Baby, you can drive my car

Driving to work in my sweet Mexico City is delicious... on the two or three times a year some official holiday allows people to crowd the beaches, leaving the city to those of us (still) not forced to comply with school's calendar to afford some days away from home.

In these rare ocasions, one gets at least an extra hour of sleep, a nice breakfast with the family, and gets to the office smiling, and raving about how you managed an average speed of 60 km/h instead of 15!

Given this scenario, and the fact that I live in the suburbs, I made a decision a couple of years ago. I could go on, like anyone, ranting all through the morning about how long I spend on the car, or I could give a better use to my time. When I decided this, I drove 30 km to work, and another 30km back home. Each way would take at least 1:30h on my car, or 2:00+ by bus. One nasty day, with heavy rain, it took me 3:30h to get back home. If you do the math, it makes you wonder why on earth we need a car that can go above 50km/h.

Nowadays my drive is just over 10km each way, and I'm happy and thankful about it. Nevertheless the attitude remains: let's make the best use of this time behind the wheel. So, today I'm sharing with you some tips and ideas, and a couple of gizmos involved in pimping my drive.

Before I go on, I must say: I had already written a long article some days ago. And a bit painfully by the way, using my smartphone's keyboard. That, only to realize the blogging software I used for this purpose ate my article. So, I am doing this trying to remember as best as I can. I must confess I was so disapointed I left some days go by before coming back to blog, as you can see from the publishing dates. And now that I rethink it, I guess it will be better if I write at least two or three shorter pieces. So, here goes piece #1.

Breakfast!

Yes: I usually have breakfast in my car. I am a slow-eater, and I like my breakfast hearthy. So, coffee-and-run is not an option, as neither is sitting down, nice and easy with my wife and kids to share eggs, bacon, juice and milk. But at least 30 minutes in the car make perfect sense for some decent -and pleasent- nutrition.

My wife frequently sets me up some portable breakfast. If she is not awake yet, I'll manage myself. Read again: portable breakfast. If you have ever done more than coffee and cookies while driving, you have seen the evident threats involved, from a stain in your shirt to a serious accident. So, what is a portable breakfast?

• A portable breakfast stays together. A sandwich, a wrap, quesadillas are portable: you wrap them with a napkin, if any, and there you go.

• Some food can be made portable using an appropriate plate. I use a deep dish which is heavy enough to stay put on the seat, and that can take a reasonable amount of stop-and-go before slipping to the floor. Scrambled eggs, rice, pasta (I had gnocci just last week) fit nicely in this dish.

• Some food needs a fork. Advise one: don't; prefer a spoon. A fork has prongs, and you don't want one going through you tongue if you need to stop suddenly. Advise two: the grip can be heavy, and with the car's motion, it can flip over and end in the floor easily. Plastic, even disposables seem to be a better option. Advise three: if you need a knife, you need to use it BEFORE you get in the car. Once the engine is running, you only have one hand available, at best. Having said this, I must confess I once had SUSHI! While chopsticks are actually a good choice for a tool (if you are handy with them, that is), all the soy sauce/wasabi/ginger logistic place sushi on the extreme end of the bite 'n drive sport. ("Bite 'n Drive" I think I like it. If you like it too, remember: you saw it here first).

• Travel mugs are a must. You know, those mugs with a lid with a hole to drink through. Prefer those where the hole has a lid; better if the lid slides instead of popping up. No lid can result in spills if you need to brake suddenly. Soup can be made portable inside one of these! But as far as I can tell, this only works for soup with nothing solid on it (veggies, pasta...) for these won't go through the hole. But for me, the travel mug usually carries a latte I prepare myself. Make sure your mug fits nicely in you car's cup-holder.

• Beverages. Besides a travel mug, you can get many products in bottles or tetrabrick that work just fine. Bricks that take a straw are a decent option. Sport bottles are too. But recently I came up with a solution to drink a brand of juice that I like but comes with a large, round, screw-off lid. I take my swiss-army knife and make a thin hole on the lid. It turned out to be safer than a sport bottle; if this bottle falls, the hole is to small for any liquid to spill, and I can drink confortably sucking through it. Only downside is when the hole is too thin and I need to re-work it.

• Stains happen. So, sometimes I wear a jacket that I don't mind getting dirty until I finish breakfast. Peace of mind comes with this device. But if the stain happened already, there is a nice resource I found upon entering parenthood: baby wipes will remove almost any food stain if you use one immediatly.

• Napkins. Have enough napkins available.

• Pay attention. Every time I talk about things to do while driving, I'll never stress this enough: first of all, you are driving. Keep your focus on it. If you have to chose between grabbing an extra bite and grabbing the wheel with both hands for a tight turn, you are thinking wrong: there is nothing to think! Put down that tuna sandwich and drive, for Pete's sake. You can take it again when the road goes back to a straight line.

