And most likely, the stuff inside the box is important, but not important enough that you’ll bother going inside the box if you have to work at it. So now you’ll never go inside the box.

So you’ve decided to strike out on your own, by freelancing or start a company. The first day you get up, you realize you’re free. No office, no working hours, no one staring over your shoulder, no constant pressure to have your butt in a chair doing nothing. Great, right?

Well, kind of. The first month works great: you’re super productive and everything gets done in two hours, and then you go  home and watch TV the rest of the day. Then your subconscious realizes that if you stay home, you can do nothing but watch TV and surf the web all day, right away.

So you go to coffee shops and libraries. For free, or the price of a latte, you can get wireless, and work with fewer distractions. [1]

There’s only one other big problem: the alarm clock.

[1] If that’s too much angling for seats for you, you can also find a good coworking space for a few hundred bucks a month.

The alarm clock

Credit

The alarm clock is, biologically speaking, the enemy. Studies almost universally seem to show that having less sleep is the equivalent of taking the stupid knob on your brain and turning it up, all day. Any machine that interrupts your natural sleep cycles can’t be good; in nature, it’s essentially the equivalent of having a (mostly) friendly bear wander by your hut at 6 am every morning; you wake up groggy, stressed out, forced into action. An entire company was started and funded around avoiding it.

So, naturally, the first thing you do, once you’re free, is turn it off. The only problem: You’re a night owl. So now you have random hours. Every day you wake up, and you’re not sure what time it’ll be.
Do you just head to the same cafe, whether it’s open for 12 hours or 4?

Cognitive Load

One of the hidden advantages of regular office hours in a regular office is reduced cognitive load. If you have to work every day, but you’re not sure where or when, you spend time thinking and processing: “Is this place open? Is it worth it to commute 30 minutes if they’re going to close at 5? Maybe I should just stay home today. I wonder what’s on my email.”

Continued for too long, this thinking drains your reserve of mental energy, before you’ve gotten to work.

With a rigid, defined procedure, none of this thinking takes place: You roll out of bed, put on your clothes, do whatever and in 30 minutes you’re in the office. And you haven’t had to make any decisions yet. Your mental energy is saved for when you get in and tackle the first work-related problem.

That’s the benefit of reduced cognitive load.

Morning Routine 2.0

Does this mean that you, the freewheeling self-employed freelancer, need to don a suit every single day, set your alarm clock for 4 in the morning, and go for a run of 1.8 miles before coming in for a coffee and commute to the office?

Fortunately, it doesn’t.

The most important thing that you need to have in the morning is not super rigid rules, but a set of algorithms that reduce cognitive load.

Most likely, in the morning, you’re making the same set of decisions, over and over again:

• What should I wear?
• Where should I work?
• What am I working on today?
• How long should I work?

For a full-time employee, these sets of questions have the same answer, every single day. Regardless of whether you’re feeling great or tired, regardless of what you have to do that day or what appointments you have, you have to answer these questions with the same location and the same time.

Using the same answer every day may be easy, but it doesn’t always fit. Sometimes you’re taking calls and networking all day; sometimes there’s a tropical hurricane heading past your state and it’s pouring buckets for the next week.

So, instead of a morning routine, have a morning algorithm. Here’s one I’m starting to use:

1. Pick out clothes the day before, based on weather and schedule.
2. If I have to take calls that day: pull out the laptop and work from home (It’s hard to take calls in a public space).
3. If there’s a meeting/event to go to: find a place to work near the meeting place
4. If it’s before X o’clock: Work at the faraway office (most productive for long blocks of time)
5. If it’s after X o’clock: Work at a nearby coffee shop.

With whatever algorithm you use, the instructions should be so simple, straightforward and brain dead that you can apply them in 5 seconds without questioning them. And once you’ve polished your algorithm over a few weeks of use, you should always follow it to the letter. Amend it with the greatest caution, because once you start changing it every morning, the benefits of reduced cognitive load disappear.

By doing all your thinking beforehand, you can save your brain cells for when your routine is over and your real work begins.

You’re looking through your inbox, and you see one of those messages. You know, those messages where you know you need to respond, but you can’t just dash off a quick email – you’ll need to sit down and think about it. Or you want to be extra sure that what you’re writing is the right response. Every time you check your mail the email keeps bugging you, and you think, “I know I should deal with that, but not right now; I’ll get back to it later.”

One quick way to get the ball rolling: Write a quick two minute response as a draft, right away. Save it, don’t send it.

When you separate writing and sending:

• You enable yourself to write something without it having to be perfect right away.
• If you’re writing an email with strong emotional content, you get to put some distance between the emotion and the email.
• You don’t get stuck looking at the same messages as often. You can archive the message and save the draft as a reminder.
• You get a head start on writing the full response. Writing a very quick first draft will help get your thoughts flowing and make writing the actual email easier.

Extra tip: If you’re using gmail, you may already know you can stop an email you send by accident with Undo Send, but if you want extra security, try adding the day you want to send it as a recipient. Gmail won’t send the email since the name you type in isn’t a real email address. (Try it!)

Lately there’s been a lot of privacy backlash over Facebook making a lot of information public by default. But one question that’s getting lost in the controversy deserves more attention. Why are they doing it?

I was lucky enough to be at a semantic web conference just after Facebook unleashed its new Graph API. What Facebook has done, for those who aren’t familiar, is changed Facebook interests and “likes” into links. So now, instead of having a list of movies and hobbies you like, your profile now links to pages for Cooking and The Godfather.

Cooking has more friends than you do

These pages are wrappers of the same information that was on Wikipedia, IMDB and elsewhere, but with likes and wall posts added. If you click on some of the Wikipedia links, you’ll get taken not to Wikipedia, but to another Facebook page that wraps it. Facebook may be using Wikipedia’s content, but the experience and the information is controlled by Facebook and stays on facebook.com.

