Curatorialist

Over the last three months, I’ve had zero emails in my inbox about 75% of the time. It rarely gets above 20 emails and, when it does, I can get it down to zero in minutes. I implemented a custom system for myself that has freed me from the chains of piling-up emails which, let’s be honest, becomes your daily To-Do list. But worse, it’s a source of constant stress and actually works against productivity.  The camel’s back broke for me one night when Amanda asked me what I did at work all day, and my answer was: Emails. I didn’t ever want to have to say that again. So, I came up with a system. Works for me, so I thought I’d share it.

1. Divert.

Emails must be sorted and filed BEFORE you read them. This cuts down the largest portion of incoming mail. Here’s how you do it:

1. Create a folder structure for your mail. Mine looks like this: Articles, CC’d, Events, Newsletters, Personal, To Do, Travel, URLs, Work. Then I have sub-folders within Personal and Work. You don’t have to follow that structure, your life is what it is. But for me, this covers just about any kind of email that could come in (or needs to be filed). And some of them are very strategic. I’ll get to that.
2. Use Rules. This is a big one. In Entourage, it’s under Tools. Click on New and you’ll get something like this:  As you’ll see, the options are plenty. They key is to create enough rules to handle nearly every TYPE of email that comes in.
3. Specific Rules. Some Rules apply to just you – I get a lot of All Company emails, for example, so I made a rule that sends anything that has our all-company address in the To: field straight to a folder called All Company. I also get a lot of “Hot sheets,” sometimes spelled as two words, sometimes as one. I have ONE rule that sends any email with either spelling to a folder called “Hot sheets.”
4. Key Rules. Here’s where we get to the important stuff. You need a rule for any email that comes in with HTML in it. I send all those to the folder called “Newsletters.”  This covers ALL junk that isn’t being caught by my Junk filter. It also covers anything you’ve subscribed to. Because they all use HTML to embed images. And then I highly recommend one for CC’s. Any time you are CC’d on an email, have it go to a CC’s folder. And then, lastly, make a To Do folder. The rule on this is to have any email where the subject is “To Do” and the sender is YOU to be moved to a folder called To Do.

You can see what’s happened here. For the most part, all your emails will now be sent to sub-folders. I know what you’re saying. What if I miss an important email from my boss, family, friend, girlfriend??

2. Exemptions.

The Rules box is broken up into two main sections: IF and THEN. And you can add as many IFs and as many THENs as you want. And one of the IFs functions is called “Is Not.” For any rule that you want an exemption for, add another If/Is Not. Those will be unaffected by the rule and go straight to your inbox.

3. To-Do.

This is a new habit. Get ready. I noticed that I was keeping emails in my inbox as a reminder to take care of something. It had become my To Do list. I would even send myself emails to remind myself to do something. The problem with this is that a) it doesn’t prioritize your To-Do’s very well and b) you’re mixing To-Do’s with memos and everything else. Untie yourself from this construct. If an email prompts you to do something, add the To-Do item to an ongoing email, called To Do, that you respond to and email back to yourself . Then delete the former one.  This does a couple things:

1. It keeps all your action items in one place, which you can print or adjust whenever you want.
2. Psychologically, it’s one email instead of tens, or hundreds. It has an amazing calming effect.
3. You will start to prioritize in a completely different way. When it’s not in your inbox, you have to make a decision: am I doing my To-Do’s right now, or am I in a meeting, or am I brainstorming, or writing an article, or whatever. Just the act of forcing that behavior starts to reorganize your life in better, more productive ways.

And then, because you have a rule for your To-Do to go to its own folder, that’s not even in your in-box. And there you go.

But what to do with all the emails going into those other folders?

4. Reading behavior.

We tend to read emails in order, by date. Until one comes in that catches our eye, or is from someone that pushes a hot button. It’s not necessarily more “important” than what we’re doing, but it’s shiny. And we can’t avoid it. The reading behavior gets all messed up because you’re simultaneously answering in order AND by shiny-ness. The hummingbird effect. Diverting emails eliminates this behavior.

But emails will start to compile within folders.