Besides sushi, there are many interesting episodes in my bite 'n drive memories. I will just end with a recent one (the one that happened just the day the original article got lost). That day, my wife made me this: (from bottom to top) pita bread, sliced open; smoked salmon; goat cheese; spinach; red onion; a dash of salt, pepper and herbs; the upper skin of the pita. This came warm and with a bottle of cranberry+apple juice (cold). I didn't have time to prepare my own coffee, so I went to a new coffee shop nearby and got myself a double espresso. I swear I saw a couple of envy looks while driving. It was so good! I might be some kind of bite 'n drive ninja, but my wife certainly has become a B&D chef!

Jargon File

Chances are many of you arrive here with a hefty cultural baggage on the subjects I write about (quite possibly heftier than myself). But then again many others, upon reading a post, will find they can't connect all the dots. That's where the Jargon File comes in.

Whenever I feel some subject might be new and obscure for some, I'll try to give a brief explanation in a post called Jargon File: Subject. The post will also be tagged as JargonFile, so you can easily find all of them. I won't try to write full, in-depth primers on big subjects such as GTD, for there are way better examples out there. But a quick, basic explanation may come in handy, and I may even throw in some links for further discovery.

Why the name? you may ask. Well, back in 1975, when the Internet was a wild jungle, only for the initiated, a text file was created where the hacker's jargon was compiled an explained. Sort of an enciclopedia of the early computer hacker's culture. To cut a long story short, the file is still mantained as of today by Eric S. Raymond. You can't claim to have some level of hackerdom if you don't know the file. Specially if you belong to younger generations, take a look. It has been a long road.

But I am getting off-topic. This Jargon File post was -of course- about the Jargon File itself. Not really much to do with this blog, but I felt this needed a justification. Wait for the next one. And if you want to request a specific explanation, please do. Make a comment on the entry, and I'll be happy to do it.

Disruption is evil!

aka the turn of a friendly 3x5 card

It just hit me! For ages, I have been disrupting myself. Let me explain. My mind is volatile; it tends to fly after every other crazy idea... and to let important ideas fall through the cracks. I might as well have some kind of attention disorder. But a system should cover for this problem, shouldn't it?

So, for some years now I have been using alarms. Being that Palm's default task list app cannot set an alarm to a task, after trying every piece of software alarm, I eventualy settled with Chapura Key Suite, which is the closest you can get to Outlook (and believe me, it's really close) within Palm OS realms. And of course, it includes alarms for tasks and not only for calendar dates.

Now that I've made the move to Windows Mobile (more on that later; hold your fire and flames, Palm fans), alarms come with the package, but the native tasks app sucks big time on the Smartphone version of WM5, so I got myself eXtreme Agenda which, albeit a few inconsistencies here and there, rocks.

Here is how my system works: let's say while driving back home, I must pass by the store and get some coffee. I know I should be already driving at around 19:30. So I set an alarm to fire at that time: coffee! When the time comes I will be close to the store and will be remembered to stop and buy some coffee. Once, I read that a proactive person is nothing but a reactive person who happens to react on time. So, I set myself to react to the alarm.

What's the problem with that? Well, imagine I have an unscheduled meeting. At 19:30, during an intense work session with the customer, an alarm will fire, setting me momentarily out of context. I know I must snooze it, but for how long? I just tap one of the options provided by the software, knowing it might be either too soon (again during the meeting) or too late (already at home).

A minor problem will arise if I am already driving, but still far from the store: as I'm usually using my phone for music, the song will be muted to let the alarm play. So I snooze it. Two songs later, off it goes again. I might receive a phone call, and bipbip! it would be interupted too.

Besides, unless the phone is in vibrating mode, everyone around can be a victim of this "unflushable alarm effect"; as I am out of the required context for the task, I keep on snoozing, and it keeps on beeping once and again. My wife simply hates this.

Since I am no guru, let's turn to a real one. David Allen says there are no interuptions: only inputs. The productivity ninja must be ready to face an interruption and ka-blam! instantly process it, defer it, convert it into next actions, everything without sweating.

But this is no interruption. Interruption is your boss wanting to check some ideas with you just now. Interruption is your kid crying for his bottle when you were finally ready to start watching that movie. These alarms of mine are disruption, and self-inflicted! I can define contexts in my PDA, but my PDA doesn't know when do I switch contexts. It just fires an alarm at a time I thought I might eventually be in the appropriate context to act. But change happens, and my estimation isn't that useful most of the time. And having some piece of hardware reminding me of things I haven't done (because the context is not right, or because I don't want to do them just now) isn't exactly stress-freeing.

Stress leaves when control comes. There are interruptions I won't be able to avoid, but hey! they are just inputs, right? I'll Train and deal with them. But I must take control of what I can do at every context; not leave it to my PDA. So, beginning today:

• I will clean my task lists, and make sure every action is listed in the right context. 3x5 cards are my choice, for they fit in my shirt's pocket and in my car's "card-holding device" (more on this later).
• I will discard the alarms. I don't know how many are left yet, so I will check each against my lists, and turn them off.
• Use alarms strictly for deferred, time specific dates, or for situations I am pretty sure it will go off at the right moment (not many, but there are some).
• Review, review, review! I know here lies the main problem in my productivity system implementation: I don't review enough. This goal is really a project in itself, so I'm delimiting to this: review my 3x5s and conciently avoid numbing them down.

