Photo: Black kangaroo paws in the dying sunlight

I have not been, traditionally, much of a gardener. In fact, we built and moved into our house over 6 years ago and up until last month we have not had any kind of garden at all. The reasons for this are multiple:

1. I don’t like the traditional “lawn with flowerbeds” that everyone in our suburb has – not only is it boring and ugly, but it’s a massive waste of water, looks unnatural and is totally unsuitable for our drought-crippled West Australian climate
2. Neither Dave nor myself are gardeners, and we really had no idea how to approach creating a native, water-wise garden, and
3. Establishing a garden has really not been a priority for us, at all.

That all came to an end a few weeks ago with the help of a friend of mine, Mrs A, who is a gardening nut and has been suffering separation anxiety from her own garden after the sale of her house. I gave Mrs A free rein and a couple of hundred bucks and she chose, sourced and planted around 90 trees, shrubs and groundcovers native to our general area as well as instructing us in their care.

The garden is still quite sparse now (during winter) but next spring we’re expecting the groundcovers to start growing spreading, the bushes to start filling out and the trees to start stretching. In a couple of years, we’re hoping it will become a pocket of riotous wild natural bushland that uses a minimal amount of our state’s precious water, doesn’t require much in the way of maintenance, provides some screening for the house, and looks bloody fantastic.

If you’re wondering where problem-solving fits into all this, hold on, I’m getting to it…

For now, each plant is quite small and they are spaced apart. Around each plant we put a small circle of mulch to help retain water. After the first rain shower we had, the weeds starting shooting up all over the garden, and I started the battle to keep them down. I started by going after the biggest ones, but it seemed that every day there were more and more and I really wasn’t getting anywhere.

Then one morning, squatting in the front garden with a pair of gloves and a weed bucket, I had an epiphany. I’m a geek and a programmer. I am fully aware of my anal-retentive tendencies and in my daily work as well as my personal life, I quite often harness these tendencies in order to get things done efficiently. In essence, the garden shouldn’t be any different.

How do we accomplish a task or project? By breaking it down into it’s smallest components and then working on them one by one until they are finished. I break a new site into sections and complete them one at a time. To borrow David Allen’s example from the excellent book/productivity bible Getting Things Done, there’s no point putting “Climb Mt Everest” onto your todo list – but if you put down “buy protective clothing”, “book ticket to Nepal” and “research sherpas”, you’re on your way to accomplishing the larger goal.

The geek factor comes into this as well: make it a game or competition, and the race becomes more important than the end result. The compulsion to keep going, to beat whatever the criteria for success is (shortest time, or longest time, or whatever it may be) will drive the geek to keep going.

So, back to my garden. What is the purpose of weeding? I don’t care about the weeds themselves, but I don’t want them stealing water and nutrients and choking out my plants before they have a chance to establish themselves. So I set the goal: make the immediate 30cm area around each plant weed-free. This roughly equates to the mulched area around each one. Then I defined the process: I would go around the garden clockwise and remove all weeds from each mulched area, plant by plant. Once that was done, maintaining that weed-free zone would be a much simpler undertaking. The weeds outside the mulch zones I’m not particularly bothered about, but if their removal becomes a necessity I will formulate a new methodology to attack them.

After one full week, approximately 70% of my plants have a completely weed-free zone. On the first day, I cleared around about three plants. The second day, I doubled the number of cleared plants. On Friday, I popped out at lunchtime just to do a spot of weeding. That’s my anal-retentive impulses taking over. For now, I’m happy to let them.

In essence, my epiphany is not really news to anyone except me – every “problem” in life can (and should!) be attacked with the same philosophy. Embrace your inner anal-retentive geek! It really works.

Posted from kay lives here

An epiphany on the nature of problem-solving whilst weeding…

In my never-ending quest for productivity-enhancing tools, I came across an application called Write or Die. The very title very much appeals to my no-nonsense approach to getting things done (both the capitalised and non-capitalised versions, for the fans of David Allen’s productivity system of the same name).

