TonsofTime – Enjoy the now

Are you hesitant to ask a question to a coworker because you expect to find the answer by yourself later? En then later on, you forget what that question was that you thought of when you were studying the subject?

Questions pop up in your mind in the same way as ideas. You have to capture a question, especially if it is a good one, right at the moment you get it.

It can be annoying to bother your client or collegues with unnecessary inquiries. You do not want to ask questions, when you think there is a good chance that you will discover the answer before the end of the day.

But it would be a mistake not to record any questions for that reason. What works very good for me is to still write down any questions that rise to mind, but to postpone sending the questions to my collegue untill at least the end of the day. When the answer is still not evident by that time, I feel free to send an email asking the information to a coworker or customer.

After sending the mail, I copy the text of the question in a list I maintain in Excel.

Columns I use in the list

• Status: New, Open, or Closed
• Date Open
• Date Closed
• Short subject
• Sent to
• Text of the question
• Text of the answer

What I regularly do, is enter questions in the list with the status ‘New’. This means that the question has not been sent yet. At the end of the day (or week, if you prefer) you can send all the questions with the status ‘new’ for which you still need the answers. After sending the question, change its status to ‘open’.

Very eagerly, I read the interview-series titled The Setup. The men and women interviewed, explain what hard- and software they use. ‘Hardware’ includes things like laptops, but also camera’s, microphones and so on. Mostly, the tools people mention are not new to me but sometimes I discover something very interesting.

John MacFarlane is a professor of philosophy at the University of California in Berkeley. He speaks about his creation, the very powerful converter of text markup formats called pandoc.

I use pandoc’s extended markdown for lecture notes, letters, slide presentations, handouts, and short articles. For books and more complex documents, I use LaTeX.

I intend to explore what the extended markdown of pandoc can do for me. I have installed pandoc on my Windows laptop under Cygwin and on my Linux-hosts.

Derek Sivers a writer and serial enterpreneur, has inspired me to start using Anki, about which Derek says:

For learning anything, I use the awesome Anki, which I love so much I donated $500 to. (The author wrote me back, thinking it must have been a PayPal mistake.)

With Anki, it turns out that memorizing things is very easy. The workings of the program are based on the learning theory called Spaced Repitition. At the moment, I am learning LPI level 2 from this and I am teaching my children multiplication. With Ankidroid you can practise even when you are waiting at the train station. It is very effective.

Amongst the many inspiring interviews, one final:

Steve Coast is an architect @Microsoft and founder of Openstreetmap. Steve Coast uses the library often as a source of reading material.

I use the library a lot. King County in Washington State has the most traffic of any US library, or so they claim. I refuse, typically, to buy Kindle or other books with a zero resale value. I’m keenly aware that the same information can be had in multiple forms. For example a book can be Kindle, Nook, Hardback, HB 2nd hand, Paperback, PB 2nd hand, Library, audio book (audible.com), Library audio book. I don’t care how I get the information, therefore I may as well have the lowest cost access.

This short ‘howto’ describes:

• putting the home directory of Cygwin on Dropbox
• making the todotxt.cfg work on all Windows(*) machines, regardless of the directory where your Dropbox is located.

(*) This only works on Windows Vista and higher.

Background
Since a month or so, I use the open source task management script todotxt of Gina Trapani. I am enthousiastic about the uses of this system, so I have spent some time optimizing it. Below is a description of a few hacks that I use.

Because the computers that I use daily are Windows based, I decided to install Cygwin so that I can deploy the original todotxt.sh bash-script. Running the todo system from the command line has a lot of advantages, like easier search and selection, tab completion, easier adding of todo’s, etc.

If you want to know how to set up todotxt.sh under Cygwin, please read this short manual. Here, I asume that the reader is already familiar with using todotxt.sh in this way.

Putting the Cygwin home directory on Dropbox
When your Cygwin home directory is replicated to all your Windows machines, so are all your Unix terminal programs settings. When, for instance, you have created some aliases by editing your .bashrc file, it is very nice to be able to use these on all your Cygwin-machines. The same goes for your .vimrc or even your history!

The script todotxt.sh is also located in your home-directory and when the home directory is replicated by Dropbox, you only have to upgrade your todotxt.sh installation once to keep all your Windows Cygwin machines up-to-date.

1. Stop Cygwin
2. Make a backup copy of the directory C:\Cygwin\home\{yourname} to a safe location.
3. Move (not copy) the directory C:\Cygwin\home\{yourname} to your Dropbox. I have moved the home directory to the location {Dropbox}\settings\cygwinhome.
4. Create a symbolic link to the Dropbox location with the utility mklink.

Below is an example.

mklink /d c:\cygwin\home\ton c:\Users\ton\Dropbox\settings\cygwinhome

This command creates a directory link with the name ‘ton’ (my username) that points to the cygwinhome-directory on your Dropbox. Of course, you should substitute ‘ton’ with your own Windows user name.

This function to create links is not available on Windows versions older than Vista.

Making the todotxt.cfg file roaming
I also use the Android-app Todotxt Touch and therefore, I would like to keep the location of the todo.txt file to the default. Therefore, I do not place my todo.txt file in my Cygwin home directory.

