Every year or so I get cranky about my task management system and switch to something new. This year it’s particularly bad because I’ve been hearing the Siren Song of OmniFocus. I swear every nerd blogger I read uses it: e.g.,

• Ben Brooks at The Brooks Review
• David Sparks at MacSparky
• Aleh Cherp at Macademic

I even believe John Gruber (Daring Fireball) uses it though he’s a little cagy since they are often a sponsor of his.

BUT, I strongly believe you shouldn’t switch systems unless you’re solving specific problems. That is, I invest in my systems and don’t want to switch just for fun. Hearing that some other piece of software is “really good” or even “better” than what you’re currently using isn’t good enough for me.

Last year when I made the switch from Google Tasks to Remember The Milk (RTM), I had some clear requirements:

• Cross-platform: I was spending time on Mac, Windows, iPad, and iPhone and I needed to be able to access my tasks from all of them.
• Rock solid invisible sync: I never wanted to think about which version of my task list I was working with. There should be just one master copy (preferably in the cloud) that gets seemlessly accessed and updated from various clients.
• Power and flexibility: Google Tasks met the first two criteria, but it was just too simple. I wanted more than due dates and separate lists. I wanted to be able to attach priorities, contexts, durations, and other arbitrary tags. I wanted to dynamically create lists based on these characteristics that showed me just what I wanted (and was able) to do at any particular moment.

At the time, RTM was the best solution, but the world has changed since then. Omnifocus now provides highly regarded Sync Services. And I’ve shed my need for Windows now that I carry a MacBook Air with me everywhere i go.

Stepping up a level for a moment, the overall task management system you use is far more important than the particular tool you use to implement it. I’m a GTD (Getting Things Done) guy, though I’m not the most orthodox devotee you’ll meet. There are two things I love about GTD:

1. You get the mental to do list out of your head. Since you’re not constantly worrying that you’ll forget something, your mind is freed up for more interesting creative work. And you’re not forgetting things!

2. Once your tasks are organized, GTD provides a way to quickly see what you can and should be doing in any given context. This is exactly what I couldn’t do with Google Tasks.

After a year of experience (and tweeking), I’ve got an implementation of my GTD system in Remember The Milk that works pretty well. Before casting it aside for a new pretty young thing, I’m going to describe my system and what works and doesn’t work for me. It’s almost certainly not a perfect match for anyone else, but it might give you ideas for things to try or think about.

RTM is a simple system that lets you build complex systems on top of it. Basically, you just define a bunch of lists of tasks with characteristics. These characteristics include priorities, due dates, durations, locations, and arbitrary tags–exactly what I want. The power comes from defining Smart Lists that are basically saved searches based on these characteristics.

Projects

Even though RTM supports multiple lists, I keep almost all my tasks in the Inbox list and use other lists only for storing things like books I’d like to read or ideas for upcoming posts. I define my projects with tags. Home-related projects have tags starting with “ph-“ (e.g., “ph-basement”) and work-related projects have tags starting with “pw-“. Most tasks that go into the system have either a project assigned or a simple “work” tag. If it’s a single task home project, I don’t take the time to assign a project tag at all.

Locations

I assign each task a single location tag: at-desk, at-phone, at-home, at-econoffice, at-errand, or at-wife. The last one is special: tasks that require consultation with my wife. Someone else that runs a lot of errands might find it worth their time to set up several locations that cause tasks to pop up when they go somewhere, but generally I go somewhere because I need to do something and so don’t need to get reminded.

Contexts

Coming up with the right set of contexts is critical to the system and it’s the hardest part. In The GTD Book, David Allen talks a lot about home, office, and phone. With smart phones, the set of things you can do “on the phone” is far larger than it used to be. Since I usually have my laptop with me and most of my resources are online, home office, work office, and even cafe are almost the same.

