised that I was bookmarking a lot of web pages because I liked what they explained and wanted to remember what I read. More precisely, I wanted to remember that I had read that. At that time, this seemed the more natural way to approach this problem.
A month later, more or less, I landed in this New York times article: The Data-Driven Life.
Music to listen with this post: Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsvkii’s Concert 35 D-major, Allegro (Spotify link , Youtube link). I’ll write why this piece in a forthcoming post.
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A week and a half ago, @nochiel, a twitter follower retweeted the following, initially written by @marcoarment (lead developer of Tumblr and Instapaper):
Fundamentals, fundamentals, fundamentals. Everyone knows it, fundamentals are fundamental. It’s like saying water is wet, isn’t it? But again and again the greatest teachers of hard disciplines remind us that we need to master the fundamentals to become the best.
Vince Lombardi, said it:
Fundamentals win it. Football is two things; it’s blocking and tackling. I don’t care about formations or new defences or tricks on defence. If you block and tackle better than the team you’re playing, you’ll win.
Introducing LeechBlock
You arrive to your office. Quickly check urgent mails, close the mail program and browser and put a nice solid hour, hour and a half, even two straight hours of work. Then decide that you deserve a break, and maybe with a fresh cup of coffee from the coffee machine you decide to browse idly for a few minutes. And then a co-worker knocks at your door and asks if you are coming to lunch.
The ‘broken windows theory’ is a widely known theory, based on folks knowledge (which have been also tested in real life).
Consider a building with a broken window. If this window does not get repaired, other windows can break (over time, or by vandalism). In the long run, someone may break into the building, becoming a squatter.
Or a more usual situation. If some litter gets accumulated in a sidewalk or a lot, soon more litter will accumulate, until people start leaving whole bags of trash.
It is a widely accepted theory that the use of tools determined the development of the human brain. Nowadays, using tools is thus a quite common endeavor everybody does.
But ask a carpenter if he would use a jagged saw, or a draftsman a broken pencil. It is not only using the tools, but using the best tools.
But what is for the best tools? Using the best possible tools is not enough: you need to love your tools.
The pleasure and pain of time management In this post I’ll review some time management systems to get the most out of your workday. Of course, keep in mind that you also should have rest time.
Start strong Start your day doing some work for at least half an hour straight. You can do this at home, before leaving yo your office (if you usually spend at least 1h between getting up and leaving) or just on arriving to your office.
From flickr
Around a year ago, I stumbled into this lifehacker page, suggesting an IBM-developerWorks tutorial on how to install a just 3 things to your system to be able to… whistle control your computer. Whistle a tune, open Firefox. Things like these. You know how geeky I am, I had to try it. Smaller problem: the tutorial is for Linux/Windows and I was on a Mac.
Althouh I use AucTeX, which already has nice quick-writing techniques, I have found emacs’ abbrev-mode together with skeletons are a nice addition to it, allowing me to be really quick at writing LaTeX. The included examples to use dabbrev and skeletons are for the mathbb and theorem environments.
Sample usage: When I write \mbb, and then open the left {, mbb gets expanded to mathbb… so I have \mathbb{ as needed.
Lavaurs algorithm on course
Like almost every year, August comes with a lot of pending To Do lists… This year, it is choking full, mostly of work related issues, and some unknotted threads waiting to be finished. And in two and a half weeks I’ll head for Paris, and then my “vacation” is over.
Yesterday I wasted my morning: bought my orange belt, set up the external monitor for my netbook, configured the printer, fotocopied two pages of a book and drank an horchata with a friend.
Two and a half weeks ago, I got a netbook and promptly installed Ubuntu, followed by Fluxbox (as already explained). And after two weeks of almost continued use, I like it even more than when I decided to use it. Some of the points I really enjoy (in no particular order).
Strong keyboard shortcuts. As an emacs junkie as I am, I love keyboard shortcuts. And Fluxbox is incredibly flexible in defining or removing them: Even system-wide shortcuts are customizable.
Setting a local proxy through a remote machine
To set up a local proxy using some computer in another network (in my case, my office computer to accessing MathSciNet search and such), go to a console and
ssh -D 42 YourRemoteMachineName
And then set Firefox to use a proxy. In preferences, go to the Advanced Tab and select Connection Settings. Here you should select manual proxy configuration, in localhost with the same port number (42 in this example) as you used up before.
I have been using several productivy enhancers (or time-wasting avoiders) as of late. Although I find them quite useful, I wonder if I could find something even better.
Think: I have already talked about think elsewhere. Think enables the user to focus on just one application, seeing nothing more. It is like the blinders of a horse to keep you from distracting.
LeechBlock: A FireFox addon, which allows you to block certain sites at certain times of the week, or after a predetermined amount of time has been wasted there.
There are a few Mac applications I use so often, I couldn’t live without them. And most of them are free, or really kind shareware.
Caffeine: Keep your Mac from sleeping. Carbon Emacs (F): Well, this is cross-platform. And you know, I can’t live without it. Plus, Carbon Emacs has some nifty additions. Check it out! Disk Inventory X (F): Shows graphically the size of files sitting in your drives.
I have finally finished (duh!) reading a book on shorthand (stenography) focused on the catalan language. It is a book by Josep Cormand, “Estudi de fonologia bàsica : Mètode d’escriptura ràpida”, ISBN 84-218-0320-4. It is based in a method developed by professor Dalmau, based on catalan fonology. Once you are able to write in this way, you enjoy it more and more, is quite an interesting feeling. Although I find re-reading what I wrote a pain… I have written a lot more than read, thus I am still far from being proficient at it.
For about a year I’ve been procrastinating a lot, and lately I decided it was time to end. To do so, I kept on procrastinating (avoiding my work) to research the web for causes, cures and pitfalls in this “disease”. In the following entry I’ll tell you everything I’ve learned (slightly condensed), hope it serves you too. Keep in mind it is a long post, bookmark it now if you can’t keep reading for this long (or use it to avoid working for about half an hour :) I will only cover the aspects of causes (and related cures) and related time management systems, but for now I will skip motivation, leaving it for another post, as I’m still thinking about it.