Why not use my PDA for these lists? Well, for one, the PDA's task list needs some deep cleansing and I can't afford to wait until I'm done with it. But most of all because in this case, lo-fi is more immediate. I don't want to quit the media player to check my tasks and try to read an LCD display while on a moving vehicle (that I am driving!) My "card-holding device" displaying the right @Car card should do.

Now that I think it, before this "card-holding device" I used another disruptive method: post-its on the rearview mirror. They were intentionally disruptive because I get so distracted that I will only remember if they disturb me. And disruptive also because they tend to fall down. Dangerously disruptive!

In the end, self-inflicted disruption is self-punishment, originated from the assumption that I can't do it and I need some sort of whip to do it. Today I believe I can change the paradigm and decide that I can indeed do it, and finally stop the punishment to start taking control.

About

I hate it when a blog does not include an "about" section, a "mission statement", or something to give me the faintest idea of whatever was going through the blogger's mind when s/he started to write. So, here I come.

First of all, a disclaimer:

I am no productivity guru. Far from it. I am a tweaker and a thinkerer who, being alive in the era of blogs, thought it would be nice to write down some experiences along the path of actually achieving results. Not being authoritative here; this is no expert advice. Things written here might prove useful to you. Or simply fail and burst as a slimey green blob of chaos. You have been warned.

In the begining

Since I was I kid I felt fascinated by personal organizers. My dad used to carry around a beautiful European organizer, I guess it was an A6 format (small: 105 × 148 mm). It was made of black leather and it had all kinds of sheets for every imaginable purpose. I liked to see him get his new set each year, sit down, and dedicate the next hour or so reviewing and changing the old pages for new ones, which he kept inside last year's hard plastic box. For my incipient engineer mind, all that made sense in a beautiful way.

So, I did my own version. Of course, my kid's income couldn't afford my father's organizer, but I tried to do as well as I could, with the organizers he was given as business presents each year and never used. That, only to discover a pattern: until the end of January, everything was OK. By mid-February I almost never read it or write anything in it, and by May, I had already started -and failed- a couple more.

Enter PDAs

Fast forward to the beginning of my job life (I am guessing 1999/2000) Dad -again- had got himself one of the first PDAs a couple of years before. It was awful and huge, but not so expensive, and the concept, somehow, made sense. Few months later, he got himself his first Palm (still a 3Com Palm Pilot Professional). Later on, I bought it from him, as soon as he upgraded to a Palm V.

At the moment, it made sense. What made more sense was when months later, I found myself carrying the device with me almost every day (huge as it was), and keeping it updated most of the time.

Enter GTD

I liked to believe that a gadget, along with my simple intuition, could make for an organization system. Wrong. Absurd task lists, events that weren't realy events and other nonsense populated my Palm. And most of all: many things were not getting done at all, and I wasn't happy about it.

It was 2005 and the blogosphere was healthy and happy. I first read about GTD at some blog, quite possibly at Steve Pavlina's excellent site. On to Wikipedia to get the scoop on this new -for me- TLA, and it really made sense.

I won't bore you with the details of my ongoing quest for the state of stress-free productivity. Not in this first post, at least. Suffice to say that it was a complete revelation. If you stumbled upon this blog, you may already know what GTD is about. If not, take a look here, as I did. You owe it to yourself.

(Re-)enter lo-fi

From my early collection of digital watches to my ever-present smartphone, I have always been a gadgeteer. All of my friends could only find it logical that I used to carry around a "Bat-belt" wit my huge first Palm, along with the cellphone. Bits are in, paper is dead.

Or so I thought. But there is always a right tool for every situation. And every time I look, there is a new paper-based "lo-fi" tool: hPDA, D*I*Y hPDA, 3x5-cards fever, the Tickler file, Moleskine (reborn from its ashes) and lots of DIYers sharing their productivity wares to the world, no software involved. Besides, I found myself frequently resorting to the dangerous Post-Its, so I decided to give paper a new try, in a better version that those sticky notes.

And here I am

It's 2008, and my productivity arsenal features a smartphone, a binder with my own sheets (more on that later), and recently again, 3x5 cards. And now also this blog. My friend Hans always talks about how sad it is to "read and read web sites, and never write one and share". I think it was about time to start. Someone might find these articles useful. Someone might feel like sharing their own stories, so comments are welcome and will be read. The beauty, after all, is in the community. By the way, AdSense is enabled, and Google promises links will be be kept in the context of the site.

That, in few words, is the story so far. Some chapters of it are -I believe- worth sharing. And that is why this blog exists. Hope you like it. Welcome.

(It feels good to mark as done the "start blog" task on my list ;) )