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The cult of busy | Scott Berkum:

This means people who are always busy are time poor. They have a time shortage. They have time debt. They are either trying to do too much, or they aren’t doing what they’re doing very well. They are failing to either a) be effective with their time b) don’t know what they’re trying to effect, so they scramble away at trying to optimize for everything, which leads to optimizing nothing.

everydaycarry:

submitted by Rawls

This is my office/suit carry.

Moleskine Weekly Calendar
Retro 51 Tornado Elite (with blue ink)
Muyshondt Aeon Black HA
Spyderco Dragonfly PE FRN (never carried into court)
iPhone 3GS with super thin case (with the awesome and free Fastcase App for finding case law and statutes on the go)

The iPhone eliminates the need for me to carry law books into court anymore, which is really staggering given where the profession was a 100 years ago (with barrister’s book cases). All I carry now are my client’s case files.

I realized a while ago that I never REALLY need more than a small knife and a super light Dragonfly is just the ticket (I would love a CF Dragonfly, almost as light, but a bit higher class, but they are impossible to find).

The Retro 51 is a nice pen, but not so nice I would be sad if it got damaged or lost. There is really no rational reason to use black ink over blue ink, as blue ink allows you to distinguish between copies and originals (very important for submitting briefs and pleadings to the court, originals only).

The Muyshondt Aeon is one of the best lights I have ever seen or owned. Dead simple interface, good tint, good low and stunning high, all with staggering run times. Worth every penny.

All of this resides in my favorite bag a Tumi Alpha Expandable Laptop Briefcase.

Now if the Muyshondt had a nickel silver heat sink instead of a brass one, the black and silver motif would be complete.

Editor’s Note: Very well thought out and coherent carry you have there… Nice to hear a little of the thought process behind a combination of gear for a specific purpose, so thanks for writing your opinions on that.

Minimal and functional everyday carry

Spout is the lastest design concept from Melbourne-based industrial design consultancy Charlwood Design.

Spout is a sink designed with a internal sensor: when you place hands in the sink, the water is activated. You can adjust the temperature with a simple dial and in the center of it there’s a button that can be pushed to a continuous water flow.

A great example of minimalist design, joining the faucet and the sink in just one product… Will this be the end of faucets?

Spout was a finalist in the Reece Bathroom Innovation Award.

using notational velocity :mnmlist:

zenhabits:

My fairly simple setup and usage of a lightweight text editor.

Super simple and easy. Nothing like Notational Velocity.

(if you are stuck in Windows, try Notes)

These days I use the simple Mac program Notational Velocity to write nearly everything — notes, lists, todos, ideas, blog posts, book chapters, rambling rants to the government, and so on.

I noted this in a feature Shawn Blanc did on my Sweet Mac Setup (and indeed it is sweet), and several readers asked for an elaboration – how do I use NV?

It’s not complicated. Notational, as many of you might know, is a lightweight program that does something very simple:

• It allows you to write text.
• It saves these texts automatically — you never have to press Save.
• It lets you find these texts very easily through a search bar that displays matches as you type the search, very similar to Google Instant.

The last part is the magic. In the location bar, you just start typing, and instantly whatever you’re looking for appears. Also if you start typing a name of a new file you want to create, you just press Return and the new file is create — no need to go to “New File” or something like that in a menu.

And by learning one keyboard shortcut — Cmd-L to instantly go to the “location bar” — you never need to use the mouse. Just type Cmd-L, start typing your search or new file name, and press Return when you’re done. Then start typing or editing with the keyboard.

It’s extremely simple, but it works better than any other text editor I’ve used, and so I decided it would be all I use. I haven’t looked back.

My Setup

I’ve set up a couple things worth noting:

1. Under Preferences/Notes/Storage, I’ve set it to store notes as plain text files. This allows me to email individual text files to people if necessary, to open them in other text editors, and to access the files from my phone if needed.
2. I also have it synchronizing with Simplenote’s online service. I don’t use Simplenote as I don’t have an iPhone (if I did I would) but I like having all my notes backed up and accessible online. You can do this under Preferences/Notes/Synchronization. It’s free.
3. Lastly, I moved the “Notational Data” folder in which all the plain text notes are stored to my Dropbox folder. I haven’t used this yet, as I only use one computer yet and don’t need to access my files from other computers, but I like that it’s instantly backed up and accessible online — once again. It’s also free and easy to set up.

My Usage

What is there to say about usage? I don’t do too much unusual, but here are a few notes:

1. I append prefixes to the file names so I can group things — so for Zen Habits posts, I’ll have a “zh-” prefix, before the post topic, so that when I start typing “zh” it’ll show all my Zen Habits drafts. I do the same for mnmlist posts, chapters and notes for my new book “focus”, and interviews.
2. I make the text editing field a bit bigger than default. I just like more space. Other than that, everything is default, including font and text size and all that.
3. It would be nice if you could write in full-screen mode in NV, but instead I will just paste a file into WriteRoom or Ommwriter and enjoy the full-screen focused glory, and then paste back into NV when I’m done, where it’s instantly saved. I love instant save — why isn’t this done always in every program?
4. I have a todo list in NV that I don’t refer to very often. I don’t use todo lists much anymore, except as a dumping ground for things I might need to remember later. Most days I know what I want to work on — whatever I’m excited about at the moment.
5. Instead of keeping a list of ideas for posts for my blogs, I just start a new post (with the prefix I mentioned above). It’ll have notes for the post. Then when I want to look at my post ideas, I just type in the prefix (like “zh” or “mnml”) and I’ll see the list of post ideas.
6. I store other snippets of text, like commonly used html tags I put into posts, or links to ebook downloads for those who have trouble downloading, etc. On my old iMac I had these snippets in TextExpander, which was nice, but I’ve been too lazy to set up TextExpander and all the snippets I use on my Macbook Air so they’re in NV.

That’s about all I can think of. If you have questions, ask on Twitter and I’ll add to this post.

I love NV for its lightness, its simplicity, its speed. It does everything I need with a minimum of fuss, which is basically perfect.

Exchange can “remote wipe” ALL your cellphone data, not just the emails…:

Yeap, connect your cellphone to Exchange and have your data wiped by a disgruntled IT person or by mistake (hey, it’s M$, they code bugs by design!).

Another reason to stay away from M$ products.

“Plan to throw one away; you will anyhow.”

- Frederick Brooks, “The Mythical Man-month” (1975)