Right now I have four smart lists that define my contexts:

c-working

due:today or dueBefore:today or (list:Inbox and (tagContains:pw- or
tag:work or tag:weekday) and (dueWithin:"5 days of today" or
priority:1 or priority:2 or priority:3))</tt>

This is the context I look at during the work day or at night when I’m working. It includes everything due today or that’s overdue so I don’t miss deadlines. It also includes any tasks associated with work-related projects or that can only be done during the week (tag:weekday). The most interesting piece is where I drop all tasks that are due more than five days from now that have no priority assigned. These are the tasks I don’t even want to think about until it gets closer to their due date.

c-weekend

due:today or dueBefore:today or (not tag:work and not
tagContains:pw- and not tag:weekday and list:Inbox and (dueWithin:"5
days of today" or priority:1 or priority:2 or priority:3))</tt>

On weekends and any time I want to focus on the non-work part of my life I check this list. It’s almost the inverse of my work context except that it also includes anything that’s due or past due.

c-out

tag:at-errand or tag:at-phone

This is what I should and can do when I’m out and about.

c-easy

tag:fun or tag:easy or timeEstimate:"< 1 hour"

When I’m tired or just have a few minutes, I look at this list. It’s my newest context, and I might eventually break it into a tired list and a separate quick-task list.

All four of these Smart Lists are sorted first by due date and then by priority. I often use high priority to mark that a task is the next action for a project. This way it’s always listed before other actions that I want to record but might not be ready to do. A while back I read another article about implementing GTD in RTM and it suggested using an na tag. My system allows me to complete a task for a project and have the other tasks still show up on the list. The last thing I want to do is to constantly be tagging new tasks as na as I complete other tasks.

There are plenty of times when I want to focus on a particular project and in those cases I simply look at the Tag view for the project and see all the tasks associated with the project no matter when they are due or what their priority.

Weekly Review:

Just as David Allen says, I’ve found that if I don’t do a weekly review, the information in the system drifts away from the information in my brain and loses its value. That’s when most folks fall off the wagon. So support for the weekly review process is super-important. Here’s what I do every week:

• Look at my untagged Smart List (not isTagged:true list:Inbox) and assign project (if necessary) or location tags
• Look at the tasks for each project:
  • Are any upcoming tasks missing?
  • Are priorities and due dates right?
  • Can I delete any tasks that are no longer needed?
• Add any new projects that didn’t make it into the system during the week
• Quickly look at all the tasks in the system (usually between 100 and 150)
  • Do I need to lower / raise any priorities?
• Look at what I accomplished in last week (completedWithin:”1 week of today”)–good for setting feasible future expectations

One nice thing about this way of doing weekly reviews is that it can be done in chunks here and there –I don’t have to set aside the traditional 2-3 hour block.

Room for Improvement

On the whole, I’m pretty happy with my system, but that doesn’t mean there’s not lots of room for improvement.

First, my system isn’t that great for capturing or doing long range planning. I can’t specify task dependencies and I can’t even specify start dates for tasks. If I could, that would let me filter out tasks that I know I’m not starting for a while. I try to follow orthodox GTD practice and only use due dates for when things are really due. That way I don’t miss these things in a sea of stuff that I’d like to be done on that day.

Second, while the iOS apps are very good, I’m getting tired of the clunky RTM web interface. It’s functional, but pretty ugly. I use Fluid to make RTM a pop down menubar app, but I can’t get it to play well with multiple Spaces. That is, when I pop down the app, it pulls me back to the Space I first started it. And when RTM automatically logs me out of the website (more often than I’d like), I can’t use 1Password to log back bin. I’m still totally dumbfounded that no one has built a decent native Mac app for the service.

Third, entering new tasks requires me to click on the menubar app and then put the cursor in the new task text entry box. It sure would be nice to have a global hot key for this.

Bottom Line

Remember The Milk bugs me, but it also works for me. And maybe Omnifocus wouldn’t be uniformly better. I’m worried that it would try to force me into new ways of doing things that just don’t match my work flow. Maybe instead I need to check out Things…. Or maybe I just need to get back to work!

There have been times in my life when I’ve listened to whatever music I wanted whenever I wanted, but these days, I have a lot more constraints. At work, I’m pretty underslept and need all the concentration I can get—that means a silent work environment. At home, I don’t feel right cranking up Swedish death metal or even Katy Perry in front of the kids. I get my classic rock fix while shopping in the supermarket late at night, and in the car, all the trashy dance music stations I like are full of static.

