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How to be productive using low tech. And why.

How to be productive using low tech. And why.

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We’re living in an interesting age. There’s an app for that. For anything. No matter how simple. We’ve turned apps and technology into a fetish and we try to use it to solve every problem, even when it’s the wrong tool. Sometimes (I daresay often), the technological solution actually makes things worse in the long run.

And that’s why some of the best ways to get things done are highly-effective low-tech solutions. You can read about some of them in the interview. Click here:  When it comes to productivity, expert Stever Robbins says keep it old school.

Skype is better, but still problematic

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My article on Skype exposing address books to the world has gone mini-viral. Written in 2017, it’s gotten dozens of citations in early 2019. A reporter approached me, asking if the problem still exists. After doing some research, here’s what I’ve found.

Microsoft’s article is incorrect (probably by accident)

Microsoft explains how People You May Know suggestions are generated in this article. At the time of this writing (February 14, 2019), the article is incomplete. The article claims you or the contact must both take action to be visible to each other through People You May Know. For example, you must add each other in your address books. Or you must exchange an invite and acceptance.

Microsoft doesn’t mention the problem case: mutual connections

The problem case exists, but is not listed here: if you have a mutual connection, then you’ll show up in each other’s People You May Know list. The mutual connection is someone who fits the you-both-take-action criteria.

So if Sam is connected to Ash, and Ash is connected to Stacy, then Sam and Stacy will show up in each others’ People You May Know list even though they’ve never taken any action with respect to each other.

Sam and Stacy will see each other without a direct connection

Deleting Still Doesn’t Solve The Problem

I deleted all my contacts. Skype is still suggesting dozens of people. I don’t know any of them. As mentioned on Microsoft’s list above, Skype remembered my past connections and is still suggesting their people to me. I don’t know any of these suggested people, but now I know one of my prior contacts knows them.

This no longer works for strangers, thank goodness

When I first found this issue (Dec 2017), I created a new test account. Browsing a stranger’s profile was enough to get suggestions of people with the same last name who looked the same (presumably family members). As of today (Feb 2019), it seems like Microsoft has reined this in a bit … from my very brief testing, it seems you need a common contact to start the suggestion engine.

I still consider this a security problem, though not as bad as it was before.

You can only figure out the contacts of someone you are or have been connected with. You can’t do it to a complete stranger, you need to have one contact—invite, connection, or chat—with them first. This isn’t as big a hurdle as you might think.

Journalists still shouldn’t use Skype

Journalists beware! If you’re a journalist, using Skype can compromise your sources. JournalistChris interviews source LittleSnitch on Skype. If JournalistChris later interviews source MafiaDon, MafiaDon will have LittleSnitch suggested as a contact. After all, they both have you as a mutual contact. If MafiaDon knows about this bug, then MafiaDon may agree to Skype with you precisely to see if LittleSnitch then shows up on MafiaDon’s People You May Know list. You really don’t want MafiaDon knowing you’ve been talking with LittleSnitch.

Even with strangers, you can get some information. When you browse random profiles, Skype will tell you how many mutual contacts you have. If you only have a few contacts in Skype, you can guess with some certainty who the mutual contact is.

if MafiaDon did your interview and then immediately looked up LittleSnitch‘s profile, MafiaDon would see that they have one mutual connection—you. That might be enough to tip off MafiaDon that LittleSnitch has been talking to the press.

Lawyers and Consultants, you beware too

The problem I outline for consultants and lawyers in my article remains. If you’re BankruptcyLawyer and you chat with MicrosoftCEO, then later chat with LogitechCEO, LogitechCEO will start seeing MicrosoftCEO as a suggested contact. LogitechCEO might even Skype with you deliberately to see who else gets suggested after the chat.

