There is some current hullabaloo over twitter’s most recent hires. I agree with the commenters on that post. Shutting down productivity tools with two weeks’ notice is an big, big problem. Worse for me is the implication that Twitter are content for this to happen and content to hire people who do this (the comm...

read more

It turns out that I hate having the mouse cursor visible in my working window. I didn’t really know about this until I used a colleague’s dual-monitor machine. He has set the window focus to follow the pointer and I consistently selected the window I wanted to type in and one whoosh of the mouse later was happily typing code into Firefox. It turns out that this doesn’t really work 🙂 ...

read more

I’m sure that if I added up all the time I spent waiting on train platforms, I’d have plenty of time to get all my work done. I know, that’s it! The reason my project is behind is because it’s the trains’ fault for being late. Honest!

read more

This blog is currently powered by Blogger. The only two desktop posting tools I’ve used and liked are w.bloggar and Windows Live Writer. The problem with both of them – or at least, my perceived problem with them is that they take too long to load. Quite often...

read more

As well as only being interrupted at regular, predictable times, I want any interrupt-driven tools (like aggregator and email toaster alerts) to respect my calendar and presence status. In fact, it should be possible to drive my presence status from my calendar. If my calendar marks me as being in a meeting, or busy in any way at all, then I want my IM status to be changed automatically,...

read more

Kathy Sierra is right, our attention is badly used and unfocussed and it’s not just our own fault – your aggregator checks for updates every hour, but that’s probably from when it started, so at what time will it next notify you of new items? Your email scans every five minutes, so the likelihood is...

read more

Help. I just rediscovered my Dilbert desk calendar. It’s still in mid-June. Ah well, I wasn’t planning on doing any work today anyway.

read more

Right on schedule, Gez has posted an article about Getting Things Done with WikidPad. It’s a good article covering all the basics, but you’ll probably need a copy of WikidPad to hand in order to really understand it – there’s a lot to absorb.

read more

I don’t post to my blog very often any more. This tends to be because as I have one idea for a blog entry and start writing it, I get an idea for another, so jot down a note about the general jist and get on with the initial post but my brain keeps being distracted by what I should write in the second post. The times I’ve decided to abandon the first post to work on the second the exact same th...

read more

Appalled by my recent low level of productivity, I’ve set myself a number of small achievable tasks to perform. The first took a few hours of coding and is presented here: The UK Blogger Map What surprised me the most about doing this was that I ended up with so few entries. Admittedly there are two layers of selection – first you m...

read more