First impressions, mind reading, snap decisions and thin slicing.

Those are strong concepts, some of them even mind boggling. But these are the very concepts that Blink, the book by Malcolm Gladwell is all about. This book will help you think about the way you think, especially in the first two seconds of meeting someone or seeing something. The two seconds where our unconscious takes over and let’s us think without thinking.

First impressions

The book has many examples about first impressions. About instinctively knowing whether a statue is a forgery or whether a service at tennis ends up as a double fault. These are examples from real life where experts knew instinctively what the right answer was in a blink. But not only experts do this, we all do this all the time. The first two seconds we look at something or at someone are the two most decisive seconds we can imagine. It’s hard to grasp, but most of the information we use to make decisions are packed into those two seconds.

Thin slicing is the concept behind the 2 seconds. In those two seconds we observe a lot, but our unconscious picks out only a small amount of decisive information. But as it is our unconscious doing this, we don’t consciously know what those critical pieces of information are. It’s something we learned to feel intuitively or instinctively. Blink takes a look at studies that have been conducted about what those thin slices are in particular situations.

One of the studies I really liked was a study about facial expressions. In this particular study the movements of the face were broken down into the smallest bits of muscle contraction (action units). Every movement was identified and facial expressions where tagged with these action units. By methodologically eliminating action units from an expression and asking lots of people to interpret it, the decisive action units where determined. They thin sliced the human face (although that sounds gruesome…). Nice fact: the results of this research have been used to create realistic facial expressions in animated movies.

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Yesterday this domain has been abused by a spammer. Last evening my email box filled with over 3500 “Returned mail” messages for addresses that do not exist. This morning the count is at >7500 messages. I can’t even begin to imagine how many were delivered.

I don’t know if they abused the mailserver at my provider, or that they just used my domain as the (fake) return-address. I’ve submitted a support ticket at my provider, but I have to wait until the workday starts (in 3 hours) to get a response. I’ll update this message when I have more news.

For anyone visiting this site to check who sent them the junk email: I apologize for the inconvenience! I have nothing to do with those mails, please delete them at once! I sincerely regret that you were bothered by that email, as much as I regret that my domain was abused for this.

I’ll keep you posted.

[Update]
The servers at my provider Argeweb were not abused. The spammer only used my domain as a fictitious domain where the spam was coming from. Argeweb was so kind as to remove the catch all function from my account, so the remainder of the mail will bounce, instead of flooding my inbox (counter stopped at 8000 undeliverable mails). Not a lot more I can do but to delete all the messages.

As the world is buzzing about the keynote speech Steve Jobs gave yesterday at Macworld Expo, I want to draw your attention to another speech he gave: the commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005.

In this speech Steve Jobs tells three stories. They are stories with a message of the lessons life presents and about how your choices define the outcome of those lessons. The underlying message throughout the speech is a message of authenticity, about being true to your own values, needs and wants, about listening to your own inner voice.

Enjoy this 15 minute video:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. - Steve Jobs

On Sundays I’m looking back on the past week. How did I perform towards my goals? How did my blog do? And how am I keeping up with my Getting Things Done system and Zen to Done habits?

Blog performance

I finally finished my post on comparing the different paper planner systems. It turned out to be a lot more work than I expected, but I’m pretty satisfied with the results. Traffic to the post has been good and some other blogs linked to it (thanks for that!), which lead to a rise in subscriptions (welcome!). Unfortunately it hasn’t been submitted to Digg yet (if someone feels like doing that I would be grateful) and although it has been submitted to StumbleUpon and received some thumbs up already, there is no (like zero) traffic coming from StumbleUpon to that post. Which is rather odd, we’ll see how that develops in the next week.

Subscriber numbers have broken the 600 barrier for the first time on Friday. This week’s average has a nice increase, both for subscribers as for visitors. I lost a Technorati point, but I suspect that their calculations are lagging behind (that happens a lot over there), because there are a handful of new incoming links from blogs that haven’t linked before.

I won the interview yourself contest at Shane and Peter’s blog with the best question (you had to make one up yourself). Curious to see what it is? Check the interview and leave your answer in the comments if you feel like it.

Today I’m going to add and update some pages on the blog, the About page needs an update. I’ve started using Twitter a lot more since a week or two (click to follow me), so I’m going to add it to the Contact page and the contact form needs to go live again too. And I have more on the list, I’ll see how far I get before it’s time to get back to renovating the house.

Fun fact: I started blogging at work too. I’m going to use it as an interactive way of communicating about project progress for the IT project I’m managing. Curious to find out how that’s going to work out.

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I’ve been using technological solutions for my calendering and for managing my To Do’s (or Next Actions) for a long time now. The last paper planner I owned and used is pre-2000. My last solution was a PDA I used for planning, contacts and for my Getting Things Done system. But the PDA was stolen recently.

Time for a brand new start, and I’m switching back to paper. I know, I couldn’t believe it myself either, but it’s true.

Drawbacks of the PDA-based system

On my PDA I mainly used the standard software to manage my contacts and appointments. For my GTD system I used ListPro and SOTI pocket controller (a setup inspired by gtdfrk) and it worked out quite nice, but it had some drawbacks that made me dislike it:

1. Entering data was painstakingly slow. (tap - tap - tap - tap -…)
2. The screen was too small. Both for displaying lines of text as for getting an overview of the lists.
3. Synchronizing was a horror. Two-way synch errors made me redo all kinds of work.
4. Loss of ALL data when it got stolen. To overcome #3 I had decided to keep all data for GTD on the PDA
5. No battery = no system. No system = no ubiquitous capture tool.
6. Calender and contacts did synchronize with Microsoft Outlook at home (which I do not use), but not with Lotus Notes at work (which I do use).

To solve most of the issues, I’m switching back to paper. That obviously won’t solve #4, all data is still in one place, nor #6, but I did that by hand anyway. And I discovered that I like writing a lot, old-school handwriting. It’s a lot better than tapping on a screen with a stylus anyway. 

Requirements for a paper based planner

Before starting to look at the different options, I made a small list of requirements for my new planner.

• Must fit in my pocket anytime
  So it must have a small size (about A6-size) and it must be thin.
• Week in one overview
  I don’t have a lot of appointments, so I don’t need a lot of space for them. Preferably there’s also no timescale to the day, let me decide myself upon my working schedules please.
• Ample space for notes
  I do have a lot of thoughts and things to do, so I need a lot of space for them.
• Simple and no clutter
  I don’t need inspirational quotes, pictures and other clutter. I need a simple system as one of the ZTD habits prescribes.
• Not expensive
  I prefer not to spend a lot of money on it. The PDA was expensive, but it had navigation on it too

So the best solution is small, simple and cheap.

Comparing different planners

I’ve limited myself to commercially available ready made systems. There are a lot of DIY planner systems out there as well, but I left them out of the scope. Partly because a lot of those systems assume you have a binder available, because you owned one of the systems already. And partly because I just didn’t want to go DIY on this one, I have already enough on my mind as it is.

Before I dive into the details, I’ll give you the table with the final results. Scoring is pretty easy: Get a requirement right, you get a point. Only the first and the last requirements are a little different:

• Fitting in my pocket is divided into two sub-requirements: Small and Thin. Both score half a point.
• Price is divided in two scores: Cheap ($0 to $50) and Average ($50 to $100). Cheap scores a point, Average scores half a point.

Now onto the details and the final result.

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