So I’ve started listening to 97.1, My Country. It comes in crystal clear and plays terrific new country. Trust me that I’m as surprised as you are as I’ve always been an “I don’t like country” guy. The twang and the stories and the guitar always bugged me. I’m not totally sure what’s changed, but over the last few weeks I’ve Shazamed several songs that I’ve had to buy on iTunes. Here are my current favorites:

• “Country Must Be Country Wide” (by Brantley Gilbert): This is a straight-up country anthems and it’s so rockin I swear Bon Jovi could have recorded it in the mid 80’s. It’s got awesome guitar and great lines like “In every state there’s a station playing Cash, Hank, Willie, and Waylon”.

• “Got My Country On” (by Chris Cable): Another anthem, this reminds me of all those rap songs that brag about being the biggest gangsta around. Except this gangsta is “Gonna do some chillin, chicken grillin and guitars”. He even says he’s “Trickin [his] truck like a Cadillac”.

• “This” (by Darius Rucker): This song couldn’t be more earnest: “Thank God for all I missed Cause it led me here to this.” I’ve never been a Hootie and the Blowfish fan, but maybe I need to give them a chance. Yikes.

• “Drink On It” (by Blake Shelton): This one is less sweet, but just as earnest. It’s about a country boy trying to get a girl drunk so he can sleep with her.

Maybe this will country thing be a fad for me. Or maybe I’ll be wearing Wranglers and cowboy boots by this time next year. I’ll definitely pass on the Skoal though.

I’ve always wanted to live life efficiently. When I was in third grade I made a list of all the chores I had to do every morning (like make the bed) and timed myself doing them. I even made my mom assign quality grades to each task to make sure I wasn’t sacrificing on that margin for speed.

I don’t make my bed anymore, but I do grade a lot of papers and I like to give copious feedback. The returns to optimizing this process are big. That’s why I recently decided to try out several iPad PDF annotation apps to find the one that best fits my workflow.

My needs aren’t extreme. I mostly want to highlight, strike-through, and add colored text. Occasionally I want to underline, add a long note, or draw a shape. And since all my documents live on Dropbox, I want to easily sync whole folders. It turns out there are at least three apps that can do all of these things, but they have some important differences in how they get there. Here’s what I’ve found:

GoodReader 3.14

GoodReader has been my go-to annotation app for the last six months, and it sets the bar high. The only real annoyance is that you have to enter inline comments (i.e., use the typewriter tool) in a popup editing window before the app drops your words into the document. Once there, it’s easy to grab the comment (by holding a finger on it) and move or resize the text box. This is critical since you never know exactly where or how big the text box will be. You don’t have any control over the font for these inline comments and the one it chooses is cheesy typewriter, but I don’t mind.

Syncing folders with Dropbox is great although the sync button can get hidden way down in in the “Web Downloads” area are under a long list of “recent” downloads. In fact, the whole document management interface is functional, but messy and unintuitive–i.e., once you know your way around, you don’t waste a lot of time, but it’s never pretty and there is a learning curve.

One useful feature I haven’t found in the other apps is a Back button under the scroll bar that (obviously) puts you back where you were after you scroll somewhere else or move to a bookmark. This is great when you’re flipping between text and tables.

iAnnotate PDF 2.1

iAnnotate PDF has a clunky name and a cartoony interface. I think it’s been around the longest and it’s extremely configurable. People who use it swear it does everything they want but it takes a little work up front to set it up. I believe them. And when you add inline text, you do it in the page itself which is much more natural than typing into GoodReader’s disembodied text box.

On the downside, it’s been crashy for me. I’ve been using an original iPad, so maybe it’s more stable on newer hardware. It doesn’t have a scroll bar that lets you move directly to the end (or beginning) of your document. It doesn’t always highlight the spaces between words and I can’t get it to autocorrect when using the typewriter tool. But even if these things got fixed, I just find the ugly icons too distracting.

