Admin Toolbox

Last Monday, I attended my third Tufte class. You get the whole collection of his books with each class, so I’ve accumulated a mini-library, now. Last time I attended, I put together a supergraphic, a distillation of all my notes.

This time, though, I took my new LiveScribe Echo Smartpen and recorded the whole damned thing. You can view the result below:

Don’t think for one second that this replaces the experience of personal attendance. Among the reasons:

1. The audio is of varying quality (this was my first major outing with the smartpen).
2. You can’t appreciate the visual display elements, which feature prominently in these sessions.
3. You can pose your own questions to Edward (he’s quite friendly).
4. An additional book will probably be out by the time by the next time training rolls around again, which will expand the subjects covered.

By the third class, it’s easy to appreciate how the course contents have been refined. New angles find their way into the seminar. Groups of people can have pow-wows and hammer out ideas around the day’s class. Not that I’ve, you know, done that (I always fly solo at these things), but I do have ears. Plenty of other attendees do this in the spaces outside the main hall.

Most Important Takeaways

Please take a moment to appreciate the irony of a bullet-list of cool information from a class where purveyors of bullet-lists should be hung from the rafters.

• The symmetry between producing and consuming is strong. Both should involve the same questions.
• The map is the metaphor to shoot for. They are dense with data but quite understandable.
• To clarify points, add data. Don’t dumb it down.
• Al Gore’s iPad application includes… instructions on how to use an iPad? Uh, what?
• Graphics are not for special occasions. They belong in the narrative with the words.
• Don’t re-invent things; find and copy. Find and copy.
• Keep multivariate information together in the viewing space.
• Ditch PowerPoint. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has.

That last point was the most precious moment. We are certainly computer users when the CEO of The PowerPoint Company ditches it. Good dealers never use the product. Give that moment a listen (and apologies for the quality of the audio and edit).

Fly on the Wall Moments

As with the last time, I always seem to overhear one consistent complaint: That the class isn’t hands-on. There are hundreds of us in attendance, and the point isn’t to make the programs go or to fix my particular chart.

The class is about glossing lightly over the books, highlighting the general approach, getting focused on the essentials, then leaving us to apply these ideas to our own particular circumstances. These aren’t classes about software.

The class is meant to get us to think about design one level higher than we’re accustomed. When I learn about the importance of removing excess lines, we aren’t in Excel territory. Striving to see the data and a narrative, together, and undivided by the means of production, means we won’t be covering Office, either.

If you are interested in the application of these concepts to the particular problems you face, then it’s time to get our in-house education departments involved or DIY. Hell, pay me some money. I’ll whip something up.

Seriously, though. Attend a class when it comes near your area.

Thanks to Lifehacker for making me aware of a cool tool that puts your Recycling Bin in the taskbar.

It may seem like a small tweak, but MiniBin really does make dealing with deleted files easy. Not only can you open up the recycle bin just by right clicking on it, but you can even empty on it just by double-clicking—no showing the desktop necessary.

Shouldn’t this just get rolled into the next revision of Windows?

Download: MiniBin

My family rents, so we have to get clearance to do anything major. However, my hope is that I’ll be able to purchase some Idea Paint because my blank walls need some love, and this stuff will change that particular game.

Basically, this is paint that you use to turn a wall into a whiteboard. If I had an office at work, I’d have already purchased some of this stuff. As it stands, my office at home will have to suffice. Anyway, check it out. If you are artistically inclined and have the wall space for some brainstorming, it’s worth your attention.

I haven’t been posting much lately, because life has decided to be difficult. Medical stuff, moving, a parade of time-sucking commitments. Technology, take me away!

It’s a level! It’s a screwdriver! It’s a ruler! It’s a pen!

I want it. It wouldn’t be used to its optimal capacity, but it’s too cool to pass up. Geeks will need to be patient, though, because it’s sold out as of this post. But when it isn’t? Stock up. I know I will.

More than a year ago, I documented an office hack that I make use of regularly. I converted my number-pad into a greek-character pad. Well, if you have the cash, that won’t be necessary. Check out the X-Keys Desktop (via Cool Tools).

This key pad allows the user to program any number of keystrokes, computer functions, or a combination into a single button. The obvious use is to make a single button activate a tool or function in a program that can be done with a keystroke combination, ie: “ctrl+P” which in most programs will activate the Print command. However, it can be much more elaborate than that.

Looks pretty cool.

I gush easily for really cool electronic devices that exude simplicity. To this list, I offer the following:

NoteSlate is low cost tablet device with true one colour display, real paper look design, long life battery (180h !), together with very handy usage and very simple and helpful interface for pen and paper. This easy, compact and portable gadget is used anywhere you want to make any notes, drafts, sketches, any ideas for future reference. Paper for everyone! Write a note and check it later, save it, or delete it. Maybe send it after. Just one colour is enough to express the basics. Keep your life simple. You will love it. For $99.

A light, efficient, slate that I can write on? For 100 bucks? Based solely upon the concept, I can’t click enough Like buttons to stop the soul-gripping urge to own this thing. Visit the site and drool.

One of the things that I’ve always loved about the Microsoft Office suite is that you have an amazing amount of control over the menus. I take pride in ripping useless stuff out of the ribbons so that I can keep focused on the small percentage of tools that I actually use.

