Bit Literacy

Title: Bit Literacy
Author: Mark Hurst
Book date: 2007

Key Points:

Reduce email in-box to 0 each day

  1. Read all personal email, then delete
  2. Delete all spam
  3. Engage fyi and action items
  4. a. Delete/file all fyis
  5. b. Finish all quick 2 minutes
  6. c. Move bigger to to-do list

Induction e-mail

  1. Read/delete all personal email
  2. Delete spam
  3. Sort by subject newsletters – delete
  4. Sort by subject/from fyi/cc – delete if out of date
  5. Sort by date, oldest first do as above, delete, or do 2 min, or move bigger to do list

Clear/don’t save sent item

Manage to-do

  1. Use electronic simple system
  2. Time activated
  3. Easy to move time, priority
  4. Example gootodo.com
  5. Create todo by email address

Media Diet

  1. Have 1-2 Stars – outstanding paper/online – example Economist, boingboing.net
  2. Have 3-4 Scans of different types
  3. Have a few targets

How to read URLs

Create bit-literate clipping

  1. Include URL
  2. Publication
  3. Date
  4. Title
  5. Author
  6. Actual text of article
  7. In BODY of email
  8. Store paper ones as electronic – SCAN

Managing Photos

  1. Maximize – take lots of photos
  2. Filter – but delete after
  3. Two-level storage – Year / month-event

Create bits

  1. Email short to point
  2. Display/share best photos
  3. Website clear from home page
  4. Front-load content, hook then support
  5. Or Context, Hook, Support, Optional Appendix
  6. Context = Document title, author’s name, date, preface
  7. State the obvious, avoid relative dates, avoid thoughtless/anger – bits forever

File formats

  1. Photo: JPG vs PNG/GIF
  2. Audio: MP3
  3. Text: plain text, avoid attachments
  4. Proprietary – Word, etc – lock in, upgrades, hidden data
  5. Text – Mac – TextWrangler or TextEdit
  6. Text – Windows – metapad,TextPad, UltraEdit
  7. PDF good

File naming

  1. Use initials-date-topic.extension
  2. Hypen faster than underscore, avoid space is good
  3. Date, without year for most projects less than a year?
  4. Topic optional
  5. Name common file, start with space or underscore/hypen, no date
  6. Canvas file and log file, chronological, most recent on top
  7. a. Movies, books, health

Storing files

  1. Inside my docs/etc – projects, and a personal one
  2. Two levels – project then optional subfolder, or directly files
  3. Optional folder – old, clips, deliverables
  4. Personal folder – info, clips, writing, taxes yyyy, yyyy folder
  5. Project level – expenses, reg/login/nice notes(review time)
  6. Is it a place or only place (export emails?)
  7. Email export, related project data stays together, easy to transfer
  8. File system induction, create old-yyyymmdd, drag old, start to move things to new folders

Other essentials

  1. Touch type
  2. Learn dvorak
  3. Bit lever – misspellings, long words, long urls, managing passwords, typeing html, typing signature
  4. Bit lever – Mac – Typinator, TypeIt4me; Windows – ActiveWords
  5. Avoid the mouse
  6. Macros
  7. One touch access
  8. Take screenshots
  9. Backup
  10. Saving bookmarks – del.icio.us

Bit ownership

  1. Stored on own hardware
  2. Accessible via file system
  3. Saved in non-proprietary format

Developer tips

  1. First things first – basics tasks easiest and quickest to perform
  2. Way to improve productivity
  3. Set better defaults
  4. Provide more ways to delete bits
  5. Offer more time-based features
  6. – time window
  7. – future forwarding
  8. – time based filing – organization by year/month
  9. – timeout – allow time to sunset item, or ask for renewal
  10. Allow advanced users to change non-essential defaults
  11. Offer ASCII-friendly features
  12. Make common features keyboard-accessible
  13. Stop gratuitous attempts to lock in market share

Mac vs Windows

  1. Mac better unless situation around is Windows, or you like Windows

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