Category: Geekin’

For most of the GTD (Get(ting) Things Done) mastery student, there is a constant research of better “todo” app or tool. I’ve been in this for a very long time and used many apps. Desktop, mobile, command line, cloud, API… You name it, I’ve probably used it for some time.

At the end, I found myself staying very plainly managing my todos without needing a lot of features. In fact, I needed not to worry about the features of the apps I used. This especially become an issue as I’m OCD (obsessed about “order” and tidy) and a little bit ADD (regularly distracted). When you have a todo app that looks ugly and you need to use their features in order to clean things up, it eats up your time aside of actually focusing on your todos.

Methods and apps

There are also a million apps (I wrote 4 of them for myself) does a combination of “todo” management and a specific type of method. Like pomodoro, or kanban or whatever is out there. This gets more dangerous because the method is actually completely independent from what the todo is, where it lives and how it lives. It can be written on a paper list. For instance, if you do pomodoro, the best way to do it actually use a kitchen timer. Literally, use that old school timer to perform your pomodoros. Otherwise, I almost always find it time consuming to think that things will be more connected and automated when you have a todo app that does the pomodoro. So you can click to a todo and a button to do pomodoro of that item. It sounds good but it’s opposite in practice.

Plain formats works best

For long time, I used cloud based (to sync between my devices) tools. I used evernote, then quip, then trello at some point, then few more. But I found it, the simplest when I can simply copy paste stuff to move around. Because you’ll be consistently re-prioritizing your todo list, editing, adding, removing, marking things done. It’s just how the process of GTD works. That’s why you need a method that is the most convenient and requires less adaptation and portability between platforms and environment. There are few fancy stuff you may want to have like:

• A programmable interface (API/CLI) – for instance to have your top 3 todos for the day appears on a screen somewhere. Or query the last completed tasks.
• Color coding or highlighting at least to distinct what’s done and what’s not done. Ideally, when you’re done with stuff, it should disappear from your screen but in some cases, you want to see them at least until the end of your day to be able to review.

Todo.txt

After many years trying different things, I came across with the todo.txt format. It’s a very low level and with few simple rules to give you the freedom to use whatever tool you want, wherever you want with having additional capabilities with community implementations on CLI, cloud, mobile etc…

https://github.com/todotxt/todo.txt

todo.txt format is so simple that is explained in one annotation below:

To be honest, I don’t use almost any of these things except the “done” marker. So for me, it’s as simple as todos are either not done or done. That’s it. What I want to do manually is always re-ordered them and have separators (which I simply use 3-5 dash characters “——” as an extra line).

I love this format is because I use it in a few different tools on my platforms. Wasn’t super happy with the desktop solutions, so I forked and enhanced a simple code editor written on electron/nodejs. Added a few capabilities and adjusted the color schema to my liking and open sourced published it (You can find, download and contribute to it here: https://github.com/mfyz/todox).

On mobile, it’s not that easy to have a custom code editor without getting my hands dirty with a lot of native coding which I felt lazy. Also, another point that I had to figure out was the sync between my devices. I live on apple ecosystem so I simply used iCloud drive of the text editor app I use on my iOS devices (Textastic).

Texastic supports textmate and sublime bundles (including custom syntax support and themes). I installed a sublime text implementation of todo.txt format and had color coding which all I needed on my mobile devices. Most of the time my activity on my mobile devices are simply adding new stuff to the list or mark them done.

I have a fun way to track people goes to space and I want to share that with you on this post 🙂

I love using “If This Then That” (IFTTT) and have been using it for years. It’s a brilliant service. For first-timers, I can summarize it as “Internet Robot”. What it does is, connects two internet services (or smart devices) in scenario basis consists of two parts: “event → action”. So it takes an “action” when an “event” happens.

Some generic samples of how to use IFTTT;

• When I post a photo to facebook → Save to dropbox
• When there is a new entry in RSS → Send me an email
• When weather is rainy → Tweet “take umbrella”

Almost all popular services are available in IFTTT.Each service has their own set of events and actions.

Tracking Space Activities

I use IFTTT for many different ways, mostly work related scenarios but I have some fun use cases. One of the most fun thing I do with IFTTT is to use NASA’s events about space activity (when there is a new launch with astronauts going into space), I send a message to my slack channel named “space”. This way I see astronauts went to space and often I check their wikipedia page, their achievements etc…

I want to talk about a tool we use and how to leverage it for better collaboration on pretty much anything involves multiple people. But first, I encourage to read my thoughts on writing and reading at //mfyz.com/written-communication-king if you haven’t done so.

I started using Quip pretty early on when they came out and loved it from start. Love the simplicity and giving real-time collaboration features and mostly mobile-friendliness of it. Compared to Google Docs, it feels much more lightweight.

