ROWE is a simple concept: let people do what they want at work — as long as they’re getting work done. Evidently Best Buy has put the system into place and has increased productivity by 41%

This, like democracy, is another example of a great system that works for the best among us, but fails to deliver for the average. I think this would be great to apply to the stars at a company, i.e. most talent and most self-discipline, but for most in America’s work force it would equate to almost certain failure.

It’s clearly a better system for those who are mature enough for it; I’d love to see it implemented in more places so we can see additional metrics on it.

If you’re an efficiency/productivity nut like I am you are probably also obsessed with keyboard shortcuts. One of the main ones for me is the ability to close documents in OS X without saving them.

So, given the dialog above, how do you select “Don’t Save” without using your mouse? You can’t use the arrow keys, and you can’t use the tab key. It was annoying me, so I looked it up.

Turns out it’s simple enough: ⌘-D — for “Don’t Save”. :)

[ Edit: Evidently you can also just hit the spacebar if you have full keyboard access turned on. Thanks Jon. ]

The fundamental problem when managing feeds is input management. Most of us simply have too many feeds to read in a single sitting. How can we be sure we’re reading the right content at the right time? The goal is to avoid the anti-GTD state of not being sure - a state that consumes valuable brain resources and keeps you from functioning at your best.

That’s what this system helps you do: it lets you instantly choose which feeds to read at any given time - allowing you to feel fully satisfied when you’re done with a session.

The System

Create three types of tags within Google Reader.

1. Priority
2. Subject
3. Location

Mine look like this:

• Priority (general importance): Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
• Subject (classical organization): Security, Programming, Design, Humor
• Location (contextual consideration): Industry News, Important World Events, etc.

This breakdown gives us three choices for how to attack feeds. You can go by:

1. General importance of the feed (priority)
2. Type of content that you want to read at a given moment (subject)
3. Where you are (location)

The key to the whole system is that each individual feed can have multiple tags assigned to it. This feature is there for a reason.

So if you’re at work during regular hours you can read your “work” feeds, which include important information pertaining to your profession, key world events, and perhaps some other tidbits that may be useful during work-related conversation.

During lunch you can read your “lunch” feeds, which include your feeds that are still work appropriate during lunch but perhaps aren’t completely work related, e.g. Dilbert, XKCD, Reddit, etc. Or, you can choose to read based on priority or subject instead.

Assigning the multiple tags makes it possible to cover the same content during various types of reading sessions - whether you browsed based on time available, where you were, or a particular interest such as design or programming.

This system helps me greatly in getting through my feeds with less stress, and allows me to feel confident that I’ve read precisely what I should have during my session. I hope you find it useful as well.:

[ Original, longer version here ]

I’m constantly optimizing how I do things, and nowhere is this more important to me than with my feed reader. I happen to use (and highly recommend) Google Reader, and what follows is a multi-tiered approach to classifying and reading your feeds using an often ignored feature of the application.

The Problem

The fundamental problem is input management. Most of us simply have too many feeds to read in a single sitting. How can we be sure we’re reading the right content at the right time? Are we reading too much? Too little? The goal is to avoid the anti-GTD state of not being sure - a state that consumes valuable brain resources and keeps you from functioning at your best.

That’s what this system helps you do: it lets you instantly choose which feeds to read at any given time - allowing you to feel fully satisfied when you’re done with a session.

The System

Create three types of tags within Google Reader.

1. Priority
2. Subject
3. Location

Mine look like this:

• Priority (general importance): Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
• Subject (classical organization): Security, Programming, Design, Humor
• Location (contextual consideration): Industry News, Important World Events, etc.

This breakdown gives us three choices for how to attack feeds. You can go by a general ranking of importance of the feed (priority), by the specific type of content that you want to read at a given moment (subject), or based on where you are (location).

The key to the whole system is that each individual feed can have multiple tags assigned to it. This feature is there for a reason.

So if you’re at work during regular hours you can read your “work” feeds, which include important information pertaining to your profession, key world events, and perhaps some other tidbits that may be useful during work-related conversation. And during lunch you can read your “lunch” feeds, which include your feeds that are still work appropriate during lunch but perhaps aren’t completely work related, e.g. Dilbert, XKCD, Reddit, etc.