PDF Expert 4.0

Ah, we have a winner! PDF Expert is a breath of fresh air. It has everything I like about GoodReader (except the back button) in a package that’s just beautiful to look at. The document management UI is super-clean, fast, and intuitive. It even gives you thumbnails of the first page of each document. The icons in the document annotation UI are simple and classy. When browsing a pdf, the page turns are very fast.

On top of this, I don’t know how I lived without PDF Expert’s undo and redo commands. They not only keep you from inadvertently junking up your document, it means the UI doesn’t ever ask “Are you really sure?” when you delete something because you can always roll back to the previous state.

What’s not to like? Some people complain that it only opens one document at a time, but I find opening and closing to be fast enough that this isn’t a big deal. My biggest complaint (and it’s minor) is that you only have 9 colors to choose from for markup and they’re kind of brash. It’s like they were inspired by the available colors for Apple’s cheap Smart Covers.

Honorable Mentions

PDFpen has been around for quite a while on the Mac, and if Preview wasn’t as good as it was, I’d probably be using it there. But on the iPad, it’s the new kid on the block. None of the positive reviews on the app store compares it with the big three, and a few negative reviews say it’s crashy and has fewer features. It will probably improve over time, but considering it costs the most ($15) and seemingly does the least, I’m skipping it for now.

Notability is really a note-taking app that can also annotate PDF’s. When I’m in a meeting or seminar, I usually use Nebulous Notes and type right into a text file. If I have a copy of the slides or the paper being presented, I now take my notes right on them with PDF Expert. Notability is particularly strong with drawing, but I find even with my Cosmonaut stylus, the lag between moving the pen and seeing my picture is just too unnatural to replace pen and paper.

Bottom Line

PDF Expert is fantastic. I’m so glad I went through this exercise and have graduated from GoodReader! Of course, I could have just read Cynical Babblings’ recent review of same apps. I found it while I was in the middle of my evaluation process, and he’s much more thorough than I am. And he also likes PDF Expert best.

Update: On December 30, 2013 I wrote up my impressions of PDF Expert 5.0.

Most grown-ups, even those without kids, have heard of Eric Carle—He is an extremely popular children’s book author who illustrates using collage. In fact, his Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do See and The Very Hungry Caterpillar have now supplanted Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon as the standard gift for newborn kids.

Both my daughters celebrated Eric Carle week at school last month and it got me thinking (again) just how over-rated he is. He’s either today’s Norman Rockwell or the kids’ version of Thomas Kinkade (“Painter of Light”).¹ With a few exceptions (like The Secret Birthday Message), his books couldn’t be more repetitive and formulaic.

I’m not saying his books have no redeeming qualities—the pictures are pretty and they do appeal to the 1-2 year old crowd. But thats not exactly the most demanding audience and his collage style isn’t even unique. Leo Lionni started publishing picture books with collage back in 1959 and Lois Ehlert won a Caldecott in 1989 for Color Zoo.

Leo Lionni in particular deserves far more attention than he gets. The only good thing about many of his books being out of print is that it made it slightly easier to pick four Lionni books to send to my sister’s family for Christmas.

Lionni was a late bloomer as a children’s book author as he had a full career as a “real” artist before writing Little Blue and Little Yellow. His stories are quirky and many push the envelope on what’s possible in a kids’ book. And every one has a positive message. For example in his first book, the characters are splotches of color who get mixed up and turn green. Their parents don’t recognize them until they cry themselves apart, but then the parents recognize their mistake and learn not to be so judgmental.

In A Flea Story, you never even see the main characters. Instead you only hear a dialog that’s reminiscent of Herman Hesse’s odd couple Narcissus and Goldmund. One flea just wants to stay home on their dog’s butt while the other longs for adventure. They travel together for a while and then split to follow their own paths. Stories that appeal to both adults and children are rare and those that do usually have two sets of jokes (Rocky and Bullwinkle is the classic example). Lionni manages to make the same things funny to all ages.

