shhLIFE!

In my quest to find the “perfect” GTD system for my use, I’ve decided to actually try a few todo systems for a week at a time until I find the one that I like the best.  I’ve got a rather complicated workflow that I need to support. Some things I’ve come up with as prerequisites are:

1. It has to be cross-platform.  At work I use Linux, at home I use Mac, and in meetings I use my iPhone and pen/paper.  So I need to be able to add tasks in any environment, and get access to my information at any point as well.
2. It has to be fast.  If it takes too long to enter data, it’s not worth it.
3. It has to be flexible.  There’s no way I’m going to be able to develop the proper system right off the bat.  I’m expecting it to modify and change over time, so I want it to be flexible and easily scalable.
4. It has to be fun. If I don’t like using it, I never will.
5. It has to be visually pleasing.  Seems shallow, but when I look at it I want to think “woah momma!” not “oh grandpa, put your pants back on”.

Thanks to a quick email by the developer of http://gtdagenda.com who is doing a great job of getting the word out about his system, I’m making it my first pick to try using a GTD methodology for my work.  I’ve been using it for day and a half, and will post the results of my findings over the course of this week.  Since I’m learning this software as I use it, I’m sure there are going to be things I discover or things that power-users can tell me that I’m not aware of.  If you have particular tips and tricks about various softwares, please let me know!

This isn’t a full review, just some first impressions based on using it for the past day and a half.  Your mileage may vary.

GTD Agenta – First Impressions

My initial thought as signing up was that the website itself does a great job of giving you an overview of how the tool works.  It’s got screen shots, breaks things down into sections, and a quick read gives you the basics of how you can use gtdagenda rather quickly.  It even gives some examples of how to impliment GTD and ZTD with their tool.  Very handy!

Below I’ve listed some Pros and Cons based on my initial experience.

Pros

Dan (the developer) is very responsive. I’ve emailed him a few times and he’s been very quick to get back to me with responses and notes.  I’ve certainly used other software where the developers take a long time to get back to their users, or never do.  Dan responds personally to email, and also does a great job about getting the word out about GTDagenda.  He obviously is very passionate about it.

Eventual IPhone application (no ETA). One of my requirements is an iPhone application that syncs with the tool.  Currently GTDagenda has no iPhone app, but it does have a mobile version that works pretty well.  Unfortunately, I’m often in meetings where I have no internet access, and need to be able to have something local that I can sync with.  Dan has mentioned that there is an iPhone app on the way, but there’s no ETA on it.

Context/Projects list on right is very nice. I really like that on the right hand side of the screen are you list of contexts and projects.  You can quickly filter by either of these and each one shows you how many tasks are in those contexts or project.  Cool!

Projects with tasks but no “Next Action” flag turn red. This is a great way to make sure that all your projects can move forward.  Super awesome fantastic!

Interaction is relatively fast, no long redraw time . While not the speediest web app, it’s certainly no dog.

Checklists.  A great way to help you form productive habits.  Like going to the gym every day.  Nice.

Calendar on the sidebar. I like the calendar on the right to quickly see what’s due or done on any given day.

High Level Goals. Basically this is like grouping the projects into bigger projects. Handy for doing things like “Projects – Mine” and “Projects – Others” for projects you’re responsible for, but other people are doing them.

Email Notification – you can have GTDagenda email you every day with your “next actions”.  Nice!

Cons

No current iPhone app, only web access. If you work where you have spotty access, this limits ability to use GTDAgenda

Only 1 context per task. I like to use multiple contexts to handle people, departments, locations, etc

Can’t assign a “person” to a task. For example, if I’m waiting for John to finish a shot, I want the @waiting for context, and the @john context.

Very linear workflow.  You MUST create a project and a context before you create  a task.  If you’re in the middle of creating a task and then you need to add a context, you loose your task creation.  This really inhibits my workflow.

No quick way to add a task. You must be in Task/Next Action, or project pages.

Adding contexts and projects wasn’t intuitive right off the bat. The first time I wanted to add a context I had to hunt around to find it.

UI seems a bit messy. I prefer the clean UI of Todoist

Date due can’t have a specific time, only a day

Not “AJAX”ey enough. This is totally subjective, but I prefer the interaction of Todoist.

Can’t reorder tasks on Today. If I have a whole bunch of Next Actions, I would like to be able to look at them and then order them in the order I want to attack them.

No automatic assignment of Next Action. I would like to be able to automatically assign the next todo in a project to Next Action as soon as I complete the current Next Action.  This way I can stay in the Next Action page and just keep cruzing instead of having to then go over to the Projects page, set my next action, and then head back to the Next Action page.

