Dan Wiggle

At work we run a monthly lunchtime screening of a web/ux/social media conference recording or virtual seminar. Most recently, we watched Jared Spool on why now is a great time to be a UX designer, recorded at the UX Immersion conference in 2012. A great talk, as always, but I particularly liked one concept in the talk: the ladder of competence.

It turns out to be a common and long-standing idea, and the inspiration for some truly dreadful illustrations, but I’d never heard of it before. It’s a simple model of learning that describes four stages of  competence and self-awareness that people go through when acquiring a skill.

Steps on the ladder

The idea is that at the bottom of the ladder is unconscious incompetence; that blissful time when you don’t realise you don’t know what you’re doing (and merrily do it anyway). Next is that difficult conscious incompetence phase, where you’re probably embarrassed to have realised that you’re actually really bad at something. Climbing a bit further, conscious competence comes when you’ve grafted a bit and got to a point where if you apply yourself you can do something reasonably well. At the top of the ladder is the holy grail of unconscious competence, which is when you’re so good you don’t even have to really try any more.

Reflecting on competencies

The talk got me thinking about where I am on the ladder in the various things I do in my life, whether work, family or leisure. It’s an interesting exercise to reflect on what you really know and whether is it better to be consciously competent at a larger number of things or to work harder at a small number to achieve unconscious competence.

We recently bought a new Ultrabook at work, for taking to meetings, working at home and hotdesking from time to time. It’s great in many ways, including the feather-light portability, fancy touch-screen and, most of all, the absolutely magical instant resume from sleep (seriously, I can’t open the screen quick enough to catch it waking up; it’s amazing and makes such a difference to how I use it).

But the whole thing is almost scuppered by Windows 8.

Seriously??

Here are just a few things that bug me:

• I can’t run Chrome in anything other than maximised mode? Or have a Word doc and an Excel sheet side by side? Seriously?
  (Edit! I just found an option in Chrome to ‘Relaunch Chrome in Desktop mode’ which stops it being forced to maximised. I’ve been using the thing a month, and I just found it. So still, seriously?)
• If I switch to another app with music playing in Chrome, the music stops. Seriously?
• After using the work VPN, Windows won’t connect to any of the Metro (or whatever the heck it’s now called) apps because it has somehow cached the office’s proxy details and apps won’t work via a proxy. Seriously?
• It took me ages to work out how to search for apps in the store. Turns out, every app uses the same search as the OS, but there isn’t anything to ever indicate as much so I found it by accident. Seriously?
• I’m still not sure how I’m supposed to quit a program. Drag it all the way from the top of the screen to the bottom? Seriously??
• There’s a distinct split personality thing going on between Desktop and Metro and lurching between the two is just weird. Seriously?

I’m sure there are more, because it feels like it’s driving me round the bend. No doubt I could spend a few hours googling around and figuring some of this out, but for all the brilliant things that are in Windows 8 (and I almost forgive all the faults just for the instant wake!) it’s baffling that some of this wasn’t caught in the beta.

The Apple temptation

Having watched lots of people switch to Macs in recent years and having never been very tempted because I didn’t want the overhead of learning a new OS, I’d always expected that it would be Apple launching some new killer feature that would draw me into the fold. But in the end it’s probably Windows 8 that is nudging me away. Lucky for Microsoft, Macs still cost a fortune and I’m still cheap.

In 2010 I read hardly any books at all.

In 2011 I read almost nothing in the first five months of the year, then 16 books by 2012.

In 2012 I read 23 books.

So far in 2013 I’ve read 4 books and am a couple of hours off finishing my 5th.

Zero to (moderately) well-read

Mid-2011 I decided to do something about the big backlog of books I wanted to read but was always ‘too busy’ to tackle. I’d started following the Seinfeld method for forming habits, so I committed myself to reading for 30mins every day and the habit stuck.

Reading more books has been a great change. I’ve always read lots, but for a while my battle to keep up with my Google Reader feeds pushed anything much other than blog posts and web dev articles aside. I still don’t read anything too deep and serious, in fact far from it, but it’s still satisfying to be tackling longer-form works.