Indeed, you can imagine someone doing this very deliberately. If EvilBoy seriously wants to do research they could do this:

  1. EvilBoy creates a new skype account, live:innocent_journalist2
  2. EvilBoy approaches BankruptcyLawyer and says “I’m a journalist. I wish to interview you for an article. Connect to me on Skype as live:innocent_journalist2”
  3. EvilBoy interviews BankruptcyLawyer
  4. Because BankruptcyLawyer is now the only contact in the live:innocent_journalist2 account, the People You May Know will suggest BankruptcyLawyer’s contacts to EvilBoy
  5. Furthermore, EvilBoy can now look up anyone’s profile on Skype and see if they have a mutual contact. If so, they know that person is in BankruptcyLawyer’s addressbook

This requires a concerted effort on the part of EvilBoy, and it also requires that BankruptcyLawyer add EvilBoy as a contact, accept a connection request from EvilBoy, or chat with EvilBoy at least once.

This Can Still Be Awkward Personally

This is still a problem. Let’s say Ashley uses Skype to meet people for online dating. Ashley might answer personal ads and chat with Syd and Alex. Ashley probably doesn’t want Syd and Alex to start showing up in each other’s contact lists. That could be awkward, especially if one (or both) of the relationships goes farther than a Skype chat. It seems like the privacy problems here are pretty evident.

In summary: the hurdle has risen since I wrote that article. Instead of being able to reverse engineer a stranger’s address book, you can only reverse engineer someone you’re connected to or have chatted with. Once. EvilBoy can still use Skype to work mischief, but now it takes a bit more work. For some people, this may still be too much of a privacy breach from a product that was founded on the premise of confidentiality.


Get-it-Done Guy’s iOS 9 Review: at most, a step backwards

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iOS 9 marks the first iOS release where my thought has been a pretty consistent “Well, I guess Apple’s jumped the shark.” Most of the reviews I’ve read of iOS 9 have apparently been written by sycophantic Apple fanboys who don’t actually use their phones to do anything except take selfies and post to Facebook. I’m writing here from the perspective of someone who actually wants to use an iPhone as a tool. Sadly, things aren’t looking good.

In no particular order…

Low Battery Mode is a nice idea. It’s a single setting that does tweaks power things across the board when your battery is low. You can turn it on automatically (the low power dialog box now has an option to turn on low-power mode). Turning it back off later, however, requires navigating surprisingly deeply into Settings. The UI for the feature seems poorly thought-out. (Which, sadly, seems to be increasingly common in Apple products these days.)

The “return to last app” link is pretty convenient, but it’s uglier than I would have imagined possible in such a small UI element. The text has different size and baseline from the other text in the status bar, and it’s too close to the “back” arrow. If you have “Show button shapes” turned on (which I do), the underline merges into the letter. In short, it’s so ugly that every time I see it, I cringe involuntarily and think that somehow my phone must have glitched and displayed garbage on the screen. It’s a testimony to the aesthetic consistency (note: I didn’t say “beauty,” I said “consistency”) of the rest of the interface that such a minor element can look so atrocious because it violates so many design principles in so few pixels.

More bad UI (this is from iOS 8, but it’s still broken): Mail’s swipe actions still put “TRASH” on the same swipe gesture as “FLAG” or “MARK UNREAD” (depending on how you have configured your settings). This means the two most extreme, opposite options (“keep this and mark it important” and “delete this”) use the same gesture, differing only by a completely unpredictable combination of swipe distance and speed of swipe. This may go down in my book as one of the all-time worst UI decisions ever made in iOS, and iOS 9 doesn’t address it at all.

Greater battery life. I haven’t noticed, but as a big Apple fan since the original Macintosh, I have to say something positive, so I’ll pretend that the claim is true without verifying it. I think battery life has been extended, but it’s still not enough to give me a full day’s use.

The new app switcher interface is interesting in a vaguely positive way. In iOS 8, previously viewed apps were to the right in the task list. In iOS 9, they’re to the left, and they are full screen. I’m getting used to it, and it’s nice to be able to see the full screen view of what was happening in the app.