Assigning the multiple tags makes it possible to cover the same content during various types of reading sessions - whether you browsed based on time available, where you were, or a particular interest such as design or programming.

This system helps me greatly in getting through my feeds with less stress and allows me to feel confident that I’ve read precisely what I should have during my session. I hope you find it useful as well.:

I’m constantly optimizing how I do things, and nowhere is this more important to me than with my feed reader. I happen to use (and highly recommend) Google Reader, and what follows is a multi-tiered approach to classifying and reading your feeds using an often ignored feature of the application.

The Problem

The fundamental problem is input management. Most of us simply have too many feeds to read in a single sitting. How can we be sure we’re reading the right content at the right time? Are we reading too much? Too little? The goal is to avoid the anti-GTD state of not being sure - a state that consumes valuable brain resources and keeps you from functioning at your best.

That’s what this system helps you do: it lets you instantly choose which feeds to read at any given time - allowing you to feel fully satisfied when you’re done with a session.

The System

The first thing we’re going to do is make three categories of tags/labels within Google Reader (think folders for old-schoolers). These are:

1. Priority
2. Subject
3. Location

Mine look like this:

• Priority (general importance): Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
• Subject (classical organization): Security, Programming, Design, Humor
• Location (contextual consideration): Industry News, Important World Events, etc.

This breakdown gives us three choices for how to attack feeds. You can go by a general ranking of importance of the feed (priority), by the specific type of content that you want to read at a given moment (subject), or based on where you are (location).

So if you’re at work during regular hours you can read your “work” feeds, which include important information pertaining to your profession, key world events, and perhaps some other tidbits that may be useful during work-related conversation. And during lunch you can read your “lunch” feeds, which include your feeds that are still work appropriate during lunch but perhaps aren’t completely work related, e.g. Dilbert, XKCD, Reddit, etc.

The key to the whole system is that each individual feed can have multiple tags assigned to it. This feature is there for a reason.

What this allows us to do is put our feeds in all three categories simultaneously. This gives us the simplicity of knowing what to read at any given moment, but at the same time it links all three categories together. So if you read TechCrunch from one view it gets marked as read in the others as well.

Examples

Let’s take my Information Security News feed. It’s a Yahoo! Pipe I built that combines news from around the industry, removes duplicates, etc. It’s a fast way to get the top stories I’d find in my “security-news” tag that contains multiple individual feeds.

For my infosec pipe feed I have the following tags applied in the three dimensions (PSL):

• Primary (priority)
• Security-News (subject)
• Work (location)

The trick is that I can decide to read from any one of those categories and I’ll still cover this very important aggregation feed. But if you take my Design Observer feed it’s more likely to break down like this:

• Tertiary
• Design
• (no location because it defaults to home)

Assigning the multiple tags makes it possible to cover the same content during various types of reading sessions - whether you browsed based on time available, where you were, or a particular interest such as design or programming.

This system helps me greatly in getting through my feeds with less stress and allows me to feel confident that I’ve read precisely what I should have during my session. I hope you find it useful as well.:

This looks to be the best GTD application I’ve ever seen. The only question I have is whether or not there will be a mobile interface. In my opinion, the only kind of GTD system that will work long-term is one that can be with you wherever you are.

Be sure to check out the screencast.

[ Cultured Code: Things ]

Tim Ferriss just returned from another mini-retirement, this time in the Slovak Republic. He blogged about the whole trip and even put up a video of some gun play.

But at its core the post was about time management, and it basically consisted of one nugget:

Just remember: if you don’t have attention, you don’t have time. Did I have time to check e-mail and voicemail? Sure. It might take 10 minutes. Did I have the attention to risk fishing for crises in those 10 minutes? Not at all.

Attention, not time. So if spending 10 minutes to do something is going to pull on your attention for much longer than that, judge by the latter not by the former. Email and voicemail are great examples because they recursively hide additional time-drains within them.

Nice concept.:

Like many out there I’m rather obsessed with doing things the best way possible. Up until yesterday I was using browser-based quick searches to perform quick Internet searches. But there’s a better way.

QuickSilver (sorry, OS X only) allows us to get the same quick search functionality, but from anywhere. So if you’re working on some code in TextMate, reading email, or working on the command line, you no longer have to switch to your browser to start a search. Just invoke QuickSilver from wherever you are and search away.

