Entries from June 2006 ↓

Because it’s been a great month for the future of the human race. First we saw Bill Gates deciding he was going to dedicate his collosal energy and brainpower more to his philanthropic pursuits than his technomonopolistic pursuits, and now we see one incredible side effect of this decision - his old friend Warren Buffett, the 2nd richest person on the planet, decides to give the Gates foundation the bulk of his own immense fortune, because he thinks it will be well managed there. So to some extent what we see here is the worlds most successful market competitors deciding that cooperating to help the least competitive (ie, the third world) is the best thing they can do with their fortunes, rather than competing against eachother for the top spot on the rich list, as any decent Robber Baron of old would do.

Pretty good example of how things are changing if you ask me. People are beginning to realise that we’re all in this together. I think now that we’re no longer “connected” in a mediated way via our TV sets and newspapers, but hyperconnected in a more direct fashion by way of the net, the 6 degrees of seperation are reducing to 5. Eventually everyone will be no more than 3-4 “hops” away from someone suffering under 3rd world conditions, and that has got to make a difference I think.

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This will happen to you eventually, if it hasn’t already.

A while ago I reached the point where I’ve been reading the blogosphere long enough to identify sufficient numbers of really smart people blogging about stuff that really interests me, that more is published by them in any given hour than I can actually read in that hour. I’m inclined to call this my “information saturation point”, where I must forever give up on being able to absorb all the information I would like to absorb, because it appears faster than I can read it. Filtering out junk is no longer sufficient. Even filtering out boring is no longer sufficient. I have to filter out the interesting stuff, and that’s hard.

Now, I’m not a real fast reader, and I do have rather a lot of interests, but I suspect everyone is going to hit this point eventually, simply because the volume of posts on any given topic is is constantly increasing, and the net helps you find more topics to be interested in, while the available daily reading time of the average human remains more or less a constant. Skimming, and simply learning to read faster, will only get you so far.

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Every now and then I read something that makes me think “wow, almost exactly what I would have said, were I three times smarter”. The last guy to really make me think that was Umair Haque after reading one of his insanely long powerpoints, but tonight it was Dale Carrico, after reading this - anyone studying at Berkley, get thee enrolled in one of his courses, I’m sure you won’t regret it.

Ok, so I showed this blog to my housemates, and they didn’t think it completely sucked, so perhaps I’ll actually tell other people it exists…

Getting Things Done. It’s a mantra worth paying some attention to. Dave Allen started it - he wrote a book, mainly for managers I think, but it’s given a huge number of time-poor project-rich geeks a new lease on life as well. Just google for GTD and you’ll find a lot of them blogging about it. Some of the tools Izeal is working on are going to help people Get Things Done, and I’ll certainly let you know about them after we launch.

Here are my first two GTD hints.

First hint: If you haven’t done so already, read the book! Reading people blogging about the book is insufficient! It really is worth reading cover to cover, particularly if you feel you don’t have time to read it!

Second hint: If you have already read the book, are comfortable with writing in WikiMarkup and are looking for a cool, free, browser based tool to help you manage your stuff, try this one, or this one, or this one. Actually, try all three, and stick with the one you like. The good news is that they’re all adaptions of TiddlyWiki, which means that moving items from one to another isn’t going to be too difficult.