Spotlight sometimes fails to look up contacts. Spotlight on iOS used to search my contacts. I could swipe down, type the first few letters of someone’s name, and a tap would take me to their contact record. My business involves a lot of phone calling, and this was my #1 way to find a contact. From everything I’ve been able to determine, this randomly fails in iOS 9 about 20% of the time, and Spotlight doesn’t list matching contacts. So the only reliable way to look up a contact on iOS 9 has been to go into the Contacts app, scroll up, and type into the search box. And speaking of Spotlight and Siri… [Update: turning off Spotlight and turning it back on seemed to fix the problem about half an hour later. Maybe there was an indexing glitch or timing thing that made/makes my contacts vanish from Spotlight?]

“Smart” Siri guesses wrong, and recovering from her wrong guess is a lot of work. They’ve substituted “smart Siri” for the favorites” and “recents” that used to appear in the task switcher along the top. Since “smart” anything is almost guaranteed to give you the wrong answer 80% of the time, this is yet another big loss. My job is conducted on the phone, and “Favorites” an “Recents” were quite useful. Smart Siri only shows 4 choices, and it tries to figure out who I want to call, and it’s wrong.

If the theory is Siri should be “smart” to save me effort, then they need to consider what happens when Siri’s smarts turn out to be stupid. The failure mode of Siri guessing wrong is MUCH more work than “smart” Siri saves in the first place. I really would love a return to the iOS 8 model. (That’s why “favorites” exist! Because I know I want to contact those people often. Replacing my “favorites” with “smart” guesses is kinda weird.)

Maps now has transit direction! … not! Despite acquiring HopSpot, which does have transit directions, Apple didn’t bother including transit directions for much beyond San Francisco and New York. If you’re a pampered techie living in San Francisco, blissfully unaware that the rest of the country exist, I’m sure this looks like a big win. From the outside, it looks like a half-baked, duct-taped partial integration of functionality that’s already several years late coming to market. Apple has $203 billion in cash, and now we know why: because they sure as heck aren’t using any of it on software development.

Smarter web-enabled spotlight is ho-hum. I’m not sure who these people are who are continually going to new neighborhoods and cities and needing to know where the local eating spots are, but I pretty much know the neighborhoods where I spend 90% of my time. These relentless offers to show me ads from local businesses or help me find places to eat are ubiquitous and annoying, rather than useful.

Reminders now lets you move reminders between lists! Yay! But inexplicably, there’s still no way to delete completed reminders en masse. You have to swipe them one at a time. Since I have several hundred completed reminders, the swipe interface is not very useful.

Notes is better, but you can’t use the better-ness. As they did with iCloud in the Mavericks upgrade, Apple has implemented lots of new features in Notes in a way that is so incompatible with collaboration that it makes your head spin. In short, you can use all these great new features, but only if all your machines (including your desktops) are running iOS 9 and the next version of OS X (which isn’t out yet). If your notes are in a shared account with someone else, presumably they need to be upgraded too.

The problem with his scheme is that not everyone has the luxury of controlling the upgrade timing of all their devices. So it’s possible to end up with some devices upgraded and some not (or never, if the device in question can’t handle the new version of the OS), ruining sync ability without providing useful new functionality in its place.

This is not an impossible problem to solve, it just requires some thought and careful architecture. I’m sad that no one at Apple bothered to think this through.

Keyboard fail: they removed the double-tap-with-2-fingers-to-select-paragraph gesture. Since I used that very often, its removal has tanked my ability to compose and edit text quickly.

Ad blockers don’t work on iPhone 5. It says “not compatible with your device.”

Random major crashes. every now and then, with no warning, the phone simply freezes and requires a power-button-and-menu-button reboot to become responsive again.

On balance, the differences that I’ve noticed as a user, trying to get my work done, are mainly negative. The few positives are subtle enough that they don’t really do much to optimize my workflow. And removing the select-Paragraph gesture actively adds delays to any writing-oriented task I do on my iDevice.

Other than the features listed above, I’m having a hard time telling the difference between iOS 9 and its predecessors.

TL;DR

Underwhelming new features, and an explicit step backwards in many places.

