Simplify

I’m a perfectionist. I always have been. I struggle every day with wanting everything to be perfect. I’ve spent the past 10 yeas working at internet companies. For anyone who has ever used a website before (clearly you), this isn’t going to come as much of a surprise. But it turns out software (including websites) aren’t perfect and never will be.

One debate we often have at work is when should particular bugs be fixed, if ever. Those last two words are the kicker. That’s right: if ever.

Despite being a perfectionist, somewhere down the line, I learned about opportunity cost. It turns out not all bugs should be fixed. This was an amazingly difficult concept for me to understand. With bugs, the argument is two-fold:

1. Whenever you change code, you run the risk of introducing bugs. To fix bugs, you need to change code. Thus fixing bugs often begets more bugs. Side note: begets is a great word.
2. Fixing bugs comes at a cost of not building other things. This means that the outcome of fixing a bug has to be more valuable than the outcome of any other thing that could possibly be built with the same resources.

Now fortunately for most bugs, this evaluation is easy. The bug impacts many users and is important to our business or customers are upset or it leaves us vulnerable or … a million other things. You get the idea.

But there are always those other bugs that are much harder to classify. They don’t affect many people, but they look bad. How bad? Does it really matter? Are we being perfectionists or is it really important? I’ve found that these decisions are often the toughest. Learning to make them quickly and decisively has saved me much time over the past ten years.

Learning to let go of perfection and focus instead on desired outcomes and recognizing “good enough” has helped me enormously in my career. Now you might not work in software, but this philosophy works in every day life as well. It really comes down to filtering out the noise and focusing on what’s important. It’s not about being perfect in everything, it’s about being good enough in the things that matter.

I used to be a news junkie. I strongly believe that as an American citizen I have a civic duty to vote responsibly. I thought that the best way to do this was to be a news junkie. If I don’t know about the issues, how do I pick who has the best policies for the issues? My actions were based on a false assumption. I assumed that the news was the best source for understanding the issues. I was wrong.

I didn’t consciously stop reading the news. It just happened over time. It began in November 2004. I was deeply disappointed that we Americans re-elected George W. Bush. Don’t worry, I plan to keep specific politics out of this post, but the 2004 election had such a profound effect on me that I have to mention it. In the days after the election, I would start to read the news and would have to stop. It was too depressing. Instead of the usual ups and downs that is the American mass media, I saw it all as extreme downs. I stopped reading as a way to fend off despair.

This may sound extreme to some, but at this time, it really was affecting my daily life. So I stopped reading.

At the time, I thought I would pick up again after the post-election mayhem died down and the news turned to the more mundane. But even after that happened, I still couldn’t stomach it. So I gave it up.

About two months ago, it dawned on my that the California primary was in February and that I better figure out who to vote for. I started by watching the New Hampshire Democratic debates. I was blown away.

I didn’t know a thing about the candidates before watching the debates. I had ignored all media up until this point. I don’t have television, I don’t read the newspaper, most of my family subscribes to a brand of politics I don’t prefer, and I don’t run with a crowd who discusses politics often. So I really did know nothing about the candidates.

this gave me a fresh mind to evaluate character, performance and policy differences. For the first time in my life, I was watching a debate and not rooting for a winner. I was curious, engaged and indecisive. It was refreshing.

Afterwards, I fought the urge to dive into the news coverage. After all, I don’t need someone to tell me what my opinion is. Instead, I kept watching the subsequent debates.

I voted on Super Tuesday without reading a single article about the candidates, without visiting a single election website and without watching any television pundits. As a result, I believe it was the most educated voting choice I’ve made.

It had other benefits as well. I saved countless hours by not reading or watching the news. I also saved myself the emotional rollercoaster of the ups and downs of an election cycle.

I hope the candidate I voted for wins, but I don’t plan on watching how it plays out. After the conventions, I’ll tune into the debates, but until then I’m enjoying my ignorant bliss.

As I try to whittle away at all the needless time sinks in my life, I have found that snail mail takes up a surprising amount of time. I don’t get a lot of mail, by any standard, but so little of what I do get is meaningful, that I tend to ignore all of it. It piles up on my dining room table and is a constant eye sore.