My reading in 2012

Want to see what all those books were that I allegedly read? Check out the virtual bookshelf below, and see my 2012 list on Goodreads for details and what I thought of each book. I love Goodreads, but it gets better with more people and I only know about three who regularly use it – go sign up now and look me up.

Digital bookmarks

As if it wasn’t obsessive enough to be reading 30 minutes every day and anal enough to be logging everything on Goodreads, I also use ReadMore on my iPhone as a digital bookmark and motivator. A digital bookmark of course sounds like the ultimate in pointless apps, but it’s actually brilliant: scan a book’s barcode, tell it you’ve started reading and when you stop and it keeps track of how long you’ve spent and predicts when you’ll finish. How could you read a book without that knowledge at your fingertips??

A friend acquired an iPad for Christmas and asked if I could get him started with some app recommendations. He probably expected two or three, but instead got a list of over 40. I guess I got carried away, but he thought it was useful and said good lists of suggestions were hard to find so I should share mine.

A quick caveat is probably in order. These are obviously personal choices. The apps I use reflect my life – I read a lot, write a bit, like a bargain, play games but only occasionally, have a toddler, wish I was a musician and enjoy a drink at the end of the day. If any of that sounds like you, then some of these might suit you too. Here we go…

Read stuff:

• Flipboard (brilliant magazine-style reader that pulls content from all over the web, including social networks and Google Reader)
• Instapaper (simple but revolutionary app for saving articles to read later; I use this all the time!)
• Reeder (a Google Reader client; useless if you don’t use Google Reader, obviously)
• Google Chrome (I’ve not ditched Safari entirely, but I prefer this; if only I could change the default browser in iOS settings – c’mon Apple, you’ll have to do it eventually…)
• GoodReads (track your book collection and see what others are reading too – sounds naff, actually good)

Write stuff:

• IA Writer (brilliant, minimal plain text writing app)
• Nebulous Notes (another good plain text editor)
• Textastic (programming text editor; looks good, but tbh I don’t write a lot of code these days, and much less on the move, so I’ve not used it a lot)
• Haiku Deck (like Powerpoint, but without the bullet points and with great imagery pulled from Flickr)

Watch stuff:

• iPlayer (obviously! Probably the most used app we have, albeit mostly by our 2-year old)
• IMDB (I love this one – I always open it thinking I’m just going to look up something specific, then end up watching trailers and adding things to my LoveFilm list for half an hour)

Store stuff:

• Dropbox (completely brilliant ‘how did I cope before’ app for keeping stuff online and accessing on all devices)
• Evernote (‘remember everything’ I think the blurb says; it’s always looked promising but been too slow and clunky for me, but recent updates mean I’m trying it again)
• Springpad (a lot like Evernote – dump stuff in it that you want to remember. I use it as a personal cookbook and pub/restaurant guide)
• LastPass (for securely storing passwords – only useful if you use it on PC too, which you should)

Spend / save money:

• Rightmove (surprisingly good; keeps tempting me to browse for alternative houses that I can’t afford)
• Amazon (here, Amazon, take my money, again…)
• AppShopper (unfortunately this one seems to have been pulled from the App Store; I’ve linked to the website instead though and it’s definitely worth checking out – app prices go up and down all the time and this will buzz you an update to let you know if something on your wishlist changes. Essential when £1.99 is just too pricey but 69p is okay!)
• HotUKDeals (browse for bargains and get alerted when stuff you want but don’t need gets cheaper)

Get creative:

• Paper (brilliant drawing app; bit pricey for the extra brushes though)
• Drawing Carl (kid-focussed, but powerful, drawing app)
• Strip Designer (make your own comics)
• Halftone (make your own posterised pictures)
• Web Albums (view Picasa web albums, including offline – really great, if you use Picasa / Google+)
• Snapseed (photo editor)
• Stop Motion Studio (make your own Wallace and Grommit)

Make some noise:

• Propellerhead Figure (brilliantly simple but still powerful music app – loads of fun)
• ReBirth (old school drums and synths – awesome! I still can’t work it though…)
• Animoog (looks cool, makes cool noises, no idea what I’m supposed to do)

Play a game:

• Super Hexagon (best iOS game I’ve played in ages; I’m still yet to last more than 35 seconds before game over, but I’m addicted)
• Osmos (chilled out gaming; pretty much the opposite to Super Hexagon)
• Whale Trail (addictive flying whale nonsense, set to a Gruff Rhys tune)
• The Walking Dead (best story-telling I’ve seen in a game; I switched to Xbox to play beyond episode 1 because it was a bit jittery on my iPhone4 but otherwise it’s the same on iOS)

Keep the kids quiet:

• Anything from Toca Boca (they’re all brilliant but we especially love Toca Kitchen, Toca Hair Salon, Toca Doctor, Toca Kitchen Monsters, Toca Store and Toca Robot Lab)
• Green Eggs and Ham (it just reads the story, but it’s nicely done and Dr Seuss is just classic)
• First Puzzles (simple jigsaws, but nicely done)
• Teddy’s Night / Teddy’s Day (really cute interactive stories, the former including a potty scene with very realistic sound effects!)

Finally, have a drink:

• Top Shelf Drinks (keep a list of what’s in the booze cabinet, get lists of things you can make)
• GetDrunker (similar to above, but a bit more “I’m at a party, what booze is there and what can I make?” – obviously essential for me then, all those parties I go to…)
• Drinkspiration (fancy cocktail app from Absolut)

Phew.

Blogging is hard. But this time I’m finally going to crack it.

Some folk seem to have a knack for knocking out prose that skips along at a nice pace, tells an interesting tale and gets it all over with in just a few paragraphs. They’re confident in what they have to say, write a single draft, publish and move on. I am not one of those people.

Establishing the habit

I’ve previously described my enthusiasm for using streaks as a way to form and maintain habits. My other favourite self-motivational technique is to tell people I’m going to do something before I’ve figured out how to make it happen. I’ve been saying I want to run ultra-marathons for ages now; one day I’ll have to make it true, else it’ll just be embarrassing (see, I just did it again).

So, here’s my plan: at least one blog post per month throughout 2013. Committed to in public, and if I can get the first couple out of the way I’ll not want to break the chain.

One post a month doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s still making me hesitate before hitting ‘Publish post’. Maybe I should just save as a draft and check it over tomorrow…

Google I/O has been and gone, including some neat announcements such as Google+ events and iOS Chrome, but Google’s social layer still seems to me to be missing a crucial, potentially game-changing feature: it should allow users to categorise their posts, and followers to select which categories to follow. I’m not the first to think this, but it never seems to get mainstream coverage. If it sounds familiar though, that could be because it’s exactly what Pinterest does and I think one of the secrets of their success.

The problem with posting publicly

I would prefer to post publicly most of the time, but there’s a problem. While there’s little that I might post which is ‘private’, the people who follow me are likely only interested in a small portion of what I might post. My family doesn’t want to read about ‘fancy computer things’; my peers at other Universities likely don’t care too much about life in York. I don’t think I have anyone in my circles who is interested in the full range of what I might post about – life with a toddler, web geekery, cooking, life in York, cycling, running etc. My followers are likely better judges of what they want to see than I am, but Google+ forces me to make that choice for them.

So every time I post something publicly, I feel the friction of not wanting to put off at least some of the people whose stream that public post ends up in. That nagging feeling and the pressure of deciding who might want to see what I’m sharing stops me posting much of anything.

Segmenting public posts

As Google+ acknowledges, we all have different social circles with whom we communicate. Crucially though, new people join our circles all the time by discovering shared interests. The trouble is, sharing with our circles means sharing only with people we already know and thus giving potential followers very little to go on.

A simple categories list could make this go away. We could even call them ‘segments’, to fit with the ‘circles’ theme. For every post I make, I could define a new topic (segment) to use as a label or choose existing ones to apply. By default, anyone following me would see everything I post, but they could also be shown a ‘Posted in segment: XYZ (hide this segment in future)‘ link alongside my posts. A summary page could list my segments and allow bulk (de-)selection of segments to tailor which of my interests to follow.

