I posted about my wishes for the iPhone 2.0, and I didn’t think that wish list would come in handy so quickly. I have had issues with my Macbook, Merlin, recently, it would not recognize the battery at all. Even with the battery in, when it was plugged in, would restart. I assume this is because the battery was trying to take over. The Macbook operated as though the battery did not exist, even though I had a brand new battery.

I took Merlin to a Genius bar. The Genius said that I should send it in. Today, I finally had a chance to. Which means I am operating on my work laptop or my iPhone.

I was going to attempt to use just my iPhone for everything. Email, web surfing, even podcasts. It would be all possible if… the iPhone had copy and paste.

iPhone Copy and Paste from lonelysandwich on Vimeo.

To blog, I write and then copy and paste text to make it more coherent. Conducting some of the day to day business (web surfing), I need to have copy & paste. That and the ability to use the horizontal keyboard everywhere.

June is coming quickly, never more true as we wait for our baby. It has been rumored that Apple is releasing SDK built apps for public consumption. Oh yeah, and that iPhone 2.0 3G thing. While I am curious about the 3G availability and any price increases on the 3G data plan, the thing I am most excited about is the third-party applications.

Some of the applications I am most looking forward to are:

• OmniFocus Lite
  I need a way to take my OmniFocus with me. Syncing (not necessarily over-the-air) is critical and I would like the application to be a mobile version of the robust Getting Things Done application.
• Office Lite
  The mobile office suites are limited to viewing most document, that combined with the iPhone’s native view-only capability makes getting real “office” work impossible, unless you really like Marker Felt fonts. A iPhone native office suite would be very nice, I don’t need it full featured, but cut and paste would be very attractive for me to throw some dollars at.
• Call Screener
  Blackberry has a cool app that lets you whitelist calls you want to receive, but lets the rest go to voicemail. I love this idea. I would easily throw $20 - $30 at an app like this.

Photo by AdobeMac

Back in Mid / Late March, I wrote about how I was going to conducts some self experimentation based on Neuro Linguistic Programming.

My experiments were:

1. Weight loss using the Neuro Linguistic Program “I can make you thin” by Paul McKenna
2. Changing sleep patterns and speed to asleep using Pzizz, a Neuro Linguistic Program.

Results on the weight loss have been marginal. I have been supporting a pregnant wife, which has put a whole lot of food in front of me, some of which is of questionable health values. At the beginning of the experiment, I weighed in at 184. I am currently weighing between 181 and 183. Not much of a loss. I think that this portion of the experiment will be greatly helped with my wife is no longer eating for 1.5. I know it sounds like an excuse and it is, but it is hard to control what you eat when you don’t do a whole lot of the cooking 1.

The Sleep experiment has been much more productive 2. While I have not had a problem with getting to sleep quickly, Esther has, particularly since becoming pregnant. Getting up every couple hours hasn’t helped. Esther would say that Pzizz has helped her fall asleep quicker and get back to sleep (although that could be attributed to pregnancy induced exhaustion).

A corollary experiment to the Sleep experiment has been the Nap Experiment. The Nap Experiment grew out of the Sleep Experiment and adds the Pzizz Naps to my routine. So far the use of the naps have been spotty at best, but the results have been phenomenal. I have woken up after 20 minutes invigorated and full of enough energy to get me through the rest of the day without making me lose sleep at night.

Notes:

• I am going to get back to the “I Can Make You Thin” program. I think it could be very effective, I just need to follow the simple steps consistently. Will make a concerted effort to do so for the next month
• The Sleep Experiment has been a success so far. Will follow up with Esther to check her thoughts.
• The Nap Experiment should be included three times a week to see if it is an efficient way of beating the mid-afternoon / early evening energy slumps.

Related posts:

Self Experimentation

I am a marked man. A VP and I had a disagreement regarding a a proper hue and luminence and now it seems that I can’t do anything right. Not that I’m no performing my job duties, it is simply little things that are getting my neck in the wringer.

My plan for the next few months, lay low, don’t draw attention to myself of my work and ride this out. Why are office politics so messy?

Steve Rubel twittered an interesting link this morning: Eliminating the need for customer service.

To summarize:

“A company’s customer service staffing is inversely proportional to the quality of its underlying operations.” Focusing on how many times and why customers contact the company can be a very valuable metric.

By empowering your customers to solve their own problems, you reduce the amount of time and staff that must be spent solving 80% (according to the authors) of your customer issues. Without that wasted (using the term liberally) energy, you can focus on your core business, whatever it may be.

Walking through your systems, questioning why each step is necessary, learning where your customer get stymied and quit, can be valuable to solving any issues. Much like a weekly review, tackling the weakest portions of your system, and improving them if / when possible.

In the The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss applies the Pareto Principle to his customers, getting rid of the 20% who caused 80% of his companies problems. Why get rid of them, if you can make it easier for them, making your work and productivity easier.

About a 3 weeks ago, I followed Tim Ferriss’ advice and setup an auto responder on my email. It said that I had a full workload and was checking my emails twice a day, but in the event of an emergency or something urgent, give me a call. The exact wording is below:

Dear Colleague,

Due to high workload, I check email twice daily at 9:00 AM and 4:00 PM EST. I respond to urgent email at those times and endeavor to respond to all other email once a week, on Fridays at 9:00 AM EST.

If you require urgent assistance (please ensure that it is urgent) that cannot wait until either 9:00 AM or 4:00 PM, please contact me via phone at XXX-XXX-XXXX.

Thank you for understanding this move to more efficiency and effectiveness. It helps me accomplish more to serve you better.

Sincerely,
Jered

The only problem with auto responders is that they respond to everyone. I know that is the point of an auto response, but my place of work is run by people who have a fundamental misunderstanding of both email and productivity.

