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Tag: productivity

  • Ugmonk Analog Starter Kit Review: Go Analog to Be Productive

    Ugmonk Analog Starter Kit Review: Go Analog to Be Productive

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    Many years ago, I asked my most accomplished, successful friend what his secret to success was. His answer was simple, but it also changed my life. He said, “I make a list of all the stuff I need to do, then I do it.” He happened to use 3×5 index cards for his lists, so I copied the idea.

    Over time, I took his simple system and worked it into my life, and decades on, I still start most days by pulling out an index card and working on whatever it says I need to do. At the end of the day, I glance at a longer list of projects (not on an index card) and a list of more strategic goals, along with my calendar, and decide what to put on the index card for tomorrow.

    I talked about this system in our Best Paper Planners guide, and a WIRED reader emailed me to ask whether I had ever heard of Analog, an index-card-based system similar to mine (but better looking). I contacted Jeff Sheldon, founder of Ugmonk, the company that makes Analog, and he sent over an Analog Starter Kit. I’ve been using Analog for a couple of months now, and I’m happy to say it’s an excellent way to organize your day and get things done. It’s simple, elegant, beautifully made, and, well, analog. I wouldn’t say it replaced my decades-old system, but it sure makes it look a whole lot nicer.

    Getting Things Done

    Small wooden box with top opening to hold index cards laying flat as well as a slit to prop an index card upright. The...

    Photograph: Scott Gilbertson

    There’s a slogan on the Analog site that reads, “Analog doesn’t replace your digital tools, it works alongside them by helping you focus.” I think that’s important to keep in mind. While I use and have almost always used a paper-based system, you don’t have to go completely paper-based to get something out of Analog. And really, even I don’t. I keep track of appointments on a digital calendar.

    Still, when planning my days and making lists of what I want to accomplish now, I have always been a fan of paper. The tactile, mechanical process of writing things down etches them in my brain in ways that nothing screen-based ever does. That’s where Analog comes in.

    Analog consists of a cleverly designed, beautifully made wooden box (available in either walnut or maple), custom-printed cards, and a metal divider/lid that keeps everything tidy. It’s designed to sit on your desk, show you what you need to do, and look good doing it.

    There are three card colors: white cards for what you need to do today, cream-colored cards for items you won’t get to until later, and darker cards for those someday/maybe tasks you haven’t committed to doing but are interested in. The cards are 100-pound smooth, uncoated paper that’s sturdy enough to stand up in the provided slot so you can see your tasks for the day at a glance. The back of all the cards have a very faint dot grid pattern printed onto them, which makes them handy for jotting notes.

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  • Why Is the Slack Hold Music So Haunted and So Good?

    Why Is the Slack Hold Music So Haunted and So Good?

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    When Danny Simmons finished his first Slack Huddle, the same thing happened to him as did me: He didn’t hang up, the music faded in, and he went hunting for the source. Only he wasn’t looking for a random auto-playing browser tab. He was trying to figure out how a long-ago basement recording session from his old house in Toronto was piping into his ears.

    Simmons is a lanky sound designer and—I truly didn’t see this coming—a mainly bluegrass musician based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He and Butterfield met back in college, when they were both in a band called Tall Guy Short Guy. (“I came in to replace the tall guy,” Simmons explains.)

    After graduation, Simmons became a gigging musician and Butterfield embarked on a failed career as a video game designer. Except Butterfield had a funny way of failing. He kept trying to build games and then accidentally building the internet instead. His first, Game Neverending, never ended up making much money but did include an infrastructure for sharing photos that became the basis for Flickr. (And Flickr—with its open API, its use of tags, its social networking functions—became the basis for much of the social web.)

    Flickr sold to Yahoo for about $25 million in 2005, and a few years later Butterfield tried his sorry luck again, setting out to build a lighthearted, esoteric, and surreal new game: Glitch. To do it he got the old band back together, not just from Flickr but from Tall Guy Short Guy too. Simmons came aboard to write a score—to invent a folk music for all the geographies in the game, and the requisite “bloops and bleeps and alerts.”

    In Glitch, as one of the game’s developers describes it, players “planted and grew gardens and milked the local butterflies. They collected pull-string dolls of modern philosophers—including plausible Nietzsche and Wittgenstein quotations. They climbed into enormous dinosaurs, passing through their reptilian intestines and out of their helpfully sign-posted butts. It was, in a word, preposterous.”

