fplanque: IT world

Do you remember the days where you'd carefully read through everything your RSS aggregator collected for you? Do you still do that? Do you even open your RSS aggregator? Do you even use one?

Chances are you're using twitter by now. 140 characters max per tweet. And you don't even read them all! You just skim through them.

Way too much information of course.

And yet, many people still write incredibly long blog posts with fancy writing & diluted content. Even bloggers who tweet their posts to twitter. They should know better... I don't want to point at anyone in particular; just click on the averag elink in twitter and see if you want to read all that text...

I'm willing to bet that 95+% of the people who click through from twitter to a blog post do not read that post in its entirety. We have to make those posts shorter!

I just have to say how much I love the way iMovie '09 handles video files.

When you import video, you can save it to any drive connected to your Mac. It will go to a folder named "iMovie Events" on the selected partition.

Whenever that partition gets full and you want to move to a larger drive, you can just move the files to another partition and relaunch iMovie. it will find the files in their new location, no questions asked! And your iMovie projects will continue to work without asking where the source files are.

I wish every piece of software made things just as easy as that

How many times have you heard "Time is Money"? It's getting pretty old and boring, isn't it?

Well here's a new thought: Time is just like Money! Especially: you can't just wait until you find it... if you want some, you have to make it! And in both cases: you have to develop skills to do that!

Think!

I just finished reading "the dip" by Seth Godin. I actually didn't really know what the book was about and I basically picked it up just because it was less than $10 and because I loved previous books by Seth Godin (no doubt he's one of the greatest marketers of our generation!)

Well I'm glad I did. This is a small 76 page book, so it was pretty easy and fast to read! Actually, it could probably be even shorter and still make its point! But wow! More than making a point this book will actually pep you up and motivate you to hang in with your projects... or to quit before wasting any more time. Basically it tells you that the worst thing is to stay on a dead end track...

But for me, the most interesting part was the motivational part about how the dip before success is a normal thing to experience. If a project didn't have that painful phase where nothing seems easy and where you feel like you want to quit, then that project probably wouldn't be worth pursuing anyway... since just anyone else could do the same.

This is exactly the kind of stuff I want to read right now, with the down economy and everyone around loosing their energy.

Of course, the book also made me realize that a couple of my projects were sort of dead ends and that I should quit them right away. But that's part of the process! Reading this book over the last 2 days made me feel better about prioritizing my projects and cutting dead branches!

Minimum cash & time investment. High motivational return. Check it out!

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) — Buy it now at Amazon.com

I have complained a couple of times that there was no decent GTD software available for Windows... to the point I'm actually considering switching to the Mac just for that!

People keep advising me to just fall back to the real life method of using 43 folders. For the record, that is: 12 folders for all the months in the year + 31 folders for all the days in a month. You then rotate the folders in a way that will make them pop up whatever you need on a specific day.

I so disagree with 43 folders being a replacement for GTD!

While the 43 folders are part of David Allen's GTD method, they do not replace software. GTD software presents you with a list of next actions you can do in a specific context and you can choose from them what you want to do without forgetting anything important. It has nothing to do with dates and deadlines.

The use of 43 folders on the contrary lets you easily pop up whatever needs to be acted upon on a specific date.

Granted some GTD software also copes with dates and deadlines but that is not the gist of GTD.

Now... I bet the confusion has a lot to do with Merlin Mann's site, named 43 Folders (which is a cool name indeed) and talking a lot about... GTD!