Mambo Taxi

My brain is going a mile a minute, which is frustrating because it's well after midnight. I'm thinking about: work, upcoming visits (from a cousin, and hopefully to Ithaca), and random this-and-that.

One theme to the random is "the web as open-source organizer of ideas"...

I know lots of people who blog ideas with the hope people will jump on them. I do, and occasionally I browse websites devoted to the topic. Halfbakery was cool, but it seems mostly moribund these days. A friend pointed me at a brand-new site hosted by Reddit called SomebodyMakeThis, which made me smile. Seeing it reminded me long ago (2003? gawd!) I had posted this page of ideas. Most of which are embarrassingly quaint. "email with tags"- sure sounds like gmail; "fuzzy GPS via cell towers"- hey, google did that too, for gmaps on my phone; "video driving directions so you know what you're looking for"- I'd rather have street view, thanks google! And in 2003 I didn't anticipate GPS devices adding 3-d views (a feature I've never particularly liked, it turns out.)

On the other hand, I would still like to have "Email-sorting software." I could appreciate a gmail-sifter to find patterns in my mail: suggesting new labels, perhaps identifying things I consistently leave in the inbox instead of filing (and for what reasons?) In the end, I don't think the sifter, itself, would come up with the best patterns on its own: this would need to generalize the patterns as rules, which you could share with others, and collectively figure out which rules are useful.
And, somehow, not build Clippy for Gmail.

My apologies if reading this has put you to sleep. There may be a conservation of awakeness at work.

*sigh*

I want 43things.com crossed with a project-management tool. Crossed with delicious.com social-tagging. A crowd-sourced life coach.

Does anything like this exist already? Is the idea insane?

[The following won't make much sense if you haven't looked at 43things. Check 'm out; I'll wait here.]

What I'm picturing:

You're prompted for a goal you're working toward. (Such as "Learn Japanese.")

Then you're prompted to supply a list of things (sub-projects) you need to do before you can complete the goal. You can type in a list, and there is a pre-populated list aggregated from other people working toward the same goal; which you can tick "Need to do this" or "Already did this" (or, "what? this has nothing to do with my goal. Bury it.")

Then you go into each of the sub-projects, and fill in what you need to do to complete that goal. Also pre-populated with other peoples' suggestions. And so on, until you've mapped out a tree of the concrete details between where you are and your goal. Ideally, the terminal nodes are either already done, or "Next Actions" you could take right now (in the right environment; more on that in a bit).

Alternatively, you can start at the beginning, making a numbered list of steps. The site can present your project in either direction- detail-first or big-picture first. The problem with a numbered list of steps is it can artificially limit the order you do some tasks- so this site has to make it easy to rearrange tasks and look at your goal in many different ways. (Some folks do this with mind maps; I'd hope this system could switch from entirely text to a visual mind map as well).

A task might also need to specify a context in which it makes sense to do it; necessary conditions that are environmental, not items you do. ("At the office", "After September 1st".) With that addition, we've built something based on "Getting Things Done". But there's the social aspect, which is lacking from GTD, and a big part of my motivation for describing this.

Projects and sub-projects could have "testimonials" from people who successfully finished them,
as 43things.com currently has - such as "I did this and it was easier than I thought. The key thing was..." "achieving this made me feel ... " and "people who are doing this are also doing ..."

I like this idea, though it doesn't go far enough. Psychology tells us if you want to achieve something difficult, you will need to break it down. And the further you go into detail, the more likely you are to succeed. I saw this when I was making phone-calls for Obama: they had us ask "do you know when you're going to vote tomorrow? Do you have a plan for how you'll get there?" and the claim was that asking these questions would improve turnout by 25%. So, yeah. Motivating a task by breaking it down into little pieces is powerful.

But I want more. Once you have a recipe for achieving a big goal, not only could it build you a map to get you there; it could also aggregate for many people. As I said previously, it could suggest sub-projects from others. Things you hadn't fully thought out yet; an intervening step you missed; or different options for doing the same thing.

With aggregation, you can browse. Find out what other goals are made possible by your goal. This is a choose-your-own-adventure for REAL LIFE things people have done. And where that eventually got them. This is a powerful motivator, I think: in addition to breaking down your project into sub-projects, it's a step-by-step story of other peoples' successes.

So. Finding patterns. One example: if you spent a bit of time checking off things you've done, it could list you some easy "new projects" characterized by few additional steps. Sure, lots of them won't appeal; but I imagine some could be inspiring surprises. And building the list of accomplishments could make you feel pretty good about things you've done and forgotten, or mentally discounted as unimportant.

