Dave Caolo

One paragraph into the introduction and I’m loving this book:

“Our culture celebrates the idea of the workaholic. We hear about people burning the midnight oil. They pull all-nighters and sleep at the office. It’s considered a badge of honor to kill yourself over a project. No amount of work is too much work.

Not only is this workaholism unnecessary, it’s stupid.”

A-freaking-men.

The folks at Overcommitted have made the official iPhone app for Highrise. It’s simple and effective, as one would expect any 37signals product to be. I like that the app’s main toolbar matches itself to the color scheme you’re using with the browser-based version. They’ve also made the initial synchronization fun, but I won’t give away how.

Highrise lets you manage communications you’ve had with contacts and customers as well as tasks and appointments. I’ve been a happy customer for years. Look for my review at TUAW this week.

I’ve never gotten much use out of notes on the iPhone because I dislike typing more than a few words on it. I’m slower with it than I am with a full-sized keyboard which is frustrating. Plus, the bundled Notes app syncs with Mail, which makes no sense at all.

Now that I’m using the combination of Notational Velocity, SimpleText and WriteRoom, my iPhone is full of easily-accessed, useful notes that I wrote on my Mac and transferred with no effort. Here’s how it works.

Notational Velocity is designed to create, store and retrieve notes. Its marquee feature is modeless operation. There’s no difference between searching for a note, browsing a note or creating one. It’s extremely fast and efficient.

WriterRoom is a full-screen text editor for the Mac and iPhone/iPod touch. It works well, but I’m really using it just to display notes.

SimpleText brings the two together. It’s a sync service originally created to let Taskpaper and WriteRoom users sync documents. Fortunately, it works with Notational Velocity, too.

Here’s how to set it up.

1. Open Notational Velocity Preferences
2. Open “Notes” preference pane
3. Select SimpleText’s folder for “Read notes from folder”
4. Under storage, select ”Storage and read notes on disk as Plain Text Files”

That’s it. Now every note created in Notational Velocity is instantly synced with WriteRoom and vice versa. It’s simple, it costs all of $4.99 to set up (the price of WriteRoom) and it “just works.”

I’d absolutely love to have one of these in the back yard to use as an office. Beautiful.

American teachers* are required to stay current with the latest educational trends, practices and theories. In fact, the state has formalized the process by requiring them to earn a certain number of Professional Development Points, or PDPs, per year. My wife is in the process of picking some up which made me think … why aren’t I?

Staying current, sharpening skills, pushing forward professionally … these are things all professionals should do. Unfortunately, most industries don’t have a formal system in place. It’s worse for independents like me; I can progress or stagnate with no one to answer to but myself. With that in mind, I’ve devised a system to identify professional areas of need and make sure they get fed.

I’m going with a college semester model. Right now I’m in my spring semester. What will I study? Well, that was determined by answering this questionnaire.

1. What do  you want to learn?
2. What is the next step in  your career?
3. What concrete, observable actions can you take to take the next step?

The answer to number one was simple: I want to continue to write about Apple, Inc. The next step is twofold: To improve my current skills and to write for a wider audience. Step three gets to the meat of it.

I’m taking two “courses” per semester. Each course is worth 3 PDPs. The first course is “Writing for Independent Professionals.” The required texts are

1. The Little Red Writing Book by Brandon Royal
2. On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Royal is first. During Week 1 (March 1-6), the assignment is to read chapters 1-3 and complete all exercises. During week 2 (March 7-13), the assignment is to read chapters 4-5 and complete all exercises. This continues for 10 weeks until I’ve completed the book and all exercises. At the end, I’ll demonstrate mastery of the course’s lessons in some way (haven’t figured that out yet).

On week 11, I start again with Zinsser. Once that’s over, I’ll again take another “final” followed by  a 2-week break. Then my 2nd semester begins.

Future courses will stray from grammar, style, structure, etc. and focus on Apple, writing for the web, networking, etc. I’m looking forward to it and I’ll tell you how it goes. And now … time to hit the books!

*This is probably true of teachers outside of America, but I don’t know.

I used Tags 1.x and liked it. It’s not really an “everything bucket,” but a powerful tool when combined with search. Version 2.0 is a free upgrade for registered users or US$29 for a license.

Gale Sayers is a pro football hall of fame inductee and my go-to source of motivation.

Watch the highlight reel above. He’s got an almost supernatural grace. Time and again he absolutely should have been tackled to the ground, only to run another 40 yards. He disappears into a crowd of players and emerges, sprinting, from the mess. His speed is super-human.

It’s his elegance that stuns me. Gale weaves in and out of defenders and linemen as if his brain is five steps ahead of his body. There’s no time for calculation, he just reacts. It’s incredible. At the 2:04 mark, he actually comes to a full stop behind the line and then runs 60 yards for a touchdown.

It doesn’t matter if you dislike football. There’s a power in watching someone truly excel at something. When I watch this footage of Gale, I want to write better, work harder, attack the day’s to-dos, make my kids feel special. In fact, I watch it several times per week.

Hats off to Gale. You were the best ever.

Boom goes the dynamite.

You think working from home means watching Star Trek in your underwear? Grab your bat’leth, because those are fighting words.

In the feast-or-famine cycle of self-employment, I’ve recently put on my Fat Guy Pants and pulled up to a traditional Thanksgiving dinner. It’ll last as long as most turkey dinners do, but I’m going gorge myself until it’s over.

Managing it requires paper, pens and a plan. I typically do a weekly review of all my open projects, but tonight the David Allen Angel on my shoulder was pestering me. “Dave,” he said. “You’ve got to get this out of  your head. Don’t wait until Sunday. Remember the anxiety dream you had the other night? Who do you think sent that to you?”

He’s right, of course.

David Seah creates amazing files for this very purpose. The Progress Tracker is an awesome project manager. Use one sheet per project, with the associated actions listed below. Track how long each action step takes in 15 minute increments and use the notes section for reference info. I keep each one in a labeled manila envelope.

Now I’ve got each project broken down into small, observable action steps. The most pressing go into my notebook, sorted by importance (the 3 Most Important Tasks of the Day go on top) and context (@computer, @phone, @errands, etc.). Now I can feel I’m in a state of relaxed control even though there are many people waiting for me to fulfill commitments I’ve made (Please don’t stop writing me checks!). There’s a lot to do, and some discipline and organization can make it all happen.

If there’s time to watch TNG (Skin of Evil is the best episode ever. EVER!) while wearing a pair of boxers and my Cooper’s Seafood House T-shirt, I haven’t found it.

(Pay no mind to the fact that I wrote this in running pants and a hoodie).

As an independent worker, I’m learning to be the manager, technician and boss of Dave, Inc. The most important lesson I’ve learned is to never sit down in front of the computer without a list of what must be done.

Approaching the work day without a list of observable, clearly-defined actions creates one of two scenarios. Either you’ll attend to every distraction that pops into your mind and make insignificant progress on many projects or you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time on a project that’s less critical than others.

Every night between 9:00 PM and 10:00 PM, I review my projects lists and pick the three mission-critical tasks that MUST be completed on the following day. Then I gather 5-6 other tasks that can wait a day but would be the icing on the cake if completed within 24 hours.

I then take a pen and a notebook and write them down. This simple practice reduces my anxiety tremendously, lets me sleep and gives me direction in the morning. When it’s 12:00 noon and I’ve completed all three critical tasks, I feel fantastic.

The method I’m using is a synthesis of GTD, Leo Babauta’s The Power of Less and The Pomodoro Technique. Eventually I’ll describe it here.