It came out of my musing what I can leverage to help bring Lapsus to market. I was off with a cold for much of the last 2 weeks and the pace of development has slowed to a crawl. I really worry that I won’t be able to even make the May deadline I’ve set myself for the Beta. I just seem to be going so very slowly.

What’s the worst that could happen?

I think my worst fear is that I’ll run out of money before I get to charge for Lapsus. And I definitely don’t want to work my way through all my savings. What am I going to do if I get to May and it’s nowhere near ready? What happens if it runs further than this and all my money runs out?

Then I realised – I was assuming that my savings were my biggest asset. If they were gone, I was working on the notion that I couldn’t develop Lapsus any more and the dream would be dead. The more I thought about this, the more it just didn’t hold water. Let’s say, worst case scenario, I launch version 1 horribly late then no-one buys for ages. Say all my money runs out. What would I do?

Assuming the business case for Lapsus is sound (and the more people I speak to, the more this seems to true), and I can eventually release it, eventually it will start to make a little money. And in the meantime, I’ll have enough experience to get a job as a 9-5 coder to cover my bills. Then the rather obvious truth hit me.

My Greatest Asset is Me

All these worries – running out of money, having to get a job – are totally irrelevant. I’m so committed now I can’t back out. I’m really excited about the prospect of Lapsus existing. So it will happen eventually. And when it does it’s going to be awesome.

My greatest asset is not time or money – it’s me. It’s my skills (limited though they are). It’s my excitement and passion for the product. It’s my ability to spend 6 years thinking obsessively about the same project whilst not losing enthusiasm for it.

The Bottom Line

In business, you need to care for your assets or they don’t serve you well. If my greatest asset is myself, that makes eating cheap, unhealthy food seem very foolish. It shows why obsessive worrying that keeps me awake and exhausted is a really bad idea.

If my biggest asset is me, my biggest priority should be caring for myself. And that will help me to get Lapsus to market faster.

A Question

What would you do differently if you believed your greatest asset was you?

I’ve been a busy boy…

I’ve been thinking about the UI for more than a year now and I’ve produced nearly two whole sketchbooks crammed full of ideas. Although I was tempted to delve in and produce a working interface in code, I wanted to follow best practice and do some testing on a paper prototype first.

I’ve spent the last few days refining ideas and putting together a well thought out interface. I made an interactive prototype with bits of paper and today I conducted my first test with the wonderful and extremely helpful Gavin Montague of Left Brained.

Iceburg, right ahead!

Within minutes of giving Gavin the first user task, it was clear to me that my design was, to not put too fine a point on it, a garbled mess. As the test continued, it bubbled up many assumptions I’d made that turned out to be invalid.

By the end I lost count of the times I thought “That was obvious to me. It’s not to him. That needs to be changed.”
Throughout the process, Gavin came up with lots of great suggestions of how I could improve interface elements to be much more usable.

It turns out that the mental model I’ve used and the concepts are pretty obtuse and suffer from extensive Cognitive Dissodance. Bottom line – rip it up and start again.

Assumption. The mother of all f**k ups.

When I started sketching the UI, I thought that the more time I spent thinking it through, the better. How could this be wrong?

What I didn’t realise that the longer you think about anything, the more comfortable with the concepts you get. That means that very quickly you lose your sense of what’s obvious to a newcomer.

The moment Gavin sat down and started using my prototype, I realised I only understood my UI because I’d been thinking about it for so long. If I could do this again, I’d be showing my ideas to people much earlier.

Release early and iterate.

I now understand why “release early and iterate” is so important. I was so close to building something in code and wasting huge amounts of time. And that kind of scares me.

Essential but hard.

I’m now left with this uncomfortable feeling of having all my interface foundations taken away and going back to the drawing board. It’s put me significantly behind time. And it’s hard to accept that I’m as capable as Microsoft of making a usability nightmare. Hmmm. Maybe not quite that capable.

However, with the constant feedback of users, I’ll eventually reach a usable interface. And when I finally start coding, I’ll know I’m building something my target market can use without tearing their hair out.

If I can do it, anyone can.

If you’re building a product, when did you last test your design on real users? If the answer is “not lately”, check out these resources and run some quick and dirty usability tests. You might be shocked at what it reveals. I was.

I’ve put together a survey. It’s 11 questions, 3 pages and should take no longer than 5 minutes to complete.

Tell me what you want from Lapsus.

This is a really exciting time for me – the user experience of Lapsus is something I’m really passionate about getting right.

When I’m done with the UI for version 1, I’ll be showing how it evolved, as I’ve been sketching out my ideas for more than a year now. And with all the user testing I’m planning on doing in the next few months, the design will evolve a lot more.

The interest shown in Lapsus continues to amaze me and I’m excited to see what happens when I finally reach a Beta. Development is slow, but steady.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned!

In the UK, if you need medicines you ask for a repeat prescription from your doctor, then take this into the Pharmacy, sign the back and you get your drugs.

The Dreaded Survey

A few months ago, I took in my repeat prescription to my local Pharmacy. They handed me a survey form with my medicines. There was a web address I could go to and they were asking for feedback on the service they provided. Normally I bin surveys on sight – I’ve got more fulfilling things to do with my time than fill out forms. But for some reason, I was intrigued. I think part of it was an interest in how they’d execute the survey online. So I fired up Safari and went to the web address listed. I answered a few demographic questions and some standard issue questions: “On a scale of 1-5, how are we doing with blah”. The usual drill.

The final question was “Do you have any specific suggestions for how we could improve?”. My initial reaction was “No, not really. I just want to get on with my life now, thanks.” But there was a pretty big white space, and a flashing cursor. So I thought a little longer. Was there anything specific they could improve?