Here are some of the searches that I do through QuickSilver:

• Google
• Google Images
• Google Maps
• Video (YouTube)
• Wikipedia
• Dictionary
• Thesaurus

[ If you want any of these bookmarks (quick searches), or want to know how to set them up, leave a comment below or [contact me](http://dmiessler.com/contact/) ]

So, the old way:

1. From a non-browser app, switch over to your browser (alt-tab)
2. Command-L to get to your URL field
3. Type “$shortcut $searchterm”

Using QuickSilver:

1. Invoke QuickSilver
2. Start typing the kind of quick search you want to do
3. Tab to the query field and enter the $searchterm

You may be thinking that there are three steps involved in both so there isn’t really any savings, but that’s an illusion. The real savings comes from the process being the same all the time regardless of where you started from.

It’s a matter of simplification. All Internet searches — the same way — every time.

humanproductivitylab.com

Few things are as important to geeks as how they stay informed. Knowledge is so key to us that the ability to pull it in, process it, and ensure that it’s recallable, is absolutely vital to being effective in our work.

One of the main problems we as information fetishists face is the lack of a solid, repeatable methodology for processing new input online. Too often we bounce back and forth between this site and that site, maybe check a blog or two, and then half-heartedly label the task of “reading news” as completed. This approach is not only a really poor way to stay on top of what’s new, but it’s also very anti-GTD.

The GTD Approach

For those not familiar with the GTD system, this essentially means that part of your mind will linger on activities that it doesn’t believe were performed adequately. This is actually a horrible way to go about your day; you want all your brain power focused on your current task, and being “sure” you’ve adequately absorbed today’s new information is crucial to this.

Below I touch on three main steps for accomplishing this goal. Following this simple methodology will ensure that you not only get the best information every time you start a news reading session, but it’ll also help you to actually trust that you’ve had a quality news gathering experience. This trust is what will allow you to move forward in a focused manner, with all your processor and RAM where it should be — on your current task.

Have Quality Sources

At the core of efficient news reading is having quality sources. The phrase, “garbage in - garbage out” comes to mind — meaning the better your sources are, and the tighter they’re tweaked towards the kind of news you are looking for, the more efficient your individual sessions will be.

Think aggregation. One of the coolest recent developments for people who value both time and information has been the emergence of meta-sources, or aggregated sources, of news. Two of these that I deem as absolutely crucial are listed below:

• Reddit
Reddit is an incredible collection of diverse content. The unique thing about this site is its focus on the more intellectual stories, i.e. subjects that branch into philosophy and politics as well as technology. I’ve seen many political sites that are heavier in this area, but none that ride the line between this space and technology so gracefully.
• Digg
Digg is an essential resource. Watching the front page for this site yields perhaps the hottest technology stories of the moment. It’s purely technical, so you’re not going to see it watered down with other types of content. If you’re a technical geek and this isn’t one of your sources you need to attack yourself.

Yes, most already know about Digg and Reddit, but they’re still worth mentioning. You have to learn to let go and limit your inputs; realize that the odds are good that anything you need to know will likely hit one of these two sites. Trust the system.

In addition to these meta-feeds you of course want to include a number of other specialized sources as well. These could range from personal blogs to industry-specific sites that keep you abreast of current events. For industry-oriented content you want to focus on the sources that bring the best content per unit of time. This seems fairly obvious, but being able to make the distinction between “cool”, “necessary”, and redundant is very important.

Not to pick on any particular site, but if you read a lot of different technical sources you may notice that content rarely shows up on Slashdot without first being hitting at least one other site. The question then becomes — do you need that site as well? Look for these types of sources within your list and see where you can trim them. I haven’t read Slashdot in over a year.

Choose What to Read Based on How Much Time You Have

So that brings us to the most important element of all this — deciding what to read at what time. I suggest that you organize your feeds into two to three groups based on priority. I call mine (creative, I know) primary, secondary, and tertiary.

