I just checked out Joel on Software again after a long hiatus during which I cared not for accessible talk of software development best practices. Fog Creek has a new product, available for free, called Trello.

It’s essentially a simple way of storing lists of todo lists online, working with them, assigning them to people, and tracking completion. I’m using it right now to manage my own personal development/art projects and it’s pretty sweet.

It’s true what they say about recording todos being relaxing. I’ve just written down a plot sketch for a story, blocked out two screenplay outlines I might combine, added two lists for tracking some sales leads, planned post production for a video I’m working on, planned production on another, blocked out two software ideas in my head, and made a quick todo list for learning more about Kinect hacking.

I wasn’t fully aware of all of it until I put it all into Trello. At some level all of that was/is living in my head causing me “argh, I should really be…” stress. Now it’s all online, and prioritized, into nested lists. Now I can choose what to do and not do and use The Now Habit to crunch through some of it.

All this took maybe 1/2 hour — maybe less. inb4 “you should go do things instead of organizing things to do and then blogging it.” Somehow Trello’s also made me confident enough to stop using email for todos and get to inbox zero.

Trello is designed for teams but scales down to a singleton really well, and you can log in with your Google account (single sign-on is finally happening peeps).

No word yet on the ultimate software design test: is it better than a piece of paper? It’s certainly more fun and just as quick, which is a good start — it’s a program you can think in, which is rare.

And there’s also a mobile app.

It’s that time of the liturgical year again: the jihad against norms; Lent.

It’s supposed to be about fasting, about giving things up, which is why Fat Tuesday is such a big party: Ash Wednesday is the first day of the rest of your eternal life.

But the Lenten fast can contribute, I think, to a poverty of experience — and I’m not sure giving things up really works as a method of self improvement. That thinking implies that you’re already perfect and just need to shed some cruftybads. I prefer to work on building skills, on adding happiness to my life.

To that end, my Lenten jihad is against procrastination. No promises, but my Now Habit system is working swimmingly — after 40+ solid days I might have some nice stats to share.

Today I had a tough conversation with a professor. He said that I was talented, and that my procrastination problems made him feel sad for me.

Thanks to Jared this blog has a minor reputation in the productivity sphere. His post on GTD with Evernote is an MPF classic. But GTD doesn’t work for me. It’s too high-level. It presupposes a level of organization utterly foreign to me. It assumes the answer to my productivity problems is to make my completely-nonexistent system more efficient.

What do you do if you can’t even start? What if you’re not just disorganized, but anti-organized? What if productivity setups you come into contract with implode?

Despite Merlin’s disdain for the Lifehacker crowd (“joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging“), Lifehacker’s shotgun-survey method of productivity tools dredged up a winning suggestion: The Now Habit.

The thesis of The Now Habit is that procrastination is not a problem, it’s a symptom. The problem is anxiety, which is treatable. Entrenched procrastination, divorced from the underlying condition, is not treatable. It’s the only productivity book I’ve read which feels like it addresses problems I actually have instead of ones I’d like to. If you feel like “schedule time to do your weekly review” is a vaguely humorous existential joke the book might interest you.

Essentially The Now Habit, a very quick read, boils down to a powerful change in point of view: that workaholism makes workaholism necessary (entrenched procrastinators can easily be end-of-cycle workaholics), that procrastination is incurable because it’s not the problem, and that creating, identifying, and defending lots of downtime is an essential productivity skill. It moves procrastination away from Puritan morality (“work harder”) and towards positive psychology (“think different”).

If Getting Things Done seems like too much work then check out The Now Habit. First, the systems are compatible. Second, TNH requires very little effort, most of it fun: plan your time off before you plan your work; orient your thinking towards the well-deserved break and away from dreading the task; work in little chunks and follow them with outsized rewards.

I am notoriously disorganized.

One morning when Ryley and Jared came over to pick me up for a camping trip we’d been talking about for weeks I was completely unprepared. I shoved some clothes in my backpack and walked out, completely unprepared for the weather we encountered.

I didn’t pack for my last European vacation until midnight the day before our early morning flight. I finished just in time.

I just moved to London and finished packing, again, moments before my ride to the airport showed up. I went over the allowable weight at baggage check and ended up forgetting some important cables, costing me a couple of decabux.

My todo lists, historically, go unreviewed. I find them almost useless as daily carryovers build up causing anxiety and eventually I just give up and deal with high-priority emergencies.

But no more. I have too much going on. Packing luggage is one thing, but too many sheer tasks go into getting even small film projects done. Something as simple as renting equipment requires a shuttle-launch-style checklist: batteries, lights, tripods, damage, settings, cables, mics, screens, gels, monitors, communication gear, etc. All backed up by potentially hefty financial penalties.