Hmmm. Let me think…

What happened next was strange. I realised that actually, there was one thing they could improve. It was a small detail and I’d never mentioned it to anyone, but it always annoyed me that there was never a pen at the counter. There’s a form on the back of every prescription which needs to be filled in. It always struck me as silly to have to ask every time “Do you have a pen?”.

Once I’d mentioned the pen, I couldn’t fail to mention the lack of proper writing space. There was a tiny area to rest on nestled amongst the boxes of cough medicine, but I wanted a proper flat surface with a bit of space higher up so I didn’t have to lean over to fill in the form.

I gradually found that actually, there were lots of little things they could improve to make my life a little bit easier. I’d just got used to the experience of ordering a repeat prescription being less than ideal. And let’s face it – these little glitches weren’t exactly life wrecking. I think I’m capable of asking for a pen every time. And as for the lack of a decent writing surface, I’m only ticking 3 boxes and signing, not writing War and Peace.

But nevertheless, the classic Mastermind “I’ve started so I’ll finish” syndrome applied, so I continued to tease out all these small internal frustrations. After typing solidly for 30 minutes, I felt I’d cleared my head a little, but was skeptical they’d do anything about it. Surely my suggestions would be quickly “filed” in the nearest bin?

Surprise!

Well, a week later I had yet another prescription to hand in. As I approached the counter, to my amazement I saw a pen in plain view. Not only that, but they’d cleared a space to the right of the medicines for filling out the form.

They’d listened to my feedback, but what’s more, they’d actually done something about it. For the first time in a long while, I felt empowered as a consumer. This means I’ve now got a real connection to that business in a way I don’t have for most Pharmacies. And that means as long as they keep that pen at the counter, I’ll keep giving them my trade.

Sweat the Small Stuff

The improvements they made must have taken them all of 30 minutes – they were so small you could be forgiven for thinking they wouldn’t make any real difference. But they listened and acted, and that was the most powerful thing they could have done.

So when a customer next asks for something that seems small and insignificant, take the opportunity to act on their feedback. You may just bag yourself a very loyal customer.

Recently I was putting together a little promotional video for the Lapsus Beta sign up page. I wanted to add subtitles and I was amazed at how much effort it takes to do them well.

Good Subtitles Need Care

They need to be carefully timed with the voice over. A few frames too soon, and the appearance of the subtitles distract from what is being said. A few frames too late, and they feel tacked on and irrelevant – another distraction.

The text also needs to be very carefully thought out. Too much text and it’ll not get read properly. Too little and it doesn’t communicate the message you want.

The layout of the text is surprisingly important too – words need to be grouped carefully on each subtitle line.

I realised that subtitles have a lot in common with my aims for Lapsus.

Subtitles Interpret Experience

Try watching a film with the sound off. You can watch the characters move, speak and interact. You can guess what’s happening, but it requires hard work and deduction. And you never fully understand what’s going on.

That’s how I feel when I want to know where my time went. I can guess, but it takes a lot of work – searching through logs, looking at time stamps on files and emails.

Lapsus should interpret your experience on the computer, much the same way subtitles interpret the narrative of a film.

Subtitles are User-centric

You only speak English, but the subtitles are in German. Hmmmm. Not that helpful. Lapsus should work around the user at every opportunity.

Subtitles are Invisible

If traditional timers were subtitles, they’d be bright red in a 60 point font, obscuring half the picture. Timers get in my way.

Lapsus should disappear into the background and only emerge when you need to know your times. It should become a natural part of how you interact with your computer.

Software as Subtitles

I think more software should feel like subtitles for your work – not the main focus of your energy, just there in the background, supporting what you want to do.

I’d love to hear what you think. What software do you use that achieves this well? How can we make software more invisible?

Update

I just found an amazing post about mistakes at Eric Sink’s blog. It’s a great partner piece to mine, from someone who actually knows what they’re doing. Unlike me.

My First Job

When I graduated in 1998 I went to work as an Electrical Engineer at a local company. The company was small, developing exciting lighting products and I had great plans for my future. It was not meant to be.

In the 5 years at this company I had a pretty tough time. At one stage I was working a 90 hour week. I had a thousand yard stare. I was permanently exhausted.

But the most difficult thing to deal with was that I just kept making mistakes. It became a vicious cycle.

Being John Gallagher (circa 2000)

1. Do something from your to-do list.
2. Whilst you’re doing it, be aware that you could make a mistake. Make sure you’ve thought everything through.
3. Once it’s done, make sure to question if you did it right.
4. Oh no. Somethings gone wrong. Remember that thing yesterday that you dealt with? You made a mistake.
5. Whilst you’re correcting the mistake, think how this mistake happened. Then think about it some more. Imagine how annoyed the customer/colleague this affected is. Think about how they feel. Think how much damage you’ve done. Feel really bad, because you should – it was you who made the mistake. How could this have happened?
6. The mistake has now been corrected. Carry on.
7. Ah. That mistake I made yesterday that I corrected? I made a mistake correcting it. Another mistake to correct.
8. Go to 2.

Maybe you can start to see a few problems with this pattern.

I Felt Rubbish

Every time I realised I’d made a mistake, I’d feel like a fool, like an idiot. I’d curse myself. And whilst I was trying to correct it, this meant I wasn’t concentrating. I was too busy feeling bad about myself. And that meant I made more mistakes.

I became convinced I was worthless to the company. I desperately wanted to perform well, but couldn’t understand why things kept going wrong. I tried reading self help books, meeting with my managers regularly to examine my workload, loads of things. Nothing really worked.