The great thing about this system is that each folder is a different mindset. Newsletters is a mindset. You can scan and purge newsletters very quickly. I get over a hundred a day, but I can scan them all in under 60 seconds and then Mark All As Read: Command+Option+T. That’s 100 emails in a minute, dealt with. Because they all obey the same function in my life: information/news. In essence, that folder is an RSS feed.

CC’d is a different mindset. That’s work stuff, but that isn’t directly to me. I can check that throughout the day, knowing that it’s not urgent. I’ll take a little more time with those, scanning for issues or things I might want to chime in on. But it’s not stressful, not urgent.

All Company Emails I check maybe once a day, sometimes twice. And the ones from the brass go straight to my inbox, because of my exemption, anyway. That’s a 30 second scan.

And then there’s emails from friends and family. This is a tough one. You know who these people are in your life – your circle. This is going to hurt, but you have to send it all to a folder, too. Mine is called “Discussions” and is nestled into Personal. I hope any friends or family reading this aren’t offended, but it is specifically because of how interesting these people are that I must divert them. When I’m at work, there is almost no down time. It is constant. And when there isn’t a meeting going on, I want to be focused on my clients’ business. Discussing things with friends and family on email is actually one of my favorite things to do, that’s the problem. I could do it ALL DAY LONG. I have to force myself into the habit of carving out that time, not having it carve into mine. And I actually pay more attention to the words this way.

So, what does end up in my in-box? They tend to be important issues. Emails come in to my inbox slowly now, but each one is a very valid need, almost always about work. And that’s how it should be. It has decreased my stress and focused my attention. Email is barely an issue for me anymore.

Hope that’s helpful. Wait’ll I tell you about my bookmark system.

You know what I learned from SXSW? That I could totally make TED better.

From my POV, TED and SXSW are almost completely opposite from each other – but each needs what the other has.

TED’s motto is “Ideas Worth Spreading.” SXSW’s is “Tomorrow Happens Here.” And that says a lot. TED speeches are amazing. My mind has been blown many times from the videos I’ve seen coming out of there. But the next day, I’m onto my business and it hardly ever comes up again, except in dinner conversations. The ideas are worth spreading, but the emphasis is on the worthiness of the ideas, not the spreadability of them. Enter SXSW…

SXSW is about the spreading, often at the expense of the idea. People gather, make plans, share code, talk shop and scheme about new systems and collaborations. And usually the subject is the social web; new tools for connecting. And they’re do-ers. Makers. Tinkerers. Sure, a major portion of the ideas you hear about will end up being nothing more than lonely code, but there’s an energy of making things happen at SXSW. It has a laboratory feel. I was sitting at a table last night, talking through an idea and the people at that table, literally, could have made that idea. There were coders sitting next to artists, writers, producers and publicists. All we needed was computers and phones. And the likeliness of that idea getting made is actually pretty high. Because I know who to call and we all broke bread together.

SXSW is kind of strangely devoid of tangible results – that is, there are so many ideas, proposals, speeches and programs that you tend to get cynical because you just know they’re not all going to get traction. Just check out Paul Carr’s rant on Tech Crunch. It’s not that Carr is completely wrong, it’s that he belongs at TED. He’s looking for a finished idea for proof of worthiness. He should be at the conference that celebrates that. But that conference could learn something from SXSW, too.

I know I could turn TED into a place where ideas actually do spread. But it would be a chiropractic shift in how they organize it. I doubt that they’d ever embrace or try it, for two major reasons:

1. It’s apostle-based. TED does celebrate the inventor, the genius and the bringer of good, there is no doubt. It is an event for the “best and brightest” and those that are allowed to attend are of the same ilk. I think the strategy is to invite influencers and those with the kind of capital and following to make these ideas come true, It’s an old process for the spreading of ideas, invented in Ancient Greece and Rome. And it’s outdated.

I know people who go to TED. They’re leaders. And leaders are delegators. They tackle large issues and hand off the small ones – whatever system they work in needs that kind of top down approach. But that’s not how spreading happens anymore, not on a grand scale. Even the most dynamically enthused TED conference-goer, is too limited, in terms of reach. Impassioned speeches are simply not the tipping point for great ideas.