Already I’ve learned: if you don’t check it, plan for it to fail.

I am also poor, so the iPhone is out. I walked into Rogers and got their dirt-cheapest student phone, the Nokia Surge 6790, and it’s been effing amazing. First, let me say that this is my first new phone in ages and I’m surprised at how the state of the norm has advanced.

It’s a slide phone which I haven’t had before. It’s candybar-style, but with a screen (that rotates digitally) which slides back to reveal a full, physical keyboard. I got an unlimited texting program and have been greatly enjoying the lack of T9 and ease of double-thumbed texting. I’ve been tweeting like crazy from it.

It plays MP3s, with MP3 ringtones. I’ve loaded it up with rap and Zevon and I can set per-contact ringtone-songs: East Coast rappers for my Ontariommies and West Coast gangsta shxt for those back home. It has a speaker that blasts tunes about as well as my laptop and rocks hands-free calls.

The phone has a 2MP camera that shoots video with some fun on-camera photo editing options (borders, color inversion, different toning options, some more advanced stuff). I have an SLR and shoot in HD-or-better for school, but this is good for messing around and making stylish photos of people to go with their contacts.

I have timers set on it to go to a slideshow of my photos after ten seconds of inactivity and then go into powersaver and lock the keypad after one minute. Those seem to be fun — I like putting the phone on a desk, catching a couple of good pics, and then having it shut down.

Best, I just figured out my first-ever use of Bluetooth: I can wirelessly sync it with my Mac through iSync, and transfer files (music, photos). I always have my MacBook with me (paper notes are 90s-style) so: assignments and class and shooting schedules go into iCal, phone pulls them down and pings me when I have to go do something.

I’m very close to my ideal of being bossed around by a device I find fun, I trust, and that I control to my satisfaction. An electronic friend I can chat with, who’s always helpfully on top of my schedule: *ping* time for Editing, *ping* time to return the camera to avoid fines, *ping* time for yoga, *ping* take your meds!

It’s one downfall is that, insanely, it takes a 2.5mm headphone jack (chances are that what you think of as a “headphone jack” is the 3.5mm kind). Out of the five or so sets of phones I have around here it’s only compatible with those with which it shipped. Longer-term this means I need a 2.5mm -> 3.5mm adapter, as I don’t want to carry multiple sets of phones around (need good over-the-ear ones for school).

All-in I’m pretty happy with my new little friend. I think he cost just over $30 with a three-year contract. Oh, and it came with a game called Marble Cannon — Zuma meets Breakout meets pinball — and I’m fully addicted.

I’ve been falling down the rabbit hole on my iPhone game — again. I’m getting too wrapped up in details: “I should shade this graphic better”, “that would look nice with a color gradient”, “I should extend the Bézier curve perpendicularly to its tangent, not just horizontally”, etc.

This is all, essentially, polish. I still need to do sound and music, for example. It’s just fun to polish because I know how to work with features I’ve already implemented — they have a high tweak/reward ratio.

In professional development, which is what I’m ostensibly doing, there are three(-ish) key project management trail markers you’re looking to hit, the ABCs of game development:

1. Alpha: The game is feature-complete. No new features need to be written, existing code needs debugging. All art/sound assets should exist, if not in final form.
2. Beta: All art/sound assets should be final. Code should be stable and fixes limited to high-priority bugs.
3. Candidate: Good for submission to your publisher. Fixes limited to crashes (shouldn’t exist), guideline violations (breaking the rules of your publisher’s platform), or legal issues.

You then iterate on candidates until one is accepted and released. My game, under these definitions, is still pre-alpha — I’d like to get it there before I leave for Europe next week. Then any work I do on it in Amsterdam will be improvement, not implementation.

I’ve been going through my clothes making three piles: keep, donate, and scrap.

“Scrap” is anything that has a hole, however small. I figure not even the homeless want that stuff. I’ve wanted to make stuffed animals and other toys for a while and I decided that my scrap pile is a good source of materials.

As with any new endeavor, first I had to learn the terminology. I googled around About.com and found a basic workflow…

1. Dismantle fabrics.
2. Design a pattern.
3. Sew the pattern.
4. Decorate.
5. Stuff.

… as well as some info on basic techniques.

Dismantling clothing is relatively difficult because, perhaps rightly, wearable items aren’t designed for disassembly. The basic idea is to take a fabric separator and loosen all the stitches, but I’ve been using an exacto-knife with mixed results (careful not to cut yourself or destroy the fabric).

