Silver Clipboard

Best Timer Ever: The Invisible Clock

For a long time, I searched in vain for the perfect timer. Many moons went by with my desires unfulfilled. Until, lo, I came upon the Invisible Clock and was happy.

The Invisible Clock has all the usual features one would expect of a timer, a basic countdown timer, alarms, stopwatch function, a nifty meeting timer, but the real gold in this clock is its custom timer.

The custom timer allows you to sent some length of time (say an hour) then have the timer go off and predetermined intervals, e.g. when 45 minutes left are left, and then 5 minutes left. The blessing of this little machine is it will infinitely loop the custom timer and signal different alarms for the different predetermined intervals.

I leave mine on constantly set to a thirty five minute timer. My Invisible Clock vibrates quietly once when thirty minutes have past and again when five minutes have past. In this way it keeps me on track working thirty minutes at a time with five minute breaks in between. The timer seems custom made for productivity strategies like Merlin Mann’s (10+2)*5 procrastination hack.

If you are interested in completely checking out all the functions and how they work of the invisible clock the instructions are available for download.

Click here to buy the Invisible Clock

Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero Talk at Google

Merlin Mann gave a presentation at Google titled ‘Inbox Zero’ about how to manage your email. Merlin ruthlessly views email as an information delivery mechanism: once you have what you need, chuck the email. Emails are not letters or, as he often says, ‘Each email is not a little hug’.

One source of tension with my wife is her email management. It’s really my problem as I can’t help but look over her shoulder when she loads gmail and see that she has 276 unread emails in her inbox among the thousands of other read messages. Being the sneaking, meddling person that I am I played the audio version of Merlin’s talk on our road trip across America while she dozed, semi-conscious, in the car. By the end she was awake, listening, and hopefully feeling more guilty about her email.

[Click here to view Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero Talk]

You can also read more about Merlin’s email philosophy at InboxZero.com

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Photograph by brookenovak

Doane Paper

While sitting in a meeting, Chad Doane noticed that all the design guys used grid paper and all the marketing guys used legal pads. In an attempt to bring the two sides together he designed a hybrid grid-legal paper. It’s a neat idea and available for sale at his website or for free download.

[Try out Doane Paper]

How Ubiquitous Capture is Vital for Creative Work

Scheduling creativity is a fool’s task. You can’t sit at a computer and decide ‘now is the time I will be creative’. However you can force yourself to work on existing projects.

Ideas appear when the neurons firing in your brain make a new connection. Creativity is random. The good news is you don’t have to do anything to make it happen. The bad news is that you can’t force it to happen.

In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King describes the creative process as it happened to him while working as a handyman at his old high school.

One day [Harry, a coworker] and I were supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls’ shower. I looked around the locker room… There were no urinals, of course, and there were two extra metal boxes on the tile walls.. I asked what was in them. “Pussy plugs,” Harry said. “For them certain days of the month.”

I also noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boys’ locker room, had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached. You could actually shower in privacy.

…I started seeing the opening scene of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains, or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn’t know what it is, and the others girls — grossed out, horrified, amused — start pelting her with sanitary napkins… The girl begins to scream. All that blood! She thinks she’s dying, that the other girls are making fun of her even while she’s bleeding to death. She reacts, fights back, but how?

I’d read an article in Life magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergeist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena… There was some evidence to suggest that young people might have such powers, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first— Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescence cruelty and telekinesis, came together and I had an idea.

That idea eventually grew in to his first novel, Carrie and started his prolific career. But Stephen King wasn’t trying to come up with an idea for a book. It just happened because creativity is random.

The fleeting, random nature of thoughts is what makes ubiquitous capture is so important. When an idea pops into your head, no matter how important or trivial, or how good or poor, write it down immediately. You should keep a pad of paper on you at all times to capture ideas.

Even though creativity is beyond your control, if you practice ubiquitous capture you will always have a stock of ideas to draw from when you sit down to work. Once you get into the habit of capture, you will discover that it is a self-feeding process. The more you capture your ideas, the more aware you become of your own thoughts and the more you have to capture. Get a notepad and get to work.

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Photograph by Chris Metcalf

Jerry Seinfeld and Productivity

Lifehacker has an article on Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret. The key, he says, to writing good jokes is to write them every day. But how to keep yourself motivated? He suggests keeping a calendar just for writing. Every day that you manage to write, put a big red ‘X’ through the day. Your only job is now not to break that chain of ‘X’s. The longer you make the chain, the less you will want to break it. This strategy is adaptable for any habit or action that you want to do on a daily basis.

The story at lifehacker is told seconds hand, so while it may be apocryphal, it is nevertheless valuable. I’ve adapted it for growing a pile of index cards on my desk and it certainly works. If I write for thirteen days straight, skipping out on the fourteenth day is made very unappealing by the thought of having to throw out those thirteen cards and starting over.

[Read the article at lifehacker]

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Photograph by jurek d.