After a few years of this pattern day in, day out, I was really unhappy. I cried randomly for no reason. I couldn’t sleep properly worrying about mistakes I was going to make or had made that day. I’d always been a pretty happy person. That feeling went away and was replaced by a vicious anxiety. I felt like I was losing the essence of who I was.

Being made redundant was the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Within a week of leaving, my happy personality returned. I looked back on what had happened as though it wasn’t me.

My Second Job

I worked for a charity doing IT. At first, everything was brilliant – it was a fresh start, with no more long hours.

But after a couple of years, things started to go wrong again. The old patterns rose up to the surface. Every day turned into a catalogue of mistakes. I couldn’t believe it – I thought I’d left this behaviour behind.

Once again, I’d allowed mistakes – simple, little mistakes at first – to at first demoralise me, then take me down the vicious spiral I knew so well until I was on the point of paralysis.

The Point

Recently I launched my first Alpha of Lapsus. As you might expect, I made some mistakes. For the first time, I could see clearly the trap I was about to fall into yet again.

I tried to concentrate on providing a fix rather than feeling bad, or imagining how annoyed my Alpha testers might feel. I wasn’t totally successful, but I was more able to think clearly about how I could correct the mistake. I finally realised something really obvious.

It’s not the mistake that’s important, it’s how you deal with the mistake.

If I allow myself to obsess over the mistake itself and how terrible it is:

1. I’ll feel really bad.
2. That will mean I can’t provide an effective solution.
3. That will mean the mistake doesn’t get fixed properly.
4. And… wham! We’re back into the old pattern again.

Since I focused on fixing my mistake, I didn’t jump on the helter-skelter of bad feeling and the mistake was fixed properly.

Other Coping Strategies

1. Giving people an “out”

“I’m doing my absolute best for this person, but if they’re unhappy, they can always quit.”

For my Alpha Testers, it means I’ve asked them to try the software for a minimum of 3 weeks. After that they’re free to stop. For the paying customers of Lapsus, this will mean a full 30 day no quibble refund, which is great business practice anyway. Giving people an out means I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel shame. I feel like I’ve done right by the person because I’ve compensated them in some way for my mistake.

2. Caring less

“You care too much.”

I’m really passionate about every little detail. Some people have told me “You care too much.” I disagree. There’s too much mediocre stuff out there. Caring about quality is something that I think will stand me in good stead.

The solution isn’t to just care less, it’s to change how I channel that energy. It’s to be relentlessly positive when something doesn’t make the grade. It’s to consider how unpleasant or difficult situations have helped me. That isn’t changing my standards, it’s just changing my attitude when things don’t go as planned.

3. Accepting failure

“Mistakes are OK.”

Making mistakes is part of life. “Mistakes are OK if you learn from them” the world bleats at us. I’d go one further. “Mistakes are OK.” Full stop. End of sentence.
Learning from mistakes isn’t essential. It’s valuable, of course. And it should be encouraged. But the first quote seems to imply that if I don’t learn from my mistakes, the world ends. It doesn’t. Shit happens. It doesn’t mean I’m bad at what I do or my project is doomed.

Accepting that I’ll not always learn from my mistakes means I’m much calmer when correcting a mistake. And it increases the chances that I make sure it never happens again.

4. Focusing on my needs

“I care best for others when I’m caring for myself”

Being empathetic is a great quality to have, but like anything else, when it’s taken to extremes it can be really unhelpful. To be effective I need to decouple myself from others.

By thinking what I need to put right the mistake, I’m much more effective at putting it right. Which means less mistakes and better solutions.

Conclusion

It’s still very early days for me, but I think I’ve made my first baby steps at battling against “The Tyranny of Mistakes”.

As always, your comments are always welcome.

The week before last, I gave a brief 10 minute talk at Glasgow TechMeetup about Lapsus and how I was making it “Smarter than the Average Application”. Heidi, Sam and Ijonas were all really fantastic and made me feel very welcome.

You can see a video of my talk below.

You can also see my slides.

As I said in the talk, I’m looking for Ruby on Rails developers to Alpha test Lapsus. If you’re interested, please get in touch.

Questions

1. Are you interested in Lapsus, but want something right now?

2. Do you use TextMate for much of your work?

Yes and Yes

Then this post is for you. I’ve found an application that:

1. Watches TextMate and looks at the path of the front window.

2. If this path is within the path of your project directory, it assigns the time to that project.

3. Exports times in text format.

4. Operates entirely via the command line.

5. Is free!

What is it?

It’s a lovely little Ruby script called MateWatch made by the talented folk at Argument From Design.

Of course, it doesn’t have all the fancy features that Lapsus will have. And it only tracks time in TextMate. And it doesn’t have a GUI.

But since it’s open source, I could change it to watch XCode instead. I guess you could modify it more extensively to suit your needs.

And because it logs to plain old text files, you could build a little script to send this data to any web service of your choosing.

All in all, MateWatch is a rather nice little tool. Thanks, Argument From Design.

I’m making a Desktop time tracking application for the Mac called Lapsus. When I tell people Lapsus is a time tracker without timers, their first reaction is usually “OK… so how does that work then?”

So in this post I want to talk about exactly how Lapsus works. I’ll cover a whole raft of features I’m considering.

In Brief

Lapsus allows you to track your time without manual timers. Just work as normal and Lapsus tracks your computer usage in the background.

The Core – Time Tracking

Lapsus does away with timers by polling the active window every few seconds. It tracks documents, URLs and other activity.

Document Tracking

You tell Lapsus which folders on your hard drive are for projects. It gets the path of the active document in the background. If this document is within a project folder, it assigns the time spent to that project.

