J. Eddie Smith, IV

Instapaper is unique in that I recommend it to everyone. I honestly can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t get something out of it because anyone who uses the internet reads things on the internet.

I also can’t think of a better topic for my first ever Macworld article.

J. D. Zamfirescu says that we’re moving toward a society made up of mostly programmers:

During the industrial revolution, the appearance of new tools of automation demanded workers with the skills to use those tools. The skills required for the computer revolution will involve the use of software and, increasingly, the creation of new software. We’re already flying down this road. One day, we will all be programmers.

I don’t see this happening, and I think the comparison with the Industrial Revolution is wrong.

My day

This morning I woke up and made coffee. But not really. I ground the beans with a grinder I didn’t make. I used a French press that I bought (in Paris of all places). I didn’t even harvest or roast the coffee. Bought that, too. 

I drove to work in a car that I did not manufacture, made of parts from all over the world—none of which I know how to repair.

At work, I sat down at a computer made of components that also came from all of the world and were assembled in a way that I would never be able to replicate.

I used and took for granted all these things for a reason.

They made it possible for me to do a job that very few other people understand. Few people have heard of actuaries. Fewer know what they do. Even less know what I do.

I don’t know what you do either. But I’m betting your day wasn’t that different.

The lonely but prosperous specialist

I agree with Zamfirescu that the Industrial Revolution increased employment for people willing to assemble things in exchange for money, but it did not homogenize the workforce—certainly not long term. Nor did the advent of cars turn everyone into mechanics.

Instead, as our civilization pops through each technology-powered tipping point, we, the users of technology, become increasingly different. We specialize.

Technology allows us to do stuff other just make technology.

I would argue that standards of living generally increase as the number of specialists in a population increases. Though we know less and less about what we all do, we benefit economically from the fact that we’re all doing different stuff.

The arguable downside is that people know less and less about how to make the tools they employ. A specialist cedes a lot of power to those who make his tools.

The software industry has a bright future, and it will probably increase demand for people that know how to write code. Programmers may even attain some kind of social exclusivity as pillars that bolster the civilization we’re creating.

But I’m more excited about the opportunities software will create for people who make other things with software. I’m curious just how different, and great, we can become.

[Zamfirescu article via Justin Blanton]

When I got a chance to be an early reader of David Sparks’s Paperless Field Guide, I got so excited. Then sad.

Excited because it was the best multimedia e-book I’d ever seen. Sad because I couldn’t tell anybody about it.

Fortunately that long wait is over. David’s book is out, and it really is fantastic.

Maybe you’ve already been attempting paperless. Maybe you’re curious about it. I don’t care—you’ll learn something new. David covers it all, from capture to file management. And all the tools in between.

Beyond being extremely informative, Paperless is a beautiful work. And I do mean work. David sweated all the details. There’s no telling how many hours he spent perfecting the many screencasts embedded throughout the book. He also took care to select very high resolution images that look amazing on the new iPad’s Retina display.

If a book can be aesthetically practical, Paperless is it. It’s the best $5 you can spend in the iBookstore today.

Reader Jeff asks:

I keep trying and failing to use something for task management… I keep trying OmniFocus (and other task management apps) but the problem is I enter things, I watch screencasts, I get everything setup nice – and then I never see that window again…

What is it that makes you look at OmniFocus? I’m sure it is second nature to you by now, but how did you come to use it and rely on it in the first place? Was it something you had to adapt to or did it just fall into your life like a perfect Tetris piece?

I’m tired of not getting anything done – or at least I say I’m tired of it. Then I watch a screencast, put a bunch of things into OmniFocus, and then don’t look at them ever again for the umpteenth time. Maybe I just don’t actually want to do anything. I hope not, though.

I loved this question. For one thing, it’s just so beautifully honest. It’s superficially simple, yet it slices through the evangelistic aura that enshrines any popular productivity system.

I especially liked it because it made me think.

What is it that makes you look at OmniFocus? After all, what good is any system if you don’t want to look at it? What makes it enjoyable?

What follows is my answer. Maybe it’s yours, too. Maybe it’s not.

Defining OmniFocus

Forget about GTD canon. Forget the apps. Forget sync, AppleScript plugins, and themes. Let’s call it what it is.

OmniFocus is a brainless messenger. It’s a channel through which my planning self directs my doing self. When I’m creating projects and actions, I’m a manager. When I’m checking off actions, I’m a worker.

OmniFocus is not a manager. It doesn’t ship with a ball-busting boss that can threaten to make my life worse if I don’t do things.[1] And so using OmniFocus for self-management requires a lot of self-discipline.

I believe good self-discipline falls naturally out of self-trust: knowing that I’m doing the right thing, right now. Worker-me trusts manager-me. I’ll come back to this in a second. (Trust me.)

Good cop >> OmniFocus << bad cop

In a very idealistic sense, I think all tasks in OmniFocus should fit into one of two categories: 1) things I enjoy doing right now or 2) things that will lead to later rewards (or avoid negative outcomes).