The gap in the market

I like Google+ a lot. I’m too verbose for Twitter and have never got along with Facebook. But I need more control over what I see from people I follow and more confidence that my followers only see what they want to see from me. Pinterest seems to show that it can work. It’s a poor fit for Twitter, and Facebook doesn’t have the personal / professional network crossover that Google+ looks like it is aiming for. It could be a real winner.

PS. Missing link no.2 – the multiple identity crisis

Less exciting, but probably more critical, I’d also love to see Google fix the multiple identities problem for those of us who use Google Apps and a personal account. Currently we’re forced to have two public identities if we want to use Google+ from a personal account and with an Apps account. It’s desperately confusing and dysfunctional.

Solve the identities issue and add segmented content filtering and Google+ could become the standout personal/professional crossover social network.

I spent a few evenings a couple of months ago choosing a new to-do list manager, Asana. Writing up the process has been on said to-do list for a while now, which could be a damning indictment of my choice but more likely just reflects the size of the backlog I had to migrate.

Moving on from Backpack

I’d used 37 Signals’ Backpack for over five years, but had got to a point where I was just dumping stuff in there and forgetting about it. The product has changed focus since I started using it too, so much so that I was on a ‘grandfathered’ plan because my mostly single-user requirements weren’t really the business 37 Signals are after. My efforts to follow the GTD process had also become almost unrecognisable, and a clean slate seemed like a good way to get some momentum back. So it was time to find a new tool.

Decision making

To help me choose I tried letsimondecide.com, a free web tool for helping make decisions. It took a bit of getting used to, but it really helped me both focus on what was important in the first place and to automatically work out which tool came out best against my criteria. I’d definitely use it again for similar decision-making.

Here’s the wish list I scored and prioritised against:

1. Adding tasks
2. Next-actions list
3. Speed
4. Recurring to-dos
5. Lots of projects
6. Work and home
7. iPhone / iPad
8. Emails out
9. Sub-tasks
10. Task notes
11. Search
12. Inbox view
13. Emails in
14. Team working
15. Viewing all tasks

The ones that didn’t make the cut

I started with a long list of a dozen or more tools, but below are the ones that made the shortlist and got a full evaluation. To stop me writing an essay about each, I’ve imposed a Twitter-style 140 character limit for my summaries of apps I tried and rejected:

Producteev

Fairly well featured, but just didn’t feel right. Also, I couldn’t work out how to send it an email.

Doit.im

Very promising, but lacked polish. Translation errors would bug me, I saw errors, I kept pressing wrong buttons.

Flow

Very nice, and I’d be happy to pay if it was just me but it gets pricey for the team (and we’ve no budget)

GetItDoneapp.com

Very feature-rich, but felt a bit homemade and not quite slick enough. Version 4 was coming soon and sounded better, but too late.

Rememberthemilk

Lots of people like it, but the interface and UX have always really put me off.

GTDify

Sounded promising, but when I went to trial it they’d posted a closing-down notice. Now defunct.

The winner

The app I went for in the end was Asana, a relatively new entrant to a crowded market, but one well backed and funded and looking to go places. In the end, Asana felt like an easy choice. It’s fast, well-featured without being cluttered, and free.

There’s a lot to like:

• It’s really fast (on desktop at least)
• Separate workspaces make a clean split between work and home really easy
• Projects and tags are nice and flexible
• Sharing works well (when I was choosing I mostly picked based on personal requirements, but three of us in the office are using it together now and getting on well)
• Keyboard shortcuts are really handy
• Emailing in tasks is soooo useful, I don’t know how I managed without it. And having the emails filtered into different workspaces by sender address is brilliant – if I send from my work email, it goes on the work list.

