I am a creative person and like many of that ilk, my level of organization is also creative — to put it kindly. Productivity is a trait that I admire and occasionally accomplish quite well, but it is often hampered by the fact that I seldom have much of a plan. For instance: at some point near the end of this month, I will sit down and pay the bills. I will probably approach this task differently then the last time I did it. It’ll all get done but in a different order and manner, which is not the best way to approach finances.

To solve this problem I’ve decided to create a document, a User Guide for me and my life. Also, in order to make this productivity project interesting, this User Guide will be more than just about how to pay the bills. It will be a self-portrait.

It’s been a while since I’ve created a self portrait. In some ways this blog is a self portrait; however, mostly it is just a stage. A real self portrait involves honestly peering into one’s self and painting, drawing, sculpting, or writing an representation of what you find.

“Colin, a User Guide” will be my self-portrait, an non-chronological autobiography. It will be a reference guide to every thing I do from paying the bills to the blogs I read to the daily tasks at work to the routes I take on my bicycle. It will be a detailed description of how I approach life, death, politics, beauty, art, culture, and friendships. It’ll be a catalog of all the hopes, dreams, regrets, and desires that shape me and propel me through life.

I will be designing this as an actual user guide with easy to follow instructions and call out tips. If anyone were to need to become me this document should get them pretty far. Which may come in handy if I get hit by a bus one of these days. [note to self: include a Living Will as part of the book's appendix]

In order to make this a true self portrait, I will be honest with myself as I write this. Which means that there will be parts of the book I won’t want people to see. As such, I will be creating two editions: the public version with sections redacted and the private edition encrypted under lock and key which includes the personal and financial details I’d rather not share with the world.

Initially, this book will be developed as a PDF; however, I am also interested in actually getting this printed. A private edition for myself and a short limited edition run of the public edition. I have already designed a cover and started on an outline. The process of creating this book should be interesting, and I will post updates to this blog as I work on it.

UPDATE [09/18/2009]: While this technique still has it’s uses, I no longer use it myself. For various reasons I have switched to using gmail’s normal imap, which was put in place several months after I created this system. So don’t be looking for this page to be updated. Also, I have closed comments on this post as it receives more spam than real comments these days.

As I posted previously, I’ve been experimenting with finding a my perfect iPhone email set up. Since then I’ve made a few changes and I’m really happy with the results. As such, I thought I’d post a bit better of a tutorial since it’s a bit convoluted from the back-end—though still simple to use and the complexity is invisible during daily use.
This post has been modified since it was first published to reflect alternate approaches and improved techniques. I will continue to improve this post in the future to fix any bugs that emerge.
Tutorial Revision (8/21/07): Because of a discovered issue with MS Exchange, I have revised how outgoing emails are handled.

Benefits to this system

• Spam trapped via gmail’s awesome spam filter
• Use your personal domain name address as your public-facing address (i.e. from and reply)
• Read and send email using iPhone and Mail.app with
• Email marked as read, deleted, or moved is automatically synced between iPhone and Mail.app via IMAP
• Gmail archives all email both received and sent

How it works from the front-end

• My catcubed.com email is my main public email address, but I also still receive messages sent to my Gmail.
• All incoming messages (including my catcubed.com account) are spam filtered via gmail’s fabulous spam filter
• I use my iPhone and/or Apple Mail for normal day to day email reading/sending
• Personally, I read email, reply if needed, and then delete; thus, keeping my inbox clutter-free (in keeping with a GTD approach). If I need to review an old email, I go to Gmail where all my emails both incoming and outgoing are automatically archived.
• Alternately, if deleting is not your style, you can set up your Mail.app to automatically move mail to an archive folder on your computer.
• Additionally to reduce digital clutter, I’ve manually set it up so that all mailing lists are filter to remain in gmail instead of forwarding my iPhone. I go to gmail to check mailing lists.

[...]

I’m still experimenting with blogging apps. This time posting with Ecto. It’s rather nice though a bit complicated possibly for the average user — especially since I had to troubleshoot it. I do like how much control you have over the image code, which makes using my wordpress lightbox plugin easy.

I tested MarsEdit too which is much cleaner, but really only good if you want to post text only as adding images takes waaaaay too many steps. MarsEdit’s live preview is great as long as you know your way around html/css to set it up (which is strangely complicated considering that the rest of the app seems set up for the average user). On the opposite end of the spectrum is Journler which seems just plan convoluted looking.

