Author Archives: Garrick van Buren

Distraction Elimination Week: Day 4: Visual Field

There are 2 major visual field distrations; inside the monitor, outside the monitor. First, inside the monitor: Since 1997, my desktop background has been “Solid Gray Medium”. I’ve played with other shades of gray, but always found SGM to be the most neutral, keeping the focus on the applications I’m working in and making screenshots …

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Email Subjects are Irrelevant, Only Sender Matters

An email comes from you mom, your sister, your BFF. Does it matter what the subject line says? No, you open it right up. I suspect there are some commercial organizations you feel the same about. In my house, it’s DailyCandy, BabyCenter, Joyent, Amazon, our insurance agent, accountant, etc. Any one of those organizations could …

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City Pages – Exception that Proves the Rule

There’s a best practice in podcast-o-land: Don’t go public with your podcast until at least episode 6. Like too many local publication moves in this area – they’re far too focused on ad-supported page views to let the technology work for them – technology like RSS and downloadable files. At best what the City Pages …

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Distraction Elimination Week: Day 3: Applications

I normally have around 10 different applications open and running at any given time – a persistent set of communications apps (Adium, Mail.app, SpamSieve), a couple browsers (Safari, Camino), and the 2-4 apps necessary for whatever I’m doing at the time. Adium’s Preferences really let you dial it’s presence down. In Advanced > Contact List …

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Distraction Elimination Week: Day 2: OS X Finder

The human eye is extremely sensitive to changes in the visual field – especially in the periphery. The OS X Finder places quite a few distractions – changing things unrelated to the task at hand – in the edges of the screen. Let’s eliminate them. Start by opening up System Preferences: Dock: Check “Automatically hide …

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Weinberger is the Capital of Duh

“The amount of time our son is being required to spend memorizing whether Bismarck is the capital of North or South Dakota will dwarf the total amount of time he would spend in his lifteime looking it up at Google. This is information that adds nothing to this comprehension of the world. ” – David …

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FriendFeed.com – Just Aggregating Your Friends’ Feeds?

“…if you’re brilliant enough to create Google Maps, Gmail, et. al, move on to inventing a flying car or something.” – Rex Hammock A while back, when I was regularly publishing to multiple sites, I had a thing I called the gFeed that pulled all those feeds (probably a half dozen at my peak) into …

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Why I Prefer Working Outta the Home Office

“You’d think working in close proximity to your co-workers would keep you accountable, but most times it has the opposite effect. We actually attempt to hide ourselves in a cloud of co-workers hoping no one notices our lack of speed and productivity.” – Arik Jones Unless everyone in the office is working on the exact …

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Distraction Elimination Week: Day 1: Audio

Each day this week, I’m minimizing some distraction on my MacBook Pro. Today, it’s the unnecessary and often redundant audio noises. In the OS X Finder, go to System Preferences > Sound and make sure all three checkboxes are unchecked. In Mail.app, go to Preferences > General and select “None” in the New mail sound: …

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