Amazon announced a new “frustration free packaging”, which removes the products from all that plastic packaging so that customers do not have to hunt down their jaws of life to open these things up. I guess memory cards are what are being called out, but lots of things I buy have annoying and definitely unnecessary packaging.

Two things all e-tailers should do:

1. Learn from Apple to make the packaging cool, mostly with paper, and promote re-use of those boxes.
2. Send simply packaged goods to customers in recycled paper. I can understand having some shinier packaging for brick & mortar stores but just make it easy for e-tailers to do the right thing.

In this day and age, why not?

I was inspired after watching Heroes to watch The Fly. Yes, the Fly with Jeff Goldblum from the 80’s. The reason is that the Mohinder character from Heroes is a direct replica of Jeff Goldblum’s character in The Fly, Seth Brundle.

The Fly actually holds up quite well since it was made as you watch Jeff rocking the David Copperfield hairdo…well…until he turns into a fly. I hope that is not a spoiler given the name of the movie is The Fly. This was actually one of my favourite movies growing up because it’s just great sci-fi. The first scene of the movie has Seth saying into the camera, “What I’m working on is something that will change the world.” Then he turns into a fly…over the next 90 minutes or so. As my lovely wife had not had the pleasure of watching this movie, I thought it would be a great opportunity to watch her reaction to some of the sci-fi gore in the movie and sure enough…there were some great scenes that made her say, “ZOMG WTF”. Yeah…totally worthwhile if your female partner has not watched this movie.

From: Mr J
Sent: 20 October 2008 18:25
Subject: Vote for prop 8

Have you heard proposition 8? Will you vote for it? Proposition 8 will definitely impact your life here in US, especially for your children and grandchildren. Prop 8 is NOT just about same sex marriage. It will change US.

1. What’s prop 8?

Eliminates Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_8_(2008)

2. What shall I vote?

Yes to prop 8:
Protect traditional marriage and family. Marriage = a man + woman. Family = Dad + Mam + kids.

Interesting point, Mr J. However, my London colleagues were all very interested to know whether Mr J is a northerner. They haven’t heard “Mam” in quite some time. I keep thinking Cartman from South Park for some reason.

Homosex will NOT be taught in ALL PUBLIC SCHOOL.
Homosex will NOT be forbidden or punished, and they will NOT loose all current rights.
http://www.protectmarriage.com

No to prop 8:
Marriage = part A + part B. Family = part A + part B + kids.
Homosex WILL be taught in ALL PUBLIC SCHOOL. (CA edu law 51890)
http://www.NoOnProp8.com

3. What’s impact to my life?
1) If prop 8 fail, it will change value of marriage, from Government, Public Education, and Society perspectives. US is still a dream land for you, but will it be same for your kids.
2) You may spent $1M++ to buy a house in good school district with 900+ API. But if prop 8 failed, your kids will be taught a lot Homosex value in ALL PUBLIC SCHOOLS. This means, there will be more chance that they become gay/lesbian when they grow up.

-[removed]

Now, I am on the fence on Prop 8 but the real question is what is Homosex? I mean there are some very interesting and debateable questions that come up with this guy’s support of Prop 8. What use is a $1M+ home if your kids turn to this “Homosex”.

Feel free to partake in good political debate on Prop 8, because educated and informed discussions are the only way we avoid Mams partaking in Homosex.

I’m not Republican or Democrat but if that crazy ghost on the right runs our country, I’m staying in the UK.

I’m not sure what she stands for, but I think it’s time to put a hot president into the White House. PALIN 2008!!!

I know it’s a bit early to think about the holidays, but believe me, it’s starting to feel like winter here in London. I think I’ve been a pretty good boy this year except for the general assault and WOMD allegations put on me, that is. This year I am asking for 5 simple products that any normal guy would want:

1. A CO2 powered bear-killing knife
2. An airplane blinding ultra laser
3. A remote controlled super paintball machine gun turret
4. A imaging graffiti machine
5. A stealth phoneline tapper

That’s all, Santa. Not asking too much this year, am I?

Disclaimer: I’m still using the older version of Outlook 2003, not 2007. Most of these principles transcend versions, but some may already have been addressed with 2007.