In an effort to save time, I try to sort my mail no more than once a week. It gets sorted into one of the following piles:

• Requires Action (bills, invitations, etc)
• Recycle
• To File
• To Shred

I try to work through the Requires Action pile immediately after sorting. Otherwise, this pile continues to sit and be an eyesore. I pay bills, respond to invitations, etc and then immediately sort the mail into one of the other piles. For example, after a bill is paid, it goes into the To File pile. This process has been manageable but it’s not ideal.

I still have piles of mail sitting around at all times. More mail comes every day. No matter how diligent I am (and frankly I’m not very), it never ends. I’ve decided to take a new approach. Instead of managing my mail, I’m focusing on eliminating it altogether. Here’s what I’ve done so far:

• I’ve signed up for paperless statements from all the services that offer them.
• I signed up for Green Dimes (a junk-mail elimination service)
• I’ve asked to be removed from all credit bureau mailing lists (1-888-5OPTOUT)

I’m hoping to get to the point where the only items I get in the mail are DVDs from Netflix and the occasional bill. I’ll report back on how it goes and what other things I try. Do you have any good tips on eliminating snail mail? Please share them in the comments.

It’s a subtle difference, but I’ve found that focusing on tracking spending and not each and every purchase makes me much more likely to 1) stick to a tracking system and 2) stay on budget. What’s the difference?

Tracking Purchases

I used to use Quicken to track every single purchase. I would keep track of all cash spending in my phone or pda and then would transfer it to Quicken when I returned home. When I received credit card statements, I would import them into Quicken. Because I work on a Mac, this involved manually downloading export files from each financial institution and then uploading them into Quicken one at a time - or paying a ridiculous monthly fee from various financial institutions to automate the process. It was a very tedious solution and as a result, as hard as I tried, I never kept up with it.

Recently, I’ve changed my philosophy. Do I really need to know that on October 23rd, I bought 3 books from Amazon or that on November 12th, I bought coffee from Starbucks. It was overkill. Not to mention, while I love Quicken’s fancy reports and charts, for my needs, it was way too much information. I wasted way too much time staring at pretty charts and too little time actually assessing my spending habits and planning accordingly. It became apparent, i needed to shift my focus.

Tracking Spending

What was the point of tracking all of this stuff? What I really wanted to know was the following:

• What was I spending my money on, at a macro level (food, rent, clothing, fun stuff, etc)?
• What was a reasonable budget for each macro category to strive for?
• What was my overall cost of living?

I figured that macro categories were informative enough to sufficiently influence my spending habits. But were also flexible enough, as to let me not feel too restricted. Thus improving the odds of sticking to the budget. For example, I use the following macro categories:

• Rent
• Utilities
• Food
• Clothing
• Hockey
• Outsourcing
• Discretionary

I don’t drive, so you won’t see things like car payments, gas or car insurance. Hockey is a fixed cost for me and not something I’ll ever give up, so I treat it like a basic need, right alongside food and rent. Outsourcing is something I’m experimenting with and might grow into a broader Business category as I explore alternate sources of income from my standard paycheck. The discretionary category is how I avoid tracking everything from books to coffee to new toys. I don’t care too much about what I spend my money on. I know that if I set goals I’ll adjust my spending and make better trade-offs on which toys to buy. So I set an amount for that category and gauge my progress throughout the month to make sure I don’t exceed it. It removes most of the tedium of budgeting but still keeps me on track.

The key reason why I budget and track my finances at all, is to assess my overall cost of living. While I love my job, my company, the people I work with, etc., my long term plan is to be self-sufficient. Just like a startup, the path to self-sufficiency involves doing two things: 1) reducing my expenses and 2) increasing my personal revenue. By tracking spending in these 7 categories, I can track my key expenses and clearly identify my personal revenue goals.

Instead of tracking every single purchase, once a month, I tally my expenses in each of these categories. I make sure I’m still on track and it also provides regular reminders to focus on my income goals. I track all of this with a very simple excel sheet. No more charts and graphs, just the raw numbers. You can download the spreadsheet, if you want to see just how simple it is.