Overcoming Email Overload

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From Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge
October 25, 2004

Being at or near the the top of your organization, everyone wants a piece of you. So they send you e-mail. It makes you feel important. Don’t you love it? Really? Then, please take some of mine! Over 100 real e-mails come in each day. At three minutes apiece, it will take five hours just to read and respond. Let’s not even think about the messages that take six minutes of work to deal with. Shudder. I’m buried in e-mail and chances are, you’re not far behind. For whatever reason, everyone feels compelled to keep you "in the loop."

Fortunately, being buried alive under electronic missives forced me to develop coping strategies. Let me share some of the nonobvious ones with you. Together, maybe we can start a revolution.

The problem is that readers now bear the burden
Before e-mail, senders shouldered the burden of mail. Writing, stamping, and mailing a letter was a lot of work. Plus, each new addressee meant more postage, so we thought hard about whom to send things to. (Is it worth spending thirty-two cents for Loren to read this letter? Nah….)

E-mail bludgeoned that system in no time. With free sending to an infinite number of people now a reality, every little thought and impulse becomes instant communication. Our most pathetic meanderings become deep thoughts that we happily blast to six dozen colleagues who surely can’t wait. On the receiving end, we collect these gems of wisdom from the dozens around us. The result: Inbox overload.

("But my incoming e-mail is important," you cry. Don’t fool yourself. Time how long you spend at your inbox. Multiply by your per-minute wage(*) to find out just how much money you spend on e-mail. If you can justify that expense, far out—you’re one of the lucky ones. But for many, incoming e-mail is a money suck. Bonus challenge: do this calculation companywide.)

(*) Divide your yearly salary by 120,000 to get your per-minute wage.

Taming e-mail means training the senders to put the burden of quality back on themselves.

How you can send better e-mail
What’s the best way to train everyone around you to better e-mail habits? You guessed it: You go first. First, you say, "In order for me to make you more productive, I’m going to adopt this new policy to lighten your load…" Demonstrate a policy for a month, and if people like it, ask them to start doing it too.

  • Use a subject line to summarize, not describe.

People scan their inbox by subject. Make your subject rich enough that your readers can decide whether it’s relevant. The best way to do this is to summarize your message in your subject.

BAD SUBJECT:

GOOD SUBJECT:

Subject: Deadline discussion

Subject: Recommend we ship product April 25th
  • Give your reader full context at the start of your message.

Too many messages forwarded to you start with an answer—"Yes! I agree. Apples are definitely the answer"—without offering context. We must read seven included messages, notice that we were copied, and try to figure out what apples are the answer to. Even worse, we don’t really know if we should care. Oops! We just noticed there are ten messages about apples. One of the others says "Apples are definitely not the answer." And another says, "Didn’t you get my message about apples?" But which message was sent first? And which was in response to which? ARGH!

It’s very, very difficult to get to the core of the issue.

You’re probably sending e-mail because you’re deep in thought about something. Your reader is too, only they’re deep in thought about something else. Even worse, in a multi-person conversation, messages and replies may arrive out of order. And no, it doesn’t help to include the entire past conversation when you reply; it’s rude to force someone else to wade through ten screens of messages because you’re too lazy to give them context. So, start off your messages with enough context to orient your reader.

BAD E-MAIL:

GOOD E-MAIL:
To: Billy Franklin
From: Robert Payne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Please bring contributions to the charity drive

Yes, apples are definitely the answer.

 To: Billy Franklin
From: Robert Payne
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Please bring contributions to the charity drive.

You asked if we want apple pie. Yes, apples are definitely the answer.

  • When you copy lots of people (a heinous practice that should be used sparingly), mark out why each person should care.

Just because you send a message to six poor coworkers doesn’t mean all six know what to do when they get it. Ask yourself why you’re sending to each recipient, and let them know at the start of the message what they should do with it. Big surprise, this also forces you to consider why you’re including each person.

BAD CC:

GOOD CC:
To: Abby Gail, Bill Fold, Cindy Rella
Subject: Web site design draft is done

The Web site draft is done. Check it out in the attached file. The design firm will need our responses by the end of the week.

