Managing electronic project environments?
Berko
estate investor. I am a graduate student. We'll leave it at those three
for now.
My problem is that I'm a minimalist. I don't keep a lot of icons on my
desktop, and I get a little stressed out when I have too many things
open in my dock. There are some things that I keep open no matter what
I'm working on: Mail, Acquisition if there's a download happening, for
example, and I could not do without Quicksilver any day of the week.
Obviously, programs like these are tied to my particular user account.
This is what has stopped me from simply using multiple user accounts to
sort out my task environments. That, and I don't want to miss emails
from one of my websites because I'm in my real estate investing
account. You get the picture.
Merlin recommended Virtue. I like that program, but there are some
things I don't like. For instance, when I am negotiating a real estate
purchase, I don't want so many menu bar items and dock activities going
on. In my day to day life, I have Spymac utilities, Tiger Launcher,
Audioscrobbler, an alarm, Pod2Go, etc. in my menu bar and programs like
iSquint and Lostify in my dock. Some of these don't exactly project a
professional image. Also, Virtue is really nice for working in
different environments concurrently (I keep one desktop for coding and
one for testing so I can easily switch back and forth.) but it seems a
little too "present" for the kind of separation I am talking about.
Does anyone have tips on this? Is Virtue about as close to what I am
after as possible? Is Virtue about as close as it gets or is there
more? How do you keep your OS X work environments separate?
Vicki Brown
> Obviously, programs like these are tied to my particular user account.
> This is what has stopped me from simply using multiple user accounts to
> sort out my task environments. That, and I don't want to miss emails
> from one of my websites because I'm in my real estate investing
> account. You get the picture.
For my most recent job (now kaput) I was able to work largely from home.
I set up a "Work" personality (account" and used fast user switching.
switched back to "Personal" several times a day. I never felt that I missed
any email but I felt that I had much more control over when I was in each
personality.
Also, I had different sound notification for incoming mail in the different
accounts. Mail still comes in when an account is not in front - so I'd get a
background sound notification if "Work" mail arrived while I was in my
personal account.
I suggest making several accounts, turning on Fast User Switching, and trying
it out.
--
- Vicki
ZZZ
zzZ San Francisco Bay Area, CA
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jefff
synchronization. It happened to me and I've heard of it happening to
others: I had set up a temporary user to test out some software and
settings and sync'd my palm while both users were running (only one
active) after that I could never get my Palm to sync with USB again. I
had to use bluetooth (very slow) until I upgraded to Tiger and
completely reinsalled everything. They might have fixed the problem by
now, but it's something to be aware of. (i.e. have a fresh backup on
hand.)
Vicki Brown
> One thing to be cautious of if you use fast-user switching is Palm
> synchronization. It happened to me and I've heard of it happening to
> others: I had set up a temporary user to test out some software and
> settings and sync'd my palm while both users were running (only one
> active) after that I could never get my Palm to sync with USB again.
I think this was a coincidence. I frequently synched while the other user was
active. In fact, I almost never logged out of my "Work" personality, just
switched back and forth. There should be no relationship between Palm Hotsync
and other user accounts.
Unless you somehow tried to "share" the palm stuff between users??
Nik
> My problem is that I'm a minimalist...
>
> There are some things that I keep open no matter what
> I'm working on: Mail, Acquisition if there's a download happening, for
> example, and I could not do without Quicksilver any day of the week.
>
> In my day to day life, I have Spymac utilities, Tiger Launcher,
> Audioscrobbler, an alarm, Pod2Go, etc. in my menu bar and programs
> like
> iSquint and Lostify in my dock.
Berko, you have a very strange definition of "minimalist." Sounds
like you keep a zillion and six programs open at a time, which will,
quite simply, lead to a mess of dock and menulette icons.
I have a couple suggestions, as a fellow multi-function human (i.e. a
freelancer, dayjobber and grad student):
You seem to mention two problems, 1) You get annoyed/stressed
(distracted?) by lots of icons and activity on the screen; 2) You
want to project a professional image when people see your computer,
despite your desire to have lots going on behind the scenes, keeping
your stuff running.
Neither of these are going to be fixed by MORE software. What I would
recommend is a combination of the following:
Hide your dock. The dock is a big source of distracting icon
happiness. Set it to auto-hide, and it'll show up when you need it,
and stay out of the way when you don't. When you're acting
professional, rely on Quicksilver to handle your launching, and keep
your unprofessional dock icons out of the way.
Consider changing the default icons for some of your less
professional looking applications if you really want to look like a
suit.
Reduce distraction by setting things to distract you on YOUR terms.