There are dozens of task management applications out there. But the ones I’ve tried in the past have all forced me to change the way I like to work and as a result I try them for a few weeks and then give up. It’s too hard to change my behavior to fit the arbitrary design of an application.

This all changed about 8 months ago when I started using OmniFocus. This little app by OmniGroup supports my current way of working so well, that these days I’d be absolutely lost without it. It’s quite simple, I keep a list of projects and tasks for each project. When entering a task, I add a context (ie. work, home, online, errands, etc) and due date. The app allows me to view my tasks by project or by context. So when I’m planning out projects I use project view. When I’m ready to do work, I switch to context view and look at the things I can get done based on my context.

For example, each morning before leaving home, I see what I need to do for that day. At home, I use it to keep track of such mundane things as trash day, when to scoop the litter box and when to review my produce delivery.

At work, I use it for everything. I have tasks set up to remind me to send out weekly update emails, to prepare for scheduled meetings, what the next steps are on various projects, etc. When someone asks me to do something, I immediately add a task for it and get back to whatever I was working on before the interuption. I can also send emails from Mail.app to OmniFocus, which is a tremendous help in managing my inbox.

I’ve even started to use it to get me into the habit of doing fun stuff. I’ve set up tasks to remind me to contact friends I haven’t seen in a long time and have them repeat so that I don’t go too long without reconnecting. I have projects for dream vacations with tasks that get me one step closer to making them realities. I even have a couple of inspirational projects like one to motivate me to become a better hockey player, with tasks like working out and eating healthier.

What this has done, is allowed me to focus on the task at hand instead of worrying about all the little things that I don’t want to forget. OmniFocus remembers everything for me, leaving me to live my life.

In Tackling the News Feed Monster, I mentioned that I was looking for a news feed reader that would allow me to only subscribe to specific categories of a blog. I just watched the demo for Fav.or.it and it’s possilbe their Slices feature may do the trick. I requested access to the beta. As soon as I can try it out, I’ll post the results here.

The following two changes have made me far more productive both at work and when working on personal projects on the computer. They allow me to concentrate on what I am doing by limiting the number of interruptions throughout the day.

Check Email Once a Day

I saw an interview with Tm Ferris (author of the Four Hour Work Week) where he suggested that people only check their email once per day. I’m not quite there yet. But I now check my email based on the clock not based on how many unread messages I have. In fact, I don’t leave my email client open anymore. I open it to read and respond to email at 11am and at 4pm and then I leave it closed the rest of the time.

This seemed scary at first, but in reality it’s very liberating.

Set IM status as Away

I love IM. I love being able to ping a friend throughout the work day instead of trying to remember to mention it later on. I’m okay if they can’t respond, after all they are at work. But it’s less formal than an email and I know they’ll read it eventually.

Unfortunately, not everyone has this view of IM. Many expect an instant reply. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come back to my computer to see messages like the following:

11:01am hey, I have a question for you
11:02am are you there?
11:03am hello?

To properly set expectations, I’ve switched my status to “Away” at all times. This does two things: 1) for the people who don’t realize that work takes precedence over IMs it sets the expectation that I am not going to respond immediately and 2) for those people who are looking for an immediate answer that they could probably get elsewhere, they tend to look elsewhere instead of bugging me. Most of my friends know that I’ll get back to them eventually, so I’m not missing out on too much good stuff by setting an Away message. Instead, it’s there waiting for me when I get a free minute.

Last May I realized my tivo had increased my tv-viewing habits. I no longer channel-surfed, but I also never missed an episode of any show I cared to watch ever - even if it was a show that previously I would have been more than happy to just watch occasionally. I also watched ridiculous amounts of hockey. I’ve been known to binge and watch every second of every Olympic hockey game or Stanley Cup playoff game. It was getting out of control. It was far too easy to come home from work and default to watching television.

So I did what anyone in this situation would do. I cancelled my tv service. Ok, maybe that’s not what you would have done, but I have no self-discipline, it’s all or none for me.