 To: Abby Gail, Bill Fold, Cindy Rella
Subject: Web site design draft is done

AG: DECISION NEEDED. Get marketing to approve the draft

BF: PLEASE VERIFY. Does the slogan capture our branding?

CR: FYI, if we need a redesign, your project will slip.

The Web site draft is done. Check it out in the attached file. The design firm will need our responses by the end of the week.

  • Use separate messages rather than bcc (blind carbon copy).

If you bcc someone "just to be safe," think again. Ask yourself what you want the "copied" person to know, and send a separate message if needed.Yes, it’s more work for you, but if we all do it, it’s less overload.

BAD BCC:

GOOD BCC:
To: Fred
Bcc: Chris

Please attend the conference today at 2:00 p.m.

To: Fred

Please attend the conference today at 2:00 p.m.

To: Chris

Please reserve the conference room for me and Fred today at 2:00 p.m.

  • Make action requests clear.

If you want things to get done, say so. Clearly. There’s nothing more frustrating as a reader than getting copied on an e-mail and finding out three weeks later that someone expected you to pick up the project and run with it. Summarize action items at the end of a message so everyone can read them at one glance.

  • Separate topics into separate e-mails … up to a point.

If someone sends a message addressing a dozen topics, some of which you can respond to now and some of which you can’t, send a dozen responses—one for each topic. That way, each thread can proceed unencumbered by the others.

Do this when mixing controversy with mundania. That way, the mundane topics can be taken care of quietly, while the flame wars can happen separately.

BAD MIXING OF ITEMS:

GOOD MIXING OF ITEMS:

We need to gather all the articles by February 1st.

Speaking of which, I was thinking … do you think we should fire Sandy?

Message #1: We need to gather all the articles by February 1st.

Message #2: Sandy’s missed a lot of deadlines recently. Do you think termination is in order?

  • Combine separate points into one message.

Sometimes the problem is the opposite—sending 500 tiny messages a day will overload someone, even if the intent is to reduce this by creating separate threads. If you are holding a dozen open conversations with one person, the slowness of typing is probably substantial overhead. Jot down all your main points on a piece of (gasp) paper, pick up the phone, and call the person to discuss those points. I guarantee you’ll save a ton of time.

  • Edit forwarded messages.

For goodness sake, if someone sends you a message, don’t forward it along without editing it. Make it appropriate for the ultimate recipient and make sure it doesn’t get the original sender in trouble.

BAD FORWARDING:

GOOD FORWARDING:
To: Bill

Sue’s idea, described below, is great.

—

From: Sue

Hey, Abner:

Let’s take the new design and add sparkles around the border. Bill probably won’t mind; his design sense is so garish he’ll approve anything.

To: Bill

Sue’s idea, described below, is great.

—

From: Sue

Hey, Abner:

Let’s take the new design and add sparkles around the border…

  • When scheduling a call or conference, include the topic in the invitation. It helps people prioritize and manage their calendar more effectively.

BAD E-MAIL:

GOOD E-MAIL:
Subject: Conference call Wednesday at 3:00 p.m.

 Subject: Conference call Wednesday at 3:00 p.m. to review demo presentation.
  • Make your e-mail one page or less.

Make sure the meat of your e-mail is visible in the preview pane of your recipient’s mailer. That means the first two paragraphs should have the meat. Many people never read past the first screen, and very few read past the third.

  • Understand how people prefer to be reached, and how quickly they respond.

Some people are so buried under e-mail that they can’t reply quickly. If something is important, use the phone or make a follow-up phone call. Do it politely; a delay may not be personal. It might be that someone’s overloaded. If you have time-sensitive information, don’t assume people have read the e-mail you sent three hours ago rescheduling the meeting that takes place in five minutes. Pick up the phone and call.

How to read and receive e-mail
Setting a good example only goes so far. You also have to train others explicitly. Explain to them that you’re putting some systems in place to help you manage your e-mail overload. Ask for their help, and know that they’re secretly envying your strength of character.

  • Check e-mail at defined times each day.