With a hidden dock, you will only get notifications when you CHOOSE
to get them (by looking at your dock). Same with menu bar icons: Hide
the icons which just display information, and just keep the ones
which serve some useful purpose which CAN'T be handled through other
means. For your system monitors and so forth, use Dashboard/Yahoo
widgets and invoke them with an FKey.
Also, think about paring down your software. A lot of that stuff
isn't necessary all the time, and particularly not when you're doing
work (be it real estate work or studying or whatever else). Quit
those applications when you don't need them, and your dock will look
serene and empty.
--Nik
normnode
thing.
Four desktops - one full of terminal windows tailing logs on a few
servers, one with a database connection and other apps related to my
work in progress, and another with 'communications' - work email app,
firefox with my gmail or other personal mail, and anything else that is
fun - streaming radio or music, sudoku - - whatever.
This leaves a fourth desktop empty, so I can find the calming refuge of
an empty desktop rather quickly.
Jacob Stetser
1. A sensible 'Work' directory structure:
Work/
1_In_Progress
2_Upcoming
3_On_Hold
4_Completed
5_Ongoing
Each of these folders contains client or project folders, and I move
them around depending on current status. I originally had 4, but
added the 5th for frequently recurring clients/projects. This way, I
can prepare for upcoming work without cluttering up my "In Progress"
projects as well as periodically archive "Completed" work without
having to go rooting for repeat customer resources.
The names have no spaces mainly because I run Rails projects directly
from within these folders, and sometimes the spaces will confuse
commands.
2. Billings [http://www.marketcircle.com/billings/]. Great, simple,
intuitive time-tracking/billing software. It could stand a few more
report options and more flexible invoice templates, but... it's been
a godsend for keeping track of hours spent working.
3. Virtue (?) ... multiple desktops for the Mac. I just downloaded a
version that actually switches desktops when you cmd-tab through
applications. No need to go chasing down which desktop has which
application. I just keep Textmate and Terminal on one desktop, Safari
and NNW on another, and Mail in another... many few distractions!
(That being said... I've tried multiple desktops in the past and
abandoned them... so it might be the same now... but the first two
tips have helped me tremendously.
Jake
Kit Strong
Ben Wilson
My speculation:
In Progress are active open projects. Ongoing are inactive open
projects.
Jacob Stetser
"Ongoing" contains projects that get reopened regularly (and then
they go into In Progress until I'm done with the work for a while)
Jake
Berko
to be out of the way. I don't see any problem with having videos
converting in iSquint and downloads going in Acquisition while I'm
doing other stuff. It's just bandwidth crunching that needs to get done
and doesn't involve a lot of my own interaction, but I would like the
option of turning off the dock icons entirely. Hiding the dock is
helping though. I just recently started hiding my Dock and that is
working out pretty well. I'm down to only three utilities in my menu
bar that are not System things such as Airport and Bluetooth:
iScrobbler didn't have a way to get rid of the menu item. My "egg
timer" is pretty much indispensable. Salling Clicker stays because I
need to know when it's not connected to my phone. I also have iChat in
the menu bar, but that's on the border of System and proggie. So, I
think that is an improvement. I tried doing without my volume, battery,
and bluetooth in the menu bar, but that didn't work out so well. I am
using Dashboard more now for system monitoring etc. I think this is
helping some. We'll see how things play out.
rickla
>
> Work/
> 1_In_Progress
> 2_Upcoming
> 3_On_Hold
> 4_Completed
> 5_Ongoing
> Each of these folders contains client or project folders, and I move
> them around depending on current status. I originally had 4, but
> added the 5th for frequently recurring clients/projects. This way, I
> can prepare for upcoming work without cluttering up my "In Progress"
> projects as well as periodically archive "Completed" work without
> having to go rooting for repeat customer resources.
Would it be possible and feasible to do something like this by means
of, for example, Spotlight comments and Smart Folders. That way, you
could keep things grouped by subject area or whatever, while still
having the project status reflected in an alternative structure? I've
never done this, but the idea of moving project folders around all the
time makes me somehow uneasy. Or how about keeping project folders in
subject areas and moving aliases around in the way you suggest?
jfw
It would be and I did that at first. But I find that the subject areas
are less important for the ongoing work. My equivalent of _Completed
is an archive sub-divided into subjects. However, I should say that I
try to keep myself to less than 10 _In_Progress items and am very
realistic about _Upcoming -- NO Someday/Maybe hopes and dreams type
items.
This way is much faster and more focussed. When something is on
definite and on the horizon it goes in to _Upcoming. When it starts it
moves in to _In_Progress, etc ... Fancy bells and whistles just get
too distracting. Manually moving items into categories helps me to
focus on current status.