I would probably look at OmniFocus a lot less if I only put the un-fun there. So I don’t make it the bad cop:

Instead, I tell OmniFocus to tell me good news, too:

For me, OmniFocus doesn’t just include reminders to pay bills or make unpleasant phone calls. I put reminders to Huffduff podcasts, try interesting apps, and to watch videos. You know, fun things that I want to do—not now, but later.

Syncing it all, starting with me

If my life had an extremely narrow focus, I’m not sure I would need a system like OmniFocus.

But I don’t have a one-dimensional life. I have a family. I have a full-time corporate job as an actuary. I work on the side. I volunteer. And I have an irrepressible urge to write stuff.

I do all of these things because I’m fulfilled by all of them in their own special way. My life challenges me to constantly to rebalance my attention, to sharpen my focus on the now—whatever that now happens to be any moment of the day.

OmniFocus continues to be a daily presence in my life not because it’s a very well-made product, not because it’s used by people I respect, and not because I think I should use it. The honest, if unintuitive truth is that OmniFocus works for me because I’ve made a choice to pursue things I care about.

OmniFocus can’t make me love what I do each day of my life. And OmniFocus can’t make me look at OmniFocus. OmniFocus can only tell me what I’ve told it to tell me. I just have to look and listen.

And I look because I trust myself.

The fact that physical inactivity—specifically sitting all day—increases one’s risk for a variety of nasty health side effects, including death, continues to shock and astound internet readers the First World over.

Also breaking: eating fewer calories can cause weight loss.

What’s most troubling, I think, is that the latest round of sitting studies are leading people to believe that exercise is pointless. The general takeaway, collectively paraphrased, seems to be “If you’re sitting all day, then it doesn’t matter if you hit the gym at the end of the day.”

The ever-observant and part-time New York Times watchdog, Dr. Drang, offers a welcome, if lone, voice of reason among the hubbub caused by a couple of recent sitting studies reported on by the Times.

I agree with Dr. Drang’s dissection of the Australian study. Alas, I don’t subscribe to PubMed.gov and don’t have access to the full study, but I think the key sentence lies in the abstract’s conclusion:

Prolonged sitting is a risk factor for all-cause mortality, independent of physical activity.

No matter how the researchers sliced and diced the 200+ thousand adults in the study, those who sat a lot had a greater risk of dying than those who were more active. It just so happens that one such group was defined by physical activity.

Suppose you selected a sample of adults who all jogged, say, three days a week. Some of the adults in that group sit more than eight hours a day, while others are more active, sitting four hours or less.

Which members of that group do you think would be healthier?

Sure there is a point at which too much activity becomes unhealthy, but I know I’m lightyears from that threshold, and I bet most other adults are, too.

And so here’s where we are:

• Sitting a lot is bad for us
• Our jobs require us to sit a lot
• We’re doing something wrong
• Oh look, I’ve got email

… which is where we’ve been for a while now.

I think what bothers me the most is the all or nothing fallacy. Some exercise is always better than no exercise. And it’s true of so many other things, too.

Humanity was never meant to sit still, figuratively or literally. Neo-sedentism is likely our greatest enemy yet.

I used to know this guy. I’ll call him B. We met at a local social media club event a few years ago, which is kinda fitting. I’ll explain in a moment.

B seemed like a cool guy. He was about my age, seemed interested in the same things I was, and he seemed driven to succeed on his own—something I admired.

So we started meeting up for lunch every couple of weeks. And like clockwork, about 30 minutes into the meal, he would reach into his bag and pull out a catalog of stuff he was selling to support some of his entrepreneurial endeavors. I mean, every single time we met he would try to sell me stuff. Aggressively.

After a few months, I got tired of it. Outwardly, he was friendly and open, but it became clear that his agenda was not friendship or lunch. It was to sell me household cleaners, vitamins, and other crap I could buy at Target for the same price.

I stopped hanging out with B.

I’m beginning to feel the same way about Google, Facebook, and any other service that approaches me under the guise of a non-business relationship only to collect.

It’s becoming the great 21st century con: They make friends with you, then take as much as they can—only they’re not getting your money; they’re taking your privacy for their own gain.

At the same time, I’ve started appreciating traditional business-customer relationships more than ever. I enjoy paying for things because it’s an explicit business transaction. There’s nothing phony about it.

Apple doesn’t give me an iPad because they want to be friends with me. They give me an iPad because I pay them for an iPad. My accountant doesn’t do my taxes because he’s a philanthropist. I pay him to do my taxes.

With money, comes accountability to the customer. If my iPad stops working, Apple has to answer to me. If my tax return has errors, my accountant will be answering questions.

No one is answering my questions at Google, Facebook, et al. Why would they? They have customers to attend to, and I’m not one of them.

Privacy is fast becoming the de facto currency with which we transact online. And so few people understand how much they’re spending or who it’s going to. Most people don’t even know if they’re the customer or the product.