The concept is simple: give Write or Die a target number of words and a time limit, and it will, depending on how severe you have the options set, "yell" at you if you’re falling behind the target number of words per minute. You can set it to simply change the colour of the background to an increasingly angry red (surprisingly effective), or set it to pop up and nag you if you’re getting behind (I find this a bit annoying, and not in an effective way either). Or, you can let it get nasty: disabling save until your goal is reached; disabling backspace; forcing full screen or always-on-top; or, if you’re a serial procrastinator who believes in tough love, you can set it to start deleting words (the so-called “kamikaze” mode).

I generally find the progress bars at the top of the writing space (one bar shows the number of words, while the other shows the elapsed time) with the reddening background is enough to keep me typing and not allowing myself to check email/Twitter/feeds/Facebook/the real world until I’ve reached my milestone. But I can easily see that some other people would really need the more hardcore options.

There’s a free online version, but it seemed like so much fun I quite happily shelled out $10 in PayPal for the full version, which is an AIR app. It keeps stats – the number of words written, the amount of time, average words per minute and per session, etc. There’s even a game built in as well, where you can pit yourself against other Write or Die users.

I drafted this blog post in the application (I set myself for 400 words in 15 minutes, although I stopped the session and pasted it into Live Writer to finish off before I’d got to the end. One feature that would really make it great for me would be spell-check – just the red-wriggly-underline type checking like in Word and Firefox. But then again removing all distractions to you just hammering out words – especially ones that appeal to the obsessive-compulsive – is the whole point of the tool.

If you’re a geek like me and making things into games helps to motivate you, Write or Die is highly recommended.

Posted from kay lives here

Write or Die!

I do get a bit tired of defending my use of Twitter and Facebook. But now, some studies are showing that the mental stimulation provided by social networks can stimulate the brain and help in problem solving.

How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive

I’ve always felt that connecting with people you like (or dislike), even fleetingly as is the case with Twitter, makes our lives richer and more interesting, and that can never be a bad thing. But like with everything, you need to be in control of your time and your impulses. Now there’s a theory to back it up.

Ha, take that. It’s not time-wasting after all.

Posted from kay lives here

So social media is not the end of the world, after all…

I was just reading an article from SitePoint (via their RSS feed, ironically) about maximising your social media time. I thought this little snippet was kinda funny:

Be Picky: I subscribe to a lot of feeds (well over 60), but I regularly review what I have coming in, and I’m ready to unsubscribe when I lose interest.

No matter which way I think about it, “well over 60” is not “a lot of feeds”. I thought I’d take a peek into my Google Reader stats:

From your 450 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 14,149 items, starred 278 items, shared 14 items, and emailed 0 items.

Hmmm. I don’t even think of 450 feeds as a lot. Some of them are aggregated, but on the other hand some of them are status feeds (Campaign Monitor, Google Alerts, Facebook etc). I know people who subscribe to far more.

Using Google Reader, I’m able to skim through all the items and flag what I want to read – and from the stats above, 278 items flagged out of 14,149 is 1.9% – and it doesn’t take more than about half an hour. It’s one of my early morning tasks and it’s something I enjoy a lot.

Of course, I have a massive backlog of flagged items that I want to read in more depth, but I like to think I’m saving them for rainy afternoons or plane trips or something.

The content of those feeds is massively varied – from tech blogs, comic strips, food blogs and photographers to music feeds (lots of music feeds) and a surprising number of non-geek blogs.

What about you? What’s in your feed reader?

Posted from kay lives here

Information Overload?

• my house is spotless, all laundry is done
• inboxes – both physical and virtual – are cleared
• tasks for the next three months are neatly scheduled
• feed reader is cleared of unread and flagged items
• physical and virtual desktops are clean and organised

But no matter what I do, I can’t seem to concentrate on code for long enough to actually do anything. Things that should be easy are not. Things I thought were obvious seem fraught with difficulty. Complication lurks in every conditional.

This has happened before. I don’t think my zen-like state of Getting Things Done is the cause of my lack of code focus – I think it’s a symptom. In the absence of any real work, I’m seeking refuge in structured procrastination.

I’m sure I’m not the only one that experiences this. So, what do you do when your coding brain goes on holiday? How to do you get your code mojo back?

Posted from kay lives here

Missing in action: code mojo