Month: September 2010

An Apology for Idlers  →

In light of all the “Worry isn’t Work” and “how to I manage my inbox” talk lately, this essay by Robert Louis Stevenson (written over 100 years ago), mentioned in the aforelinked post, deserves its own link.

Here’s another quotable lines:

He sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return. Either he absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives a recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole nervous system, to discharge some temper before he returns to work.

And with the advent of Twitter, Facebook, and a million other things to distract us, this essay is now more relevant to more people.

An Apology for Idlers

A Freelancer’s Schedule  →

Dave Caolo, while writing about his daily schedule as a freelance writer, hits on time management:

I’m not afraid of hard work, but I am afraid of regret.

That statement right there? Those are words to live by. It does not get any clearer than that when it comes to the purpose and incredible worth of time management.

Perhaps my two, all-time favorite quotes about time management are these:

Benjamin Franklin:

Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time; for that’s the stuff life is made of.

And Robert Louis Stevenson (who is one of my favorite authors):

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

Stevenson’s quote above is from the third chapter in his writing, Virginibus Puerisque, titled: “An Apology for Idlers“. Highly recommended. In the article Stevenson talks about the often looked-down upon value of breathing deeply of life instead of always consuming our focus with work and busyness. Sound familiar?

And though this quote from Stevenson sounds like an inspirational one — i.e. devotion to something great can only be sustained by the neglect of worthless things (which is very true) — Stevenson’s point in this context is that perpetual devotion to our work (and I’ll add: entertainment) results in the neglect of our family, our friends, and life in general.

A Freelancer’s Schedule

David Chartier’s Sweet Mac Setup

Who are you, what do you do, etc…?

I am David Chartier, an Associate Editor at Macworld. I write about all things Apple, its products, and the third-party ecosystem that helps to make its products great. I also write about tech news and culture at onefps.net, and tweet at @chartier.

What is your current setup?

David Chartier's Setup

David Chartier's Setup

My primary machine is a late 2009 27-inch 2.66 GHz Core i5 iMac that could eat small family pets alive if left unchecked. I have a wireless Apple keyboard and a Magic Trackpad which is probably going to replace my Magic Mouse. My iMac’s partner in crime is a mid-2009 17-inch 2.8 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro. I have a 64GB iPad WiFi + 3G that I am increasingly using to write pieces (like this one), and an iPhone 4 that is almost never out of my arm’s reach. I also have a 2TB Time Capsule, an 802.11n AirPort Express, a 160GB Apple TV, a Logitech G9 mouse for gaming, and my wife has my old late 2008, first-gen aluminum unibody MacBook (before they went “Pro” and got an SD slot). I know, we’re the shrink-wrapped Apple family. I’ve had to find a way to live with it.

Why this rig?

I love screen real estate. I rarely full-screen apps, so when I’m writing I’ll give my browser, word processor, a chat window or two, any e-mail I need for reference, and other things as much balanced screen space as possible so I don’t need to switch between them to move information back and forth. Some techie friends consider the 17-inch MacBook Pro to be the aircraft carrier of Apple’s portables, but I love having all that space on-the-go when I need to use all those resources for pseudo-multitasking.

What software do you use and for what do you use it?

I have a ton of third-party apps, many of which I use infrequently for tasks like video transcoding or uploading photos to multiple services at once. But if I had to start with the fundamentals for writing at Macworld, I use MacJournal for almost every post, Skitch and Acorn for editing photos, and Safari. For communication I use Mail with MobileMe and Macworld Google Apps accounts, Adium for when I’m not slingshotting back to iChat (until I give in and want to use Facebook or Yahoo chat again), and Propane for the Macworld chat rooms that run on 37signals’ Campfire.

To keep track of story ideas and leads I use a mix of OmniFocus (after my nearly finished exodus from Things), Evernote, and Mail. I also have a few menubar utilities, though I’m trying to be a little more discerning about those lately. I use LaunchBar for lots of productivity stuff like launching apps and creating new e-mails and iCal events, CoverSutra for controlling iTunes, and Divvy for keeping all my windows in their places.

I’m trying to work LittleSnapper into my Macworld process so I can keep original images around for when editors need them for print. I use Time Machine to backup my Macs and my wife’s MacBook to the Time Capsule, ChronoSync to backup key files and media to a secondary external 2TB drive, and CrashPlan as a third layer of remote redundancy.

How does this setup help you do your best creative work?

I love to look at the big picture whether I work at home or on-the-go, which is why I keep lots of resources available at a quick glance and why I use MacJournal. It’s the only Mac word processor I can find which lets me draft in rich text, but copy to the clipboard as the perfectly formatted, plain HTML that most CMSes want. Lots of my peers pen in HTML or Markdown, but I don’t like to look at code or URLs when I write. To me, code is code, and prose is prose. I want to draft, re-read, and continue drafting a piece as the reader will see it, watching for things like the visual flow of text and too many concurrent links that can weigh a paragraph down.