For personal use cases, I used to use Evernote for note taking purposes and keep my notes on cloud and keep them synced between my devices and computer. Quickly after starting using Quip, I moved all my notes from Evernote and iCloud Notes to Quip. I document my personal information, my plans, new ideas, my book notes, to-do lists and mfyz.com stuff from todos, bug tracking to articles to write. I even write these blog posts on Quip first, then finalize before I move them to my blog. After publishing, I move them to a folder like “Published” or “Archive”.

At our team, we use quip daily basis and I use quip maybe as much as I use my email client or maybe even web browser. I often edit 10-15 docs in quip a day as mix of personal and business docs.

We use Quip at our team for following reasons primarily;

• Transparency – we believe in creating a culture of transparency, where our team has full visibility into all aspects of our work.
• Quip allows us to see (in real-time) what people are working on.
• Quip’s history allows us to see the conversations and evolution of our thinking, not just the finished product.

Here are few tips that we collected as the team and try to implement on our Quip settings.

• Turn notifications off apart from @mentions to reduce the noise – most of us don’t need to know everything that is happening in quip in real-time.
• Fine tune your notifications for documents and folders that you are an active contributor or reviewer of.

We use Quip with it’s “team” version which we pay very minimal cost monthly but there is almost zero reason you need to pay as the team. Their team functionality is free and it’s not very different than sharing a folder to a group of contacts.

Other than my team, I have smaller teams for my other initiatives and a family folder with my wife that are not designed as “team” they are just well organized single folders that are shared with team members.

When becoming parent, first thing you get into is the feeding and changing cycle of the baby(ies). It’s tiring but optimizable cycle since the whole thing is pretty standard in the beginning.

 

And keeping track of feeding and pooping activities becomes very important especially in early days. You need to feel comfortable that your baby is growing. Best way to know how they are doing well is to track how much they eat around the clock and how many times they pee and poop. It’s a weird thing to track when you think about it but it’s actually very natural and best way to think the only sensors you have about your baby in early days.

You’ll most likely to have multiple people looking after your babies and it’s inevitable to do shifts on feeding and changing duty and it gets really easy to lose track of how much they are consistently eating or pooping. Most parents take notes on paper, or keep track of it in some ways. The tech parents 🙂 will obviously use some form of digital tracking and there are many many apps does this. I’m looking this in an experimental mind and thinking, how this becomes a seamless process.

Last year, when I was trying to hack amazon “dash” buttons, I found this engineer dad, hacked dash buttons for exactly this purpose. Basically, he had 2 buttons for his baby that when the baby poops, tapping to one when the baby pees, he taps to the other one which is pinged to an IFTTT hook to log the timestamp of the activity in a google spreadsheet. Connecting the dots between these services literally takes 5 minutes if you guys are familiar with them.

My challenge was having 2 babies and my early “monitoring” task that I was assigned from the pediatrician was to track of how much babies ate in every 3hr cycle. So I had to log how many milliliters babies ate. I also needed to see last 3-4 times to make sure I balance out if one baby ate less last time, so she gets more attention this time. Having 2 babies at home definitely, requires 3 people’s attention. We also share the day to take some of the feeding hours to be done by one person. I usually take nights and when it’s my turn, I don’t have anybody up to ask what they ate last time. Same thing for my wife and my mother in law when they wake up and I go to bed and it’s time to feed the babies.

I created a solution to stick one of the old tablets to the wall and create a mini-app to log and see the last 4-5 feed logs. So everytime someone feeds the babies, they simply click 2-3 times to log exact amount for each baby.

I wanted to write a react js app to practice react a native little bit more and also have native animations but I found myself losing in “perfect” routing and modulation of the UI which I dropped and wrote a web app in half an hour. I pretty much created a front-end only app that triggers webhooks and implements some proxy APIs to public services to pull some more helpful information for our home life (like clock, weather, brief forecast, a background slideshow of black/white photos from Flickr). Here is how the tablet screens look like. Of course, I’m using a full-screen web view wrapper app to display these in a more kiosk-like way.

Then I let bitbucket to host it without worrying about deployment, hosting etc…

Who has a spare tablet?

Well, we’re trashing more tech gadgets than ever. You may have an old android tablet or iPad or you may not. There are 2 super cheap ways to do this.

Amazon kindle fire tablets are getting bought-from-china level of low costs and Amazon keeps having sales to boost to uses of kindle fire tablets. Having Kindle fire tablet 7 is often as low as $35 to own one. To be honest, it can’t get cheaper than this.

Another way is to look on eBay to get a used one for a low cost but I can’t imagine if it will be cheaper than getting brand new kindle fire tablet. Maybe the last option can be looking at cheap android tablets that go cheaper (on aliexpress).

Tablet on the wall, Ough?

Sticking a tablet on the wall is not my way of doing this. So I hacked an IKEA frame to embed tablet screen with a black canvas cardboard and hide the tablet.

Now it is much more appealing… 🙂