1. Use filters to weed out shit emails. Any email sent to a DL you should probably filter and put into a sub-folder within “@REVIEW” or “@ARCHIVE”. Some of these you want to read eventually, some of them only if stars align and you are given a month of free time at work and also a personal massage every morning by a Swedish masseusse. I am surprised at how many people don’t use filters. I have literally hit the limit on the number of filters I can write, including “OOO messages”, automated reports, and my weekly Thursday massage session reminder.

2. Turn off that annoying alert at the right bottom corner of the screen. It’s too distracting to have email alerts pop up every fe w minutes. Besides, that’s where sports updates are supposed to go. How dare they.

3. Set Outlook to only send / receive periodically. I’m working with 15 minutes right now. The Send part is particularly helpful. How many times have you sent that email and the split second after realise you had just forwarded a NSFW email to a few thousand colleagues including your boss and CEO? Um, me neither.

4. Color code your emails. This helps separate out the emails sent directly to you where you are the primary person to take action on the email. You are also the primary person to ignore that email from that fat dude in HR.In Outlook 2003, you just go to: Tools | Organize.

5. Utilise Tasks as your to-do list. I have followed the GTD style “dashboard” view for Outlook that allows me a good glimpse of all my tasks and calendar at all times on a separate window. I have more details on how to set Tasks and Calendar up to make this happen.

6. Utliise hotkeys. From going to Outlook from other applications to creating tasks and meetings. Keyboard hotkeys are back like neon colours and Rick Astley, yo.

7. Don’t surf the web all day.

8. Don’t IM all day about whether the Olympics should be counted based on total golds or total medals. It’s total medals, so the US won. Sorry, great-great-great-grandparents.

9. Review the task list on Fridays.

10. Change your name to Ocho Cinco. That way nobody will email you anymore and you wouldn’t have to use Outlook.

Ok, I got a bit tired at #7 and flew through the rest, but Top 10 sounds better than Top 7.

That should mostly do it for my GSD series. I may have one more post on GSD’ing your normal life, but the Outlook/work email aspect has been the most useful to me so far. GSD!

The first thing I think anybody should do when implementing GSD is looking at emails. For every email that comes in, you should decide on what the next action is and file accordingly (I make action items into Outlook Tasks). I generally keep my Inbox empty at the end of the day, save for a couple of important emails that I want to bang out. Any email that you can respond to in 2 mins or less, just do it (JDI). Your decision should be: Do it, Defer it, Delegate it, or Delete It.

1. Create three folders, @ARCHIVE, @REVIEW, @ACTION, and @WAITING. The “@” sign puts these folders at the top.
2. From this point on, everything that goes into your Inbox goes into one of those folders. Let me describe in more detail here:

@ARCHIVE: Stuff you’re done with. Nothing in this list requires an action. If you need something from this bucket, just search for it.
@REVIEW: Stuff you should read. I’ve toyed with the idea of “@REVIEW_LATER” for the less important emails that you might want to read eventually but right now just have one. Nothing here is important…it’s for your viewing pleasure and when you have time.
@ACTION: I keep this folder mostly empty because I use Outlook Tasks to manage my tasks and drag emails into Tasks but I use this folder for important things for today that I will need to refer to.
@WAITING: This is pretty important. I have a separate trick that helps track emails that I will share later, but basically this is the folder to keep copies of emails that you have sent to people that eat your emails like fish & chips.

This works pretty well for work but I haven’t done it yet for personal email. We’ll see how that goes…

My mate KokoBWare recently gave me a personal productivity book called Getting Things Done by David Allen. It was actually pretty enlightening. I had been in search for such a system for some time but was never able to find it. A system that captured all tasks in my life, from creating Powerpoint presentations, doing my expense reports, to purchasing the toilet paper to wipe my arse with…and wiping my arse. Everything captured in one trusted reviewed list. I’m digging it. KokoBware: you’re not getting that book back.

As I reached out on the web this is a system many techies have been following religiously for the past few years. It’s been documented on many enthusiast sites like 43Folders, which is a tech/email look at GTD. In particular, there’s a talk that the author, Merlin Mann, gave at Google that gives you a good feel for what the system is all about.

Since productivity is a personal hobby of mine, I will share my adaptation of the system, called Getting Shit Done in the next few weeks as I implement it.