URL Tracking

Lapsus gets the URL and contents of pages you visit. Commonly unproductive domains will be supplied as standard – Twitter, Facebook, etc.

URLs that relate to different projects all the time like http://localhost will log time to the last active project – perfect for those who test the web sites they’re developing locally.

Lapsus has a list of URLs that is associated with each project. This list updates as it learns your behaviour. For more details see Daily Review.

For URLs that don’t come up repeatedly, Lapsus will learn what project they are for based on the text on the web page.

Tracking Non Document Applications

Non Document Applications don’t operate on documents on disk. Examples are Mail, Terminal, iChat, DVD Player, iCal, Address Book. Lapsus will have an architecture that allows anyone to develop a plug-in that will work with any of these applications to determine what project the user is working on.

Example 1 – iChat

The plug-in could look at the contact the user is chatting with. It could get the email address of that person and by accessing the Address Book, find out what project that contact belonged to then attribute the time to that project.

Example 2 – Terminal

The plugin would scan the history of the Terminal prompt, looking for certain commands. It could assign that time to certain projects based on the command, or the directory in which the command was being run. For example, you could assign time to a specific project when sshed into a specific IP address.

Tracking Offline Time

Lapsus could guess what you were doing when you were off your computer. If you went to a meeting, for instance, when you returned to your keyboard, Lapsus would check your calendar in iCal. If the time you were away coincided with the meeting, it would assume you had been at the meeting and would assign that time to that project.

Daily Review

At the start or end of every day, Lapsus will prompt you to review your times. The interface for this will be based around iCal – a calendar view of your week or day and coloured entries to represent how you spent your time.

As well as reviewing how you spent your time, you can correct any mistakes made by Lapsus.When you correct mistakes, Lapsus will store this information and learn your behaviour.

I hope to develop an algorithm that guesses what project you’re working on with 70% accuracy out of the box. After a few weeks training, this should increase significantly. After a few months, corrections should only be occasionally needed.

Plain English Activities

Lapsus will be able to give a plain English description of an activity by looking at what file type you were editing, what application you were in or what project you were working on. Each activity will have some properties associated, such as if it’s Billable or not.

Examples

1. If the active application is Mars Edit, activity is “Writing a Blog Post”
2. If the active document was a Ruby file, activity is “Editing Ruby Code”
3. If the URL is http://localhost:3000, activity is “Testing Code”
4. If the Terminal is active and ssh is in the running processes in the current tab, activity is “Running Remote SSH Session”
5. If the active application is iChat, activity is “Chatting to *Name of Contact*”

Integration

Once Lapsus has accurate time information about what projects you were working on, you can choose how you use this data. Lapsus will be able to send times to other Desktop and Web Applications to Invoice, Collaborate or Report.

Examples of such apps would be Excel, Billings, BaseCamp, Harvest, Less Accounting, Free Agent, Mite, Tempo, Intervals or Unfuddle.

Progress

Currently Prototyping

I’m currently still trying out many of these ideas in prototypes. When I’m happy that I’ve got it working for me in a rough way, I’ll be building the first Alpha.

I’m initially aiming the application at Ruby on Rails developers. Long term, it’ll be an application that can work for any freelancer, but because of the complexity, I need to focus my time and energy on getting Lapsus to work really well for just one group of people at first.

Alpha Testers

I’m on the lookout for brave testers for my very early Alphas. If you’re a Ruby on Rails developer who’s interested in my idea and has some time each week to give feedback, please contact me using the details on the About Me page.

Timescale

I’m aiming for a public Beta by Christmas 2009. If you’d like to be kept up to date with the progress of Lapsus, please contact me using the details on the About Me page. I hope to release Version 1 in April 2010.

Wrap Up

I hope that this has cleared up some questions about how Lapsus will work. I’d love to hear people’s feedback in the comments.

A little over a month ago, I went to the Future of Web Apps Dublin, hosted by Carsonified. As some of you may be aware, I’m building a time tracking application called Lapsus. I decided that my initial market for the software would be freelance Web Developers. It’s maybe ironic then, that Lapsus is a desktop application.

A bit of background to my application as it’s relevant – Lapsus will track your time without timers. It automatically collects information about the active window in the background whilst you work then associates this with a project you’re working on. This time information can then be sent to various web applications for invoicing, reporting or collaboration. You can read a bit more here.

Back to the conference. I really enjoyed myself, met loads of interesting folk and got some great feedback on my application. I’ve done a little Web Development myself, mainly in Ruby on Rails, so I found most of the talks interesting, but they were secondary to talking to people about my idea.

Then I heard Matt Ogle from Last.fm give his talk “How to make Desktop Apps that help your Web Apps succeed” and suddenly I got very excited. He was talking about how, at Last.fm, desktop software was key to their growth. More specifically, he was talking about the scrobbling aspect of their service, where information about the music you play on your desktop is sent to your online profile. I saw the similarities to Lapsus immediately, and my excitement grew and grew. When Matt put up his slide entitled “Digital Attention Data”, I nearly had a heart attack. I had to clamp my hand over my mouth and breathe deeply to avoid seriously embarrassing myself.

I don’t see many applications that are trying to do what I’m trying to do with Lapsus. So it was really nice to see a highly experienced developer from a company I admire talking positively about the approach that I’m taking. For most of the talk, he was saying so much that I’d been thinking for years and it was a huge relief to hear these thoughts aired at last.

I understand why Web Application fever has taken over the world. I remember when I first tried Google Documents, I loved it. No folders! No need to remember to save! Lovely and simple! No messing about! Far too many exclamation marks! We’re all by now well aware of the huge advantages of Web Applications, and I’m a big fan too. I use Google Documents for my software specs, Google Forms and Spreadsheets for my surveys and Basecamp and Harvest for project management and time tracking. But for certain tasks, nothing beats the desktop.