    Early on in the game, Glitch encouraged you to do certain things—like build a house or take the subway—that required permits and identification papers. To get them, you had to visit a beige room called the Bureaucratic Hall. “It was just a waiting room, a purgatory with these lizard bureaucrats walking around,” says Simmons. “They’re walking back and forth with piles of paper, and, you know, just looking busy behind their desks.”

    And this, dear reader, is the phantom context of the Slack Huddles hold music; it was playing in the Bureaucratic Hall. To exit this limbo, you had to do something very precise: nothing. A timer started counting down, and if you moved your avatar at all, the counter would start over. That was the “quest.” You just had to sit still, watch the lizards work, and—can you hear that slow fade-in?—listen to the muzak.

    For the waiting-room soundtrack, Simmons played the guitar and synths himself, despite mainly being a banjo guy. Through Toronto’s bluegrass scene, he knew a “really good left-handed guitar player” who dabbled in saxophone. So one day in 2012, Simmons invited the guy over to record a bunch of improvised sax fills, with instructions to make them “as cheesy as possible.”

    In October 2012, Ali Rayl joined the Glitch team as a quality engineer. Just six weeks later an executive pulled her aside. He said they were shutting down the game, and he asked Rayl if she wanted to stay and “help build our next thing.” When she asked what the next thing was, the exec said it would probably have something to do with workplace communications.

    As had happened before with Game Neverending, there were some pretty cool spare parts underneath all the ethereal ambitions of Glitch—like the internal messaging system the team had built. Rayl was one of only eight core people who kept their jobs in the transition to Slack. On the conference call where everyone else was laid off, Rayl felt overcome with survivor’s guilt. “I decided, I’m going to do everything that I can to support these people, to uphold their legacy and get their work out in the public sphere,” she says. And Rayl wasn’t alone in wanting to preserve Slack’s glitchy DNA.

    That’s why the company came to use not just the waiting room muzak but also the “bloops and bleeps and alerts” that Simmons created for Glitch. In fact, Simmons made nearly all the sounds that Slack’s 32 million active daily users hear. That snick popopop noise that gives you a cortisol spike every time? That’s Simmons running his thumb over a toothbrush and making “that sound where you kind of separate your tongue from the roof of your mouth,” he says. There’s a phantom context for all of it.

    So next time you hear the Slack Huddles hold music, remember what you have to do: Sit still. Watch the lizards. The timer is counting down.

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  • How to Free Up Space in Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive

    How to Free Up Space in Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive

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    How many unread emails do you have right now? Sixty? Six thousand? Well, all of those messages and attachments take up space, whether they’re unread, old, or archived. And if you’re on Gmail and aren’t one of those weird inbox zero people who stays on top of things, you might be running out of space.

    If Google’s got its Gmail hooks into you, there’s a good chance you’re also invested in the other parts of Google’s Cloud ecosystem—Drive and Photos. Google used to be a bastion of infinite storage space—once offering unlimited room for photos and emails. But now the company has been a lot more strict about counting the megabytes you use across its services. Soon, even WhatsApp backups may count against your storage allotment.

    Google gives users 15 GB of digital storage for free. That includes everything in Gmail, Google Drive, and any uncompressed images stored in Google Photos. It’s a lot of free space, but if you get invested in the Google ecosystem—especially if your Android phone automatically backs up your data to Google’s cloud—you might find that you fill it up quickly. Once you hit the cap, you won’t be able to add anything to Google Drive, save new photos, or even send or receive emails. Google sends warnings when you’re running low, but those are easy to miss, and they often leave users scrambling to free up some space. Here’s how to avoid finding yourself in that position.

    Before you start, see where you stand: Google’s Storage page will show you how much space you’ve taken up across Drive, Gmail, and Photos.

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    The simplest way to free up Gmail space is to batch delete just about every damn thing in your inbox. Go to your Promotions tab and the Social tab at the top of your inbox, check the box in the top left corner to select all messages, then click Delete. (It’s the button that looks like a trash can, of course). The only problem with this method is that there are likely messages in there you want to keep. If you do much of your shopping online, for instance, it’s good to keep all your receipts. Luckily, there are a couple easy ways to sift through the mess and keep only what you need.