If you edit the todotxt.cfg file, the first lines may look like this:

# === EDIT FILE LOCATIONS BELOW ===

# Your todo.txt directory
export TODO_DIR="/cygdrive/c/users/ton/Dropbox/todo"
#export TODO_DIR=`dirname "$0"`


There can easily be a problem with this. On the family laptop, for instance, my username is ‘papa’ and my Dropbox is located on the path:
C:\Users\papa\Dropbox

and the todotxt.cfg configuration line would have to read:

# Your todo.txt directory
export TODO_DIR="/cygdrive/c/users/papa/Dropbox/todo"


Do you see the problem? If you want to be able to put your todotxt script and config file on a central location, there should be one uniform todo.txt directory that is also on Dropbox.

The solution? Another mklink hack. On the family laptop, I have used the following command:

mklink /d C:\dbtb C:\Users\papa\Dropbox

Now the top of my todotxt.cfg reads something like this:

# === EDIT FILE LOCATIONS BELOW ===

# Your todo.txt directory
export TODO_DIR="/cygdrive/c/dbtb/todo"
#export TODO_DIR=`dirname "$0"`


The trick here is that if you create the equivalent directory link on all your Windows machines (pointing to your various Dropbox locations), you can use the same todotxt.cfg on all of them.

I hope this helps you enjoy a centralised Cygwin home directory and roaming use of the excellent todotxt.sh!

A quote from the biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. He writes about the parody that Guy Kawasaki had published about Apple buying Next and making Jobs its CEO, about 2 years before this really happened at Apple.

Isaacson first describes Kawasaki’s spoofed press release about the takeover. And then he writes:

But reality has an odd habit of catching up with satire

How true!

In the country I live in, the polical party the PVV is in fact the reality and the so called ‘Tegenpartij‘ was the satire.

Thanks to my Facebook friend Nico Veenkamp, I stumbled upon a video about the physical aspects of the Internet: datacenters and communication hubs. This video also features the city that inspires me: New York.

Bundled, Buried & Behind Closed Doors from Ben Mendelsohn on Vimeo.

I strongly recommend you to watch this 17″ video. It is about the enormous threat we are facing by putting all our processes online on the Internet. Cyber crime and ciber terrorism are growing and they have the funds to hire programmers and testers.

A Buddhist comes at a hot-dog stand and asks for a hot-dog. The salesman asks: “Do you want one with sauerkraut or with mustard?” The Buddhist replies: “Make me one with everything.”

In the latest issue of the magazine Intelligent Life (a publication by The Economist, see the website here), Robert Butler writes that environmentalists are often irritating, because their arguments are most times one-sided communications.

Butler advises that ‘we’ (by this he means the environmentalists) should engage with others in a more humble way and try to open the conversation by inviting them to look at the issue from our standpoint. Columbo often does this by very modest way saying that ‘something’ has been puzzling him, keeping him up al night. The other person, usually a upper class murderer who thinks he can outwit this crumbly looking older man, in a kind of arrogant way complies with this invitation to look at the mystery through the vision of the detective. In this way, the millionaire killer often convicts himself, not seldom because he underestimates Columbo.

So the way that Robert Butler advizes the Greens to act more like this American-Italian police man amused me.

This week, I saw an episode of Columbo on cable. He was talking to a collegue, a forensic specialist who was working for more that 15 years on murder cases and he thought he had commited the perfect murder. Within the next 30 minutes of this episode, Columbo will get this man to admit he has killed the victim.

Columbo askes his collegue, who by then was not an official suspect yet, to visit the crime scene with him.

“I think I will go to the place again where the murder took place. Will you come with me? Three eyes will see more than one.”

I enjoyed reading this recent post by Cal Newport titled: When Working Right Is More Important Than Finding The Right Work. The main subject of this article is that there is no such thing as ‘the perfect job’, but given the circumstances, you can make a lot of different jobs rewarding and enjoyable when you approach them with the right attitude and zeal.

This reminds me of the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Chicago psychology professor who coined the term ‘Flow’. Csikszentmihalyi made it very clear for me that in any job that is to a certain level challenging, but not too much, you can reach a state where you can emerge in your task and enjoy it very much. In most of Csikszentmihalyis research, he proved that subjects often change their work a bit to make it more challenging, and that way enjoy the work more. I remember one subject that worked at an assembly line and performed his work with greater precision than he was asked by changing the rules a little bit. That way, this man could reach the ‘Flow’ state.

In Minfullness practise it is often stated that even doing the dishes or brushing your teeth can be enjoyable, given that you do the tasks with your attention completely in the present moment. I have experienced myself that this is true.

There was nothing intrinsically bad about Thomas’ prior jobs. The problem was his mindset. He was obsessed with the fantasy of a perfect job, and this obsession led him to find fault with the work actually available.

He left the Zen Mountain Monastery with an important understanding: finding the right work pales in importance to learning how to work right.

This excellent article on Study Hacks concludes with the following quote:

“No matter what kind of work I do or where I live in the world, I realized that I am the same person with the same set of likes and dislikes,” Thomas told me. No new job can change these realities. That effort is up to you.

A few days ago, I read this article: How to Beat Procrastination. I can recommend it for everyone who is interested in psychology and wants to know more about the mental mechanisms that are involved in procrastination, based on scientific research. As an extra, this article ends with advice about how you can counteract your own inclinations towards procrastination.

On my wish-list is the book The Thief of Time (also from the University of Oxford) and I have been postponing (sic!) ordering this book, because I hoped that there would be a Kindle issue available for it, but alas, there hasn’t been. I will order the paper copy then. (See also this post on Tonsoftime.)

The article on Lesswrong is largely based on the psychological book The Procrastination Equation by Pierce Steel.

I think I will read more on Lesswrong, I have discovered the site just last week.