I’m sick and tired of all these premature claims that “The Desktop is Dead”. Hmmm. Dead, eh? What are you using your Web App through again? Oh, yes, that’s right, the desktop.

I’m bored with all the talk of a utopian future where everyone will do everything through a web application. So where’s the web app with the same complexity or speed as Final Cut? I know, I know, it’s just all about bandwidth, right? When we get faster internet connections, we’ll be able to upload and edit Gigabytes of video without a hitch, right? I’m not convinced.

People talk about this like it’s either/or. Like it’s mutually exclusive. The future is the desktop or the web – Gentlemen, take your corners. How about using the right tool for the job? What about making software that takes advantage of both the speed of the desktop and the interconnectedness of the Web? The application I’m using to edit this post, MarsEdit, does a brilliant job of exactly that. I can draft my blog on my desktop using a proper, full screen editor that’s fast, native and a single click away. Then once I’m happy, I push a button and it gets sent to my Wordpress account.

With Lapsus I’m making a desktop application that, I’m hoping, will make peoples lives easier and solve a real pain. I want to make software on the desktop that compliments software on the web, not replaces it. There are so many fantastic web applications out there that have APIs, there’s really no excuses any more for not having a more integrated user experience.

I’ve got no idea what the future holds. I don’t really fancy guessing and I’m not really that interested in making predictions that will make me look a bit silly ten years from now.

I want to focus on how I can develop software, right now, whether on the Web or the Desktop, that makes our lives easier and more productive.

As I’ve said on a previous post, I’ve had problems with productivity for many years. I’ve recently made an observation about how I get most of my productive work done that I thought I’d share by use of an analogy.

A Confession

I used to be a Christian. And when I say Christian, I mean I was a proper, full-on, tub thumping evangelical Christian. I believed that people who didn’t put their hope in Christ were going to hell, that I could have a personal relationship with a supernatural entity and that Jon Bon-Jovi wrote some of the finest music ever to grace the ears of modern man. Maybe not that last one so much.

I belonged to a Christian community that held regular conferences – every term for a week or so, we all go away together on a residential to talk about our incessant love for the Lord, read the Bible and pray a lot. We listened to talks from Church leaders with insights on how we could forward our religious lives.

This phase of my life lasted for about 15 years. In this time, I learnt two things:

1. God loves me.
2. Christian speakers love a good analogy.

Fast Forward to Present

I currently don’t actively subscribe to the Christian belief system – I think it’s problematic, illogical and I believe the Christian Church is massively dysfunctional. But one thing hasn’t changed – I still love a good analogy. Or even a bad one. And after hearing hundreds of them, they’ve become a big part of how I express myself every day.

As well as programming my own time tracking application (oh, the irony), I’m also a Maths tutor and analogies have also served me well in communicating with students.

So here goes. I find that being productive is like swimming under a sheet of pack ice. Allow me to explain.

The Tenuous Analogy Bit

Phase 1 – Slipping Around

When I sit down at my computer in a morning, I usually have at least a vague idea of what I’d like to get done on my application. But getting started can be really difficult. I check my Twitter feed, my news reader, my email. I click on a few links and read some stuff that interests me. Then I start running out of distracting things to do.

In this time, I feel like I’m slipping around on top of the ice. I can’t get a foothold. My thoughts are chaotic and fleety. My attention span is very limited. I can see the direction I want to take, but I delay the decision to start because, at some level, it’s scary to be doing something that’s important to you, something that matters. I realised this thanks to an excellent post from the all knowledgeable Havi Brooks.

Sometimes, sadly, this is how the rest of my day continues. I mess around until lunch and fritter away the afternoon and evening reading articles that interest or inspire me, and whilst I enjoy myself and learn stuff, I end the day with a depressing feeling of having made no progress towards my most important goals.

Phase 2 – Cutting a Hole

Some days I manage to pull myself out of this information overload stupor. I focus my sights on what I want to achieve, fire up XCode and start programming. For the first hour, it’s usually hard going.

I want to get under the ice, and I have a pick axe to hand, so I set about cutting a hole in the ice. For the first few swings, it seems hopeless – the axe glances off the ice and hardly makes a scratch. With some focus and hard work though, gradually the hole grows, until finally the icy cold water underneath is exposed. I’m fully kitted out in a high end thermal wet suit, and I plunge through the hole into the water.

Phase 3 – Just Keep Swimming

Finally, after an hour in XCode, I’m in the zone. Programming becomes my world. I start really enjoying myself and making great progress.

Now I’m under the ice, although it’s rather cold, it feels brilliant. On top of the ice, I couldn’t make any progress – walking any significant distance was tiring and difficult. But here I’m in my element, and as I swim smoothly along, I watch with satisfaction as the scenery moves by.

Phase 4 – Running Out of Air

After 4 solid hours of programming without a break, I’m still enjoying the work, but something in my body is telling me something’s not quite right – I’m starting to feel the effects of having had no food for the last 5 hours. I lose my focus and my thinking becomes muddled. I’ve had an official blood sugar crash.

Under the ice, I’m getting tired now. I’ve been swimming for ages and although it’s still great fun, my body is complaining – it needs to come up for air. Finally, exhausted, I surface through the ice and gasp for breath, my lungs screaming in protest.

I recover, then the cycle begins all over again…

The Point

So what’s the point of articulating this long, rambling, tenuous analogy? Well, for me it provides a visual story with which to understand my productivity cycle. So it helps me increase awareness of which stage I’m in and what my body might need.