I’ve spent the past six months with no television. Not even an antenna. I turn my tv on and I get fuzz. It turns out, I don’t really miss it. Here’s how I manage:

1. I rent tv shows from netflix. I’m catching up on all the good shows I missed while getting sucked into every crappy episode of Smallville merely because they were waiting for me on my tivo. I have found that I love watching tv shows on dvd. I can watch the series at my own pace. I watched the first two seasons of Weeds in two weeks. For Sports Night, I chose to spread it out over a couple of months. It was entirely up to me - not to mention commercial free.

2. I watch sports at a bar, the rink or at a friend’s house. I’m still a diehard hockey fan and I don’t plan on giving that up any time soon. But by forcing myself to leave the house to watch it, I only watch the games I really care about - instead of just any game that’s on (or in my case on my tivo from three seasons ago). It also has the added benefit of getting me (a slight misanthrope) out of the house and hanging out with people. That’s always a good thing.

That’s it. Living without TV was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Now when I get home from work, with the default action gone, I actually consider what I want to do. Sometimes it’s watch tv, but more often than not, it’s something far more fun or productive.

In the past, I’ve been a slave to Bloglines. The little numbers next to each feed taunted me reminding me of yet another area of my life where I was quickly falling behind. No matter how frequently I read, those numbers just kept going up. For some feeds, the number would go up as I was reading (ahem … Boing Boing).

As part of my move towards simplifying the amount of information I consume on any given day, I decided I had to be much more disciplined about what I paid attention to in my news reader.

My first idea was to subscribe to only certain categories for each blog that I read. For example, I read Jeremy Zawodny’s blog for his insights on Yahoo and the web at large, but I’m not so interested in his flying posts. My plan was to subscribe to all of his categories except for those related to flying. But his blog doesn’t offer feeds based on categories. In fact, most blogs I read don’t seem to offer this option.

So I switched tactics. I thought maybe I could find a news reader that will group the posts in a feed by their category, but again no such luck. If anyone knows of such things, please leave a comment with the info.

So I moved on. I started to look at what I was reading and how frequently I needed to read it to keep up. I quickly realized two things. First, I was reading far too many feeds for legacy reasons. Second, because I grouped my feeds by topic (ie. Business, HCI, Sports, News, etc.) and not by my reading habits, I was wasting a lot of time and effort picking and choosing what to read based on the amount of time I had.

To solve both of these problems, I ruthlessly asked the following questions for each feed on my list:

Is the reason I subscribed to this feed still relevant?

If not, I unsubscribed. For example, I subscribed to Search Engine Watch when I worked for a search engine company. I no longer work at that company and while I’m still interested in search, I don’t need to know every little thing that happens in the industry, so I unsubscribed.

Would the ability to do my job suffer if I stopped reading this feed?

I subscribe to many feeds under the guise of staying up-to-date on my industry. This question alone helped to cut out most of what I was reading. If the answer was no and it was for an Internet industry feed, I unsubscribed. For example, I currently work for a social networking company. I was subscribing to Inside Facebook to stay on top of what Facebook was doing. But my company has shifted focus away from general social networking to professional networking. Since I use Facebook and I read Mashable, I don’t really need to subscribe to Inside Facebook. So I unsubscribed.

Am I scanning this feed for targeted updates I could better get elsewhere?

If yes, I unsubscribed. For example, I used to work for a price comparison engine (www.become.com). During that time, I subscribed to Brian Smith’s Comparison Engines blog. But I don’t work for Become anymore and I realized that I mostly kept up on Brian’s blog to see if he wrote about Become. So I unsubscribed from the blog and signed up for a Google News alert for become.com. Less noise, more relevant content.

Do I need to read this feed every day or is weekly good enough?

Here’s where I had to really be honest with myself. Do I need to read the latest and greatest tech news on the day it happens? Or is it okay to be a week behind? Even in the fast-paced Internet industry, for most things I decided it was okay to be a week behind.

i was able to cut my daily blogs down to three.

Is this feed for pure amusement?

There are plenty of feeds that I read merely for personal enjoyment. For example, xkcd, 43 Folders, sports news, etc. The last thing I should be doing is stressing about keeping up with these feeds, so I tossed them into a Whenever folder and only read them when I have a free minute or two for a fun break.

That’s it. As a result, I spend about 15 minutes a day reading blogs instead of an hour or more. Once a week, I spend less than an hour catching up on the weekly news.