One of R’s favorite Lioni stories is Matthew’s Dream. Matthew is a poor mouse who visits a museum with his school and is inspired to be an artist. He dreams fantastic versions of his mundane world and paints them into reality. Often when R paints her own pictures she says “I’m Matthew!”

In Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse, Alexander yearns to be a windup mouse who is loved by the family instead of hated and chased with a broom. He finds a magical lizard who will grant him his wish in exchange for a purple pebble. By the time he acquires one, the world has changed and he learns to be careful what he wishes for. R still looks for purple pebbles to give to the lizard.

My one year old does like flipping through Eric Carle board books, but as soon as she will sit still and let us read to her, she’s graduating to Leo Lionni. The pictures are even more beautiful, the stories are awesome, and the whole family can enjoy the ride.

The main goal of our biweekly trip to the New Haven Free Public Library is to pick 20 or so great picture books. I’m looking for books with beautiful art, lovable (or at least memorable) characters, an original story, and a positive message. These books are rare and they’re difficult to identify by a book spine, a book cover, or even a quick perusal. And I don’t have time for much more than that.

So the failure rate is high, but in this case failing isn’t all that bad an outcome. In fact, most books that come home succeed on at least one dimension. Sometimes the books are so spectacularly awful or inappropriate that they stretch your brain. And often R’s favorite books are not my favorites. The bottom line is that we both get a fair amount out of reading the mediocre bulk of our haul, even when most get returned never to be read again.

Our latest keepers:

• The Umbrella Queen (by Shirin Yim Bridges, illustrated by Taeeun Yoo) I have a special place in my heart for atypical stories that take place in other countries. And even better, I like stories about kids who are true to themselves. This book takes place in Thailand and follows a girl whose inner artist cannot be squashed. It reminds me a lot of The Empty Pot(by Demi) and I Ioved that too.

• Library Lion (by Michelle Knudsen, illustrated by Kevin Hawkes) The lesson here is fantastic: Rules are good, but there are always extenuating circumstances when they should be broken. The premise is absurd (a friendly helpful lion hangs out at the library) but not totally drug-addled (see Hogula: the Dread Pig of the Night (by Jean Gralley) for an example of the latter).

• The Night Worker (by Kate Banks, illustrated by Georg Hallensleben) A respectful portrayal of a Latino engineer who takes a son to the job site one night. Lots of construction equipment and beautiful almost Gauguin-style paintings. What’s not to love?

• Max’s Dragonby Kate Banks, illustrated by Boris Kulikov) This story is about two (older?) brothers playing croquet and their quirky (younger?) brother who has a big imagination and loves rhymes. Super-cute and super-original and the art is good though not my favorite style.

• A Polar Bear Can Swim (by Harriet Ziefert, illustrated by Emily Bolam) This book is designed for kids who are learning to read on their own and who are curious about animals and science. That’s a perfect match for R. It’s filled with fun facts (“A cow can drink 75 gallons of water in a day!”) and simple artwork. I’m excited to check out other members of the Viking Science Easy-to-Read series.

• Balloons Balloons Balloons (by Dee Lillegard, illustrated by Bernadette Pons) I admit I find this book a little brain-numbing, but R is going to love any book that has a rabbit in a hot air balloon dumping huge numbers of multicolored balloons on a whole town.

• The Secret River (by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon) This book is special. It was written in 1947 by the author of The Yearling and it follows a poor black girl who lives in the rural South in the early part of the 20th century. I don’t have a lot of experience with this environment, but it sure seems real to me. The art is great and the story is magical in a way that works for adults and children.

Honorable mentions:

• Ginger Bear (by Mini Grey) R and I both like the part where Horace smears cookie dough all over the toilet seat, but it goes downhill from there.

• Really Rabbits (by Virginia Kroll, illustrated by Philomena O’Neill) Cute story about two pet rabbits who do household chores in the middle of the night. We could use these guys in our house.

• Wonder Woman: I am Wonder Woman (by Eric K. Stein, illustrated by Rick Farley) An adaptation of a comic book? Really? Yes! Wonder Woman is a positive role model for girls and R loves her tiara and bracelets. And it doesn’t hurt that Dad had a thing for Linda Carter when he was in high school.

