Life Hacks Live Danny O'Brien, Merlin Mann http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2005/view/e_sess/5958 At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference San Diego, California, 17 March 2005 Impressionistic transcript by Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- Danny: I had a TV show in deep cable called 404 NOT FOUND. We obsessed with the segues, "That was a cold way of chilling your computer and another cold thing is penguins and now Linux" -- we used to obsess about these. The good thing that came out of this was before commercials, my co-presenter Dave Green would turn to the camera and say, "And now, a few short films about capitalism." And now a few short presentations about Life Hacks. I'm using a 10 minute timer to ensure that I talk as fast as possible. Here's a recap of last year, in bumper stickers: -- HACKERS PLAIN TEXT Geeks store what they do in text and spurn big apps, using plain text editors. Simplicity and speed, ease of search and extraction, cut and paste. All you need in a filing system. -- MY OTHER APP IS IN ~/BIN If it wasn't plaintext, there's one app that they loved, like mail, Excel, PowerPoint, etc. The rest was little glue scripts in ~/bin, secret scripts they are embarrassed about and don't share with others, though it turns out that they're all really similar. -- SUPER PROLIFIC GEEKS DO IT IN PUBLIC WITH COMPLETE STRANGERS AND LIKE IT. OH YES. (don't put this on your car) Geeks get their credibility and prolificness out of sharing everything -- put it in public and the public organizes it for you. Put it on a Wiki and others will fix it. -- Last year I wasn't sure that this was for anyone except Alpha Geeks, though I thought that these things could trickle up into common usage. After all geeks ruined these things and sold them to everyone else: alpha geeks got the first spam and the first spam solutions. Last year's predictions: Great apps will appear: - Decent email search - Easy webscraping - Keyboard macros for Windows - Filepile for everyone Decent email search: every geek had written one of these by hand last year. Now gmail exists. Someone said to Sergei or Larry or Moe, "I'm having problems with my email, fix it!" Also see Lookout, search for Outlook, bought by MSFT in 2005. Based on GPLed software -- good for getting the GPLed code into MSFT -- doesn't that mean that all MSFT software is infected with free software! Email is solved now, thanks to me! Social file-sharing for everyone: Synching is a huge problem as is sharing with a few people, not the world. Flickr launched two days before last year's presentation and is very good at this. Novell iFolder came out three years before I predicted it, but was open sourced a few months later. Groove was create din 1997 -- now owned by MSFT. MSFT buys everything I say! Webscrapers: Everyone was trying to write tools to scrape webpages and turn them into RSS. Who's heard of RSS? Who invented RSS? [[laughs]] Keyboard macros for Win/Linux: Thinking of Quicksilver/Launchbar/Butler from Mac, which brings keyboard use into the GUI. I thought this would come to Win/Linux, but I haven't seen it. I assumed the trickle-down would work like this: stuff from ~/bin would be turned into apps and given like gods on high to the poor people of the world. But people are good at doing this for themselves, bleeding out from us. Rather than development going around alpha geeks, people got the ideas of these things and came up with often-much-better solutions themselves. === Merlin: I stole everything on 43 Folders from Danny's Life Hacks. Watching the 43 Folders Google Group has been really interesting. Here are recurring themes from the 43 Folders community. Getting Things Done (book by David Allen)-inspired stuff is extremely popular. It really appeals to nerds: it's a framework for making progress on the projects that are important to you. It helps you boil everything you do down to atomic meaningful activities. It's the fairy-tale promise of wrangling all the crap in your life through prioritization. The thing everyone wants to know how to implement this and not get trapped putting things in folders all day long. What's the least complicated way to approach a problem: if you need a Palm in your life, use a Palm, but I use 12 3x5 index cards in a binder-clip. That sounds like, "This guy from San Francisco thinks he invented writing things down and paper." But this is about seeing tools as more than circuit boards in search of a problem. If you've got four people going to a concert, before the key is turned in the ignition, everyone holds the ticket to their foreheads and verifies that everyone else has a ticket. There's something satisfying about making it hard to screw up -- it's like clipping mittens to your sleeves. I'm a Mac user and the cool thing is all this Unix stuff moving into the Mac world: * Quicksilver: Nominally an app launcher. But it watches what you do and helps you create functional sentences using a three-pane interface -- it's GUI piping. The more you use it, the better ti gets, because it learns from you and gets faster. It helps you minimize annoying distractions that add cruft to your day by causing a modal shift. * Remind: A cal replacement that turns lightly structured text into to-do lists. So compelling that it makes people who aren't geeks want to learn configure/make/make install. What does it all mean? There's a continuing interest in making iterative small improvements to the way you do things. Not crash diets where you regain all the weight, but rather ways of changing your life that makes you better. Also, OS X is making people more ambitious about what they want to try. Installing Firefox is scary in an institution because the Dungeons and Dragons guy will yell at them for changing their computer, but OS X is easy to install/de-install. === Danny: One thing about 43 Folders is what crosses over from the first adopters to the world. Not everything makes it. Take text-editors: a blog entry on Corante by Suw talked about how in six months, hundreds of text editors have failed to organize her life. She blamed me, so I bought her a Starbucks. The reason text-editors are so important to programmers is that they live in editors. On the other hand, text-files are perfectly usable by novices. But ~/bin is taking off -- non-geeks are using small apps linked together and piping, like remind. What