While Ecto is nice, personally, I think I’m still gonna recommend Flock just because of the easy Flickr interface. Ecto does have an app called 1001 which sounds great app but it was really really slow at loading anything. So Flock it is.

Actually, I’m also gonna start to use it at work as my blogging/social/lunch-break browser, and keep Firefox as my development/work only browser. I figure this will hopefully help me focus more on work and curb any procrastination.

p.s. that picture is one of my favs from Urban Golf.

So I’ll just come out and say it: ‚ÄúI’m a app-oholic.‚Äù

I constantly am trying out new applications, which has if anything gotten worse in this web 2.0 world of web apps. Usually, I have a goal in mind of finding a better way of doing what I already do in some other application, but other times I’m just doing it for the geeky thrill.

Lately, my app hunt has been mostly centered around improving my web development environment, streamlining my blogging experience, and enhancing my productivity. The latter being the most ironic as I waste tons of time in the process.

Recently, I posted about the great little web app Todoist which I was using for this purpose. I have since abandoned that app for several reasons. Don’t get me wrong it’s a clean and fabulous tool, but it required yet another browser tab open, and most of all it just got intimidating to look at the more I added to do items.

Did Done List

To fix all this I’m taking a tip from a post off of lifehacker, Improve your productivity with a ‚Äúdid-do‚Äùlist except I’m calling mine a ‚Äúdid done‚Äù list cause I think it sounds better and frankly just to be different. Of course, I still need to keep a running to do list or else I’d forget all the stuff I need to do, but now I only need to visit that occasionally. This way the thing I normally see is the stuff I’ve happily accomplished rather than the dreaded pile of stuff still yet on the horizon.

All of this is now just living off of my wiki that I set up for our household which makes it extensible, easy to use, and best of all mine‚Äînothing like a sense of ownership to increase task stickiness. By the way, setting up the wiki was one of the best things I’ve ever done. It’s sooooo amazingly useful.

Successful hunting in app-land

I’m posting this from Ecto which so far is an excellent blog posting app. I had to make a couple tweaks to get it to work properly: 1) It doesn’t play nice with wordpress 2.1 but luckily someone figured out a fix for that. 2) I use Ultimate Tag Warrior and I needed an additional plugin to get ecto to play nicely with tags.

Speaking of cool apps, Coda. the all-in-one webdev app from Panic, looks incredible! I haven’t had a chance to play with the demo yet but wow‚Äîwish it came for the PC. I use Topstyle on my windows laptop at work, which is decent, but it’s a bit clunky as most windows apps are, and it has no internal FTP. Arg!

Lots of things on my plate right now. So I figured I’d go on the hunt again for a good todo/productivity web app. I’d love to just use the awesome omnioutliner, but living on two laptops one mac the other pc makes this rather impossible.

There are a lot of solutions, most using some form of the GTD approach. Many of them are overcomplicated or nonintuitive (like most of the tiddlywiki based solutions). Call me silly, but I think entering items into your to do list should take less effort than the task itself. I’m not going to review all the ones I tried out cause it’s a waste of time. If you want you can do your own research by reviewing all my productivity tagged del.icio.us links or you can review Lifehacker’s excellent list.

The one I finally settled on is Todoist because it’s clean and simple with nested todo hierarchy functionality, and it makes good use of keyboard shortcuts. I’d say more about it but that would be hypocritical since I’m talking about efficient use of time.

Speaking of clean and simple but in a dumb way, today I joined up on Twitter as Catcubed. It’s like nano-bloging/IMing about nothing but you’re saying it to no one and everyone at the same time. If you combine it with IMified your setup to easily shout out your boring life to the world in two seconds flat. And for you wordpress geeks there are a couple good plugins (twitter tools, twitter updater).

As a voyour, Twitter is the shortest way to waste the most amount of time in the world‚Äîespecially if you stare dumbly at the twitter/googlemaps mashup twittervision. Check it out! You to can read that pdimeglio“Skipeed class today, feeling better. Now watching daily show” or that fast640kdsl is “Going to bed.” Worldwide blipverts from peoples boring lives in realtime!

p.s. Twitter’s servers are getting smacked hard at the moment due to it’s popularity, so their page loads may be a bit slow.