davidbarbarisi.com

How to be an expert. Try hard and strive to improve. Don't quit just because you're bad at it. Natural talent only makes up for the last 1% of being a world class expert. Backed up by a pretty graph and scientific research here.

Here's another post about being an expert. Do the things you're bad at even if they're not fun. Remember the fundamentals.

It turns out that new research shows that dull environments slow down or stop brain growth. It used to be thought that the brain doesn't grow new neurons, and we just have the ones we're born with. But that was shown by studying monkeys in caged environments. Some new research involved studying monkeys in natural environments with lots of toys and other stimulating things, and they grew more neurons. So the conclusion is something about not only being able to grow new neurons, but also that boring environments prevent the physical brain growth from happening.

I found this information from this Creating Passionate Users post. It's a really good blog to read, although the posts are probably too long for people with short attention spans.

Cool stuff needs to stop happening on the Internet while I'm sleeping. I always get caught up in checking it out during the morning and I'll never get out the door on time for school. This cool stuff is super awesome. Remember the Milk added tagging, searching, and smart lists. My brain is going crazy while thinking up all the new possibilities that are... umm... possible.

(after classes and playing around with the new RTM features)

I just got done tagging all of my tasks and making new smart lists. It's great. I'm not sure how my organization system will work out, but who cares? I can just make new smart lists tomorrow based on whatever criteria I think I'll need. I'll never be able to get anything done with all these features to fiddle around with. It's wonderful. My whole life is on Remember the Milk now, and I usually don't put my whole life on any single thing, other than Gmail maybe. That reminds me, does anybody still need a Gmail invite, because I have a bunch? I guess by now everyone who wants Gmail already has it, but I guess if you want to finally jump on the bandwagon and need an invite, then leave me a comment here.

But back on topic, RTM. I now have loads of lists. I have Inbox, Calendar (for specific deadlines), Family (a shared list with my family), Next Actions, Projects, Someday/Maybe, Sent, Buy (things I'm thinking about getting, sorta a wish list), NA:GTD (next actions in my implementing GTD project, which seems funny that I created a project in my GTD system to help me implement GTD, and I still haven't finished the GTD book), NA:Web (next actions for my various web site projects), Someday:GTD, Someday:Web (for my maybes related to those projects), and UnTagged (to catch tasks that I forgot to tag). That was a long sentence that would probably work better in a list format (not ironic but sorta funny), but I don't feel like formatting the list because I add entries in pure HTML. I'm just a nerd like that. Oh yeah, the last six lists are smart lists, which means they're search criteria that were saved as a list, and they get updated in real time as tasks meet or don't meet the criteria. They're like iTunes smart playlists, which is probably where they borrowed the name from.

By the way, if you didn't know, GTD stands for Getting Things Done, and is a popular productivity system described in a book of the same name by David Allen. RTM is (especially now with the new features) really well suited for the GTD system, since GTD is a lot about making lists. So you should really read Getting Things Done, and then join Remember the Milk. You'll be more productive and less stressed. That's the goal of the book anyway. I think it works.

Since spammers (and hopefully other people) loved my sic post, here's another word that I finally got fed up with not knowing and Googled the answer. Today's word is natch, which according to this Word of the Day for June 7, 1999 page is short for "naturally." So there you go. I also remember at some point Jay was talking about people who try to shorten bad words, so instead of saying biznatch you would say natch, but I doubt that ever caught on. But for that reason, it makes stuff I read that use that word even funnier.

I'm done with this semester of college. Woo hoo. Only 2 more to go. I came up with a new web site idea which I think is going to be good. I'll tell you guys more about it later, because I don't want to give the idea away so somebody else can steal it and do it better than me. It should be launching in January I hope.

I found this great reminder and to-do list site, Remember the Milk. It's working out really well. You can make to-do lists and it'll remind you by email, text messaging, or instant messaging. It does a lot of other great stuff like being able to share lists with other people, and of course it has RSS feeds. Oh yeah that reminds me, the syndication feed icon is now standardized, sort-of. Maybe I'll change my icons on this blog to match. Oh yeah and RTM supports the iCalendar format, so you can export the data into almost any calendar program, except Outlook. I think my favorite part of RTM is that it lets you enter dates and times in normal typing format, which is exactly something that I complained about a while ago. So instead of wasting time clicking on forms just to enter a date and time, or trying to remember how to format the date, you just enter it like "this Thursday at 11pm" or "Dec 20 at 9am" instead of having to tab through drop down menus or search on a calendar for where you want the task to go. It seems to support a lot of other date and time formats too, and it makes smart assumptions, like that when you enter a vague date you usually mean the one in the near future, not Dec 16 of 2004 or earlier. It also accepts input for recurring tasks correctly, like you can type "every week" or "every other week" or other ways like that.

Ok, I found the post I made, it's this one about my dry erase desk where I talked about how dates and times should be entered into calendar programs. I wonder what other calendar programs do it like that. It seems like only the most obvious way to input dates, and by now there's probably lots of already written code to interpret the input. I think I remember there being something in PHP that will convert dates into a standard format and can be given any format as input. I do see that blogging software (mine at least) uses a single text field for the date and time. It would probably get confused if I tried to type it in a weird order though. It looks like it's already in the format that MySQL would store it in (YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm). I think that's it. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with this date format stuff, but I guess I'm just so frustrated with how difficult it is to enter dates and times in most applications. So back to my original point, try out Remember the Milk. And if you have anything for me to do, send a task to davidb. (Don't really, I don't even do tasks that I give myself to do. Tweaking the design of this blog has been on my list for a while.)