But it’s not perfect. A few things I’m really hoping get amended or added soon are:

• Due dates are all treated as deadlines, which is a bit limited. Some things I have to get done by a deadline, but others need doing on a specific day and I don’t need reminding until then so I’d like to choose whether something is ‘due by’ or ‘do on’ a given date
• Due dates don’t bubble up through the later/upcoming/today structure automatically. I have to sort my tasks manually at the start of the day and move the ones which are due into my ‘today’ list. It’s a small job, but seems like a really obvious candidate for automation. Also, once I’ve done a repeating task the repeat version (now likely not due until a week or more later) really shouldn’t appear in my Today list.
• The mobile app is just a wrapped version of the mobile website, which is a bit slow and feature-limited. A true native app or a snappier web-app would be nice.
• Email reminders come out as a summary in the middle of the day. I think this is because the localisation isn’t working for when it sends the reminder, but a summary at 3pm isn’t much use to me.

Blog post about picking a to-do list, done. One more to tick off the list

I’ve long been a GTD enthusiast, albeit somewhat lapsed in the last couple of years. It’s a great system for keeping on top of projects and tasks that need taking care of. Where I’ve often struggled is with the little repetitive things, the daily chores that may only take a small amount of time or effort but which are easy to skip over in the midst of a busy day.

Not so long ago I found the answer to my small-recurring-tasks motivation problem: going on streaks. I’ve read more books, left fewer piles of unwashed dishes, done more exercise and kept healthier plants as a result.

It turns out the trick is remarkably simple, almost ridiculously so. I have a list of tasks I want to do daily and tick them off as I do them. Crucially, the list includes a record of how long a ‘streak’ I have maintained. That tiny element of gamification, to use a recently over-used term, has an incredible motivational effect.

Apparently Jerry Seinfeld used the same method to help him keep writing when he was starting out. He had a big wall-mounted calendar and put a fat dot against each day when he wrote something, and he became determined not to break the streak of dots across the paper. I’m using a web app called Streakly, but the principle is exactly the same and it really works.

Time-lapse turfing

A few weeks ago I cleared a small patch of gravel in our garden and put turf down in its place. It took quite a few hours and was pretty hard work, but you wouldn’t know it from the time-lapse video I shot of the whole endeavour:

Not very long ago shooting time lapse video like this would have been a relatively big undertaking – I wouldn’t have known how to go about it. But I bought a 59p app called Time Lapse HD, propped my phone in an upstairs window and went to work. Same again the next day, then a tiny bit of editing in the free Vimeo app to stitch clips together and an upload straight to YouTube.

Panoramic lunchtime photography

A couple of days ago I was eating lunch by the lake at work and it was all rather nice so I shot a quick panoramic photo of the scene:

(For the full effect, check out the panoramic view – works great on computer, even better on iPhone)

Again, not very long ago at all shooting and publishing this kind of panorama would have required specialist kit or hiring someone to do it for you. I had another 59p app, this one called 360 Panorama, and spent 90 seconds panning around the spot where I sat. Another 30 seconds later, it was on the web for all to see.

Getting stuck in

Admittedly an iPhone4 is a relatively expensive bit of kit, but that I can bolt on these kinds of features for so little extra outlay still amazes me. I think it also means we forget or don’t notice the opportunities they present at work. In the past when they cost an arm and a leg I’d have wanted to be sure before rushing in. But if it’s a few pence and a few minutes, we should get stuck in.

A couple of months ago Apple released GarageBand for the iPad. It’s the latest in a long line of music production software products I’ve tinkered around with over the years. I’m yet to make a hit record, or even anything approaching music, and I doubt I ever will.

I know which buttons to press in GarageBand to use the app. I even understand some of the technical wizardry going on behind the scenes. But I’ve never had any education in music theory or practice and don’t have the time or motivation to start now. Nobody, least of all me, should be surprised to find that an incoherent racket is the best I can create.

While my lack of musicianship seems like an obvious flaw in my plan for chart domination, there are parallels with often forgotten aspects of producing web content. Web authoring tools, such as Dreamweaver or a CMS, make it easy to press the right buttons and publish to the web. But the having the knowledge and experience to create and manage good web content is different entirely. Just as in making music, knowing which buttons to press is only the tip of the iceberg.