    One method, suggested by WIRED senior writer Lily Hay Newman, is to curate your bulk deletions by email address. Even if they come from the same company, spam messages are often sent from a different email address than the actually useful info like receipts or order information. For example, PayPal sends receipts from [email protected], while its marketing blasts (“Sign up for PayPal credit NOW!”) come from [email protected]. Shipping info from Amazon comes via [email protected]. Spam comes from the likes of [email protected] and [email protected]. As soon as you figure out which email addresses can be safely disregarded, you can delete them all without purging the stuff you want to keep. Just copy and paste the offending email address into the search bar and batch delete everything that pops up.

    Another method (this one comes from former WIRED one Peter Rubin) is to sort your emails by file size. In the Gmail search bar, type “size:10mb” or “larger:10mb” (or whatever size you want) to bring up emails with attachments that exceed the size you define in the search. You’ll still have to go through and select what you want to delete, but at least it brings all the big emails together in one place. Your best bet would be to start big and work your way down.

    Garbage Day

    After deleting the thousands of emails you’ve filtered out, you may notice that your storage hasn’t budged. Though you may have thrown everything into the trash, you still have to empty the bin itself. Unlike your garbage IRL, if you just leave them sitting there in Gmail’s trash, your trashed emails will be deleted automatically after 30 days. But if your goal is to free up space, it’s best to take care of that purge manually. (Also, you have a chance to double-check to make sure nothing important got tossed into the trash by accident.)

    Look for the trash can inside the left sidebar in Gmail and click on it. (If you don’t see it, click on More to expand the menu to show the trash icon.) Once inside your trash, you can just click Empty Trash Now near the top of the screen and everything will vanish into the digital underworld. Finally, you can revel in all your newfound space.

    Drive Angry

    Still don’t have enough room? Well, Gmail isn’t the only storage hog in the Google Suite. Google Drive and Google Photos can fill up quickly if you upload images or other files in their full quality. If you use Photos, go into your settings and make sure that your upload quality is set to Storage saver. (This used to be called High Quality but Google, as it is wont to do, changed the name.) Keep in mind this means the images will be compressed into Google’s own space-saving but still high-resolution format, while Original means they’ll stay in the (usually better) resolution you shot them in.

    Every Google Drive account has a storage dashboard you can use to monitor your usage. The landing page shows all of your files in a list, and clicking on the arrow next to “Storage used” on the right side will sort the list by file size, showing the biggest files at the top. It might also help to take a look at your “Shared with me” folder to look for large files or folders. You never know when someone might have shared 4 GB of very important photos.

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  • Slack Is Turning 10 Years Old, and Wow Has It Changed Everything

    Slack Is Turning 10 Years Old, and Wow Has It Changed Everything

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    At its core, Slack is a chat app. Every day, millions of people use it to communicate, share files, and gossip with coworkers or friend groups in one organized place. That style of free-flowing interaction—which Slack didn’t invent, but made mainstream—has changed the way we talk to each other online for better and for worse. It’s brought us closer together and enabled global collaboration, but it’s also allowed conversations to follow us anywhere … like when you get a notification at 10 pm that your boss has sent you a DM.

    This week, MIT Technology Review editor in chief Mat Honan joins the show to chronicle the history of Slack as the software suit turns 10 years old. We dig into how it helped our work lives bleed into our personal time, and how the company is faring under the auspices of Salesforce and against its competitors.

    Show Notes

    Read Mat’s 2014 story about Slack founder Stewart Butterfield and his boring startup. Here’s Lauren’s story about the Slack soft return and other office hacks you might want to use. Listen to the episode of WIRED’s Have A Nice Future podcast with former Slack CEO Lidiane Jones.

    Recommendations

    Mat recommends Airtags and the ChatGPT sticker bot. Mike recommends the Raw Impressions podcast with Lou and Adelle Barlow. Lauren recommends using the soft return in Slack.

    Mat Honan can be found on social media @mat. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

    How to Listen

    You can always listen to this week’s podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here’s how:

    If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts, and search for Gadget Lab. If you use Android, you can find us in the Google Podcasts app just by tapping here. We’re on Spotify too. And in case you really need it, here’s the RSS feed.



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