We hate telemarketers during dinner, so why do we tolerate e-mail when we’re trying to get something useful done? Turn off your e-mail "autocheck" and only check e-mail two or three times a day, by hand. Let people know that if they need to reach you instantly, e-mail isn’t the way. When it’s e-mail processing time, however, shut the office door, turn off the phone, and blast through the messages.

  • Use a paper "response list" to triage messages before you do any follow-up.

The solution to e-mail overload is pencil and paper? Who knew? Grab a legal pad and label it "Response list." Run through your incoming e-mails. For each, note on the paper what you have to do or whom you have to call. Resist the temptation to respond immediately. If there’s important reference information in the e-mail, drag it to your Reference folder. Otherwise, delete it. Zip down your entire list of e-mails to generate your response list. Then, zip down your response list and actually do the follow-up.

  • Charge people for sending you messages.

One CEO I’ve worked with charges staff members five dollars from their budget for each e-mail she receives. Amazingly, her overload has gone down, the relevance of e-mails has gone up, and the senders are happy, too, because the added thought often results in them solving more problems on their own.

  • Train people to be relevant.

If you are constantly copied on things, begin replying to e-mails that aren’t relevant with the single word: "Relevant?" Of course, you explain that this is a favor to them. Now, they can learn what is and isn’t relevant to you. Beforehand, tell them the goal is to calibrate relevance, not to criticize or put them down and encourage them to send you relevancy challenges as well. Pretty soon, you’ll be so well trained you’ll be positively productive!

  • Answer briefly.

When someone sends you a ten page missive, reply with three words. "Yup, great idea." You’ll quickly train people not to expect huge answers from you, and you can then proceed to answer at your leisure in whatever format works best for you. If your e-mail volume starts getting very high, you’ll have no choice.

  • Send out delayed responses.

Type your response directly, but schedule it to be sent out in a few days. This works great for conversations that are nice but not terribly urgent. By inserting a delay in each go-around, you both get to breathe easier.

(In Outlook, choose Options when composing a message and select Do not deliver before. In Eudora, hold down the Shift key as you click Send.)

  • Ignore it.

Yes, ignore e-mail. If something’s important, you’ll hear about it again. Trust me. And people will gradually be trained to pick up the phone or drop by if they have something to say. After all, if it’s not important enough for them to tear their gaze away from the hypnotic world of Microsoft Windows, it’s certainly not important enough for you to take the time to read.

Your only solution is to take action
Yeah, yeah, you have a million reasons why these ideas can never work in your workplace. Hogwash. I use every one of them and can bring at least a semblance of order to my inbox. So choose a technique and start applying it. While you practice, I’ll be on vacation, accumulating a 2,000 message backlog for when I get home. If you want to know how well I cope, just send along an e-mail and ask….

In Praise of the Corporation

I’m in awe. Normally, I’m not a huge fan of big corporations. I think they often (but not always) dehumanize the people who work there. They can ruin communities in the name of efficient and cost-cutting, and they distribute wealth in truly bizarre ways. But… But… They’re amazing! Not just a little amazing; they’re frickin’ mind-blowing amazing!

Today I was getting lunch at Subway and the regional manager was there helping them tune up their processes so they can deliver the same quality as measured by customer feedback as several thousand other franchises. Not only do they do it today but they will do it every day going forward, rain or shine.

Have you ever thought about that? How incredible it is? There’s never before been a civilization that could do that on such a scale once, much less thousands of times. And we take it for granted that any large company will be able to scale like that.

And the things we do… Building the ancient pyramids is considered a Wonder of the Ancient World. We build buildings that are a thousand times more complex and sophisticated, on a regular basis. We rarely even ask “is a half-mile high building feasible?” Of course it is. We’ll find a way to do it; the limitation we focus on is funding. We know we can master the technological challenges. We know we can get the supplies made to spec. We know that we can coordinate the hundreds or thousands of people it will take to pull it together. And that’s unprecedented in human history.