Difficult to separate various tags in page lists. When looking at my list of things to do today, it would be great to easily see what I’m waiting for, what’s a @work task, etc. Having colored lines for specific tags would help this workflow.

So there you go.. first impressions after using the tool for one day.  I’ll keep on it for the week and then see how it goes with my weekly review at the end of the week.  Thoughts?  Suggestions? Opinions?  Send ‘em my way!

I’ve had a number of people request the name of this new theme, so I figured I’d point you to the wonderful site where I got it!

The place where I snagged this one is: http://www.webdesignlessons.com/

I tend to look at new themes quite often, testing them out, seeing how they work, and ultimately deciding not to change mine.  However, this one I felt was really fun and nice, and I love the featured blog post up at the top of the page.  Definitely go check out some of their other themes!

Oh, I did make one slight hack to this theme, and that was to add a link to the comments from the little bubble next to the post.

That was done by taking this line:

<h4><?php comments_number('0', '1', '%'); ?></h4> 

and replacing it with this one:

<h4><?php comments_popup_link('0', '1', '%', 'commentslink'); ?></h4> 

.post-top h4 a {

     color:#cdcdcd;

}

So suddenly THIS site started getting malware errors.  Determined not to let the hackers punt me out of my own website AGAIN, I went on a rampage.. investigating and trying to figure out what was going on.

I think.. I believe.. that I’ve fixed it.

See, I read in passing that people like to use iframes to include hidden pages.  So I did a quick search on my site for iFrames, and found a post that had one in it that I wasn’t expecting.  So I removed it.. and now I’m not getting those errors anymore!

Sweet!

Please let me know if you see more malware warnings, and what page you were going to when you found them!

Thanks!

The Weta Cave.

Wow.. my old office is now a museum!  Crazy!!

If anyone goes, I’d love to see photos.. I’m curious if my old desk is still there & if they have maniquins representing the animators “working at their desks”.  Is the ping pong table still there?

This has got to be one of the most artistically inspiring things I’ve seen in a long time.  This guy.. Kutiman.. basically took a whole bunch of YouTube clips and re-mixed both the video and audio to create his own unique songs & videos.  It’s really quite amazing.. not only is the music actually good, it has this home-grown sort of historic feel to it.  It reminds me of the first time I saw the Brothers Quay animations.. they felt like something you would stumble upon on the attic.  This, to me, is the same.. it’s like I opened a box of unknown home movies and just played them together to create a beautiful narrative.

here are a couple of songs..

Check out the rest!

THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube.

I have a new favorite blog.. and it just started!  It’s called Ninjerktsu and it’s all about ninjas being jerks.

Please go check it out ‘cuz it’s totally awesome!

So lately I’ve been trying to expand my knowledge base and work on my time/project tracking abilities. One of the tools I’m using is open office calc (it’s free!).

I’ve been trying to write a really cool spreadsheet that will allow me to keep track of various phases of a project. I’ve got some fun things working, but have gotten stuck with one of the oddities of the way open office handles conditional formatting.

For those of you who don’t know, conditional formatting is a cool features that allows you to change the style of a cell based on the content. For example, I can make a cell “yellow” when the project is launched, green when it’s in progress, and black when it’s done.

The problem is that there are only 3 conditional formats allowed.. and there are WAY more than 3 phases to a project.

I’ve detailed my problem in the open office forums here, but if any of you have any suggestions I’d love to hear ‘em!

Cheers!

Originally posted: Tuesday, 22 May 2007

This friday I’m going to be speaking at the Digital Media Arts College graduation ceremony.  I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to write a speech about owning your career & working towards a goal.  It’s been quite fun driving around, pretending to give the speech, realizing that I have WAY too many stories that are WAY too long to fit into a 15 minute talk.

Next week I’ll post the finished speech here for people to read, but in the meantime I thought I’d include one of the stories I had to cut.  This isn’t a “funny” story, but it’s meant to illustrate a point:  that it’s possible to achieve a goal if you understand how to work towards it.

When I graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1996, I was working for a 3d animation software company called Alias|Wavefront.  You may have heard of them, they created the software Maya – one of the most popular 3d animation software’s around.   I had been interning at Alias|Wavefront for 6 months, learning the ins and outs of Maya and was on the track to become the key tech support person for the product.  This is because every other tech support person was focused on supporting the legacy products: Power Animator, Wavefront, Kinemation, Dynamation, TDI, etc.  I was new, so instead of training me up on their older products, I spent my time learning Maya.