transfers and what doesn't? Three mysterious crossovers: * Why keyboard shortcuts? Obvious to geeks. But non-geeks love it too. It all comes back to emacs! There's plenty that goes against this: Apple R&D shows that keyboarding is only perceived as faster, while using the mouse is actually faster. Using the mouse is a low-cognitive task, e.g., boring, and therefore it feels slow. While shortcuts are fascinating -- do I need the shift or the command or what -- time flies when you're keyboarding. Power users are delusional. OTOH, from O'Reilly: "The mouse is the single greatest obstacle standing in the way of becoming one with your keyboard and the dramatically higher productivity levels which the state promises." Keyboards get you into the zone. The mouse breaks your stride (though not if you're a designer). What throws you is the transition -- from keyboard to mouse or vice-versa. Alice Taylor: Technically Inexperienced People (TIPpies) are NEVER in a flow state. If you try to help people who are battling their computers, they're never concentrating on their task, never in flow. The trick is to stay in your chosen app and not make the transition. * Why the big screens? Also seems obvious: geeks use HUGE HUGE screens, maybe four or five of them. Ideally, you're down in the bottom like the MST3K bots, lunging with your mouse to reach the corners: FITSLAW DON'T FAIL ME NOW [[laughs]] Mary Czerwinksi from MSFT research: Best group on this stuff in the world. 2000 study compared common tasks using large or small monitors: people with big monitors did better and could remember things like phone numbers while working. It's easy, it's navigation -- all the windows necessary to perform a complex task are all in the same place so you don't have to context-switch, you and the computer don't have to change focus. Navigation is part of the problem. The thing you need to accomplish your task is distracting you from your task. What's interesting here is that so much of what we see is stuff that makes navigation easier. The traditional keyboard solution is alt-tab, which has no muscle-memory. Mouse-gestures and shortcuts exploit muscle memories -- alt-tab is Morse Code: three apps down and four to the left. Quicksilver gives you muscle-memory for switching apps. * Turn off the sodding computer I didn't mention this before because I thought people would hate me. Turn off the Internet, email, the Internet again (you turned it on again) and most of all IM. "Improved focus can be achieved through activities such as meditations, yoga and turn off Instant Messaging" - Ulrich Mayr, U Oregon. People are downed in technology: the warm blanket of technology is soaked in the smallpox of novelty-seeking easily-bored-geek technology. Geeks have short attention spans, you're all on IRC to see if anything good is going on next door. We have the Web so that we can check to see if there's anything better than what we're looking at. Flow means you can click all day and do nothing except write three Wikipedia entries [[laughs]]. Everything until now has been about keeping you in flow, but the next wave is all in eliminating distraction. I use a proxy that replaces all my web-sessions after 10 min with a page that says DO YOU REALLY WANT TO LOOK AT THE WEB OR DO YOU HAVE WORK TO DO. Stuff that should happen: * Google Suggest: a class of apps that we'll see more of, eliminating navigation. You start typing and it feeds you extra bits of information -- not completing your thought but improving it. * Rise of the Passive Informant: Things like Dashboard, remembrance agent. Things that pop up in the corner of your eye, without necessitating a context switch. IRC sits quietly in the corner, but IM goes ee-oh! * Unified Notification UI (e.g. Growl): Growl is an API waiting for apps. It is supposed to notify you with popups like, DON'T MEAN TO BOTHER YOU BUT YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE. Mitigates the tragedy of the task bar where sixty apps all try to tell you your wireless card is working. It's a better Clippy. A UI experimentation state -- bubbles, boxes, all kinds of things. * Nightmare of Desktop Search: Has the danger of being something else you have to switch to, and there's no PageRank for your Desktop. * Return of WordPerfect: The original WordPerfect was the only thing on the screen and people loved that. Maybe apps will come with modes that full-screen them. This was Raskin's core job. === Merlin: What's beyond hacks, beyond applying patches to bad systems. Not a lot of progress in PIMs -- 1984's Now UpToDate is equivalent to modern tools. What tools support good habits and smart behaviors? What helps you get from losing your shit to flow? Does your Outlook check your mail every morning and beep? Do you check you Metafilter every day? Obsessively reload your blog's stats-screen? Do you really need realtime updates from your mail? Can you switch to a fifteen minute polling interval? Your mail interrupts you 2500 times a week. I use a blog-stats program called Summary that detects differences, like spikes ("interesting referrers"). I don't need to search my stats in realtime. Weblog software could notify you when something interesting happens on your blog -- e.g. a lot of comments on an old post, maybe something cool you want to buy! Or, don't notify me of all my mail, but notify me of spikes or lots of email with the same subject. You can't shut off mail because you'll get fired, but this would help. Another problem is your overfull filing system that's too deep to navigate or your inbox with 3000 items in it -- you end up managed by your incoming mail. The guy at the diner is in the business of making sandwiches, not stacking orders. If you're filing email all day, you're stacking orders. Youo should do something with your email or get rid of it. Think of your life in terms of things that you can choose to do or not -- your job isn't about filing. What apps will allow that kind of thing? Email/blogs/etc. We've been thinking a lot about how Alpha Geek behaviors are tipping over into people who are use computers a lot but are interested in creative stuff, and Getting Things Done, a business book is leaking into geek circles. Where will the next hacks come from: ask you grandfather, grandmother, etc. Aging people and people with disabilities need to hack their lives all the time. They're who we should be watching for super-hacks.