Productivity can be so... counter-productive?

I've slowly been drawn back into the online world as of late. My new time-sucking pursuit seems to be... productivity? Huh.

Now, I don't mean I'm actually accomplishing anything. What I do mean is that thanks to blogs like Lifehacker I've been sucked into this bizarre world of shortcuts, tweaks, lists and organizers.

Some of these steps have been completely natural--Google has owned my soul through GMail and Google Docs for a while now (more recently: GCalendar and Google Reader), so an installation of Google Gears to synch all of this offline just made sense. Of course, that's not what actually happened; Google Gears has--instead of offloading my Google reliance--served as nothing more than a new desktop widget to flood with 'always online'-reliant content.

Yeah--it's a little backwards.

My computer hasn't been updated much since 2002. It's a 1.8GHz Sony Vaio, and other than a replaced DVD-RW drive (that was dead for three years or so until this last Holiday run) and a lowend GeForce4 card about a year after purchase everything running on it is stock. It's more or less been collecting dust in my apartment all year until about a month ago, when I finally gave it a much needed tune-up: Freed up a reasonable amount of space, updated the antivirus software, cleaned up the registry and defragged the thing for the first time in...a while. I was shcoked to see what it was like to be able and switch windows without dealing with a 10-15sec lag.

And then, I got greedy.

It's a good thing, really--the productivity I put into getting my Vaio off of life support spilled off into other ventures, leading me to re-install the drivers on my M-Audio USB Hub and capture some audio off of my guitar for the first time in two years. I also finally took the time to migrate my old MySpace blogs over to this site and kickstart these posts again. I then one-upped myself on the pc front and cleaned up my Launch Programs, the desktop and my Programs menu. And now that I'm slightly back in the game, I've come to a few conclusions:

1. Cataloguing Programs have a long way to go.

I keep hearing great things about Delicious Library, but since it's Mac only I haven't been able to check it out. I have tried, however, Griffith, Libra and 2-3 other Archiving programs, and have been nothing but frustrated. Griffith works the best so far, allowing you to pull up DVD information from 17 media sites (imdb, anidb, wikipedia, etc), but after sticking in information from 25 or so of my movies I became frustrated at what it didn't do: It doesn't pull up or allow you to specify a genre (I.E. Sci-Fi, Action, Foreign...), it doesn't allow you to create sub-links between related discs (Sequels with titles independant of the original, tv shows) and, more baffling, it balks at the idea of alphabetizing. It seriously wants to organize everything based on when it was scanned in. Now, if I was John Cusack and shooting to arrange my 600+ DVD's auto-biographically, this would easily be the program for me.

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

The others I tried all had similar issues. While some offered novel imaging options (creating a virtual bookshelf to select movies), they would always lack some fundamental feature such as connecting to IMDB to pull up information.

I've never been a very organized person, but the idea of this struck me as something very useful. Despite the time it would take me to key in every one of my movies, it would give me a way to keep track of what I've already bought and--more importantly--give me an easy way to scan what I have if I'd like to watch a movie. I don't re-watch my movies enough to have warranted their purchase in the first place, but I think if I was able to hop on and key in a few phrases (Supervillain, Freeze Ray, Musical) and have some suggestions tossed my way, I think I'd feel like watching these movies more often. As it is, when presented with a few too many choices I almost always shrug and say 'fuck it'.

2. The 'little' programs go a long way.

I installed a few programs recently that I never thought I'd actually use but have been nothing but impressed with. The first was called RocketDock, and it essentially mimics the Mac OS X launch bar. There's an auto-hiding drop-down bar at the top of my screen now that lets me launch FireFox/MyDocuments/Control Panel/Word/etc. Not a huge thing--but quick, aesthetically awesome and frees up desktop space. I'm simply more likely to click on one of those icons than I am to navigate the Start menu.

Also installed recently is Launchy. Launchy was one I strongly thought would never amount to anything, but I've been shocked at how useful it is. Launchy is simply a quicklauncher for all sorts of files--executables, docuements, webpages, media...It uses almost no memory and is always waiting in the background. All I have to do is press Alt-Space and it pops up. Some of the uses are a little redundant (I can type in 'fox -- forums.schoolinsummertime.com' to launch a specific webpage. Or I could just, y'know, type in the fucking webpage), but coupled with a few extra programs, it revives some things I've been completely neglecting.