At the time, Maya was in Alpha stage, meaning it was so brand new it didn’t even have a file->save option.  Seriously.  You couldn’t save a file.  Since Maya was not even out the door, there wasn’t much to support so I spent most of my time testing the code & making little demos.  At one point I was in a video conference meeting with some developers in Toronto when I heard about this guy Bubba who was making a short film in Maya.

My ears immediately perked up.

Short Film?  Here?  Somebody is making a short film?

I didn’t even know that a job like that was POSSIBLE at Alias|Wavefront, let alone that someone was doing it.  I immediately thought “man, that guy is so LUCKY!  I want that job!”

I knew that my career at A|W wasn’t heading in that direction, I was headed to become the guy explaining to the customers that the drink holder on the computer wasn’t too small to hold their coke, the can didn’t fit because it was a CD drive.

So I set about figuring out a way to switch departments.  I didn’t want to just leave the current job for a number of reasons.  First, burning bridges is bad.  It’s the worst thing you can do.  There’s a saying, it’s not what you know but who you know, right?  There’s a third part to the saying..  It’s not what you know, but who you know and how you treat them.  So I didn’t want to piss off my boss.  Second, I didn’t know if Bubba needed anyone else on his team.  Third, even if he wanted another person, there was no way he’d know about me.

I realized that the first thing I had to do was solve the problem of my boss being upset if I left.  Since I was one of the people in the support department with the most knowledge about Maya, it stood to reason that I was going to be the main support person once Maya got released.  If I wasn’t there, then the team would have to scramble until everyone else got up to speed.  So I spent the next few weeks writing up a course explaining everything I knew about Maya and how it worked.  It was designed to help people who already knew other 3d software understand how Maya worked so they could get up to speed quickly.

Then I went to my boss and told her that I’d like to teach the class to the support crew in Toronto.  Kind of spread the knowledge around so we wouldn’t be hit too hard once Maya went out to beta customers.  She thought it was a great idea & sent me to Toronto the next week to meet with the team up there.

While there I introduced myself to Bubba.  I told him that I heard he was working on a short film & said that if he needed any help I’d be happy to help out.  We talked for a bit & I showed him a few things in Maya that I had picked up over the past few months.  He invited me out to sushi with the other two members of the team (Corban and Adrian) so they could tell me about it.  We talked, and ate, and drank sake, and beer, and had more sake and more beer, and more beer, and more sake, and at the end of it they said that they’d be happy to have me help out.

They were also happy to stick me with the $300 bill, but I was so happy I didn’t even care.

6 months later I moved onto that team full time & stayed there for 3 years, creating demos, short films, and generally getting to travel around the world & talk about Maya.

This experience demonstrated to me that just wanting something isn’t enough.  You have to actively go out and seek it.  To work for it.  And most importantly, do it in a way that doesn’t piss anybody off.

Originally posted: Wednesday, 12 December 2007

Some of you may remember a website called 10 second club which has been around for a few years as a great testing-ground for animators. The concept was brilliant.. every month post a sound file and then let animators try and do their best to come up with the most unique and entertaining animation for that audio.

Unfortunately, 10secondclub is no more.. but fortunately, some excellent friends have opened up 11 second club (it’s one better!) which is basically the same thing, except this time it’s hosted by AnimationMentor.com!

Animation Mentor has provided a completely rad prize for the winner each month.. an official eCritique from a real animation mentor!  That’s right.. it’s a chance for the winner to get a critique just like the ones that we give students at the school.. but not only that, everyone can see the critique and learn from it!

What I love about this is that it gives the animator a great tool to improve themselves, and it also gives everyone a chance to see what an eCritique actually looks like.

The first critique was done by the famous Victor Navone, a hugely awesome person and animator who is just so talented it almost hurts.

The second critique was done by yours truly.. a very fun experience & I hope that Kevin (the november winner) finds it useful & informative!

Anyway, go check out 11secondclub.com and enjoy the experience!

Howdy folks!

So I had some pretty strict commenting regulations when I started this new blog to try and reduce the amount of spam.. but I noticed that I haven’t been getting many comments at all.  So I’m easing up the restrictions a bit in the hopes that it’ll mean more people will comment.

If we get overrun by spam, then I’ll have to tighten it again to needing a login/password in order to comment.. but until then, hopefully we’ll get a few more people talking!

Of course, it could just be that I’m not posting anything worth commenting about.