The modern corporation has taught us to create systems larger than any one person could ever create. It has taught us to create flows of materials and information that span the globe, enabling us to coordinate people and projects on a level that can change the whole planet. And most astonishing, these organizations keep working even though the people who comprise them come and go. Popular business mythology aside, our ability to create and share process has made our achievements largely independent of any single person. The skills and abilities reside in the structure of the systems as much as (or more than) the individuals.

Tomorrow I’m sure I’ll be back to battling the not-so-nice parts of business. But today, I celebrate the corporation, an invention that has raised the human race to levels of accomplishment we have never before dreamt of. Savour it. Appreciate it. Enjoy it. Because it has enabled you to live in the most extraordinary time ever in human history.

“Challenge questions” on websites reduce security.

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I just got finished answering nine security questions for my payroll processing login. You know the kind, “What was the first name of the person you first kissed on the lips (pets don’t count)?”

Supposedly, these questions make us all more secure. I think they make us less secure.

They used to say, “Choose a really hard-to-guess password. Don’t use your mother’s maiden name, or anything that would be easy for someone to guess.” In those days, if a thief wanted to break into your account, they had to figure out two things: 1) what easy-to-remember password you chose—for example, your mother’s maiden name—and 2) what it actually was, for example, Judy Dench.

Now, banks and other “secure” institutions happily take half of the effort out of that equation. By virtue of the challenge question, they already tell a would-be hacker which piece of information they need. All the hacker needs to do is find that piece of information. It shouldn’t be hard, given that 99% of the sites that use these challenge questions ask for the same paltry, easily-obtained pieces of information.

I make up random answers to these “secure” questions, so they’re really pretty much impossible to guess. But since I had to do nine of them for my payroll service, I had to write all nine down. I’ll never remember them otherwise.

And now the universe collapses on itself: The ridiculously convoluted, insecure challenge question system is silly and insecure. To make it secure, I had to choose hard-to-guess answers. But I can’t commit nine to memory, so I had to write them down, making them insecure again.

It shouldn’t surprise me, though. My payroll company’s HTTPS security certificate had the wrong hostname on it, and their system only worked on Internet Explorer. With technical prowess like that, I can imagine that deep down inside, they haven’t the foggiest clue what constitutes security.

Sadly at this point, neither do I.

One woman’s story divorcing her technology

In my book, I discuss the need to “divorce your technology” to eliminate distractions in your life. One woman wrote in telling her story of divorcing her technology.

Dear Stever-

I hadn’t even finished the introduction of your new book before benefitting from it. The preview of the nine steps begins with “… a lot of what you call work has very little to do with getting anything important done in life. Like when I compulsively check my social media sites every hour. That kind of thing must go.”

I’ve noticed how much time I waste reading blogs with Google Reader. I’d planned to use some upcoming travel as a natural disruption for that habit. I don’t want to waste my travel time staying caught up on blogs.

I’ve already tried organizing them into folders like “Sometimes” and “Rarely”. It didn’t work. It bugs me when I see the number of unread posts build up, and I waste time marking things read. They had to go.

“But, but, but –“, I thought, ” I really LIKE some of them. I might want to read them again, and I’ll never find them if I unsubscribe.”   I made a parking lot file and started copying and pasting links. This was a full-on illustration of why they must go.  After  an hour and a half had elapsed, I’d wandered through many interesting posts on language, holistic learning, travel tips,  how to write a thesis, learning styles, and found three new interesting blogs.  Total unsubscribes: 25.

Then I found the Manage Subscriptions link.  How appalling — I discovered I was still subscribed to 135 blogs.  That’s almost Intervention levels.  No wonder there was always something fresh to read when I visit the Google Reader site.

I booted all the blogs I new were no longer interesting or active.  Then I exported the list as my snapshot of Someday I May Need This.

After the first cut I got it down to 74. Still appalling, but a sort of progress.

The remaining blogs fall into four categories:

1) Stuff I’m Supposed To Read But Don’t Actually Like.  This includes tech industry news, and cool kid blogs like Io 9.  After sleeping on it for a night, I’m ok letting them go. After all, I have a parking lot list.