I still use several Google services, and I still have a Facebook account. But my usage has been trending down for a while now. I understand that there is an incremental cost to using those services.

I also understand that the value of privacy is changing this century, and I haven’t changed my views on the irreversibility of where we’re headed. I think the collection of personal data via mobile devices has a lot of benefits. For example, I’m fine paying a location “privacy tax” to Google for the benefit of using Google traffic data. At least there’s a direct return to the privacy tax payer in that case.

It’s when I get cut out of the deal that I take issue.

If you do nothing else before signing up for a new web service, stop for a moment and ask, “what’s in it for them?” It’s fine to use services that don’t require monetary payment. Just understand that these things are not free, and make sure you’re comfortable with what you’re getting in return.

These are not friendships. These companies are not giving you things because they’re your buddy.

One of the first things I did after upgrading from the iPad 1 to the new iPad was dash to the App Store to find a scanning app. I had already been using my iPhone to create PDFs from photos of documents, and I wanted to do the same with the new iPad.

I came up empty. I think that because the iPad 2’s camera was so poor, no one cared enough to create iPad-optimized versions of scanning apps.

But now, several weeks after the dawn of the the new iPad, things seem to be changing. Scanner Pro ($7), my favorite iPhone scanning app, is now iPad-ready. Version 4.0 is fantastic.

I really like the simple, intuitive interface for cropping pages. I can’t really describe it in words, but the cropping area just naturally moves with your finger. Very fast, fluid, and efficient.

Building multi-page PDFs is also very easy:

1. Take photo
2. Crop
3. Tap done
4. Repeat for each page

You can file the resulting PDFs into folders, email them, or send them to Dropbox, Evernote, and more.

Scanner Pro is blazingly fast on the new iPad. The camera launches almost instantly, takes photos quickly, and PDF processing happens in split seconds.[1]

Now that the new iPad has an iPhone 4S-grade camera, it functions remarkably well as a portable scanner. There’s just something right about being able to preview my scans on the iPad’s larger, Retina screen. It almost feels like I’m lifting a piece of paper off the table and into the digital world.

And this is just the beginning

I’m more smitten with the iPad every day. Just think: you can turn a paper page into PDF in seconds, open it in an app like PDFpen for iPad to annotate and sign it, then send it to someone. All without touching a PC.

I’m pretty sure even non-geeks could get excited about that, though I would need to observe one in the wild to be sure. I wonder if Chris Pirillo’s father is available.

It’s a place you should want to visit. It shouldn’t be feared. Or avoided.

You should love your calendar for simplifying your life by constraining what’s possible. A calendar is a recurring reminder of how our universe works:

1. Events involving an individual must happen one at a time
2. Time can’t be saved; it can only be spent

Time is much more like food than money. Time arrives, perishes the moment it’s ingested, and then gets excreted in the form of memories.

If time is food for memories, a calendar is a buffet of your time. If you don’t get in line and help yourself constantly, others will help themselves—to your time. They’ll be responsible for your memories.

Few task management systems arrange actions spatially such that each action’s size is proportional to the time required to complete the task. Most calendars, on the other hand, make it easy to “size” appointments based on durations.

To fail to schedule work that you, yourself, deem important is to put your wants last in line. You should regularly schedule non-meeting time on your calendar.

It’s your time after all. Until it isn’t.

I really like the concept underlying Byword’s design. I use Byword for nearly every web-bound thing I write on my Mac. When it showed up in the iOS App Store not long ago, I immediately put it on my iPhone and iPad. And things have gone well.

Well, mostly.

Byword, particularly on the iPad is filling a void (I created) when I left Simplenote earlier this year for Notesy.[1] I missed the way Simplenote showed a list of notes on the left side of the screen with the contents of the selected note on the right side (a la Mail).

Byword lets me tap across text files quickly in a double pane layout like I used to in Simplenote.

It’s possible that Byword may end up nudging Notesy off my home screen as well, but it doesn’t really matter. Since so many of these text apps sync with Dropbox, choosing one is like picking out a pair of sunglasses. They all let you look at the same world; you’re just choosing how you want to view it. [2]

While Byword is moving toward the top of my most-tapped, it’s not ready to be my one and only. I have some of the same complaints Brett Kelly has with Byword, though they aren’t as much of a deal breaker for me as they are for Brett.

Like Brett, I’ve found Byword’s Dropbox sync to be quirky at times. On more than one occasion, a file that I created elsewhere, say, in nvALT on my Mac, didn’t appear at all in Byword. The files always show up in Notesy, though, and I’ve found that if I make a small alteration to the file in Notesy, then hop back in Byword, the file will show up.

My gut tells me that these sync wrinkles will get ironed out pretty quickly. Byword for iOS is still new. I’m very happy that Byword is in iOS because it is, to my knowledge, the first cross platform (iOS to OS X) text editor. [Update: Peter points out in the comments that iA Writer is also cross-platform.]

The concept of a device-dependent, plain-text-oriented writing application that offers consistency in UI, feature set, and syncing is very cool.