I’ve been using the Office suite for what feels like decades. For example, I used the version of Word that was released for Windows 3.1. Then, as now, there is always something annoyingly non-configurable. There’s a reason, but it’s just not a good one.

This time, it’s because Microsoft desperately wants you to use their Office.com templates. They likely know that you have your own templates, they just don’t care. Take the following graphic:

You see that “Office.com Templates” section? Yeah, you can’t get rid of it. I’m sure there’s some obscure registry key that will allow you to blast it out, but that’s not exactly the user option approach. Also, I haven’t found it.

Me? I want all my highly specific templates to be listed there. Instead, I have to click on “My Templates”, then show in detail mode (because icon mode looks a mess), and then scroll down to what I need and double-click it.

Microsoft delivers the whole damned world in each of its releases, but – because of that – has always had the too many clicks problem. It takes two clicks to access stuff I hate, but four or five clicks to access the stuff I actually use.

I’m sure those built in templates are useful for small business owners, and individuals who aren’t using policy-driven template designs, but for the rest of us (I’ll say most, actually), it’s wasted space. I don’t click on the New option because I want to view forty large, ugly icons that lead to useless documents.

I want control. I have it damned near everywhere else, but I’ll probably have to wait for the next release to be able to modify it. Please, Microsoft, stop thinking for me. I have a brain that works pretty damned well, most of the time. If I want your extensive collection of painfully anti-Tufte forms, I’ll turn it on. At least let me turn it off.

As a rule, when I am preparing a new document of any kind, I use Word’s Find & Replace tool to entirely remove any double spaces following a period.

Note the highlighted spaces. Just do this and click on Replace All. Problem solved.

I realize that we’ve all got in the habit of using double spaces, but the reasons for that habit are pretty hazy. Lifehacker recently pointed readers to this Slate piece by Farhad Manjoo, where he lifts the fog:

In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace. To accommodate that machine’s shortcomings, everyone began to type wrong. And even though we no longer use typewriters, we all still type like we do. (Also see the persistence of the dreaded Caps Lock key.)

The problem with typewriters was that they used monospaced type—that is, every character occupied an equal amount of horizontal space. This bucked a long tradition of proportional typesetting, in which skinny characters (like I or 1) were given less space than fat ones (like W or M). Monospaced type gives you text that looks “loose” and uneven; there’s a lot of white space between characters and words, so it’s more difficult to spot the spaces between sentences immediately. Hence the adoption of the two-space rule—on a typewriter, an extra space after a sentence makes text easier to read. Here’s the thing, though: Monospaced fonts went out in the 1970s. First electric typewriters and then computers began to offer people ways to create text using proportional fonts. Today nearly every font on your PC is proportional. (Courier is the one major exception.) Because we’ve all switched to modern fonts, adding two spaces after a period no longer enhances readability, typographers say. It diminishes it.

There’s more, but it’s really about inertia. That’s a common enough feature of any bureaucracy, but trust me; you don’t have to do it. And it’s for the same reasons that you don’t use white-out to fix spelling errors or send telegrams via pneumatic tube.

If you work in a job with any white-collar elements, you are inevitably going to encounter some Corpo-speak.

These are those words that pepper meetings. It’s the action items that will be handled off-line and what not. Used minimally, these words are barely noticeable. But when they’re used too much, the temptation is to play a variation of bullshit-bingo.

Fortunately, there’s a place where you can put a phrase in and get the English version out. The site is Unsuck It and it looks like it’s going to be a valuable resource. For instance:

• Accelerated Emergence of High Maturity Behaviors becomes Faster results.
• Action Item becomes Goal or To do.
• Bottleneck becomes Slow down.

Using that last example, “John’s workload bottlenecked the process” should become “John can’t manage his time and slowed things down.” It may seem hurtful, but unclear speudo-terms hurt baby Jesus. Let’s all try not to use them.

(Hat tip to Lifehacker)

That’s what data can feel like.

Think about your inbox. When was the last time you could see all your actionable items in a single windowpane? I work hard to maintain Inbox Zero, but sometimes I struggle. Occasionally, I deserve a reward.

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But the fact of the matter is that managing our inboxes isn’t fun anymore. It should be fun, because it’s our primary means of business communication.

A ways back, Mozilla announced that they were going to fix this.

Raindrop aims to be a sort of intelligent inbox filtering system that kicks minor messages and notifications to the sidelines while foregrounding messages from Mom and other important people you actually know.

Raindrop also wants to pull in messages from Twitter, Facebook, IM, and eventually any other communication platform with an API. Direct messages and @replies would be seen as more important and therefore foregrounded over regular not specifically to you messages. The idea is to make a people-centric communication tool that brings your various services together in one interface, instead of constantly playing a game of “find that browser tab” when you want to check up on a particular conversation or thread. (Dybwad)

Everything lives everywhere. There are too many clicks and pageloads. Is it so hard to fix this?

There are some tools, but there isn’t an all-in-one solution. For instance, Threadsy gets points for being browser based, but it only includes some of the data paths I’m concerned with. Also, I can’t configure how it looks. I’m still not really in control.

At this point, Raindrop is taking baby-steps. There’s a lot of room to usurp their hopes. But if not them, someone will eventually figure this out. They will make lots of money. And if they can figure out how to make it work seamlessly with Outlook server data, I will connect to it intravenously.