I'm getting an error message on Mind Traffic Control :

A server error occurred. Please contact the administrator.

First time I've seen it is tonight, but if anyone else is seeing it and it persists, then please tell me in the comments.

Update : OK, seemed to have fixed itself pretty quickly.

Update 2 : Not that I seem to have a lot of regular users of MTC.

Worth reading "Where's your data?"

Remember, your Mind Traffic Control data is easily exportable. Just go to : http://mindtrafficcontrol.appspot.com/exports (Via the "Export Data" menu item) and choose whether you want your data exported in CSV format (which you can import into Excel or EditGrid etc.) or OPML (which can be read in the OPML Editor or (less conveniently) in any XML editor).

Haven't written here for a long time. A couple of notes and catch-ups.

Chandler 1.0 is out.

I was struck by these features :

Chandler aims to provide a more integrated approach to managing information with:

* A Quick Entry Bar to enter everything from ideas to reminders and appointments.
* NOW-LATER-DONE Triage List to collect, process and track everything from deadlines and meetings to drafts and ideas.
* Tickler Alarms to auto-re-focus deferred (LATER) items to NOW

Something like this experience is already available in Mind Traffic Control if you want to experiment with it. :-)

I'm getting into two further things :

Zbigniew Lukasiak has got me thinking about email again. It's still the most commonly used social software, and there is still room for improvement. Zby and I are thinking of doing something about this ... watch this space for more.

Meanwhile, I'm also back into feeds, in particular, creating and reading Yahoo Pipes. I'll talk more about this soon too.

Finally, a couple of good posts from Stowe Boyd about the shift to the flow internet. Or rather, the ongoing need for recombiners for the small pieces (eg. comments, replies etc.) that are scattered across dozens of different feed services like Friendfeed etc.

Very important Mind Traffic Control update today.

The art of Mind Traffic Control is to defer as much as possible until later. But there are times you might have deferred a bunch of things until next week, only to find that actually, you *could* start doing some of them this week after all. (Maybe another task just got cancelled and freed up some time)

Until now, it's been a flaw in MTC that you couldn't rescue this stuff from the future.

That's now been fixed.

If you find yourself with time on your hands and want to pull items back : go to the Overview menu, and the Deferred list. You'll see a new button at the top titled "Restore the selected items to main queue". There's also now a column in the table with checkboxes for each item. Select any items you want to pull back and press the button. That's it. The items are back in the main "next actions" queue.

Of course, please tell me if this seems to have caused any problems. Doesn't look like it this end, but your bug reports are important.

Prioritizing by Anxiety.

I see what he's getting at although I'm not entirely convinced.

Obviously No Free Lunch tells us that no "prioritize-by-X" strategy could be appropriate to all circumstances. (Including the FIFO algorithm of Mind Traffic Control).

Because of this, the less time wasted imagining you can specify priorities in advance, the better. Because the only time you can assign priorities is when pulling things out of your queue. To the extent that "anxiety" helps you identify the most urgent to do now it's useful. But Andre does recognise that anxiety (like most *emotional* indicators) is pretty ambiguous; it might be that an item makes you anxious exactly because you *don't* know how to do it or even what you *want* to do about it. So, even choosing to address it now, doesn't mean "doing" it now, it may be a signal to cancel entirely.

Still ... it's to good if it helps you reduce anxiety overall. Perhaps not if you start to *cultivate* it as a priority-identification mechanism.

BTW : MTC works on the opposite theory, assuming that it's easier to know which items you can definitely postpone, than it is to know which are most urgent ... so at least it helps you clear the former out of the way. Nevertheless, what this post mainly reminds me is that, now I'm up to around 200 items under Mind Traffic Control, even MTC is breaking down for me.

Or rather, it's missing something. And I'm starting to wonder if that's the "someday/maybe" bucket. Originally I assumed that "3 months in the future" was more or less equivalent to a someday/maybe ... but I'm finding that that's not the case.

I'm scared to push things so far ahead, even for things I have no idea when I'd get round to. Because there's always the possibility that I might get inspired to try them tomorrow. I need another queue to get things out of the way, but from where I can bring them back, if inspiration strikes.

Opinions anyone?

Tonight's tweak to Mind Traffic Control : there's now an "[untagged]" filter ... so if you are using #tags but you find those untagged items are getting lost when you aren't filtering, well, that's the solution. Chose the "[untagged]" filter to restrict your queue to only those items *without* #tags.

I made an update to Mind Traffic Control today which should speed it up a little ... it's working for me in my queue ... but if anyone sees any error messages ... scream.

Oh, also, your deferred list in the overview should be sorted.

Phillip J. Eby calls Todo Lists "FAIL".

Background explanation.

Anyone not worked out how to use #tags in Mind Traffic Control?