Pattern design largely involves skills similar to drawing — break the object down into easier component shapes, then render those. A large cylinder, a sphere, and a couple of tubes makes a person, thusly: o+<

Sewing the pattern is difficult, but I just learned a trick: yo-yos. These are little modular chunks that you can just sit there and sew during any kind of downtime, like when your code is building. Yo-yos decouple prep work from a variety of designs. You can dismantle a bunch of fabric, turn it all into yo-yos, and then look at what you have and see what you can make, like witches and Frankensteins.

Decoration is down to taste. I’m experimenting with different kinds of line drawing (which is easy to do with a needle and thread).

Stuff the beast with fiberfill or various kinds of beans, or mechaskeleton & a voicebox. Add electronics and weapons and glowing red LED lights to taste.

I just finished a very promising sales call. Roughly:

Me: So send me a design brief and I’ll fire you off a quote.
Contact: Oh, we uh, don’t have one of those yet…
Me: Oh, well, let’s talk online and I’ll help you guys figure out what you want.

My goal in this interaction is to get them excited (possibly with prototypes) to the point where they say, “look, could you just do it? We want it ASAP and you already know what we’re looking for.”

Fingers crossed — here’s to tracking the work I do “for free” as a tax deduction.

On a more basic HOWTO level, when I make a business call I like to write the person’s name, number, and company at the top of a piece of paper, sketch out some answers to their likely questions, then take notes on what they’re saying during the conversation. The sheet goes in my permanent records when I’m done.

I have a pretty good case of telephone anxiety and a ridiculous amount of planning helps. I find having The Beatles’ Abbey Road medley playing quietly helps too.

Re: Making calls — Tony Robbins sez you should just plan to make one call, an easy one, then call that a success for the day. In the worst cases I send a brief spurt of short personal emails and then try to slip the business communication in while I’m on a roll. Once you see that first call go well you’ll be motivated to keep going — the first one is the problem.

I use the same basic idea, combined with some productivity ideas from my homies in the biz and in grad school, to get the coding ball rolling. Another trick there is to not stress about slacking — just acknowledge it and start with the smallest doable next-task to get the ball rolling again (mixing Robbins, GTD, and a little Buddhist meditation).

Generally I try to organize my task list by “closest time to most money”, which is a finnicky metric you have to figure out for yourself.

CNN has pics of some very tiny home offices for the urban warrior.

Me wantee.

I was talking to Cookie about CNC routers today. I’ve been geeking out so much about two trends that I’ve decided to, you know, do something about them:

1. BC exports too much raw wood.
2. I’ve been really getting into product design.

In essence: I’ve decided to start making things — probably starting with very small scale stuff like toys — out of renewable, farmed, hopefully-cheap, local wood.

But in any case, I’m still focusing on the digital realm (moreso than I have been recently). This is a next-level project. I’m really good at dreaming and I’ve recently stumbled upon a set of golden productivity strategies and tactics that are helping me to deliver. I’m filing this under “in the future, try…”

More later, but if anyone wants to jump on board let me know.

“iPad-ready” has already become a salable business jargon phrase. I closed principle negotiations on a new contract for Samhain today and I was able to use the reality distortion field to judo the meeting into that most-awesome of pre-sales states: excitement.

me: I spent yesterday reading the new iPad documentation and getting up-to-speed on the SDK. Let’s see if we can build an iPad-ready version in 60, oops, I guess now it’s 59, days.

Client: Yes! Sounds fantastic!

Another key technology? Thinking rationally about my own productivity. First, Jill convinced me of an adage I’ve been quoting for a while without, it turns out, truly understanding:

Agenda Books are Weapons that can be used to smash The State*.

Second, through experimentation, I’ve come to the same conclusion as Stefan Sagmeister: unstructured free time isn’t productive (I recommend that link if you’re working overtime regularly). I decided to try the same solution: Scheduling my time like a university student, essentially “giving myself classes” (I suppose that means I should get some kind of review as well).

Through discussion with Jared I thought I’d try having 10 four-hour blocks of time per week, and pre-plot them out on Sunday nights. Photography: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, four hours in the morning.

The immediate payoff, which I didn’t really get until I had tried it, is that structure has a soothing autistic-hugging-machine effect. It adds a dollop of helpful stress to my life, letting me say things like, “gee, I should really get back home it’s time to work on my screenplay“, or, “I schedule my time in ten four-hour blocks per week. I can shuffle some things around to fit your project in”, as I did in that client meeting.

The key for me is to keep things lightweight and email-notification-based. It would be cool if I could set up a Google Calendar that would text & email me (tweet?) scheduling info. Does such a beast exist or did I just invent something?

* I interpret this as “of Affairs”.