TED would have to break down the structure of who’s invited and who participates in order for this to work and I worry they’re not interested in that. They have created a club that I think appeals to the egos of those who get to go (it certainly would if I went), and that ego-stroking is tough to let go of. It’s too seductive.

2. Open source is complex. The other major hurdle to TED becoming more contemporary in how it spreads ideas is that the organization of their program is a relatively simple closed loop system. There are a number of complexities that surround the event – certainly the work being done by the participants is enormously complex – but the conference itself could be organized by any event planner. The invitations process, the event production and the website all employ very standard approaches.

TED needs to look at how SXSW organizes their event, perhaps even hijack it. It is a study in de-centralization. It is, itself, an open API. For TED to do that, they’d need to make available a lot more data, besides just the videos. In fact, the videos are perhaps the least important part of it. The videos should be the invitation to the event, not the result of the event. What happens next needs to be a collaborative and iterative process of geniuses, organizers, builders and social media experts.

Is TED ready to organize an open source event of that complexity? I doubt it. They have too gorgeous a package right now. It would mean a Charlize Theron-in-Monster-like ability to let go of what it’s famous for and expand itself through a destruction of its current image. Tough stuff.

TED needs what SXSW has. And SXSW needs what TED has. In some combined way, though, they could Make Ideas Happen. I wish they would.

Hell, I would organize it myself. I could do it, too. Just let me in the club.

As I prepare myself for my first trip to SXSW, I’m trying to sift through this insane dust cloud of activity that seems to descend upon Austin. But, you know, I’ve been to conferences before. I’ve sifted through complication before. I’m not a little baby, wandering naked into a zoo with no locks on the cages. Not since the 70’s. This is an event, after all, like any other – panels, speeches, discussions, movies, get-togethers, etc. I think I’ve done this before. It gets slightly more noisy at SXSW, I guess, because of all the social networking. But haven’t all conferences had social networking… forever? You participate, or you don’t. And, really, it’s just talk. Once again, those of use who make messages are getting caught up in the medium.The real sifting one has to do is news versus noise. I’m on a mission to learn something and although the experience of being at SXSW sounds kind of exciting, so are a lot of things. I’m not on a mission to be excited. The last 10 years have been too exciting, as far as I’m concerned. Digital has become legitimate on the knotted shoulders of those of us who’ve stuck with it and built it. And make no mistake, hype is not what built the Internet – real companies, like the ones we work for, are who build it, for their real business needs. The rest is entertainment. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’m more interested in what’s going to change the way businesses run.

So, I’m preparing myself. How to take in the best panels, hear from the top minds and maybe accomplish the promise that SXSW poses: TOMORROW HAPPENS HERE. We can’t rely on Twitter to tell us what the future holds. Twitter just is now. Oh, I’ll be hooked in to the hashtag hoi poloi, don’t worry. But I don’t want to look back, I want to look forward. But first… prepare.

So, I’m at the page for “first timers:” http://sxsw.com/first_time and I am greeted with this nice lead-in paragraph: “SXSW can be overwhelming to first-timers. All the things that make SXSW amazingly informative, fun and unique are also what can make it so daunting. We’ve made a video to show you what SXSW is. Watch it below:” Okay, I’m on it. Don’t love being categorized as a noob, but whatever, nobody’s watching…

HOLY CRAP. Am I supposed to be less daunted from this? A montage? And not just a montage, which daunts me, but a sped-up montage, with music! And the organization of information in this video seems to follow a “5 Days Of…” mechanism. You fit all this into five days? Even if this were put to Yo-Yo Ma, I’d be a little stressed out with how to take it all in. But scroll down; travel tips, hotel tips, dress tips… hold on, are they really giving me dressing tips? Hm. Starting to feel a little like that naked baby, all of the sudden. And, content-wise, what’s new here that I haven’t seen on a hundred conference websites? Let’s look at the panels.

