Title: Bit Literacy
Author: Mark Hurst
Book date: 2007
Key Points:
Reduce email in-box to 0 each day
- Read all personal email, then delete
- Delete all spam
- Engage fyi and action items
- a. Delete/file all fyis
- b. Finish all quick 2 minutes
- c. Move bigger to to-do list
Induction e-mail
- Read/delete all personal email
- Delete spam
- Sort by subject newsletters – delete
- Sort by subject/from fyi/cc – delete if out of date
- 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
- Use electronic simple system
- Time activated
- Easy to move time, priority
- Example gootodo.com
- Create todo by email address
Media Diet
- Have 1-2 Stars – outstanding paper/online – example Economist, boingboing.net
- Have 3-4 Scans of different types
- Have a few targets
How to read URLs
Create bit-literate clipping
- Include URL
- Publication
- Date
- Title
- Author
- Actual text of article
- In BODY of email
- Store paper ones as electronic – SCAN
Managing Photos
- Maximize – take lots of photos
- Filter – but delete after
- Two-level storage – Year / month-event
Create bits
- Email short to point
- Display/share best photos
- Website clear from home page
- Front-load content, hook then support
- Or Context, Hook, Support, Optional Appendix
- Context = Document title, author’s name, date, preface
- State the obvious, avoid relative dates, avoid thoughtless/anger – bits forever
File formats
- Photo: JPG vs PNG/GIF
- Audio: MP3
- Text: plain text, avoid attachments
- Proprietary – Word, etc – lock in, upgrades, hidden data
- Text – Mac – TextWrangler or TextEdit
- Text – Windows – metapad,TextPad, UltraEdit
- PDF good
File naming
- Use initials-date-topic.extension
- Hypen faster than underscore, avoid space is good
- Date, without year for most projects less than a year?
- Topic optional
- Name common file, start with space or underscore/hypen, no date
- Canvas file and log file, chronological, most recent on top
- a. Movies, books, health
Storing files
- Inside my docs/etc – projects, and a personal one
- Two levels – project then optional subfolder, or directly files
- Optional folder – old, clips, deliverables
- Personal folder – info, clips, writing, taxes yyyy, yyyy folder
- Project level – expenses, reg/login/nice notes(review time)
- Is it a place or only place (export emails?)
- Email export, related project data stays together, easy to transfer
- File system induction, create old-yyyymmdd, drag old, start to move things to new folders
Other essentials
- Touch type
- Learn dvorak
- Bit lever – misspellings, long words, long urls, managing passwords, typeing html, typing signature
- Bit lever – Mac – Typinator, TypeIt4me; Windows – ActiveWords
- Avoid the mouse
- Macros
- One touch access
- Take screenshots
- Backup
- Saving bookmarks – del.icio.us
Bit ownership
- Stored on own hardware
- Accessible via file system
- Saved in non-proprietary format
Developer tips
- First things first – basics tasks easiest and quickest to perform
- Way to improve productivity
- Set better defaults
- Provide more ways to delete bits
- Offer more time-based features
- – time window
- – future forwarding
- – time based filing – organization by year/month
- – timeout – allow time to sunset item, or ask for renewal
- Allow advanced users to change non-essential defaults
- Offer ASCII-friendly features
- Make common features keyboard-accessible
- Stop gratuitous attempts to lock in market share
Mac vs Windows
- Mac better unless situation around is Windows, or you like Windows