Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

I always enjoy reading a good self-help book. I like to find ways to do things better and more efficiently. But it seems to me that most of the people who would best benefit from these books are the people that don’t read them.

I’ve heard a lot recently about the book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen, and I picked up a copy and started reading it last week.

I’ve always been looking for that “perfect” ToDo list program or system. I’ve never found one that seemed to be just what I needed and I’ve tried many. These included Chandler and recently Tudumo (designed specifically for GTD) sounded promising. The beautiful and acclaimed online Remember the Milk service just didn’t seem right for me either.

But reading Getting Things Done now has clarified what was missing. Yes, it’s easy to write down your things to do in a big list, but the important thing is to write down your objectives/goals and for each one, the next action step to take. Once you do that action, you then write the next one to do until you complete your goal.

Now that sounds a lot like the way I’ve always programmed. I’ve always maintained Behold’s ToDo list publicly. Each item listed is one objective/goal. I take the next one, and I program it, step by step, each step being an action.

And now I realize what the trouble with my system (and even with GTD) is. Yes, it works to get you going and on your way to complete your objective, but doing it one action at a time leaves you with not necessarily knowing what remaining actions are required to complete your task. Almost always, you end up with more actions to do than initially expected. Some actions are harder than you expected and end up taking longer than you would have thought or may require being broken into smaller more manageable actions.

Thus explains my dilemma as to estimating when I’m going to finish each part of Behold. It is very difficult to foresee just what is involved when the step-by-step approach is taken. I could put “build a house” on my ToDo list, and start working on that action by action. How would you estimate how long that would take? Are you taking into account having to buy a tool you don’t have, or the time to order a replacement for a defective part?

Brett commented on my blog post Avoiding Tangents and asked if the next update of Behold might still be possible in March. But the step-by-step method really does not allow me to assuredly answer until it becomes obvious that there is too much to do in the time remaining.

I haven’t finished the book yet. Hopefully it will address this problem.

Many genealogy programs include a ToDo list that is supposed to help you plan your research. The ones I’ve seen I haven’t been impressed with. But the GTD technique does give a good simple framework for this. A Task/ToDo list is something I have in the “Other Interesting Ideas” section of Behold’s Future Plans and is something I ultimately want to have in Behold following Version 2.0 when I start to use Behold to record my own family information.

The work continues on splitting Behold’s Everything Report into pieces.

But while I do spend a lot of time working on Behold, I also spend time keeping up to date on what else is happening out there with regards to genealogy software.

Most of you know I’ve set up GenSoftReviews, which now pretty much runs on its own with little intervention required on my part. I do add new software to it as I find out or am told about it. But I very much enjoy the reviews, and there has been some hot topics with Geni suddenly drawing the wrath of its users and a battle between the lovers and haters of The Master Genealogist.

Then every day I check my own feed reader for my genealogical daily fix of blog-entered info. First I check what Dick Eastman has to say in his Newsletter. For completeness, I also follow the Software branch of Dick’s Forum, but that isn’t heavily traffic-ed yet.

Randy Seaver’s Genea-Musings is my next stop. Don’t know how anyone can blog that much! He sometimes reviews software in great detail step by step from the point of view of an inexperienced user of software, and I find that very valuable in thinking of ways to make Behold simpler to use.

Jean-Yves Baxter lists what’s been changed in every single new version of every genealogy software package known to man at his GeneaNet Genealogy Blog. Whenever he mentions a new feature that I’m curious about, I then go to the software’s website to find out more.

And Tamura Jones, who ruthlessly reviews genealogy (and other) software from a very technical perspective, does not have a blog yet, but he has joined Twitter, and I look forward every day to his Twitter feed.

I follow about 20 other genealogy blog feeds as well, but the four I list above provide the majority of the information I need to keep up on the current state of genealogy software.

But there are a multitude of very interesting genealogy blogs out there if you want to get all sorts of points of view. The best lists are at: Genealogy Blog Finder and GeneaBloggers.

If you haven’t already, you should start saving time and use an RSS newsreader to save time reading the sites you often visit. I use the one built into IE7, but there are many others you can choose from.

Experiment and find the feeds you enjoy the most. But make sure you limit how many feeds you monitor. Otherwise, your hours will slide away as you merrily read on and on.

Splitting the one big routine that creates the Everything Report into pieces involved a number of challenges. The hardest thing to do is to keep myself from going off on tangents.

An example of this just happened as I tried to reprogram the part that displays the titles of each section. These sections are internally numbered sequentially. I use what is known as a linked list to store them. A linked list simply links the first section to the 2nd, the 2nd to the 3rd, etc.

When the entire report was produced, Behold followed the list through and generated the sections. But now by only displaying what is visible, I need Behold to go directly to a specific section. The problem is that there is no index to get directly to that section’s information in the linked list.

I then remembered seeing an article a while back that said that a TList in Delphi is as fast as a linked list and can provide direct access to any specific item, e.g. the 43rd one. So off I went trying to change my linked list structure into a TList.

I took several attempts at this. I first started just changing the code and there were a lot more places the section info was used than I had thought. Some of them were tricky to change, and I started not trusting myself that I made the changes all correctly.

So I started again and did it more carefully. This time, when I ran the program, I got an error. I found out what it was and fixed it. Ran Behold again and another error at a different spot. Hmmm. Still no good. Two errors here is too much. Doesn’t give me confidence in what I did.

So back again I went, this time deciding to change one thing at a time and keep the program working all along. I did a couple of steps before I stopped to think about what I was doing.

My assumption here was that I needed direct access to section info. Why? Because following the linked list to get to the section would take too long. I could maintain a reverse index instead which would be another solution.

Again, this thinking was to enhance an entire algorithm. Something’s not right here about what I’m doing. All I really want to do is simply finish this bit off and go onto the next step to get a new very-much optimized Behold out and into beta.

This tangent I was on was entirely based on thinking that non-direct access would take too long. One of my very large test files had 6,000 report sections. So I tried it. I clicked on the very last report section and faster than I could blink, Behold showed the section. Following 6,000 links takes no time with Delphi. I should have realized that.

It’s funny. I’ve been programming for more years than I can remember. And I’ve got quite good at doing it efficiently. But sometimes that mental block sets in, and the obvious becomes elusive.