Finding the right tools to do your best work is a tricky business. On one hand, having the right tools can be immensely useful. I mean this with regards to both efficiency and enjoyment. On the other hand, endlessly searching for the best tools can send you into a death spiral of staring a a blank screen.

Finding the balance

When your job changes in such a way that your workflow is slowed, it may be time to seek out new tools. A broken workflow keeps you from getting the work done, and it's a problem that needs to be solved in a hurry.

But if your workflow is mostly smooth, it's less likely that new tools are going to give you what you seek. They won't magically transform you into a model of efficiency. Quite the opposite — they'll likely set your work back quite a bit. After all, you'll be busy learning the new system instead of doing that thing called work.

None of this is new

You know, instinctively, when you are wasting time in the name of efficiency. It looks sort of like work. It feels sort of like work. At the end of all the tinkering, you may even be tired.

At the end of the tinkering, you may have some new tools. You may have a shiny new workflow. But you know what you won't have? Any completed work. And if you're like most people, getting work done is kind of a big deal. Keep that in mind while you tinker away.

By now, you've certainly heard of Clear, the new and supposedly revolutionary list-making iPhone app. And you've probably ready a half-dozen reviews already. It's been out for less than a day, but Clear already has 689 ratings on the App store, with an average of 4.5 stars. All indicators seem to say that Clear is a killer app.

I'm not of the same mind.

What is Clear?

Clear is a very simple app that lets you make lists. It uses gestures instead of buttons for navigation.

What is Clear not?

Clear is not a task management app. Yes, it makes lists. Yes, you can cross things off your lists. But each list item is just a blurb of text. You can't add notes. You can't attach files. You can't schedule tasks. You can't make repeating tasks.

There's not enough power or flexibility to really handle all of your tasks and projects. Also, it's iPhone only today. It doesn't sync with your Mac, because there's no Mac app. It doesn't sync with your iPad, because there's no iPad app. It doesn't sync with iCloud or Dropbox. In fact, it doesn't sync with anything.

I need the ability to add, delete, complete, and adjust tasks from any of my devices. I need my tasks lists to stay in sync across these devices. Locking my task management system into one solitary device will not work for me.

Back to the lists

So Clear isn't good for tasks. Fine. It is good, however, for lists. You could make lists for books you want to read, movies you'd like to see, or even present ideas for your spouse. Lists of things that are not time specific in any way. Clear is good at this, though I still don't think it's the best.

If you're willing to add just a bit of complexity, Things is a much better choice. It's barely more complicated, and several orders of magnitude more powerful. Granted, the iPhone app is $9.99 instead of the $.99 for Clear, but the flexibility makes it easily worth the added cost.

A simpler alternative to Things, and arguably even simpler than Clear itself, is the built in Reminders app.¹ Using Siri to add things to a list is the simplest way that exists today. You don't get the fancy Clear interface, but you do get the benefit of iCloud sync and, well, reminders. That's an easy choice if you use more than one device.

The Interface

Simplicity with purpose is a beautiful thing. It gets rid of the fluff so that the essential is all that remains. It refines to perfection. It eliminates friction.

Simplicity for the sake of simplicity is another matter entirely. Removing essential functions from something just to make it simpler does not make that thing better. While it may be pretty to look at, it is less useful.

When it comes to Clear, the developers chose a novel new interface and simplicity for simplicity's sake. I applaud them for going bold with the navigation, but he app doesn't offer enough in the way of features for me to recommend it. Also, am I the only person on the planet who thinks it's downright ugly?

OmniFocus still lives in the dock of my iPhone, and there's nothing Clear can do to change that.

How do we know when information is true?

We are far more trusting of information than we should be. We have to be trusting, of course. There's no time to verify every bit of information we come across in life.

If you read something on the Internet, do you believe it?

You're hopping around online, and come across a hard to believe statement — something like:

Polar bears eat as many as 26 delicious baby seals per day .

Crazy, right? ¹

Your instincts would probably kick in and tell you that something isn't quite right with that statement. We all have a bullshit detector built in, to some degree.

Now let's change that statement a bit. What if it read:

Polar bears eat as many as 4 delicious baby seals per day .

Now that seems far more believable. In fact, you wouldn't question this statement at all. You would accept it as fact and move on with the article.

Why do you accept this statement as fact?

Two reasons.

1. It's not outlandish and obviously questionable.

2. It takes far too much effort to verify the information.

Books

Let's change things up a bit. You're reading a book. The polar bear statement appears — the first one. The one about 26 delicious baby seals. Do you believe it this time?

I'd bet that you probably would. Books, for some reason, are inherently more trustworthy than words on the Internet. If someone printed it in a book, it must be true, right?

Oy.

Here's the thing. Most information we come across is difficult to verify. More specifically, it's far too time-consuming to verify. For me to unquestionably verify the polar bear statement, I would have to study polar bears. I'd likely have to dedicate years of my life and countless dollars to this effort. It's much easier to simply accept the information and move on.