• Punk Farm On Tour (by Jarrett J. Krosoczka) It’s really quite good, but if you already have Punk Farm you’re not getting a whole lot more here. If you don’t have Punk Farm yet, you need to run out and get it right away!

• Tricycle (by Elisa Amado, illustrated by Alfonso Ruano) A girl from a wealthy family in Guatemala is friends with three poor kids next door. She sees them steal her tricycle but doesn’t say anything to her parents because she knows she shouldn’t have left it in the bushes and she already has a lot more stuff than they have. I love the complex emotions and the interplay of personal relationships and the gulf between rich and poor that exists pretty much everywhere but is especially stark in Latin America. All of this is lost on R, but she’s 3. I’m not so sure she’ll get it at 5 either, but I commend the authors for trying!

This post has moved to Teach Better.

A few weeks ago the girls and I went to the Peabody Natural History Musem and learned that salamanders and newts are very common animals in Connecticut. The reason you never see them is that they mostly hang out in places we don’t go. Reading a little further, I learned that the best chance for an encounter is near water on a rainy early spring night.

Last week R and I were reading one of our favorite poetry books (Song of the Water Boatman and Other Pond Poems) and I noticed that it said early spring nights were a great time to hear peepers—these tiny tree frogs congregate around ponds and to attract mates with their calls. I’d never heard peepers, but it sounded pretty cool.

Then yesterday evening, when the weather forecast told me it was going to be our last rainy night for at least a week, I decided R and I needed to take a quick trip to the neighborhood pond. We got our rain boots, rain coats, umbrellas, and flash lights and hopped into the car. “Are you excited?” I asked? “Oh yes, very excited!” R replied.

We arrived at the trail head and while the batteries in my big maglight were almost dead, R’s flashlight saved the day. We tromped along and quickly heard our first peepers! They got quieter as we approached the pond, so we turned off our lights and only talked in whispers. Within a minute, a peeper on the other side resumed calling. We both thought it was fantastic.

On the way back to the car we looked for salamanders and newts but came up empty. We also learned that balancing on wet logs in the rain wearing rubber boots is harder than it looks. At home we did some quick Easter egg coloring and got ready for bed. R was super excited to when Mom suggested she wear her Peeper jammies.

The whole trip lasted 30 minutes, but our memories will last a lifetime.

I love paper—wrapping paper, home made greeting cards, paper mâché piñatas, a good coffee table book, any Sabuda pop up book, origami, even (especially?) paper airplanes—it all makes me happy. And up until recently, paper played a big role in my workflow. I read a lot of research articles and generally, I would print them and write all over them. The act of taking notes forces me to engage and extract much more than I would if I were passively reading. These hand-annotated articles would go into my file cabinet so I could refer to my notes next time I read the article. I also grade about 100 student papers per semester and like to provide copious feedback. Since my work days are spread between two or three campus offices and a home office, my bag would get pretty heavy.

My writing process also involved a fair bit of paper as I would hand write almost all my first drafts. It just felt more comfortable than transferring my thoughts directly to a text file via keyboard, even though it meant eventually typing up those drafts and having a paper pad in my bag next to my iPad at all times.

Three things have happened that have allowed me to comfortably transition the bulk of my previously paper-based work to the digital world: iPad, cloud storage, and my new attitude toward writing. The iPad lets me bring my research library with me and read it as if I were reading paper. The screen and software are fast enough that annotation feels natural, and it’s far easier to read in a variety of positions and places than a laptop. The cloud (in particular Dropbox) lets me edit or annotate on any of my devices and have the results automatically synchronized with all my other devices without my lifting a finger. I love technology that works for me rather than vice versa.

My new attitude toward writing has nothing to do with hardware or software and everything to do with the fact that I’m just writing more. This includes blogging, writing handouts for classes, writing letters of recommendation, writing referee reports for journals, and even occasionally writing up my own research. I’m getting more comfortable composing on the computer through simple practice, and the fact that the bulk of my writing is low-stakes has made the learning curve bearable.