All you do is write your tag words with a # as in #work or #food and these items get tagged. Once you have tagged items in your current queue, a select box appears at the right of the "next action" box, allowing you to filter next actions by a tag.

Once you select a filter, only items with the selected tag will be shown. To see all queued items again, simply remove the filter.

Ouch! Major down for Mind Traffic Control today.

Must be something to do with the fix I posted this morning which I thought was pretty harmless (and worked for me at that moment, honest!)

Anyway, I'm not in front of a machine where I can work on it, this second. But I'll roll back to the previous the moment I am. Probably in an hour or two.

I fixed a subtlish bug in Mind Traffic Control today.

I was trying to pull the email address out of user objects using user.email() ... however it seemed that you might be able to have users who don't have an email address and for who user.email() fails or returns None. Not common, I guess because user id's are based on Google accounts (which is mainly Gmail accounts I'd assume.)

Anyway I've now wrapped all attempts to get user.email() in a try. But next question, what should I do instead? When I find a user without an email, what should I use to identify him or her?

Mind Traffic Control is ruthelessly useful. Indeed, it kind of strips out everything else *execept* usefulness.

Which is why, if you're thinking of trying it out, here's a hint. Don't try by putting in some random fake items like "test 1", "test 2" etc.

All they do is sit there and remind you to do them. You can't fiddle around organizing and prioritizing them, dragging and dropping or attaching little icons to them etc. (Which is the point.) So MTC looks inert.

In fact it *is* inert, because you don't really need it. MTC does nothing, because you want nothing from it. You don't really have a task of doing "test 1" or "try out mind traffic control" so the computer can't help.

It's as if Mind Traffic Control magically knows when it's being useful and when you don't really care.

So, to get the real MTC experience, put some real tasks in. Just 3 or 4 of the things you actually have to do over the next couple of days, and leave it open in a browser-tab on your machine.

Then MTC feels wanted. And the magic kicks in. ;-)

The biggest problem I've noticed people having with Mind Traffic Control is with delegating. They were sometimes delegating without filling in the task description (thinking that the original task description would get copied across - which it wasnt't) or delegating to names of people which clearly weren't email addresses (or Goggle logins).

Now I've trapped this. When delegating a task, it's description gets copied (although you can still edit it), and the system also traps non-email addresses as targets to delegate to.

Keep watching ...

Rather great Paul Graham essay on adult treatment of children.

This resonates :

Innocence is also open-mindedness. We want kids to be innocent so they can continue to learn. Paradoxical as it sounds, there are some kinds of knowledge that get in the way of other kinds of knowledge. If you're going to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to take advantage of one another, you're better off learning it last. Otherwise you won't bother learning much more.

Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don't think this is a coincidence. I think they've deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don't.

Update : and another good one on the internet as dangerous distraction for procrastinators. Twitter is ridiculously addictive. In the wrong state of mind I can find myself trying to refresh once a minute.

Mind Traffic Control is partly meant to try to harness that dynamic for good ... or at least for work. It gives you something to click manically hoping for new surprises to pop out, but it's only ever work which pops (assuming you only put real work or necessary tasks in).

Note, at some point I may import RSS feeds into MTC ... but remember, it's vitally important you do not connect MTC up to some kind of "news" feed. Don't drink from the fire-hose, as they say.

I realize there's no defined way of submitting bug-reports or suggestions for Mind Traffic Control. I need to set one up. In the meantime, use the comments for this post.

Smart Disorganized Philosophy #2

Chatting with BillSeitz I found myself saying this :

MTC needs to have what Udel called the "special charmpower" of email ... that groups are spontaneous and form bottom-up from the flow, rather than having to be designed up-front, prior to the flow .... otherwise people keep using email

Another list view for Mind Traffic Control

OK, somewhat ugly, but they're there by popular demand ... full lists of your tasks.

Don't worry Mind Traffic Control isn't forgetting them. :-)

If you follow @exmosis on twitter you'll see he's busily trying to deconstruct Mind Traffic Control turning it into an untask-list or a barter-market.

@adrianh is constructively sceptical.

Lots here

Mind Traffic Control now has #tags.

If you use any word beginning with a # when describing a task, the task gets tagged with this word. And once you start tagging, a filter appears to let you filter your queue to present only those tasks which contain the tag.

Not entirely sure I've got the UI right on this one. It is simple, I think. But maybe not obvious, and maybe not in the right place at the moment.

Comments, bug reports, suggestions welcome as always.

BTW : a good thing about the GAE, it is so simple to add new functionality. This was about three hours of development and another 3 of debugging.

The reason for the longish debugging is what looks like a quirk in GAE.

At one point I was using a user object instead of a user email in a query. (I'm using user email's as user id in the database.) You might assume that this would simply fail with some kind of type error. But interestingly it worked on my local machine (somehow in the SDK it looks as though the user object gets correctly coerced into its email) but not on the appspot server where the query always returned nothing.

Read into that what you will.