What's the big deal?

So you mistakenly think polar bears eat much more than they do — who cares? In this example, you're right. This misinformation is hardly likely to cause you any harm.

But what if you based your opinions of other things on false information? What if you start a study with false information and end up with a result that shocks the world? An incorrect result, mind you, because the basis of the study was false.

We form opinions and make decisions every day based on information that we can't or didn't verify. Information that we just trust to be accurate. A tad scary, isn't it?

Send him status updates. Constantly.

Ooh look at me! Ooh ooh! Did you see what I did? I did exactly the thing you pay me to do! Did you see it? Aren’t I the best?

A least once a day, send your boss this email. Several times per day would be even better.

Maybe your boss is too nice to tell you, but if you do this, he hates you. He hates you with a white hot fury. When he closes his eyes, all he can picture is you. Suffering.

Occasional status updates are OK, in very specific situations. If you’re working on a big project that takes weeks / months to complete — feel free to send over a biweekly update. This is especially OK if there are other people waiting on you to finish your part of the project so that they can continue working.

That’s it, though. You are expected to do the thing you get paid to do. That’s why you get paid. There’s no reason to tell your boss that. Do you also tell him how you made it to work on time, didn’t embezzle money from the company today, and held the door for an elderly woman? Of course not. These are all basic expectations.

Don’t annoy your boss to death. If everything is going smoothly, there’s nothing to talk about. When promotion time comes up, he’ll remember who gets the job done, and who loves to annoy him to death.

The moral of the story? Business advice is bullshit. I was reading an article recently¹ about how to set yourself up for a promotion. The main point was exactly this — providing your boss with constant status updates. Terrible advice. If you’re doing good work, the right people will notice.

Today I want to talk about poor products, poor customer support, and great people. I’m going to use a company that I’m very familiar with, but I’m not going to name at this time. That’ll prevent me from getting as specific as I’d like, but bear with me.

The product in question is a very complex web application. It is necessarily complex, at least on the back end. The scope of the application is huge (again, necessary,) and it has to do a metric ton of different things. These are pretty much non-negotiable in this space.

What’s the big deal, then? Complex applications are, well, complex by their very nature, right? Yes. And no. See, this application takes its complexity and smacks you in the face with it. Hard. Over and over, until your cheek is bleeding.

Bugs exist throughout the application. Worse, they persist for far longer than is reasonable. Days, weeks, even months pass without major bugs being resolved. Bug reports get bounced up and down the support chain. Level 1 will fail to understand the scope of the problem, so they’ll bump it to level two. Level two will confirm the problem, and bump it to level three for a resolution. Level three will declare that there is, in fact, no problem, and send it back down the chain. Rinse and repeat, while the customer still has a broken product.

When Support Doesn’t Understand

Complex applications tend to have complex bugs. Fixing complex bugs requires not only intelligent support personnel, but extremely well-trained and knowledgable support personnel. Not rocket science. However, when support repeatedly fails to grasp the scope of a bug, it’s very, very easy to get frustrated. When support tells you that A+B=F, when you know for a fact that A+B=C… it’s easy to lose your cool.

The Good People

Where do the good people come in? I though you’d never ask. Even this company, with its pile of issues ranging from an overly complex application riddled with bugs to a generally unhelpful support team, has some bright spots. Namely, a small handful of extremely bright people who care. Regular employees who actually, truly care are not exactly common. And they’re a fantastic asset to any company. But, and this is so important:

Good people can never overcome a bad product.

Read that again. No matter how good your people are, they can never overcome a bad product.

Unless these people are actively fixing the bad product. Then they have a chance. But rarely do such people talk to real live customers. Certainly not in the case of our mystery web application. My interactions with these bright spots are always positive, but with the same outcome: the product is still broken. Until that stops being the case, I can no longer be a customer.

Get your product right first. If you can’t do that, nothing else matters.

Dear Internet,

We have a problem. It’s not you, it’s me. Well, it’s actually you and not me at all. I can’t read you anymore. It’s getting tiresome. You really have to do something. Now would be super.

Size twelve typefaces¹ are not OK in 2011. They will be even less OK in 2012.

I’m twenty nine years old, and I cannot read 12px anything without getting so close to the screen that my breath fogs up the glass. I can’t imagine what it’s like for folks in their 40’s or 50’s.

Since the Internet isn’t a sentient being ², it’s up to you guys to fix it. If you have any control over text online, make it bigger. Start with 16px³ and work your way up from there. It will look so much better, and people will actually be able to, you know, read it.

My first problem to solve when I switched to OmniFocus six short months ago was replicating the functionality of Things’ Today list. In the default state, OmniFocus does not have a way of showing you only things that must be done today. That was how I used Things most of the time, so it was a problem that needed solving.

