Chef Neha

Awesome Indian food I made with Becca, Nikhil, and Zoe. We made Paneer Makhni, Delicious Spicy Chickpeas, and Raita. A feast! Indian food is so hard! I had no idea! You have to buy and measure about a million spices. My mom makes it look so easy.

Productivity Porn

Hi, my name is Neha, and I'm an addict.

I'm obsessed with productivity and organization. I have been reading Lifehacker since it started. I tried GTD. I own a moleskine. I love todo lists, gadgets to put my todo lists places, and methods for integrating my todo lists with all walks of life.

I probably do spend too much time playing with productivity methods and software, but I've learned to treat that as fun-time as opposed to work-time. Accepting the fact that reorganizing all the stuff I had to do was not work helped a lot. It's just my hobby! It makes me happy.

So here's a brief (hopefully) post on what's working for me right now.

0. My Restrictions

I work on several computers. I have tried a few different services for syncing folders on the file system, but none of them have been awesome. Also, I end up using 4 different notebooks, and none really has all my information in it. I hate carrying around a heavy bag, and I'm a girl so sometimes I just don't have room for a notepad. Thus, I must keep most of my life online so its always accessible.

I have an iPhone which I love, but I also believe that paper is a very necessary part of life, and I will never solely use a Palm/iPhone/Blackberry for entering information. It blows. I believe these gadgets are mainly for read-only access to your information anywhere.

1. Task Management: Remember the Milk

I love this little company. They created a cute, flexible task manager and they had things like keyboard shortcuts before anybody had keyboard shortcuts. They integrated with GMail and Google Calendar. They supported Google Gears. They're awesome people, and they keep developing and improving a great product. The reason I love this is because of keyboard shortcuts (kill the mouse!) and its integration with GMail, which is basically where I live. It's easy to create tasks from emails and see your tasks in GMail, and they offer you a bazillion ways to customize your lists, create persistent smart searches, tag, annotate, etc.

I have the following lists:

• Repeating/Deferred Where my repeated tasks go, like paying rent or moving money from my bank account to Vanguard. I will forget to pay rent without this!
• Someday Where I keep crazy long term things like learning a musical instrument.
• All Tasks By Date A smart list of every single task, prioritized first by priority and second by date due. Tasks without due dates are at the end. I usually always look at this list, but lately it's gotten so long I've created the following two:
• Home tag:house OR tag:errands OR location:home. House stuff, like laundry or hanging curtains.
• Work (tag:hmk OR tag:work) AND (dueWithin:"3 days" OR dueBefore:today). All my work (homework, google, etc) that's pressing.

I can happily add GMail email urls or regular ones to the list, and I can check this on my phone. I'm just starting to use tagging and location (I only use extra features when I need them -- I like to start simple first) and it's helpful to only see the tasks I can do in a certain place.

2. Thinking

I like to scrawl in regular sized college-rule spiral notebooks with a gel pen. This helps me think. Never underestimate the clarity that comes from writing things down! One of my math teachers in high school said that the bigger you write, the better you think. It changed me -- before that I tried to solve problems by writing small within the lines. Now I use the back of discarded printouts. Never feel like you have to type things into a computer (only one way of input!) or just keep everything in your head. I have several notebooks in different places for this, because I find that I usually don't even need to refer back to what I've written, and don't. Sometime I scrawl rough schedules for the day or todo lists, which I transfer back.

3. Brain Dump/Research

Two kinds of research: MIT research and personal research.

I generally use paper, directories/text files, emacs, and git for MIT research. I've started trying out Zotero, but I'm not sure how to use it yet. I keep a big stack of papers on my desk and I carry a few at a time in a usually unsuccessful attempt to get myself to read them. I hate reading on a computer screen. One of my classes is trying to get us to use this in-house online note-taking tool, but I find it cumbersome. However, it's an amazing job considering it was built by a single grad student!

For personal research (like buying stuff or organizing vacations) I tend to use Microsoft OneNote. I had to buy it, and it's only on one machine which runs Windows, but it's just so darn useful for capturing web information. It would probably be even better if I used Outlook (yuck). I've tried EverNote but it's not the same. I was using Google Notebook for a while till it died.

4. Scheduling Time

Google Calendar is my life. One of my classes has a GCal feed, and I love that they did that. I put all events in Google Calendar, hard or not. My only issue is that I have two -- one for work and one for personal/school use. I can't just share the work one with my personal calendar, which is annoying, so I often end up duplicating events to my personal calendar if they are important, since while in school I rarely look at my work calendar. My dad uses Google Calendar too so I can see when he's in town for visiting.

I have got all these calendars 2-way syncing to my iPhone, which is fantastic (much nicer than the web interface). I used to use NuevaSync. There are many options.

5. Browser

I use both Firefox and Chrome. Chrome is faster but only Firefox works with my MIT certificates and has useful extensions. I look forward to this being fixed with Chrome!

Given that I use several different browsers, I use Foxmarks to keep my bookmarks in sync (I don't do this with Chrome, obviously). I've tried to use things like delicious a million times but I just never end up going back to look at the things I've tagged. I keep a toolbar of shortcuts in all my Firefoxes and bookmark sites that I want to check out later -- I still have the problem of looking at things I've bookmarked, so if the page is involved with something I want to do I usually add it as a task in RTM. Also, my open Chrome/Firefox windows tend to be a list of tabs representings things I want to look at/do. I've tried to get better about closing tabs if I already have tasks associated with them (like homework for a class -- I end up leaving my class tabs open) because they add mental anxiety. This is all about learning to trust your system.

