Photo: Julian Rodriguez Orihuela

I wasn't planning on this episode, but when Ed Batista from AttentionTrust asked if he could chat with me about my attention experiments, I took the opportunity. Since Ed was having difficulty recording the conversation, I asked if he'd be OK with me recording it and we'd dual-purpose the audio. He could slant the conversation to the purposes he needed for AttentionTrust and I'd edit toward explaining AT to listeners and focusing on Ed's portion of the conversation.

So, Episode 6 was born unexpectedly, but I'm pleased with the result.

At any rate, it was a pretty good conversation and Ed makes one of the more concise explanations of the different dimensions to attention that I've heard. I'm definitely considering attending the Attention Conference in San Francisco that he's putting together for this fall.

This one's just over 30 minutes (I'm really pushing hard to keep episodes relatively short) and can be grabbed over at GlassTooBig.com.

And, if you've been digging the show, head over to AmigoFish and give the show the big thumb's up.

Dave Seah, who I interviewed a couple of weeks ago on the Glass Too Big podcast, has released a public online version of his emergent task timer. I saw a version that he posted on his freelancer forum a few days ago and really liked it. It combines the tastefully simple aesthetic that Dave brings to his design work with the really useful functionality that his multiple revisions in his workflow process has been refined to.

It's a nice, ad-hoc way of keeping track of the tasks you're working on for a given day. I'm definitely going to be giving this a shot. At the new job, my time is much like it is at a law firm: it's all tracked against projects. That means that I need to account for it at the end of the day and this is exactly the kind of thing that can help in that regard.

I like this approach better than some of the more structured tools because my days tend to shift pretty dramatically without notice. I don't want to have to define projects, tasks and milestones just to track time against something. This is that extra edge over a blank sheet of paper that makes it really useful.

Dave describes this distinction this way:

Since most people don’t actually plan out their tasks at the detailed level, the emergent task methodology may be the gateway into using The Printable CEO™ when the important high-level tasks aren’t known ahead of time.

-Dave Seah

Just enough organization mixed with cowboy attitude.

Photo: Vic Brincat

Yesterday it became abundantly clear that many of my personal improvement activities and efforts have eroded to unacceptable levels. The domino effect has rippled through them and failures in one area have led to others.

I've been oversleeping in the morning, which pretty quickly put an end to the morning walk with the dogs. Some project-related stress has ushered in the return of the Snickers-and-a-Coke school of stress management and a couple of pounds have crept back on. The major mess in my office has been promoted to a 3 star general mess and I'm finding no time for my personal projects, including this site.

So, my inner drill sergeant has been recalled from whatever tropical paradise he'd apparently retired to and was put back on active duty. He's instituted the following actions:

1. A return to the 5:00am wakeup with an offset for really late nights, targetting 6.5 hours of sleep.
2. The morning walks followed by breakfast and writing.
3. The office gets cleaned (this got started yesterday).
4. The community center membership form for gym access becomes more than just a piece of paper sitting here and I start going (checked off yesterday)
5. The convenience store (Ken's Market, which claims to have "everything") clerk shouldn't know my favorite candy bar. That's got to stop. Re-implement 300/600/900 calorie breakdown for meals and ditch the rest of the food.
6. No TV before dinner. I'm not going to be cutting TV completely. I enjoy it and have absolutely no snobby approach to it. I just need to make better use of the time between getting home and dinner.

Photo: Jan Tik

Apparently, movie critic Paul Sherman was selling movie screeners to the pirate groups online. That fact, in itself, wasn't surprising. You're not going to get movies from the theaters online (prior to DVD release) without someone on the inside making them available.

What I found surprising is that he was only getting about $40 each when he sold them. That hardly seems worth the effort to me. He sold 117 movies and didn't even clear $5000.

The devil's advocate in me says that the market indicates that a movie is only worth $40 on the open market, making it pretty hard to claim the damages claimed by MPAA, but that many transactions is just asking for trouble eventually.

It warms my heart to see that VW is bringing back the VW Rabbit in 2007. I know that it's just changing the name on the Golf, but I have a soft spot for the Rabbit.

I drove a 1986 diesel Rabbit from the middle of high school until the end of college. It was my main car through my developing independence and bachelorhood. I only got rid of it shortly before getting married.

I bought it for $1500 with 186,000 miles on it, which, as a geek, I saw as some sort of the-universe-is-winking-at-me kind of moment. The odometer quit working along the way, but I believe I put about another 100,000 miles on it before passing it on. It's moved through the family, to my brother and eventually my uncle, where I believe it's still in service on the farm as a junker.

It had problems, and running a diesel in Minnesota winters is an interesting experience, but I loved that car.

Of course, it's a bit of a different car today, including such luxuries as air conditioning and more than 53 horsepower, but I still want one anyway. Just not enough to fork over $15,000 any time soon.