I’m here for Interactive, specifically. Some interesting topics, to be sure: “The Young and the Digital.” Sounds good. “How Sci-Fi Shapes the Internet.” Interested. But, hey, what’s this: “How to Rowk SXSW.” Uh oh. That sounds awfully self-reflective. Especially when described as “Veteran SXSW speakers and attendees give their light-hearted insights and tips on making the most of your next few days in geek wunderland.” Whaaaa… where’s my bottle! And, as an aside, is misspelling words with the same amount of letters as the original word really our future? Didn’t that end with using Z’s instead of S’s? Moving on. Oh no, look at this: “How Not to be a Douchebag at SXSW.” Yeah, that’s a real panel. And perhaps the single most perfect example of irony ever constructed. So, you self-prescribed elitists, with your superior knowledge would like to impart upon us lesser-thans a warning about how not to be elitist and superior sounding, I suppose? Can somebody please call Keith Olbermann? I’d like him tackle this.

Let’s look outside the SXSW fold for a minute. Mmm, this is getting worse. Here’s an article called, oh god, “10 Ways Not To Be A Jerk at SXSW.”

Well, now I’m angry.

I’m angry, not just because this couldn’t be less helpful or more obvious, but because of the tone. Is this the voice of a new generation? It sounds like the voice of the old generation. It sounds like Silicon Valley elitism and entitlement all over again. It sounds like people I don’t want to work with, or know, or follow, or put on my Twitter List. And, unlike the pre-2000 days, where I didn’t have a choice, I really do have a choice now. Digital is legitimate. The best minds are the winners of the day, not the biggest attitudes. I know that’s what the article is trying to convey, too. But name calling isn’t necessary. We’re big boys now.

So, I believe my preparation is complete. Noise is, as it turns out, noise. I unfortunately won’t be attending the Music portion of SXSW, but I will be tackling this like I would that: trusting my ear and listening to one thing at a time with the kind of attention and appreciation that the people who are singing deserve. In that video, at 1:20, some dude dressed in all black said it pretty well, “The joy of learning and doing something new and doing something the way it really feels right – right here, right here and right here.” And he pointed to his gut, his heart and his head.

Fame and the system killed the time-honored farming of talent. Somewhere in our lifetime, fame and talent switched positions on the time line. Guys were geniuses first, then they went mad. For real. Then, guys were genius and they wanted the image of going mad, so they wrecked hotel rooms, laced people’s drinks for fun and caroused with women, because they could, it was fun and they didn’t seem to get in trouble for it. The “bad boy” was invented. And girls loved it because, underneath, the bad boy had a genius to it – a skewed outlook. Something admirable. But Street Car Named Desire became Rebel Without a Cause. Then Rebel Rebel. Then Rebel Yell. Then Tom Petty’s Rebel Without a Clue. Then Courtney sang “Celebrity Skin” and then the whole world just started watching American Idol and Rock Star: INXS and the process reversed itself. We asked the audience to vote and to find a star that had “it.” But these boys and girls are music academy snobs with helicopter parents who’ve never really lived. We elect them based on a history of what genius is supposed to look like. Carrie Underwood? There’s no there there. There’s no genius. There was never any genius. There’s a look and there’s a voice. The rest is all manufactured.

And not to get political, but Ronald Reagan had a part in this, too. I know history has rewritten all of it, but I will die knowing that that man was a dumb actor, not a genius. And although he wasn’t the worst, he paved the way for guys like W. Bush to become POTUS. It’s a straight line from there to Carrie Underwood.

And the radio stations play them because the people know them. And we say “see, it’s successful because people buy it” or in the case of politics “look at the approval rating!” All backwards. Having made it USED to be the proof that you were talented, now I don’t assume you’re talented just because I know your name, or you’re on TV, or you won an award.  And, consequently, the predominant style of music today is not “beat” or “pop” or “rap” or “rock” or “country.” The predominant style of music today is a formula. Sure, blues is a formula, too. But genius does something with it. Blues is a raw material. There’s no raw material anymore. Manufactured cardboard cutouts just do what the computer prints out. Rick Rubin, Timbaland, will.i.am, John Shanks – they aren’t supposed to BE the talent, they’re supposed to help the talent put some shine on their raw genius. Mold the clay. That’s how it used to work. No longer. Linda Perry had one hit as a singer. She couldn’t sell an album as an artist today. Then all of the sudden she’s writing songs for Kelly Osbourne??? The un-genius daughter of one of the true geniuses? All  backwards. Ozzy was the old way, Kelly is the new way.