6. Classes

I have a notebook per class, and usually I'm very good about taking notes. Everything for a class goes into that notebook, except rough drafts of problem sets (too much paper). I don't usually go back and read them, but the act of taking the notes in class forces me to listen and helps me learn. Most of my other class stuff is online -- I have backed up directories for each class which store problem sets and assignments. I use LaTex for problem sets, but I solve problems on paper first. I don't keep the paper.

My biggest unsolved problem is unifying my computer usage outside of Firefox. I have cygwin installed on my windows laptop, which is ok, and I can ssh into my MIT machines, but it's hard to know where to install programs (like NLTK, which I need for one of my classes). What I have now works ok but isn't perfect.

There you go! I hope that this was useful to someone and wasn't just me procrastinating another hour with my productivity hobby. I might do a follow-up post on workflow that's more GMail focused.

Update on research: I spent this afternoon procrastinating by really setting up bibtex. I use latex for all paper writing, and a bunch of people i know here just keep a giant bibtex file of everything they've ever read, using the annote field to hold notes. I have a simple latex file that then generates the bibliography with notes.

I can't really slice and dice it, but i think i can order it in different ways using \bibliographystyle in latex, and i can emacs search it. Cal Newport also has an idea using Excel.

i'm a mutant!

I had my 4 wisdom teeth taken out, but a 5th one has grown in. I'm getting it out on Wednesday. My friend Eugene Wu drew this awesome picture:

I'm scary.

just tell me what to buy, part II

I was just reading some of last Sunday's Business section of the NYT out loud to my sister, trying to distract her from her nausea (she has a stomache virus). Have you ever read a newspaper out loud? It's weird. Sometimes things unintentionally (i can only hope) rhyme.

Anyway, there were two articles that got me thinking. One was about Facebook and social media advertising by the big guys, like P&G. Summarizing, it's totally not working. Everyone is an idiot. P&G has some sort of fan page for Crest Whitestrips that has 18,000 fans, and they had to do a massive amount of college promotion just to get that. As I'm sure you know, 18,000 is pathetic for something that's supposed to have as wide appeal as Crest Whitestrips.

The second article was about Jay Leno and his move to the 10 PM EST/9 PM CST hour. The author was in favor because he has a lot of trouble staying up late anyway. He said something about the midnight 6 minute commercial break, and I was totally confused. People still watch things real time? And are subjected to commercials! How novel. I DVR, download, or stream almost all of what I watch.

Here's something that I'm not sure I really believe: did TV advertising ever really work? Maybe it used to work, but does it still work? I really don't think seeing an ad for some GM car while watching Heroes makes me any more likely to buy that car. Does it work for anyone? It usually just makes me cranky. The thing I miss most from commercials (since I watch everything on DVR or online) is seeing what's happening on other shows, and what new things are going to be on. That's because, duh, I'm watching TV. I probably will watch more TV in the future, and showing me some new show is a well targeted placement.

That's one of the problems I've always had with social network advertising. The targeting is so crappy that the ads are just annoying, and people are never willing to shill out their friends (the NYTimes article had 3% responding to a survey saying they might do this). Showing an ad for Tide or Crest Whitestrips is a shot in the dark. Ads on search engines are so much better -- you actually know I'm looking for the thing and probably in a buying mood.

But I finally made a connection in my head (everyone else probably already knew this) -- social networks really could be awesome for recommendations. This relates to thoughts I've had recently on the fashion/style/beauty blogs I read, but I'll get to how in a second. First, the situation: I want a new pair of boots. My sister keeps raving about her Kenneth Cole Bard Tenders (I don't know what that name means either). I am probably going to buy a pair based solely on her recommendation. How powerful is that?

I posted on Friend Feed that I bought a pair of Steve Madden boots, and someone said that they're crappy quality. I got them, and lo and behold, they sucked. The recommendations from my social community can be really valuable, and I'm more likely to take them. Most of the people on Zappos said the boots were great. Of course, almost all the reviews for shoes on Zappos are positive. Clearly people who order from Zappos are crazy.

The problem is when you introduce compensation into this lovely circle of recommendations. I'm not going to trust people if they're getting paid (ugh. the Sugar blogs), but at the same time, shouldn't they get paid? My sister loves her shoes, and tells everyone about them. She's helping me and she's really helping Kenneth Cole.

I've found that I'm even willing to take recommendations from random blogs, if I like the authors enough and feel like we have similar tastes. I read the Daily Obsession, and I keep thinking I should unsubscribe because they keep recommending things that I have no need for at the time that I read the post. But then a post will come up for something lovely that I am interested in at that time. I absolutely hate that about blogs -- they broadcast information at you when you might not be ready to get it. How much has not been useful to me because I got it at the wrong time?

Social networks should do a better job of mining and relating my favorite brands and products, and making it accessible in a highly targeted, time-independent way. Maybe I can't make money from my purchases and findings about products because of a conflict of interest, but someone should.

ah, the stresses of life

This post [penelope trunk] made me want to hire an attorney just so I could yell at him when I get stressed. Can you really do that to attorneys? Can I yell at my CPA? I have one of those. Of course, I avoid him and leave his emails unread in my inbox because I still haven't filed my taxes for 2007.