The key here is to take a look at what you want to accomplish during your reading session, and then pick the feed group that corresponds to it. Here’s how my groups break down:

• Primary: My main aggregations + information security news (which comes from a Yahoo! Pipe I made). This is for getting up to speed quickly on the things that are necessary. Nothing extra goes in here.
• Secondary: This is where I put my main feeds that I care about but aren’t part of primary. If I have a bit more time I may look at these, but they are mostly after-hours reading.
• Tertiary: These are the feeds that I want to have the ability to monitor, but won’t check regularly. I never check these at work.

Here are my others in no particular order:

• blogs (personal and select professional blogs)
• security-blogs (information security blogs)
• security-news (additional infosec news)
• security-vulns (a myriad of vulnerability feeds)
• tracker-links (watches my friends’ linkrolls via del.icious and Google)
• tracker-books (watches my friends’ books)
• tracker-iphone (watches iPhone news via a custom Yahoo! Pipe)
• tracker-semantic (watches semantic web news via a custom Yahoo! Pipe)
• temporary (gathering bin for random feeds from people who contact me)

Basically, the names of my folders within Google Reader tell me exactly when they should be read. I can easily tell — based on what I’m doing and how much time I have — which areas to read and which to ignore. This type of input control is critical for reading news efficiently.

Have a Process

The second piece of the evolved news reading puzzle is being able to quickly rip through the sources that you’ve decided on. Too many people suffer on this step and end up mangled in a car wreck of bookmarks and open browser windows.

My technique is to use one application — Firefox. I use Google Reader for my RSS Reader, and the trick is to operate using the these three steps:

1. Open Google Reader within Firefox (it’s one of my homepage tabs) and select the items you want to read. When you’re done going through your feeds, close your Google Reader tab.
2. Starting on the leftmost tab, read each one until you’re done.
3. Consider your news session finished and return to your current task.

The beauty is in the first one — select your items and close your reader. The reason we get so discombobulated is that we’re constantly going down various tangents. We open a site, read for a bit, maybe follow a link, and before we know it three hours have passed. It’s bad form, and it leads to 1) feelings of never getting enough news, and 2) wasting time. This method solves that by subconsciously saying to yourself:

Once you’ve opened all the stories that interest you and closed Google Reader, everything you need to see today is now waiting for you in separate tabs.

It sounds simple enough, but this is precisely what your mind needs to hear in order to be able to proceed. Without hearing this you’re left with a quiet nagging in the back of the mind. “Did I see everything?” “What did I miss?” These sorts of thoughts keep you from functioning optimally. But now that you can dismiss this sort of tugging at your attention, you are free to fully immerse yourself in the current task.

Archive

The final piece of this whole absorption process is archiving what you find interesting. You do this not only so that you can maybe go back and brush up on it later, but so you can refer others to it easily when it comes up in conversation.

My solution for this is a combination of Del.icio.us - a free service that allows you to keep and share your bookmarks online — and the sharing option within Google Reader. The key thing about del.icio.us is its use of tags. When combined with Firefox Quicksearches, you can do instant URL bar searches of everything you’ve archived in the past (which for me is currently 1400+ sites). For me it’s as simple as this:

d linux firewall

This simple query put into my URL bar will search every bookmark I’ve ever put on the site that have those two tags assigned to them. Very powerful stuff.

Putting It All Together

Ok, so now that we’ve got all those steps, let’s see how it plays out:

1. Open Firefox and a Google Reader tab.
2. Go through your feeds and either read each item right in the reader or open it separately (in a browser tab).
3. When you’ve gone through all your feeds, close your Google Reader tab; you’re done with it.
4. Start from the left-most tab. Read each item, focusing on the core content and not the fluff. Remember, most items are 80% fluff.
5. If the item is a good reference or you may want to read it again or show it to others, archive it using a service like Del.icio.us.
6. When you’re done processing all the open tabs, you’re done reading news.

That’s it. It’s a process with a beginning and an end, which is a critical part of being able to break the cycle of inefficient news reading. You don’t want to drift around hoping that you read your news for the day — you want to know that you did.

The cool thing about this system is that you not only cover all your news in a repeatable, dependable way, but you also do so very quickly. This gives more time to do what’s important, namely putting all that newfound information to use.:

My friend Ken just put up a post about what tools he uses for being productive on his MBP. If you aren’t using the tools he talks about you should consider trying them out.

[ Link: Being More Productive on my Mac ]