It also helps me to get ideas on how my work-rest cycle could be improved. I could try and find tools with which to more effectively dig the hole through the ice. Or I could realise that when I’m slipping around on the ice trying to get a foothold, the sooner I focus, the sooner I’ll get into the zone. Or that even when I’m finally productive, it pays to take regular breaks if I want to avoid a productivity crash.

What analogies or stories help you with your productivity?

I’m building my own time tracker. It’s called Lapsus. I’d really appreciate your feedback on my idea. Does it sound useful? Would you buy it?

What does it do?

Lapsus is a Mac desktop application which tracks time for the busy freelancer. It has the following features:

1. No manual timers.

Whilst you work, Lapsus sits quietly in the background, timing everything you do.

2. Project based.

Lapsus tracks time spent on projects, rather than applications.

3. Works with existing software.

Use your times to invoice, report or collaborate. Lapsus can send your times to a huge range of desktop and web applications – Harvest, Basecamp, Tempo, Intervals, Rescue Time and many more. It doesn’t replace these applications – it complements them.

Cut to the chase.

If you don’t want to read any more, give me your feedback through this survey. It can be completed in just 5 clicks. Thanks for your time.

If you want more details, please read on.

Why should you care?

1. Less time tracking, more time doing.

No timers mean you can mostly say goodbye to spending time tracking your time.

2. One less distraction.

No timers also means there’s one less thing to think about. How often have you forgotten that a timer was running? Then you had to try and remember when you stopped work. Wasn’t that a bit irritating? Not to mention distracting?

3. See what you did.

We’ve all had that feeling at the end of a day – what on earth did I do? Lapsus shows you exactly where your time went.

4. Use the tools you prefer.

Because Lapsus can send your times to many existing time tracking, invoicing and billing systems, you can carry on using the tool you prefer. And you’re not locked into using any one system.

5. Privacy.

Lapsus stores all your time information offline. You can tell Lapse not to track certain applications or web sites.

I’d really appreciate it if you told me what you think through this survey. I know, I hate surveys too, but this only has 3 required questions and can be completed in 5 clicks.

If you’ve got any other questions or feedback on my idea, please feel free to email me on john at jgediting dot co dot uk

Thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing what you think.

In 1998, I graduated as an Electrical Engineer and started working for a small company. For the first year, I was very happy. Then things started to go wrong.

I used to get to the end of a day and hadn’t a clue how I’d spent the time. I remembered sitting down in the morning. I remembered lunch. The rest was a blur. I wasn’t getting anything done.

As you can imagine, my bosses weren’t happy with the endless missed deadlines. And I was really unhappy that I wasn’t meeting my goals. So, being an engineer, I wanted to find a solution.

I thought that a good first step would be to find out how I was spending my time. How could I become more productive if I didn’t know what I was doing all day?

I spent more than 70% of my waking hours sat at a computer. Most things I wanted to achieve at work involved a computer. It seemed fairly logical, therefore, to look to the technology to help me figure out where my day was going.

And so in 2003 I began my search for a piece of software that would track my time. I had two requirements. I wanted it to:

1. Track my time automatically.

Many programs used a manual timer. You’d select the project you were working on, then click a start button. When you finished, you had to remember to stop the timer. It was distracting and fiddly. Not to mention a bit silly. Surely the computer could work out how long I’d spent on a task?

2. Tell me how long I’d spent on any one project.

I didn’t care how long Photoshop or Firefox was open for. I didn’t want to know how long I spent using an application. I wanted to know how long I spent working on a project.

So what did I find? Nothing. Nil. Nada. Most solutions I found were based on timers, therefore violating requirement 1. I did find a couple of programs that cleared hurdle 1, but came a cropper on 2. I kept on searching, convinced that there must be something out there that did what I wanted. Nothing fitted.

Years went by. I battled on. Every so often the “automatic time tracking” meme would resurface in my head and I’d do another scouring of the Internet. I tried yet more tools and encountered yet more frustration.

Fast forward to 2008. I became a freelancer. Knowing where my time went was more important to me than ever before. I’d last searched in 2006 and since then a lot had changed. The Internet had grown exponentially. I’d also defected to the Mac. This time, I was positive I’d come across what I’d been searching for.

Yet again I came up empty handed. This was getting ridiculous. The idea that I could actually make my own time tracker had occurred to me, but my self-esteem was on the floor. I’d never seen myself as a “proper” programmer. I was an “amateur hacker with pretensions”. I just wasn’t good enough.

Then something changed. In September 2008 I joined a local Open Source software project – the Glasgow Green Map. I submitted some code that I’d hacked on for a few days. It was messy and I didn’t understand what I was doing, but people seemed to really like it. I started to question my feelings of programmer inadequacy. “Maybe I can do it after all”, I thought.

One thing led to another and so now, in February 2009, I’ve decided to go for it and throw my hat into the Micro-ISV ring. I’ve thought a lot about how I’d implement a timer tracker for the Mac that I’d actually pay to use, and I think it’s achievable.

I’m aiming to have something out in beta by the end of 2009. Something tells me it’s going to be a lot of hard work, but I also think I’m going to have, as the comedians Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer would say “an awful lot of fun”*. Wish me luck.

* Technically, Vic and Bob never said this. It’s actually from Tom Fun and his friend Derek – 2 fictional comedy characters created by Vic and Bob in their legendary series “Bang Bang, It’s Reeves and Mortimer“.

It’s hardly a unique difficulty. Lots of sites have been dedicated to productivity tips and lifehacks. Rands of Rands in Repose fame has written an excellent blog entry about the phenomena I experience and christened it NADD – Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder.