3. Twitter is The Devil.

Twitter is an idea that makes me feel very, very uneasy. I like to ramble, so blogging is the sort of thing that appeals to me right away. But when I first began posting I had no idea what the point of it all was--it seemed like an online journal that was open for the world to see. Something about the general, open idea of the Blog seemed like it was loaded with potential, but I wasn't quite sure how that was to be realized. I think it's come around, now, as a 'respectable' medium for information to traverse. Online blogs about any and every topic are reinventing the idea of print media. It's been attempted before--with digital magazines and e-zines (two separate entities: One, trying to present essentially a page-by-page recreation of a print mag, the other trying to streamline content), but never as succesfully as in recent years. Personal blogs--including this one--are still largely pointless. But tech blogs, entertainment blogs, etc are huge commodities right now.

This comes back to Twitter, now--I promise.

That same uneasy feeling I had that blogs were a useful tool not quite fully utilized is the same sort of feeling I get with something like Twitter. I really like the idea of twitter--it's a streamlined (sorry for the quick 2nd offense, my thesaurus is a bit rusty tonight) social networking interface that has the same functionality on any beat-up cell phone as it does on the pc. It's the sort of tool that is open to a wide variety of possibility, keeping users connected at a nearly unprecedented level. Just as social networking sites have taken the simple idea of a bulletin board and tweaked it to new levels, I feel like Twitter has the potential to essentially become Text Messaging 2.0.

But.

Twitter is suffering pangs of misdirection. At this time, I've only seen a few instances where it seemed like people were earnestly able to use it to help be productive. Nearly every other instance seems to have users who maintain a 'current mood' log, give constant updates no one cares to read or--as I've done with mine--restricted Twitter's functionality to 'Drunk Dialing 2.0'.

Drunk Twittering is just cool. It's like drunkenly calling yourself and leaving little magical pearls of nonsense to find. My last real Twitter post was: "Jo doesn't believe in my Urines! Fire!". I have absolutely no idea what was going on there!

Back on task: For the immediate future, I think the next logical step is Group Twittering. An example: If you have a project for work you could set up a Twitter and each member would have access to suggestions, comments, questions...that would almost immediately be forwarded on to each other member of the team. Each member would be able to customize how they receive these items--be it in an e-mail or texted right to their phone. For the longer term, I think Twitter could serve well as a template for Cell Phone Companies to work with to bring Social Networking to the mobile world. These are specific, short burst messages that have customizeable options and give the user the ability to direct them at an individual user or topic. There's got to be a way to take this basic idea and expand it to involve group messaging, photo's, etc... Honestly, if a company started up a program like this that let users 'twit' to one another as much as they'd like for one small fee, it could be huge. The Mobile World's MySpace.

Now--and this is where everything comes, well, not full-circle, but back to an earlier point--I stopped twittering about as soon as I began. Again--I sense that the idea they have has incredible potential beyond stupid little messages, but for right now I just don't really have any reason to use it. A big part of this, however, is that if I want to 'twit' from my computer I have to bother to log in to the website and post. Likewise, from the cell I have to care enough to draft up a text message (which I hate, oddly enough) and send it off. With Launchy, though... Now I can just Alt-Space and type 'Twit -- Message goes here' and it immediately gets posted, thanks to a program called cURL. This sort of instant-gratification leads me to believe my Twitter days might not be over.

Lastly, another site that has interactivity with Twitter is Remember The Milk. RTM is a personalized task manager that can be pulled up from any cell phone, synched with gCal, taken offline, etc... Not the sort of thing I would normally use, but I do like the idea of--rather than text messaging or self-twittering reminders--I can text/twitter RTM with tasks I need to complete. These would start off as basic descriptions of the task, but once I get to a computer I can customize the timeline, steps and progress of each one. Normally, something like this would immediately fall by the wayside. But, I've started entering my work schedule/commitments into gCal and with RTM I have an easy method to customize those events into a step-by-step schedule I can access. For example: I'm moving this weekend. I can gCal 'Moving Day' and even put in a few specific time goals to meet. With RTM, though, I can create a checklist (Replace Lights, Lock Closet, Drop Off Keys) to follow up on via my cell, even after my computer has been disassembled and the internet is shut off. Could be handy.

The thing of this all is, I've spent hours looking into the options of productivity. All of this time could have been spent, well, doing something. Hence the title. It's a paradox, but I think the thing of it is once you've slowed down to look into these things you can make up that loss time fairly quickly once you integrate them into your daily use. I'm not sure if there's any truth to that thought

I guess I'll have to twitter it over, later.