We can’t look for talent within the system anymore. The system develops money, not talent. And the formula, although designed to make money is also designed NOT to make genius. Shave off all the corners and call it a perfect shape. That’s not why we love music. I don’t need it perfect, I need it pure, driven, full of life. And the system is lifeless and creates the veneer of art out of a composite of lifeless elements. We’re not building out of clay anymore, we’re carving out of cardboard.

“Thirst for knowledge.” That actually turns out to be completely true, studies prove it. The human (and other animal) brain signal the body to release a stimulant as a reward for learning. Pinker’s “if you were to design a being, you’d give it the same qualities” math applies here, too – a system that rewards continued learning, guessing, probing and speculation keeps a species safe from predators. In the end, perhaps, it is not a thirst for knowledge so much as a love of life, but at least I feel a little better about my 2 hour jaunts on Wikipedia. This is life or death, ppl!

Here’s an excerpt:

“Dopamine neurons are thought to be involved in learning about rewards – by adjusting the connections between other neurons, they “teach” the brain to seek basic rewards like food and water. Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka think that these neurons also teach the brain to seek out information so that their activity becomes a sort of “common currency” that governs both basic needs and a quest for knowledge.”

Read more here.

The best math class I ever took was the very last math class I ever took: Statistics. That was 1987. I remember remarking that if math had been this interesting in High School, I might actually have enjoyed it. And who KNOWS what would have happened to me if I had enjoyed math. But math was horrendously boring in my high school and I couldn’t see the magic in it, despite teachers who tried to speak of it romantically. In practice, they crammed formulas down our throats and lost us with ugly overhead projections and grease pens.

By college, I had sworn that I would be done with math as soon as humanly possible and Statistics was my random sampled swan song of choice. From there on out, I would concentrate on only things that had pictures. But in that class, I discovered something interesting – math can tell a story. The single moment that opened my mind (I can remember the classroom, I can even remember what seat I was in ) was the day the professor explained the fallacy of the phrase “3 out of 5 dentists recommend.”  “Which 5 dentists?” He asked. It was like the sound of one hand clapping. The class, for me, became a study in skepticism. Numbers never lie, but numbers can be used by liars, to tell lies. To this day, anyone who tells me something is a “fact” is immediately suspect. If you listen to Steven Pinker speak (from my earlier post), you see that he hardly ever uses “facts” and yet he is so clearly knowledgeable. Reason, I have found, is much better than math, in almost every instance.

Over the last few years, though, there has been a merging of math and reason, and it has happened through a technique known as “data visualization.” A quick sequence of events has lead us to a very interesting place in history, where we can now “see” math. The metaphorical operating system (desktop, folders, etc.) introduced us to this notion that code could be translated into something more humanly accessible. Then an important thing happened: the evolution of interface design merged with the evolution of the database. This was most prevalent in Website design, where engineers and designers worked side-by-side with each other, merging their talents to create online business solutions for people. One of the major discoveries during this time was the activity of “tagging,” which, in essence, was people filling up databases themselves. Imagine one guy at Flickr putting tags on photos as opposed the current practice of people putting tags on the photos themselves. Same with Facebook. Information started streaming in. Now, all of the sudden, we have a generation of people who are adept and trained to fill out database questions: from logins and passwords to cities and friends’ names to preferences and personal information. And we are starting to discover exactly how interesting math can actually be.

