kirabug’s idea files

The Frontal Cortex : Choosing is Hard.

Turns out that making decisions, no matter how small, is brain-taxing. This explaind why when I have a really rough cognitive day at work I physically burn out about 15 minutes into my martial arts. (I’ve learned to grab a snickers bar at 4pm on those days.) I’ve run into this same problem when I tried to play a game like Brain Age right after work, too. I can actually feel my brain avoiding simple addition because it’s too hard.

I think it also explains why when little kids (or puppies) are tired, asking them to choose things is also asking for big trouble. When you’re little, everything’s a decision - is this edible? should I follow Mom? Should I stay here? Do I want that? No wonder Chance sleeps so much.

Ironically, I came across this link while cleaning out my email after a week’s vacation. Every single message is a tiny decision on whether I have to act on it and when. It’s no wonder I’m grouchy and hungry and it’s not even 12:00 even though I had a huge breakfast. They mention lemonade in the article and I’m salivating at the thought of lemony sugar. Email is just too many decisions. Of course, the problem is how to get rid of them!

Daring Fireball has an article on correct email writing that caught my eye at some point during web surfing yesterday, and I got around to reading it this morning. John Gruber writes:

The fundamental source of poor email style is the practice of quoting the entire message you’re replying to…. Writing an email is like writing an article. Only quote the relevant parts, interspersing your new remarks between the quoted passages. Don’t quote anything at all from the original message if you don’t have to.

John Gruber’s got a very good point and I totally agree. That’s exactly how I prefer my email to come in and how I used to write back all the time. But it occurred to me I haven’t been writing back like that lately — not at all. So what the hell happened?

LotusNotes. LotusNotes is a bitch to use if you want to do anything but top-quote. The closest I’ve had the patience to do is copy one or two lines from the note below, italicize them, and then add comments below. If a note’s got a lot of questions in it I’ll turn on the “permanent pen” feature and respond to the original note in a different color and font.

But that’s become discouraged, really, by the culture born of this product. Because everyone top-quotes, you always know what’s already been said. Since anyone can walk into the thread at any time and pick up the full context of the conversation, Notes gets used as an asynchronous online meeting all day every day. The resulting corporate culture expects that when you have something to ask of your project team (or any other group), even if only one member of the group really has the answer to your question, you’ll write to the whole team, so that everyone’s kept informed of the important aspects of the project.

As a result, most of the notes I write have multiple recipients. Throughout a long-living thread, old recipients get dropped off and new ones added on a regular basis. It’s the functional equivalent of a live meeting where someone leaving to go get someone else who knows more about the current subject, or three or four people leaving because they’re no longer needed, while two decision-makers are pulled in. Because of the asynchronous nature of this meeting, it’s the way I prefer to work. I can chime into the meeting where I’m needed and get some actual work done while I’m not needed. I can even *gasp* eat lunch.

But because you never know who’s going to get added to the thread, or when, it’s considered extremely poor style to delete the previous messages in the thread. Occasionally when I know I’m fully changing audiences on a note, I’ll nuke everything but the last note or two and then forward it to the new victims readers, but there’s often no opportunity to do that.

In many cases, it doesn’t pay to do so even if the opportunity arises. At any time without warning, my message could be sent to one of the higher-ups in the company. It’s a really good idea to just leave the whole thread alone so they get the whole story.

So when it comes to fitting into my asynchronous meeting corporate culture, I respectfully disagree with John’s style guide, not because I think it’s incorrect, but because I think it’s inappropriate for the email users’ intent in our specific situation.

On the other hand, I’ve noticed that my work email habits have started to overflow to home, where Apple Mail is perfectly capable of inline quoting and where I rarely write to more than one recipient. (My iPhone I’m not as sure - have to check.) Yet, I’ve pretty much stopped using it because I’ve been indoctrinated into using this horrible horrible writing style for Notes. On that count, I need to retrain myself to write back in the proper style.

Three links Nighthawk thought I’d be interested in, and I am in turn passing on to you:

How to Take a Caffeine Nap

How much sleep is enough sleep?

The 5-Minute Productivity Breakthrough (which works fine for me as long as the Internet’s down, but otherwise I stop every minute or so to read another comic.)

Speaking of comics, Kiagi Swordcat has returned! Whoo!

I deleted over 1400 email messages from my mail software this evening. That added up to around 1 gig of hard drive space regained. (I’m down to under 10 gig and it’s making me nervous. In fact, before I emptied the trash can, I was down to about 4 gig.)

Two important notes for Mac users:

1) The same day that perpetual Mac-basher (and generally clueless individual) John Dvorak writes that he thinks Apple will switch to the Windows operating system HAH!HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHahahahahahahaha…. whew! I needed that…. we achive a step in “being taken seriously” by the Windoid masses - that is, someone has developed a piece of malware for us.

Yep, that’s right. If you too are dumb enough to double-click any attachment sent to you, you could catch a Trojan Horse on your Mac.

Of course, for once, the malwarian in question actually used something that would tempt the average Mac user: the promise of leaked pics of Leopard (OS X 10.5). If your Mac is suitably protected with up-t0-date virus software (freaky!) you’re already protected.

Gawd, on days like this, I really miss As the Apple Turns. Jack would’ve had a ball with this one.

2) If your Mac isn’t protected by up-to-date virus software, you might actually want to consider getting some. Yes, yes, I know, the idea of having to install virus protection on a Mac is bizarre, but hey, better safe than sorry, right?

And yes, I know that installing Norton Antivirus feels like you’ve installed a virus. I’ve run it on many a Mac (just not one I’d actually own) and yes, I too want to strangle the damn LiveUpdate window that won’t go away (though I hear they fixed that in NAV10), and smack the software for interfering with everything.

But I learned this week that there are other options. A co-worker of mine pointed me to Intego VirusBarrier after he finally uninstalled Norton (and regaled me with stories of the “speed bump” he gained in the process). I’m installing it now. It’s won awards for performance and usability, it’s designed for the Mac, and from what I’m told, it will not, in and of itself, act like you’ve installed a giant virus. Whoo!

It’s a bit pricey - $69.95 - but you do get a $5 coupon for 10 days if you download the demo first. And Norton Antivirus is advertised at the same $70, so if you’re going to run antivirus, you might as well go all the way with it.

And finally, totally unrelated to the above, something the majority of the men in the audience don’t need to worry about: How to tell if your bra fits and how to tell what doesn’t fit if it doesn’t. Kudos to Plantnerd for providing that one.

Okay, that’s enough babble for a while. Plan for Sketchy Theater on Saturday and hopefully a new full comic on Tuesday.