aaron c beals

what’s your go-to music for productivity?

if you’re like me, it depends heavily on the task at hand. the appropriate music seems to enhance my focus on the task and my ability to accomplish it more quickly. (N.B. observance of this effect is purely anecdotal and has not been scientifically proven.)

misc: jam (e.g. Phish)
coding: ambient / chiptunes (e.g. Orbital, Groove Salad, Anamanaguchi)
lifting: prog / metal (e.g. DT, Opeth)
cardio: punk (e.g. NOFX)
driving: jam or classic rock (e.g. Zep)

occasionally, there can be some crossover. for instance, right now i’m writing code with the help of some live Dead.

so i’ll ask again: what genre of music enhances your work?

surviving the email onslaught
my inbox is far less crowded (with actionable items, specifically) than it was when i was doing full-time product management, but i still struggle to manage my inbox properly. there have been countless sites dedicated to management techniques (a great example), but i haven’t yet found one that works well for me. perhaps it’s a matter of discipline. i can tell you one thing, though — i don’t miss my blackberry. i thought i did at first, but after a few weeks of sweet freedom, i realized that the value added by constant access to email and the web was far outweighed by the crushing burden of having to deal with constant interruption.

ideally, i’d like to switch to a email management model where i say “i read/answer emails from 9am to 9:30am and 5pm to 6pm daily; if it’s more urgent, call or IM me.”

my favorite new take on email, courtesy of one of my favorite authors: bad correspondence. (thanks to Melissa Leffler for the link)

starting off, as so many web 2.0 addicts do, with Gmail, i slowly started to gather more and more web-based-applications, and now i have a core group that i use regularly:

1. Gmail (personal)
2. Gmail (work)
3. Google Calendar
4. Google Docs
5. Google Groups
6. Facebook
7. LinkedIn
8. Google Reader
9. Remember The Milk
10. Joes Goals

for a long time, i used Firefox’s tabbed interface to manage multiple applications at once. on the plus side, all of my webapps were in one convenient location. unfortunately, this also meant that one application could dominate/crash the browser (i’m looking at you, google docs). i also like to alt-tab through my list of applications. the one flaw that really sent me searching for a solution was how difficult it was to log into two Gmail accounts at one time. the ietab plugin worked well while i was in Windows (ietab uses a separate set of cookies), but i’m running Kubuntu full-time at work, so that option became less practical.

eventually, i found an under-hyped offering by Mozilla Labs: Prism. web 2.0 applications have removed the need for many of the typical “web” features — link bars, navigation buttons, etc — and have started to look more and more like desktop applications. the goal of Prism is to start bridging that gap, and to achieve that goal they have provided a “browserless” browser interface in which you can run your webapps. it’s ultra-fast, clean, and each Prism instance provides its own cookies/cache/etc. the only vestige of a web browser that remains is the status bar at the bottom, but that’s just a good idea, as you’d like to see where you’re heading when you click on that link.

pretty much everything you need to know to get going with Prism is in their wiki (and there’s not much to know). give it a try and let me know what you think.

i stumbled across this article on the habits of productive, creative people, and found it inspiring: 10 ways history’s finest kept focused at work. how are you spending your afternoons?

over the years, i’ve tried many (many) different ways of keeping track of the things i need or want to do. personally, i’m a huge fan of the list, which can take many forms: paper, emails, tasks in Outlook, tasks on a Palm Pilot, etc. however, what usually ends up happening is that my brain manages to circumvent the current method of task tracking, forcing me to switch tactics. finally, i believe i have found a method that works consistently because it’s right in front of me most of the day — rather than using individual emails to track to-do items (those emails scroll away as new ones appear), i have a to-do list that sits right next to the emails.

my to-do list of choice is Remember the Milk. unlike other web-2.0-ish online to-do lists, they don’t require you to visit their site to check your list (though you can if you’d like). they have built a Firefox plug-in that modifies the layout of your Gmail page to insert a collapsible to-do list right next to your email. you can add, edit, and complete tasks right from the interface — pretty much anything you need to do — and it’s all very seamless. if you’re in the habit of starring important emails, you can even automatically generate tasks for them.

anyhow, give it a try. it’s certainly helping me (until my brain finds a way around it, anyhow).