Reading and annotation take place mostly on the iPad in GoodReader. I’ve yet to see a pdf that it can’t handle and over the past two years the annotation features have become better and better. I’m still a little slower on the iPad than I am scribbling on paper with a red pen, but the advantages outweigh the current speed penalty. I don’t have to carry 300 pages of paper around. I don’t have to make photo copies of anything. I can distribute comments on papers via email as soon as they’re ready. Students don’t have to decipher my handwriting. And with practice I think I’ll get faster. There are (several) other pdf annotation apps for the iPad, but none of them (AFAIK) integrate as well with Dropbox. I can specify a folder and GoodReader will download all the pdf’s in it so I have local copies. Then, after I’ve made my changes I just have to press the Sync button and the modified files are uploaded.

The Preview app on the Mac has always allowed some pdf annotation, but with the Lion release, it became excellent. On a desktop monitor (or two), I can blow up the text nice and big in one window and still have room to see tables/figures in another. With a real keyboard and a healthy dose of keyboard shortcuts, I’m actually pretty fast at marking up a document. I’ve heard good things about Skim as a Preview replacement, and at some point I’ll give it a try.

For storage and searching, I use Mekentosj’s Papers app. It integrates with several online research databases (including ISI’s Web of Knowledge) and makes it very easy to slurp articles into my own libary. I’ve also had some success with having it generate bibliographies for my own papers. But at the end of day, I spend a lot more time reading and annotating with Preview or GoodReader that I do searching and organizing in Papers.

New writing mostly happens on a Mac. I continue to get faster at typing on the iPad and iPhone, but I’m still way more efficient with a real keyboard. emacs (Aquamacs to be specific) is my editor-of-choice (as it has been for more than 20 years now) but I’ve started using Mindnode for initial brainstorming. I’m not sure it will stick, but it is fun.

My work world has a lot less paper in it than it did 6 months ago, but I’m still not 100% paperless. What’s left is mostly scraps, but there are two things that I’d like to eventually transition:

1. Old articles: I still have that big file cabinet full of articles with notes. Scanning them all or transcribing the notes would be a ton of work that doesn’t seem worth it. I could also just throw them away, but storing them is pretty cheap. And so for now they sit.

2. Lecture notes: I don’t like to put everything I’m going to say on my lecture slides. I think it’s confusing when students don’t know when to listen to me or read the screen. Ideally, my slides just highlight the organization and important points and include the occasional figure, table, or dramatic photograph. I tend to have a bunch of written notes that go along with each lecture that I refer to while I’m talking or writing on the board. Slowly but surely I’m putting these notes into Markdown documents that I can refer to while I teach, but for now I have a lot of physical folders.

Mostly paperless has been great for me because my bag is lighter and I now have access to almost everything I need from almost everywhere. It makes sharing documents easier and I can index digital assets on multiple dimensions. Those debates about whether aricles should get stored by author or by topic or by project are long gone since it’s easy to do all three. Paperless is also great for trees because they can stay where they are soaking up sun and CO2 instead of being ground into pulp and mixed with smelly chemicals.

100% paperless is kind of like enlightenment. It’s extremely hard (if not impossible) to achieve, but there are great rewards for striving to get there.

Every couple weeks we go to the library after school. Mostly we run around and raise a ruckus because that’s what three-year-olds and almost-one-year-olds do. But we also gather up 15-20 new books to peruse at home. I’ve tried a lot of strategies for selecting them:

• Get all the books by a few authors we like. This sometimes nets us some surprises (Janell Cannon’s Trupp is about a large earless cat who hangs out with the homeless) and some stinkers (Don Freeman’s Moptop is about a kid who “needs” a haircut) but the main problem is we don’t know enough good authors.

• Quickly make a random selection from a new part of the picture book stacks. More misses than hits but not so bad.

• Take most of the books the librarians have pulled out for display on the tops of the shelves. This works surprisingly well as the librarians have better than random taste. But I feel slightly guilty—it’s like taking the clothes off the mannequins in a shop window.