With a desktop, a notebook, and now a tablet, I have a good array of choices between power and portability. I can bang out work and pseudo-multitask at home with my iMac and on-the-go with my MacBook Pro. Or I can bring my iPad out for the day and weekend getaways and focus on one task at a time while lying on the couch or in the middle of Millennium Park.

How would your ideal setup look and function?

I hope this doesn’t mean that I fail the Shawn Blanc Geek Test, but excluding my desire for the latest and fastest hardware, I’m not itching to make major changes. However, now that the 15-inch MacBook Pro has a higher resolution display and can switch graphics cards on the fly, I’m going to downsize and save some weight. I had a Mac Pro with dual Samsung displays for a couple years (22-inch and 24-inch), and while that was a sweet setup, I find that I like having one large, high-res workspace better.

As for the iPad, OS 4.0 and multitasking cannot arrive soon enough, but it really needs at least 512MB of RAM, if not more. I’ll probably upgrade immediately when (but only if) Apple revs the RAM (though possibly at a smaller storage capacity; I’m barely pushing 32GB on this one), because I’m not that desperate for a camera.

Speaking as a reformed mobile phone junkie, the iPhone 4 is the first phone I’ve been thoroughly happy with in years. The antenna thing doesn’t really bug me because I don’t hold it that way. The iPhone 5 will have to have some serious unicorn tear polish to get me to upgrade.

The only other changes to my setup would be more gear mostly for pleasure, not business. Mobile is exploding right now, so I’d love to pick up some Androids and Pres so I could learn a lot more about what they’re up to, but mostly for curiosity and work purposes. I’m also a frequent PC gamer, so I hope to build a dedicated PC again in the next few months. Boot Camp is wearing on me, and Steam for Mac seems like it’s going to need some time to pick up… momentum.

More Sweet Setups

David’s setup is just one in a series of sweet Mac Setups.

David Chartier’s Sweet Mac Setup

Kenny Barela Wins HOW’s Best of Show for Promotion Design  →

At the International House of Prayer we’ve been privileged to work with Kenny on some freelance jobs for us in the past — he is a stand-up guy. His personal résumé packaging not only won Best of Show for the HOW Promotion Design Awards, it also helped land him a job in Denver, Colorado. Once you’ve read the writeup you can see some close-ups of the packaging here. Congratulations Kenny!

Kenny Barela Wins HOW’s Best of Show for Promotion Design

‘Worry Isn’t Work’  →

Convicting piece by Dan Pallotta:

Worry isn’t work. Being stressed out isn’t work. Anxiety isn’t work. Entertaining a sense of impending doom isn’t work. Incessant internal verbal punishment isn’t work. Indulging the great unknown fear in your own mind isn’t work. Hating yourself isn’t work.

A lot of this has to do with the (sometimes false and sometimes real) expectations that if we do not look and act incredibly frazzled our peers and supervisors will assume we are not working hard. So we are rigid on ourselves, we live with the fear of man, and we tell ourselves to stay there. Because if not, we’re clearly wasting precious time.

No doubt this hits home for many of us; it certainly does for me. The only solution is to find our value, self-worth, and identity in something other than our job. If what we do defines our value then we’ll never be good enough: every uncompleted task becomes a judgment against our character.

‘Worry Isn’t Work’

Khoi Vinh’s Thoughts on the New Apple TV  →

Man, I Love this line:

As a consumer experience, the living room is something of a disaster: a sprawling, schizophrenic mess of rat king wires hanging off the back of inscrutable devices sending cryptic signals to one another under the auspices of an alphabet-soup of initialisms and branded nomenclature — HDMI, DVI, component video, Blu-Ray, progressive and interlaced resolutions, Dolby, DTS, etc. — and that’s not even mentioning the terminology that intersects with personal computing.

In short, Khoi’s point is that the new Apple TV hasn’t solved the real issue with personal, home media centers in that they’re awkward to operate. Meaning: good luck watching a widescreen, HD movie in surround sound if you’re not intimately acquainted with all the different remotes and components.

Khoi Vinh’s Thoughts on the New Apple TV

“Byproducts”  →

A great article by Jason Fried on Inc.com about making use of, and profiting from, the natural byproducts of your core business:

Just like the lumber industry can sell its sawdust (a byproduct of milling trees), we discovered that we could sell our knowledge (a byproduct of running a business). […]

Whenever you make something, you make something else. Your byproducts may not be as obvious as sawdust, but they’re there.

“Byproducts”