My solution was to use Due Dates for every “today” task, combined with a custom Due perspective. It worked as intended for the most part. One thing has been grating on me in recent weeks, however – the incessant notifications. For a task to appear in my Due perspective, it must have a due date and time. When that time passes and the task isn’t complete, my iPhone displays an alert letting me know. That’s the idea, of course. But here’s the thing: I don’t always want a notification. Most of the due times are fairly arbitrary if I’m being completely honest with myself. I just want to see the daggone task on my Due screen for today.

Enter Flags

When I sit down on Friday afternoon to do my weekly review, I will address this very issue. Technically, my custom Due perspective is actually a Due/Flagged perspective. It shows tasks that are available and either A: Due today or B: Flagged. The difference is that Flagged tasks don’t yell at me. If I don’t complete a flagged task it just stays put, quietly.

So. Much. Better.

The New Plan

I will still use Start dates for each of my tasks. I don’t want to look at tasks that I simply can’t complete right now. That isn’t useful to me, and it’s one of the great things about OmniFocus. But I will no longer set Due Dates by default. Instead, I’ll only set Due Dates for tasks that I want to be alerted about. All other “Today” type tasks will be Flagged instead.

Having a Today type list is so important to me. Sure, what i really want is to live in the Next Actions list as much as possible. But Today tasks are necessary to plow through. The notifications, however, are less necessary. There’s no downside to switching to Flagged as my default. I will get to recapture just a tiny bit of my sanity. I’ll take it.

While walking through a parking lot yesterday, I held my phone in front of me and talked to the robot who lives inside. I asked her to remind me to do something when I got home, though I can't remember what. She obliged, of course — it's her job.

The phone, of course, is an iPhone 4S. The robot is Siri.

To someone who just heard the conversation, it probably didn't seem too terribly strange. But based on a few strange looks directed my way, people thought I was nuts. Who is this wacko, they must have though, talking to his phone?

Let's call this the Siri Stigma. If you talk to your cell phone in a public place, people will question your sanity. At the very least, people will think you're weird. Not "guy who drinks his coffee with his pinkie in the air" weird, but rather "guy who slaps himself the face while crying out for voices to stop" weird.

It will get better

If you manage to use Siri in public and not get institutionalized, congratulations. Things will get better for you over time. Do you remember when people who talked on their cell phone in public were outcasts? How about when people first started texting and walking? Freaks.

Well, at least they were freaks. Now they're normal. Now they're you

Nerds and tinkering go together like pizza and coke. In fact, it's almost as though one cannot exist without the other. In the case of pizza and coke there's no problem, but nerds and tinkering? Hoo boy.

Writings nerds are among the worst when it comes to tinkering. Whether it's a new app to make opening their favorite app a third of a second faster, or a "distraction-free writing environment," there’s always something new and shiny for a writing nerd to play with.

You spend hours, days, weeks trying app after app to find The Perfect Writing App. Finally you stumble across it – and it is beautiful. Black words on a sea of white. Or white words on a sea of black, if that’s more your style.

Only, you notice something strange. There are no words on your screen. Your screen is a sea of nothingness, devoid of any words. You sir, are an idiot staring at a blank screen. Instead of you know, writing, as a writer should do, you've spent your time searching for the ultimate writing tool.

Buying and trying apps can be useful, even fun. But you know what it isn't? It isn't writing. Writing is writing. Sit down at your keyboard, open up whatever writing app you happen to have on your computer, and type. This smart cat once said that words are found in a keyboard, and you just have to bang on it to make the words come out.

I think that is close to the truth, but not quite. The words, you see, are actually in your fingers. Not everyone's fingers have good words in them, and even if your fingers do have good words, they won’t always be good. That's OK, just so long as you start writing. Your fingers have a story to tell. Let them.

You can use any writing app you like, on any device you like.¹ The specifics aren't important. Writing is.

Don't be an idiot staring at a blank screen, even if it's the most beautiful blank screen you can imagine.

Inspiration is fleeting. For days on end, I will be inspired to create things. Website designs, new ways to make websites do what I want them to do, words on a screen. Inspiration is a wonderful thing when you have it, because great pieces of work flow from your fingers with ease.

Sometimes, though. Sometimes, inspiration is a real bitch. She's hiding from you, and you just can't find her. You look in your text editor, but she isn't there. You check on the Internet, but she's not there. Twitter? Nope, she's not there either. Coda? Nah, she's not there, though you can hear her laughing in the distance.

Lately, inspiration has been that way to me. I can't find her. I sit down to write, but my fingers have nothing to say. I start to dream up a new design, but it's all foggy. I try to tweak some code to make it do something neat, but my fingers don't know what to do.

Without inspiration, your fingers are just appendages. Sure, they're still good for basic tasks. But they will not create things on their own. For that, they need inspiration, wherever she may be.