Some large amount of 43things seems to involve doing something repetitive, like "go to the gym three times a week." For that, the social motivator could be a little calendar where you tick off the days you met your goal, and show a little public "43 weeks successful at goal" progress-marker. There are certainly lots of tasks that just involve bearing down and doing it; perhaps all those websites to track peoples' progress at exercise or whatever are relevant here.

A bit about how realistic this is. It's possible the aggregation would be impossible. At least there are these gotchas: how to accurately match up the same goal with slightly different text; and whether all goals with the same text are actually the same goal. Perhaps the matching is made on both the text of the goal, and what kinds of sub-goals it has- it can track and differentiate multiple goals with the same text, depending on whether aggregates of people pick certain sub-goals. (I'm thinking of "Proposal to Partner." Either you toss the sub-tasks "get on one knee" and "buy a ring" or you toss "determine full spec" and "book conference-room." Maybe that works?... At least it gives the user an amusing moment when they see the suggestions.)

[Edit to add: I forgot something important. Many steps aren't binary "did this" or "have to do this." There has to be a state of "working on this." So you can see a view of "what am I currently working on?" This isn't exactly the same as "this is a sub-project with sub-items and some are done." Maybe it's close, though. Perhaps if you ticked "I started this" and there aren't any sub-items, it could warn you after some period of time with no change, "are you sure there aren't any sub-items you need to identify?"

I also didn't mention "I am not going to do this." Which is a valid and useful thing to acknowledge about projects you changed your mind on.]

So... yeah. Can you build this for me, dearest interwebs? Thanks!

I would consider prototyping this in some web 2.0 language, coming up with a clever name, and seeing what happens, but I have enough experience with my idea-backlog to say that I'm perfectly happy if the idea is just out there for somebody to take if it sounds good to them.

I'm curious what you think, even if it's "why would anybody bother?"

In Pinochet's Chile, a poet held and tortured in the dictator's jails named Raúl Zurita imagined "writing poems in the sky, on the faces of cliffs, in the desert."

In 1993, this poem was etched into a mountain-base: Ni Pena Ni Miedo.

No shame nor fear.

It is three kilometers long. If you zoom in on the google map in that link, you can the attention to detail. The desert has been reclaiming the field, just as the thousands of victims of Pinochet were disappeared.

But it is said that every Sunday the children of the nearest village go out with shovels and turn the dirt inside the letters to refresh them. My mind is boggled at the scale of this.

(I originally saw this on Google Sightseeing; there was more info in their links, and more also in the translation translation of his wp page here.)

Happy Inauguration Day, everyone.

[also sent to Globe and Mail's Letters to the Editor]

Re: "Who's kidding whom? On Facebook, we're all a bunch of phonies"

Your article today that Facebook is all flash and no substance comes
on a morning when one friend changed his status to say he is "not a
failure, he just looks like one most of the time."

It's followed by seven responses along the lines of "Big love," "dude,
you're my hero", and the charming quote, "It's not much of a tail, but
I'm sort of attached to it."

Browsing my News Feed, I see one friend in Minneapolis posted photos
of newly installed solar panels on her roof, someone in Guelph has bad
writer's block, and a friend in Boston sent out a "gut shabbes, y'all."

I want to say thank you for this article which gives me another reminder
to treasure my friends for their uniquenesses, honesty, and comfortableness
with being genuine even in public. It might be that the internet gives
us a mask to hide behind, but it does also give us the tools to connect
in very honest ways. If we choose to.

A few cool things I've come across recently:

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http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/ -- finds you flickr photos matching your colour palette. Very pretty.

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For gmail users, there are some useful features available from a new "google labs" tab in gmail preferences. The two I am most happy with do simple things: move the Labels list to a column on the right-hand side; and add a Google Calendar Upcoming Events list to the left-hand side. There are other labs items, such as "canned responses" and "rotating footers".

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Finally: mind maps. I've used them as an organizational tool for quite some time.

They're great for brainstorming- the more I write, the more I think of, and arranging the thoughts spatially can add important structure that makes moving forward easier as well.

Just the other day, I came across a talk and screencast by the author of "Getting Things Done." He uses mind maps often in planning "the bigger picture" - his 20,000-foot view, life-goals and 5-year plans.

Watching his talk encouraged me to go back to a task I'd abandoned a while ago, to find a software mind-mapping tool I liked. (The last time, in '06, I gave up without finding something I'd use).

Jackpot, maybe. This is web-based, and amazingly, it seems to work well in some initial testing. There's a freebie version, which would probably suit me fine, though I might spring for the academic version ($15/yr). Go, check it out, let me know what you think. :)