Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

To complete my previous post about GTD, I want to mention the fatal flaw in this methodology.

Getting Things Done tells you to determine the next action you need to do for all of the stuff/projects you need to do. That is good! Once you do that that action, you can go onto the next.

I’ve, in effect been doing that for Behold. Behold’s Future Plans list is the ToDo list of subitems I need to do to get Behold to become that “perfect” genealogy program. Once I pick the next item from the list, I determine the first programming “Action” to do to get that thing done. Another action follows that action and so on until that item is complete. Then I go onto the next item.

Do you see the problem here? It is the problem that has caused Behold to take so many years to get to this point. Each item has many actions, often many more than you (or I) would expect. Doing them one at a time and only worrying about the next one is a great way to stay sane and is one of the best things GTD teaches you. It helps you continually make progress.

But the problem is that GTD does not necessarily get you any closer to your final product. You keep adding new ideas to the ToDo, often faster than the items can get done. The product gets better and better but the end keeps getting farther away. Something is missing from Getting Things Done to focus you. Some method to prioritize and schedule what you do.

How to fix Getting Things Done

I don’t think it’s very hard to fix. Simply add Joel Spolsky’s Painless Software Schedules methodology into GTD. Joel wrote this in 2000, and now says the article is obsolete, but don’t believe him. PSS is very simple and integrates with the actions of GTD too perfectly to ignore. You need add only 5 columns to your Actions to implement it: an original estimate, a current time estimate, the time elapsed, the time remaining, and a priority column.

You only need a list with 4 to 6 simple columns to implement GTD, and only 5 more if you want to go the extra step and prioritize and schedule the things you want to do.

Remember, any system has to be simple and fun to use or you won’t use it.

Genealogy software needs a simple but useful ToDo list. I’ve now got the model to implement one, if and when I get there.

In the meantime, I’m continuing my push towards Behold’s beta.

This one has bugged me for six months, but tonight I finally solved it.

On this Blog, there are two RSS feeds. One for the Blog Entries I make, and one for all the comments. But the RSS feed for the comments never seemed to show the comments after they were made. They seemed to appear sometime later.

It was strange because it appeared the feed was correct, and validated okay. It seemed to be okay in many feedreaders. But in the feedreader included with Internet Explorer, it had this problem. I couldn’t tell if it was a feed problem, an IE problem, or a WordPress problem.

This wasn’t a critical problem for my Behold blog, but it was a bad one for the GenSoftReviews site, since that site’s RSS feed is made up of the reviews, and those are the WordPress comments. Many reviews would be added, but they wouldn’t appear in my IE feedreader.

But a few days ago, I found that the comments feed got updated, not when a new comment was added, but when a new Blog entry (or in the case of GenSoftReviews, a new program listing) got added. That got me scratching my head and led me up a few wrong alleys.

I finally traced this to a problem in WordPress that was apparently fixed over 2 years ago and another ticket that led me to it. The problem then was a stale “Last-Modified:” header in the HTTP response to the link to the comments feed.

Then when I discovered that this problem was still alive by a recent post on the WordPress Support Forum titled: New RSS entries/comments not working, then these materials all helped me to debug a solution. Pleased to find it, I posted my solution back to the Forum, with the hope that it might help others - so they won’t bog themselves down for hours like I did.

That was an elusive bug. But now my workflow will be very much helped, since I’ll no longer have to go back to my Behold Blog and to GenSoftReviews just to check for new comments or reviews. I’ll now be getting them reliably with the rest of the RSS feeds I subscribe to.

RSS is great. It lets you follow the blogs and forums that you’re interested in, and you are in control of when you want to do that. Now my own sites are back under control again. Yay!

Twenty years of using a mouse, and until I saw it I never even thought of it.

I’m right handed and I’ve always used my right hand to hold the mouse. But then when I saw a righty doing it, it made so much sense. If a right handed person holds the mouse with their left hand, their right hand is free to write notes or enter numbers on the keypad while they still have control of the mouse.

Do you (right handed people) hold the phone with your left hand? I do. Again, it allows my right hand to do other things while I’m on the phone. So why do I mouse with my right?

I thought I’d try it awhile and see how it feels and if the change would make me more efficient.

First thing I noticed is the left and right mouse buttons feel like they’re on the wrong side. There’s one of two choices. Get used to it, which wouldn’t be too hard, or go into the control panel and switch the button configuration. I’d recommend getting used to it, since then you could go on (almost) anyone else’s computer and just start working without an extra step required to change the other person’s configuration.

I was all keen and gung-ho for it, when I discovered the one flaw for me that makes it less than perfect. I am a bit of a keyboardist and use a lot of shortcuts. The ones I use very often are the simple two-fingered left hand shortcuts that I don’t even think about anymore: Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V (cut, copy and paste), Ctrl-A (select all), Ctrl-B (bold) and Ctrl-Z (undo). With the mouse in my left hand, I lose access to these which I often do in combination with mouse selections.

But I do bring this up because you may find it useful.

Similarly, if you are left handed and hold your mouse in your left hand, you can try switching to your right. Then you’ll be able to write with your left hand while you mouse. Plus you’ll gain what I lose, the ability to use your left hand for the shortcuts, but you will lose the use of the keypad.

Here’s a cute and humorous thread about it.

And in my case, maybe instead I’ll learn to write with my left hand (or maybe not).