I’ve always had this issue, but at least when you’re working for a company there’s some structure to your day and some strong accountability. Now that I’m in freelance world, I can just float away into unproductive bliss and no-one’s any the wiser. Except of course, me. And it’s not bliss. It’s really frustrating.

It’s not helped that I’m interested in so much stuff. I’ve never been what I would call a “proper” programmer, but I’ve always tinkered with stuff on the computer that gets me excited. I’ve had phases of being obsessed with a certain technology, explored it until I get bored then dropped it like a hot potato.

Over the years, I’ve tinkered with:

• Databases (mySQL, Access, Exchange Server, SQL Server)
• Programming and Web Design (Bash, Ruby, XML, VBA, HTML, CSS, SQL, good old DOS batch files)
• Photography
• Graphic Design (typography is a real passion for me)
• Illustration (Illustrator is a program that’s very close to my heart)
• Animation (Anime Studio Pro rules)
• Motion graphics (bits of Motion, I also dabble with Shake and Max MSP)
• Editing – I have my own video editing business
• Colour Correction

In the past 15 years I’ve spent almost all my free time using computers, but I’ve got very little to show for it. My knowledge is broad rather than deep. Although this is part of who I am, and I’m happy to be like that, it does mean that I’m incredibly easily distracted. Recently, I went into the technical section of the local Borders bookshop for the first time and felt like I’d discovered my personal Mecca. I’d say offhand that more than 70% of the books there held something of interest for me, whether it was 3D modelling, Java or XML.

So maybe you start to see how these interests, combined with a lack of focus, lots of new ideas and a fast broadband connection make for a fairly chaotic and unproductive day. Even when I was working for a company, I’d be trying to do a simple spreadsheet for my manager, and before I knew what had happened, I was delving into the depths of the ODBC preferences pane, obsessed with how to show live data from an external SQL database – totally off-track and completely away with the fairies. I get pretty excited, you see, when it comes to trying to use technology to solve problems, albeit in utterly impractical ways.

I am, after all, the person who, when working for a charity with 10 employees and tasked to make a system to track evidence for funders, came up with a 30 Meg Excel spreadsheet that had 70 sheets, thousands of hidden cells and VBA macros galore.

And I was the chap who, at the same company, tried to monitor the activity of the 20-30 clients we served by designing a system that used SQL Server, Exchange Server, Active Directory, ASP, Access, Outlook and ODBC to automate client registration and monitor activity. Needless to say, I learnt loads and I had an awful lot of fun trying how to program this. Needless to say it never even got close to being finished and the charity no longer exists.

There’s also a psychological side. A part of my brain somehow associates being productive as average, normal, safe and logical. I see it as the Responsible Thing To Do, as boring, and finally, (and this is the worst) *sensible*. Urrrgh – no, please, anything but that. But to achieve a lot of my goals, I must accept that I have to be sensible. And… well… if I’m really honest, most of my day is spent being sensible, even if I don’t set out to be. What would you call sitting inside experimenting on a computer with stuff you find interesting? It’s hardly all night raves, hookers and blow territory.

I’ve must accept that this image I have of productivity is fabricated, and face up to the ultimate truth that being productive just means getting stuff done. But getting stuff done has different meanings depending on your work situation. If you’re employed in a job you hate, getting stuff done means having to plough through lots of meaningless tasks that you despise. If you’ve got a new exciting opportunity, even if that means a lot of hard work, getting stuff done can be brilliant fun.

I’m now in the latter situation, having worked for many years in the former. So productivity should now fill me with joy – the prospect of being able to work on my latest project gets my juices flowing just thinking about it. But my brain is clinging to the old definition. And even with the best of projects, there is always some of the stuff you hate that has to get done – in my case, the finances, bill paying, tax return, etc.

These hateful, soulless, dead end tasks (pain productivity) seem to be stopping me from getting on with my exciting stuff (pleasure productivity). And it’s all due to putting them off. Why, oh why do I think, at some level, that unpleasant tasks will somehow get better the longer I leave them? I plan my day that I’ll get all those rubbish-tasks-I’ve-been-meaning-to-do-for-ages done before I start anything else. So I know I should start them, but, er, “I’ll start in a minute”. I distract myself and delay for hours so I don’t start the rubbish stuff until 2pm. By the time I’ve finished with the pain productivity, it’s 4pm and my day’s gone.

And somehow it’s goodbye to yet another day where I could have got some great stuff done. Sure – I’ve done a few crappy tasks, but because of my constant delaying, I’ve never got around to giving myself the treat of the good stuff that I love. Which is tied to my big goals. Sigh.

I’d love to hear from any of you with the same problem. How have you dealt with it? How productive are you?

NSOpenPanel* openDlg = [NSOpenPanel openPanel];
if ( [openDlg runModalForDirectory:nil file:nil] == NSOKButton )
{
  NSArray *folderToAdd = [openDlg filenames];
  NSString *folderToAddPath = [folderToAdd objectAtIndex:0];
  NSManagedObject *projectToAdd = [[NSManagedObject new] initWithEntity:projectEntity insertIntoManagedObjectContext:context];
  [projectToAdd setValue:folderToAddPath forKey:@"FolderPath"];
  [context save:NULL];
}

“Hmm. That’s cool. But I want the user to only be able to select directories and disable multiple selection.” A quick look at the documentation for NSOpenPanel yielded:

[openDlg setAllowsMultipleSelection:NO];
[openDlg setCanChooseFiles:NO];
[openDlg setCanChooseDirectories:YES];

“Er… Wow. That was seriously easy”, said I, “But surely getting the selected folder name will be tricky?” Wrong. A little more research and two lines of code later, I’d done it.