It used to be that visualizing data was was Excel did – you fill in the database and then it spits out a pie chart. Now, though, people are finding newer and more exciting ways of showing data visualized. Perhaps you’ve seen The Visual Thesaurus. Or tag clouds a sites like TwitScoop. Check out this site that maps Renaissance artists and writers on a timeline, as well as an overlay on Google Maps. During all the talk about “earmarks” in the debates, I used this website to get a better idea of what’s really going on, all done through data visualization. Or this guy, who has decided to log just about every activity in his life and rather than create a new kind of visualization mechanism, has just cleaned up the old one in kind of a fascinating way.  And we’re using it in marketing all the time, from Sprint’s “Now Network” Website, to our own “Health Footprint Calculator” for Anthem. And this site gives a whole overview of different data visualization techniques. A macro of the macro.

If I were teaching a math class in High School today, I would be teaching kids with these tools. Sure, the building blocks of basic arithmetic is necessary, but geometry, algebra, trigonometry and calculus are probably not the right set of tools for today’s little minds. Many of those math languages are as dead as Latin in terms of their importance in the actual application of math in most of the world. The excuse that schools use is that the process of learning formulas, equations and proofs creates great minds – I challenge that notion. The best applications of math are happening in the fieds of data strategy and programming. Let’s flip the math on math and assume that the greatest impetus for a great mind is excitement. I don’t have stats to prove that, but it sure stands to reason.

There is a 3-DVD program on the “Genius of Darwin” that came out last year and, thankfully, someone has posted up the uncut interview with Steven Pinker, my pick for smartest man alive. I’ve read two of his books: “How the Mind Works” and “The Language Instinct” which are such amazingly straight forward and sensical looks at the human brain that it becomes immediately difficult to think about ourselves any differently than how he lays it out. Much of the thinking of both books are laid out in this video.

This is over an hour of footage and has a hard time competing with more entertaining uses of time, like a Michael Mann video essay for example, but if you have any kind of interest in human evolution, psychology, biology, linguistics or the human brain then this will be immensely interesting to you.

This is the final paragraph of a fascinating study on brains and our innate desire to know what’s going to happen before it happens.

“Dopamine neurons are thought to be involved in learning about rewards – by adjusting the connections between other neurons, they “teach” the brain to seek basic rewards like food and water. Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka think that these neurons also teach the brain to seek out information so that their activity becomes a sort of “common currency” that governs both basic needs and a quest for knowledge.”

Read the full article here.

One of my new daily check-in spots, Hipster Runoff, is worth bookmarking. Strangely, I’ve been listening to his show on Blog Radio on XM and catching his updates on his sites WITHOUT KNOWING IT WAS THE SAME GUY. WHAT’S WRONG WITH ME???? This is why you should not do things that ruin your brain, like drink from the cat bowl and eat only microwaved potatoes in college (always always always poke holes in it first, with a fork).

On the radio he is recognizable for his monotone voice and not-so-provocative questions, that turn out to be more provocative than you first give them credit for. It’s a style of talking that is one part plain-stupid truth, one part snarkasm and one part keenly observant ponderings of indie culture. He clearly knows his way around the music scene, but to me, it’s all about the cult of him. Sitting at the brink of popularity – a fine mess for a guy who admits he only likes bands that aren’t popular, because pop music themes are too universal. Watching him watch himself walk that tightrope is immensely interesting, even if it’s delivered in the least interesting kind of way.

Deadpan is the new exciting.

Hipster Runoff

Interview in The Village Voice

Interesting news to comic book fans. For those of you who haven’t been keeping tabs on the Captain, Mr. America “died” a little over two years ago. The events of his death, and subsequent rebirth (“Rebirth” is also the name of the program that lead to his super human abilities, btw) are the subject of the upcoming series.

Captain America, as an entity, remains controversial. Born of an anti-Nazi sentiment, he represents America’s military at its most glamorous: protector of freedom, fighter of evil. As the definition of evil has become hazier, though, it will be interesting to see how the resurrection of Captain America reflects (or doesn’t) a renewed understanding of war and America. I, for one, like to follow history through the eyes of artists and comics are no exception. As our troops return from the Middle East, this will be a topic that affects all of us.

The first pages were released at the LA Times today, re-posted here for your perusal. The pages will be drawn by comic artist legend Brian Hitch and, aside from the political sub-text, it promises to be a whole lot of sweets for the eye.

The uprising will be July 1st. Official site here.