After reading these books at home (some several times) there are always a few keepers that we have to order on Amazon. Here are the keepers from our most recent trip:

• Dahlia (by Barbara McClintock): I absolutely love everything about this book–Old fashioned beautifully detailed line drawings and a story about a tom-boy who gets a lacy doll as a gift from an aunt. Great fun and great message.

• Cat’s Night Out (by Caroline Stutson, illustrated by J. Klassen): A counting (by twos) book with tons of cute dancing cats–the wife and kid love it though I prefer a bit more story.

• Tinka (by Rainy Dohaney): This story about a cupcake-sized sheep is only OK and the washed out art is nothing special. But it’s still 4.5/5 stars because it’s so quirky and R thinks it’s hilarious when the crow gets a worm wrapped around his head.

• The Birthday Presents (by Paul Stewart and Chris Ridell): Super-cute story about a rabbit and a hedgehog with classic-looking pictures.

There were also a few books that weren’t keepers but merit mentions:

• Root Beer and Banana (by Sarah Sullivan, illustrated by Greg Shed) is about a middle-class country girl and a poor country girl who become friends over ice pops. The art is old-fashioned and I love how the poor girl is treated like a regular person and not a sad museum exhibit. But the stereotypes are a little heavy handed–she’s kind of dirty with ratty clothes, she has no nearby family, and she only has money she found in the street. And she can’t read so good.

• Priscilla and the Pink Planet (by Nathaniel Hobbie, illustrated by Jocelyn Hobbie) has rhymes that are as close to Seuss as I’ve every read. And the art is cute and so is the story. I’m not sure why I don’t like this book more. Maybe it’s because the main character reminds me too much of Betty Boop.

• The Bracelet (by Yoshiko Uchida): A picture book about the Japanese-American internment during WW II. Definitely not appropriate for a three year old. A little too much barbed wire.

• Fly Free! (by Roseanne Thong): I want to like this book. It’s about Buddhist temples in Vietnam and is all about doing nice things for other people. The art is pretty. But I really didn’t like that the temples were caging sparrows so that people could pay them money to release them (and get good karma). Can we just not cage the birds to begin with please?

Last week I went to a local shop and bought new tires for the mountain bike I ride around town almost every day. The angst I felt while deciding exactly what to buy took me by surprise. Part of me wanted something cheap and durable that would roll smoothly and efficiently on pavement. But another part of me wanted to replace my worn out racing tires with something aggressive, knobby and impractical for city streets.

When I was in my twenties and thirties the bike I rode defined me more than my sunglasses, my haircut, or my car. It was more than my style—it was a major part of my identity. I know that sounds ridiculous, but imagine what a truck guy’s truck means to him or what an Apple nerd’s Mac means to him (or her). A good friend of mine would call me regularly and say “Got time for some tire talk?” We would spend the next half hour dissecting the pros and cons of different treads; analyzing the tracks we saw out on the trails; debating whether Kevlar worth the price premium; discussing trends like “thin on the bottom, knobby on the sides”, and arguing about what tire shed mud or carved corners best. At the end though, the most important question was: “What are you riding right now?”

Since I hit my forties my life has changed a lot. I spend the vast majority of my time working, parenting, or doing house stuff. Trail riding (and even trail-running) is mostly on hiatus. My daylight leisure time is almost always having fun with the girls and when they’re sleeping at night I’d rather blog than ride. In a few years (when the girls are older) I’m sure I’ll be back, but until then, my riding will be limited to the streets between my offices and classrooms. This is far far better than nothing–I actually love battling traffic and the elements.

So it’s been years since my bike’s gotten dirty, but up until last week, I still had the option of veering onto any trail and cutting through East Rock Park at a moment’s notice. And I liked projecting the image of an MTB guy on his way to a trailhead (even if I was wearing a corduroy jacket). Those days are over. I chose a pair of cheap tires that ride way better than my old knobbies on the road. They even have a little bit of a tread that could handle some of the East Rock trails. But now I’m honest with myself and world. I’m a bike commuter. It’s not permanent, but it’s true. And I’m good with that.