NSArray *folderToAddPathArray = [folderToAddPath componentsSeparatedByString:@"/"];
NSString *folderToAddName = [folderToAddPathArray lastObject];

It seems that every feature I want to add, provided it’s commonly used, is ridiculously easy to implement. I’ve only been using Cocoa for a matter of days – I wouldn’t even describe myself as a amateur. And yet I can implement features that I thought might take me ages in the blink of an eye.

Cocoa is incredibly well designed and brings Apple’s “It just works” philosophy to the programming world. As I’ve already said, it’s very, very early days for me as a programmer, and I’m sure there will be frustrating times up ahead, but so far I’m very happy. Almost too happy… (cue haunting music).

One problem with this extraordinary ease of use is that I feel like I’m continually cheating. I’ve not come from a traditional programming background, but I have caught a glimpse of programming in other, shall we say, less friendly environments (*cough* Java). I’ve come from the Microsoft world – I once spent 14 hours trying to figure out how to set up a linked server to read an Exchange Server database in SQL Server.

So the idea of creating a new database entry that appears in a table view in 2 lines of code is a real culture shock, and if I’m truthful, makes me feel like a bit of a freeloader. After all, some programmers out there are having to write lots of custom code just to connect to a database and deal with third-party frameworks to do anything useful. And here I am, with only half a clue and no previous exposure to object-oriented languages cobbling together what I need in 10 lines. It doesn’t seem fair somehow.

This may well mean that when things get a lot more involved, I’m out of my depth. This code is not production by any stretch of the imagination. I’m sure that the time will come where the things I want to implement are much more challenging. For example, I have yet to experience the joys of threaded programming, but I’ll cross those bridges asynchronously when I come to them. Whilst maintaining a stringent locking strategy, of course.

For now, I’m just going to enjoy using a tool that seems to deliver on the promise “Common things are easy, and uncommon things are possible”.

Thanks, Apple.

2qw5ypvezx

It’s the stagnation of function. What problem does the software solve? We seem to have an endless stream of similar solutions to already well catered for problems. Another FTP client. Another money manager. Another Subversion front end. Another browser.

Trust me – I get the premise behind a lot of these products – “Product X does the job OK, but it could be so much better! I reckon I could make a much nicer UI. And I could definitely implement feature X a lot better.” It’s also makes perfect business sense – there’s an established market for the product and there’s a good chance users are bugged by that substandard UI too.

“What’s wrong with improving existing solutions?” you might ask. Nothing. It’s a great thing – it means at the end of the improvement road we get a wonderfully polished application. But we also need a balance between tweaking existing solutions and building the next iteration of solutions for problems that have sat for years without any substantial progress.

There are already a smattering of innovative applications out there: programs like Marco Polo, F-script, Voodoo Pad and Delicious Library all do something novel, unique and interesting. But there just aren’t enough.

Certainly, we’ve got some remarkable applications that solve the problem better than some may have believed possible – Things, Versions, Coda and TextMate – but these applications are now so polished that we just can’t improve any more. Can anyone imagine a significantly better torrenting client than Transmission? A vastly better news reader than NetNewsWire?

We seem to have become hung up on implementation. How nice does the app look? How usable is it? How many features does it have? Of course, all this stuff is vital, but we seem to develop new software within the context of existing software – “it’s like Word but better” – instead of looking for the unexplored territory.

This unexplored territory doesn’t take much looking for either – it’s sat there staring us in the face every time we use a computer. Some examples? OK…

Filing

What about a good way of filing and retrieving our documents? We’ve become totally dependent on the filing cabinet analogy. “So what?”, people say, “if we forget where we put something we can type into a box on the desktop and select from a list”. The computer has then got to search the index which is slow and returns results, at least in Mac OS X, in a constantly updating list. This approach leads to a horrible user experience that’s more circus fairground than file search – “Roll up, roll up! Can you click on the document you want before it disappears? It’s a true test of skill and reflexes, Ladies and Gentlemen!”. Every time I have to save or open a document I need to browse to the project folder all over again and I end up wanting to gnaw my own hand off with frustration. And yes, I know there are some nice applications out there like Default Folder X, Leap and Path Finder that take some of this pain away. But I still think we’ve got a long way to go – these applications feel like band-aids to solve a much more fundamental problem of how we store our data.

Window Management

Why on earth do we not have any decent tools for managing windows? If I want 4 Finder windows tiled I still have to do it manually. The lack of a proper maximise in Mac windows is a complaint that has been very well documented and yet we’re still living with it. And then there’s that lovely moment when you miss clicking on a scroll bar by one pixel and you switch to whatever random window is hiding behind your current one. If you’re trying to do work, your windows rapidly degenerate into a complete mess. And no, neither Spaces or Expose are proper solutions to this – they are clumsy workarounds that miss the point.

I think maybe these and other similar problem areas aren’t given enough priority because we don’t really see these as problems any more. We’ve got so used to working round them or gritting our teeth and battling through that they’ve become just another fact of life.

But I believe that they can be solved in a way that tackles the root cause of the problem. So I’ve decided to take the plunge and develop my own bit of software to provide a solution for a problem I face every day. I’ll be providing more details in a future post.

Which you are now reading, just in case you were wondering about your current activity. This paragraph could get existential fast, so I’ll just move on.

OK, so what’s this blog going to be about? Well, it will focus on my new adventures in programming my own bit of software. I’m doing this because there will be many challenges and excitements ahead and I’d like to share them with a few people. I could go into more details here, but I’ll save that for a future post. In the meantime, welcome.

Look at the date. Spot what I’m not saying in this message. That’s for a good reason – I think New Year is utterly meaningless. Also to be saved for a future post.

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