Shanti’s Dispatches

This GTD Prayer is just great.

Just came across Launchy, which seems like it might be the QuickSilver of windows.

I’m really bad at this.

I used to check email constantly throughout the day. It would just never seem to stop piling up!

But being a GTD-freak (a lot more so lately), I’m really trying to keep that inbox within the 1-page (visible) range, of mostly actionable / pending items.

So today I didn’t check / respond to email at all! Yes, not exactly earth-shattering news.

But I got an incredible amount done, including ripping apart my Ruby / Rails / Postgres installation on OS X and basically starting from scratch. (We’re using Ruby 1.8.4 over at Sprout and edge Rails, baby! Umm yeah, we like to live dangerously.)

… and, now here at 5AM, relaxing in bed with my lappy, I’m finally wading through all the email from the day. Sorry for all the “late” replies!

Funny, we were just talking about this at the office the other day.

Bruce Eckel’s The Ideal Programmer is making the rounds on del.icio.us/popular.

Bruce is unable to point to the exact source of this folklorish anecdote, but says:

My favorite, because it’s such a wake-up call, is that 5% of the programmers are 20 times more productive than the other 95%.

If you do know the source — of an actual scientific study confirming something along these lines — please drop a note in the comments section!

I do believe that something to this effect is true - but perhaps it’s just the top 1% or 0.5%, whatever.

My point (to my buddies) was that: Ok, presuppose it’s true, which doesn’t seem like that big of a stretch. There are always those people who are way off the charts at both ends of the bell curve.

Enter: Magic Geodesic Dome of Productivity Measurement

Let’s suppose there was a magic geodesic dome you could throw people in and measure their productivity, even all those immeasurables like people skills.

The computer says, “Alert, Alert! Larry von Lutzhowzer, your new senior programmer, is 20x as productive on an individual basis as Billy, Joe, Bob, Nancy and Chuck, who’ve all been given great marks but have roughly the same salary as Larry.”

Do you think Larry would even remotely get a bump in pay commensurate with his measured output levels (20 times, with lower bug incidence rates!)?!?

Of course not. He’d be lucky to be making twice as much, even after they determined beyond all reasonable doubt that he was 20x as productive as some of the other team members.

Please note: there are always those under-appreciated Catalysts of the team, who might not output as many Lines of Code or bug fixes, but provide invaluable glue and motivation. Their loss can spell certain doom to a project that’s already teetering on the edge.

So — What’s your point, smart ass?

Go work for a startup, or start one yourself.

That’s the only way you can leverage your skills beyond a paycheck + linearly increasing annual raise.

Turn that 5, 10 or 20x productivity into better products and services. Go all out and hit those High Notes instead of settling for second best.

ps. I know, I know. This is nothing that hasn’t been said before. Sometimes we all need a little reminder.

Update: I can’t in good faith recommend Colibri at this time, after a more thorough review. It’s not quite useful enough yet (no indexing of folders like ‘My Documents’, etc) and I seem to activate it too often for no reason and always ended up disabling it anyway.

For those of us tethered to Windows operating systems (some or all of the time), a few prayers have just been answered with the release of Colibri.

I can see the more cynical blogger set complaining about Colibri’s similarity to QuickSilver. Of course, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and QS is pretty darn close to perfect.

QuickSilver: The Original

One of the first applications I installed on my new mac mini was QuickSilver. The only real feature I use is the Application / File Launcher.

If you’d like to read about all the other neat things it can do, peruse the 43Folders QuickSilver archives.

With QuickSilver, you just hit ctrl-spacebar, type a few words, and QuickSilver guesses which application or file you’d like to launch. Keep typing if it hasn’t figured out which app/file you’d like to launch, and it should eventually find it. (as long as its in the QuickSilver index, which you can modify to include directories it isn’t indexing yet)