Facebook isn’t interested in (just) becoming an encyclopedia of things, though. Facebook is interested in becoming an encyclopedia of you. All of your interests and likes are now linked, via FB, to wrapper pages that Facebook manages. Facebook is the centralized database that stores all that information.

This is how Facebook sees you. From F8 developer conference.

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Is having an open graph everywhere inevitable?

The four founders of Diaspora, in an appropriately indie band pose.

At the same time that Facebook was transforming their site into a database of everyone, a group of four NYU college students got a writeup from the New York Times. Their project, called Diaspora, was (is) to make your personal encyclopedia entry private, so you can control your information and how it gets accessed.

But while people donated nearly 200 thousand dollars to their project, and much ink was spilled over how much Facebook was now sharing about us, one might argue that the change to a public graph a la Facebook is inevitable. After all:

• Many, some at Facebook, some elsewhere, have argued that privacy is less important to members of Generation Y.
• Plus, having a shared social graph is clearly better than one where you can’t see any of the nodes, right? Once we see how useful it is to share the music we like and the news we’re interested in through the graph, we won’t want to turn back.

There are two forces that will decide this future: developers and you, the user.

Developers matter

You may have noticed recently that a huge number of sites – CNN, Pandora, the New York Times and others – have started spouting Facebook like buttons. Some other sites have included ways to login using Facebook itself, making you verify your identity by using your Facebook information.

Websites do this because it makes things easier. People are (arguably) more likely to login to CNN using Facebook than entering their email address, setting yet another password that could be forgotten, and checking their email for some confirmation link they have to click on. The added convenience makes it worth it to connect CNN to your real name and identity. For some people at least.

Web developers are the key to this, because we end up building the technology that decides if our sites are linked through Facebook or not. And, frankly: There are few good alternatives to Facebook.

For login, there are simply no sites that have the coverage of Facebook. We as developers could let you login to CNN through Google or Twitter, but allowing Facebook logins and using Facebook likes is a necessity. Or at least, a de facto standard.

Let’s say you wanted to make an alternative: You’d need to make sure that there’s an easy way for developers to incorporate it into their sites, because for a long time, you will be dealing with developers who have to put Facebook stuff on their website, and you’ll be their spare time project. If they can’t just drop it in, they won’t!

How will people react to Facebook in the long run?

As a Facebook user, the question that really matters is not privacy or the social graph. Instead: What’s in it for me? What do I get if I share all this information?

There isn’t that much value in sharing my movie preferences to a bunch of people, only some of whom are actually my friends. Twitter has proven that a market exists for conspicuous sharing – wide, out there, open sharing – but a lot of Facebook’s privacy woes come from incidental sharing – the “oops, I didn’t know that was public” type of sharing. One person came up with his own solution – all of his Facebook information is now public.

To borrow from the earlier 2000s: Some of us signed onto FB thinking it was LiveJournal, and it’s turned into MySpace. Those of us who thought that will move on.

Facebook’s main utility, for me and the one person I asked, is to see if my friends have updated their pages, and to upload and look at pictures. None of this has anything to do with the social graph, and until someone comes up with a killer app involving me sharing my links to fourteen different things, it’s not going to matter to me. I’ll just turn it off, and my Facebook page will be just another one of the many abandoned webpages I’ve made about myself.

Anyway, when I was watching it for the first time, I spotted a reference to Chronotrigger that blew me away. The clip below is what I’m talking about:

It’s an island in the sky! And they’re playing the theme from Zeal!

The music is nearly identical to the music played in Chronotrigger when you set foot on the island of Zeal. Coincidence? I think not.

Previously

Today, the Geforce GTX 280 costs around $400 and delivers around 950 Gigaflops.

I may think I’m a person who does the right thing if I don’t cheat on my taxes, am never mean to my friends and try to help them, and try to spend some time donating or volunteering for a good cause.

To be morally good (or good at anything really) this is a very low standard. Example:

Say you come across a panhandler on the street. Do you:

1. Give them money and walk on, your conscience relieved?
2. Ignore them, knowing that giving them money would not be solving the problem and might even encourage any problems they have (substance abuse, etc.)?

The intellectual moralists are going to say, well of course, option 2; the gut moralists (for lack of a better term) are going to go for option 1. Since we know that option 1 is incorrect (assuming it’s ineffective), we might say, OK, we’re done, door 2 was the better door.

But have you really done the right thing to see someone in need and ignore them? Another example:

You’re a teacher in a failing school. While you did pretty well in teacher’s college, and have come up with good lesson plans, your students are rowdy, unresponsive, and aren’t learning. Do you:

1. Keep on teaching, hoping that maybe one or two people pick up the material?
2. Give up, realizing that your effort will not help the students?

It’s pretty obvious that option 1 is, frankly, a waste of resources (in this case, your resources); you can continue on in the noble delusion that you’re a soldier in a lost cause, but once again, you’re satisfying your gut morality while failing to do anything to answer your brain and common sense.

It’s pretty obvious that option 2 is useless.

—

—

Hopefully the armchair quarterbacks in you are reading this and shouting at me, “Option 3, Option 3!” because it’s clear that if people distill their values down to a set of binary choices, and give up on the responsibility to seek out better answers, then they are being morally irresponsible.

I do it, though.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about how option 2 is inadequate, but frankly: I often ignore that feeling. I–maybe we all–need to set the bar higher for myself. I need to engage myself to find the best answers I can, using my resources.

So that’s part one: Being binary does not equal doing the right thing.

• When two people disagree on politics (liberals vs. conservatives), is it possible that they are engaging in binarism?
• Vaguely related and funny: Because They All Suck