Shawn has issues with his sleep behavior and pitches his next amazing Hollywood script, Garrett goes postal on the US Postal Service and worries about his kid’s future, and we flirt with the possibility of some amazing format changes. Thanks to Bill Griesau for his brief appearance.
Maniacal Rage
Garrett Murray is the Creative Director of Karbon and an award-winning filmmaker
Oliver turned 6 months old two days ago and today I turned 32.
On the Subject of GTD
Me: That's exactly what I hate about GTD.
Me: 10,000,000 TextExpander shortcuts and AppleScripts and rules.
Me: So GTD means managing all that shit.
Me: Wow, way to get nothing done.
Bill Griesau: It's too much. Way too much.
Me: For me, I've found the best system is:
Me: 1. Add item to list.
Me: 2. Do the thing or delete it.
Me: And that's it. No really-long-term planning, no complex organizing or categorizing or automating.
Me: Just HERE ARE THINGS.
Me: And DO or DELETE.
Bill Griesau: Let your mind naturally decide what to do and write it down now so you don't forget it then.
Bill Griesau: DO or DELETE, and if DELETE and you think it's important, oh well—it will come back up if it really is important.
Bill Griesau: Unless it is "pay Bill Griesau for working". Then, don't delete that.
Me: And I do have one more stage, which is DO LATER, which happens naturally in that sometimes I look at my list and think, nah, not now.
Me: So I just drag something else higher on the list.
Me: And when I need something to do, i just look at the list, and do the first thing if I can. If not, the second, etc.
Me: I'm certain GTD works for thousands of people.
Me: But for me, it's just masturbation.
Me: And frankly, I'd rather spend that time actually masturbating if I have to choose between it and GTD masturbation.
Me: At least one feels good.
Bill Griesau: We already have masturbation, it's called *masturbation*.
Me: Man, that quote's got LEGS.
A while back we released Scratch v1.4 with a whole new customizable email exports system. You can create unlimited email export options with To and Cc addresses, custom placeholder-based subject lines, and have them sent instantly in the background (without showing the compose sheet) if you want.
A couple of really cool ways you can use this:
Setup an “Email Me” export (as shown in the screenshots here) and you can instantly email yourself notes after a meeting or at the end of the day.
Create a version that emails to your personal Evernote email address. Check the “Strip first line from body” box and make the subject the first line placeholder and have it send instantly. Bam, your Scratch notes look great in Evernote.
You can create as many as you want and configure them all differently. It’s pretty boss. Go get it.
Here come Amazon Coins! A place to put your money where you can’t get it back out and it’s possibly worth less over time and it can only be used to buy shitty Android games! Sign up today! (Lots of ca-ching! sounds and cheering.)
Amazon isn’t the only company to do this—Microsoft started Microsoft Points with Xbox and they’ve been tricking customers into spending more than they meant to for years. Microsoft points are currently worth 80 to the US dollar, meaning prices for games and media look cheaper than they are. A song for 79 points? That’s cheaper than in iTunes! Oh, wait, 79 points is actually 99¢. Oops. Amazon started their coins at 1:1 with a US penny, so that’s something, but that could easily change in the future without warning or notice. Take a peek at their coins terms of use, you’ll notice there’s nothing in there about permanence of value or guarantees against rate changes. You could purchase 10,000 coins today and they’re worth $100 USD, but there’s no guarantee they aren’t going to be worth $80 next year.
These kinds of monetary systems are designed to get customers to lock in a bunch of cash they can’t later get back out (no refunds or exchanges in this program, of course), and they’re baited with “discounts” to get people to dump large amounts of cash into the ether. If you buy hundreds of dollars of coins at once, Amazon will give you a discount on them, up to 10%. But at the end of the day, you’re still giving Amazon hundreds of dollars that you might not spend for months or that you have to worry about managing separate from, you know, your bank accounts. And if you buy coins at discounted rates, good luck remembering how much you paid for any of these apps, since your coins will be worth different amounts all the time.
We already have money, it’s called money.
But really, of course, Happy Mother’s Day to my wife Stacey. She’s a much better mother than I am.
Happy Mother’s Day to… ME!