2) Reading About An Exciting Life Instead Of Having One.  When I pick up a hobby I subscribe to blogs. Sometimes  I spend more time reading about things than doing them. Sometimes these blogs intimidate me so much it’s safer to read than to do.

3) Legitimate but Indiscriminate.  Can I tell you how many travel blogs I subscribed to?  Once I see a few more posts, a couple will wind up being keepers. This time I’ll ditch the rest.

4) The Good Stuff.  These are the few, the proud where I read every post. For some, I know the author and want to keep up on their life. A couple are genuine industry experts.  ( Thankfully, none are prodigious posters.)  There are a couple newspaper feeds that I skim and liberally mark all read.

After all that I’m down to “only” 44. That’s still dangerous.  I’ve set up Leechblock to give me a maximum of 20 minutes per day.  Between that and spotty Internet access, I think I’ll break the habit.

I had already realized “I should spend less time reading blogs”.  Your book connected the dots for me,  to become “… because it’s in lieu of anything important to me, and not in support of it.”  Thank you for a timely insight. I look forward to reading the rest of the book.

Productivity Before the Cloud

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I said to my friend, “I’m so happy!!! I have DropBox configured so I can access my important files from anywhere. What in the world did we do before the cloud?”

Then I stopped. I realized I was alive before the cloud. How did I access my important files back then? Oh, yeah. They were in a notebook. I popped it in my $29 knapsack and carried them around with me. All my important files, available everywhere I wanted to go.

These days, I pop my laptop into that knapsack. The laptop is heavier than the paper files used to be. Then I add the power cords. And the wireless USB dongle. And my headphones. Then I lug it all until I find someplace that has WiFi, pay $14.95 for the privilege of accessing their WiFi, and access my files that I can view 2/3 of a screen at a time. And by the way, I now pay a substantial monthly fee for my internet connection at home for all this convenience.

“But this way, you don’t have to think about what to put in your knapsack! Everything’s at your fingertips,” my rationalizing gadget-loving brain cries. Uh, huh. That sounds good, but when I watch my actual behavior, literally 30 seconds’ thought before  I leave would be all it takes to figure out which files I need for a given day and pop them into my bag. In fact, I could do that faster than the time it takes me to pack up my power cord. And stopping to do that thinking would probably result in me doing more targeted, more important work, rather than just spazzing from thing to thing in a frenzy of mock-productivity.

Help me understand. Every individual step from there to here felt like progress. But I’m hard-pressed to consider the additional cost (in dollars, complexity, etc.) of the current state of affairs worth the additional output (mainly printing with proportional spaced fonts).

Progress? Or is there a high tech marketing person laughing her head off in some hidden back room, as she jots down notes in pencil, on her yellow pad, that fits neatly inside her thin, lightweight, fashionable backpack?

Is the Net changing the way YOU think? Sure has, me.

I just read this article in the Atlantic about how the Net has changed the way the article’s author thinks. He’s wondering what the larger, societal effects will be. Being The Atlantic, he’s also savvy enough to realize there may be unintended good consequences that can’t be predicted, in addition to the negatives he highlights.

The article gave me pause. Upon reflection, I believe he’s right. Ten years ago, usability expert Jakob Neilson was doing studies that showed people skim online, they don’t read in depth. And it’s pretty clear from anyone who’s spent five minutes in a browser that we jump from topic to topic pretty quickly.

I know that my own writing has changed. I used to love writing longhand in a lined pad, and now can barely form a sentence without having a text editor where I can cut and paste. And as for reading? My tolerance for reading long non-fiction books went away years ago. I inch my way through them now. So do I absorb complicated new information that requires Thought and Contemplation? Er, not nearly as much. Maybe it’s simply that I’m older and busier, but it’s true that the Net has habituated me to sound-bite style reading.

That’s one big worry for my upcoming Get-it-Done Guy book, in fact. Part of the reason it is organized as many, many small micro-chapters is that I don’t believe anyone’s going to read a 200-page book straight through. And if I want to give readers value, it has to come in a form they can use.

How about you?