I was told to remove my auto-responder.

A auto generated message was sent by the president, who passed it on to a VP, then to a associate VP, to a director and finally to me. The message was presented to me as “the president says you need to remove your auto responder”.

My auto responder was probably seen as lacking in customer service, instead of, what a friend coined: “Oh, that’s just an autoresponse email. Definitely not meant to suggest anything other than here’s an employee who is really trying to focus on getting things done for the University. I think Jered is taking a proactive stand on his work, and wouldn’t it be great if more people were as focused and dedicated as him?”

Like the title says, a fundamental misunderstanding.

David Allen: The Curse Of The Eternally Urgent - Living on The Huffington Post
I work in a world that suffers from the eternally urgent, passing this link along hasn’t changed things, but I hope it has planted the seed.

Modern Feed serves up the ultimate Web TV surfing tool | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone
I have signed up for ModernFeed, now if I can just scrounge up enough money for a media center mac hooked up to the TV, my addiction to cable can be broken! Huzzah, this is progress!

Mac Mini Media Centre / journal / hicksdesign
Speaking of mac media center, Jon Hicks has done a super through write up on how to turn a mac mini into a fab media center.

Freedom, OS X Networking Freedom Software
Freedom kills your network connections for a time of amount you determine. If you can’t wait that long, you have to reboot. The only problem I have is, when I need to focus on writing reports, I have to connect to some databases… oh dear.

10 GTD “holes” (and How To Plug Them) | Matthew Cornell - Personal Productivity Workflow Consultant
Matthew Cornell does an extensive write up on some of the holes in Getting Things Done, and while I agree with him on some, a few of his points are addressed if you combine GTD with another system… say GTD + 4HWW? Listen to my thoughts on this over at the SimplicityHabit.com

I accompanied Esther to the doctor today, it was a standard pre-baby check up. Today was our first appointment with a new doctor after changing practices, and as a qualifier, we changed doctors very late in the process.

I’m not writing about the baby, that is covered on another blog. I’m writing about service.

Our experience with the previous doctor was abysmal. Not for the medical care, it was more than adequate, but for the service. The people working the front desk were short, terse, generally grumpy and not the first thing you want before your appointment. The doctor was always rushed, seemed distracted and could not remember my wife’s name if not for the chart in her hand.

The reason we changed practices was all because of the service we received, or not.

Everything is a service. Whether you are writing software, teaching a class, cranking widgets or cleaning bathrooms, each of these is a service.

While some of those are obviously services, others seem more like production jobs. The change comes when a market has enough competition and low enough costs that customers can change with little or no loss, for the gain of better service.

From front desk and call center staff to technicians, janitors and widget crankers, to directors and managers, each of those people are responsible for a customers perception of the service an organization provides.

While everyone has a bad day, poor customer service should not be accepted and a philosophy of “Check your problems at the door” adopted.

Even internal service organizations, like IT have to worry about departments going outside of the normal acquisition channels. Again, low risk change for better service.

Remember, everything is service.

Esther and i were driving tonight and a good number of the cars we were around had the bright screens of DVD players showing out their windows. One of the vehicles turned to go to the same store as we were, which clued us into the fact that the vehicle and it’s occupants were not on a road trip of any kind. Probably just a run to the store, like us.

What was most disturbing was that the children in the back seat had the DVD players on for a trip to store.

Can a child not make the five, maybe ten, minute ride to the store without having to have five, or ten, more minutes of “fill in the blank” DVD?

This has been theme today. Not only the kin in the car, but during training today, two of the three other people in the training were pulled away by phone calls or email. This normally would not phase me, the two people are normally every hard to pin down due to the high visibility of their jobs. They are constantly putting out fires.

The issue will be more concerning when I have to spend a good amount of time getting them back up to speed or re-teaching them parts of the software package they missed out on. Cellphones are designed with an off button for a reason. So that should you need to focus or not be disturbed, you cannot be reached.

The same can be said for email but during evenings and on the weekends. If you are never offline, how does one know when work ends and the “rest of life” begins. (As a side note, it is sad that I feel the need to refer to the living as the “rest of life”, but it is appropriate when referring to a particular co worker.)

I think this trend started with cell phones and has gotten progressively worse as cell phones have grown “smart”, incorporating email, IM, text messaging.

To stop myself from falling into these traps, I have set both my mail client and the mail program on my iPhone to only check for mail manually. I have a “no work email” policy for both evenings and during the weekend. Turning off can be some of the best therapy for a stressed out worker, I know that I now have time to focus on “worK” as opposed to managing my email, etc. It also provides time to focus on activities outside of work, in my case, running and artistic endeavors, which are important in continuing to develop as a “whole” person.

Take this weekend and turn some inputs off.

I have really started using del.icio.us to keep track of my links. Instead of keeping the automated del.icio.us link posts, which updates once a day when ever I save something to del.icio.us, I am now going to start hand picking the best links that I find. The number of “link” posts I have been having, replacing “real” content has been a little much recently, thus the hand-picked links.

• A Simple Way to Improve Your Life Everyday | Life Optimizer
  This post has been the single most influential on my week. (I also did a write up on the concept on The Simplicity Habit)
• In Secret Hideaway, Bill Gates Ponders Microsoft’s Future - WSJ.com
  I think it is interesting that a major CEO hides away for a week to just think. Probably something I should try.
• Op-Chart: Making Money Hand Over Fist - The New York Times
  A fascinating info-graphic that answers a long held question of mine.
• Modern Feed serves up the ultimate Web TV surfing tool | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone
  I have ben seriously considering getting rid of cable, this service may make it possible.