Alan Gutierrez

That was to be the title of a wail of anxiety about how it’s the last minute when I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do. Just wrote an excellent little post in Kiloblog about how to use Chip In to raise money for Bayou Boogaloo. Then, before I press save for the first time, I wonder, should I post this at Daily Beta. I’ve not done anything with that site in a long time.

Now, something that was supposed to make life faster, is making it slower. Injecting long term decisions into short term decisions. This is driven by a false sense of permanence. The sense that permalinks mean that one must choose carefully.

The point of this post, and of this theme, Getting Things Half-Done, is to study all the places where I stop. How do you overcome the dead stop? The paralysis of indecision?

In this case, it’s a variation on the fear that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. When I write a post, I have one chance to position it. I had better choose wisely. That is the foreboding nonsense that speaks in hushed tones in the back of my head. How neurotic.

In the last year, I have become more of a programmer. Still not (self-)published, but at the very least plugging away, happy with the foundations, and not turning back for another rewrite. This comes from a way of dealing with the many little murmurs of doubt. I write it down the doubt in the form of a question. Then I wait for it. In a day or so, the answer comes.

This is not always going to work. Waiting for it assumes that you have a the knowledge of the technique necessary to have those moments of illumination. More to the point, am I really going to allow a quandry like, “where do I post my little rant?” to simmer in the background? It’s not really a problem to be solved.

With some problems, stop means wait. With others, stop means nothing.

In response to my frank comments at the indev.ca forums and my blog post How I Lost My Morning to Tagging and EMail, one Scott Morrison wrote me to assure me that the data was not lost, and asked that I help troubleshoot the problem.

Obviously someone who suffers the delusion that the customer is always right. I subscribe to the Be Nice Or Leave school of customer service. Especially when the customer has yet to pay for anything.

So, rather than be a complete bastard, I zipped up a copy of a sample message, one from the server, one from my MacBook, and sent it on its way. Maybe that will tell him something.

But, what would I do if it was my code? I’d connect to the IMAP server and trace though the code. I really want MailTags to work. I figured, why not just set up an email account for Scott? No better way to reproduce the problem.

I set up an account and sent him a message.

A few hours later, three messages from Scott. The first two zeroing in on the fact that Dovecot stomps the X-Keywords header, where the tags are stored. They are also stored in a JSON string in the X-MailTags header, so the third message had a new MailTags bundle that reads the tags from that header.

After dropping it into place, I rebuild my mailboxes, and my tags reappearedThey were never lost, stored in two separate headers. Apparently, Courier IMAP is not capricious as Dovecot. It doesn’t munge headers the way Dovecot does. Scott’s communications shows that he knows his way around IMAP. Certainly keeping a MailTags specific header for the tags shows foresight. That time spent tagging was not lost.

Now, I’m tagging away again. MailTags is very much a part of my workflow.

That and Mail ActOn, which is another indev.ca addition to Mail.app.

Actually, I’d spent the day despondent wondering what I was going to do without MailTags, now that I’d become accustomed to it.

Update: It is a known issue with Dovecot, as noted in Problem/workaround with X-Keywords and Apple’s Mail.app. I wonder how this is address in Thunderbird, since it seems to always behave correctly, although there is evidence of issues as in 1.0 beta3 not preserving X-Keyword header?.

Update:: I’m now, as of April 14th, 2007, eagerly awaiting Public Beta 10. I’ll be checking the Mail Tags 2.0 site frequently. Public Beta 9 just expired. Scott Morison expires his betas so people are forced to upgrade, which is not a bad idea at all.

I’ve been fastidiously tagging my email using Mail.app and MailTags. I’d developed a routine, where I’d copy my mail into a directory for tagging, and then add tags. I’d make sure that the days mail was tagged before shuffling it to an archive.

When MailTags is added to Mail.app, search becomes very slow. This was a problem that I reported in the forums under Search is Unacceptably Slow.

Now, when I rebuild a mailbox, the tags are not downloaded. I’ve reported this in IMAP Loses Tags. This is the deal breaker.

Now I’m looking at Tag the Bird again and wondering how long it would take to hack in IMAP support. Tagging in Thunderbird 2.0 is a joke, as noted in the discussion on the Mozilla wiki, one choses their tags from a drop down menu, which means you must limit your vocabulary.

Reference was made to Tagocity, an extension for Outlook. Thunderbird and MailTags should strive to be half of this, for starters.

I don’t think the guys at Thunderbird really get tagging. As a developer, when I’m in heavy software development mode, my email channels are few and high-volume. The proverbial fire hose. A focused, high-pressure jet of email.

I’ll subscribe to mailing lists, and exchange information with a few collaborators. I can create folders to manage a handful of projects, that have a large volume of mail.

Thunderbird is great for listservs, but with a listserv, you don’t need futher categorization. The discipline of moderation keeps the listserv on topic. Tagging is nothing you need to do.

In my work in outreach, email comes from everywhere, and will make reference every aspect of my work. It is a monsoon. Classification of the email is the first step in responding to it. Gathering the droplets of information into tributaries. Here tagging is a potential life changing tool.

Developers don’t get tagging. (Thunderbird developers especially. The Mozilla project is hamstrug by it’s many, many forums, and depenedency on IRC.) Developers are accustomed to well moderated listservs and newsgroups.

GMail doesn’t do tagging right. The drop down list is painfully slow. You must create a list of tags to choose from. You can’t add a tag that you might use only every once in a while. “French Quarter Festivial” is something that I might get email about ten times a year. I don’t want to have to scroll past “French Quarter Festival”, 363 days of the year.

It’s only saving grace is that it tags a conversation, so that you only need to do this once, and messages thereafter are tagged.

MailTags is close to ideal, except that it’s broken. I’d love to help fix it, but the new version is not open source.

While browsing or reading blogs, I’d like an option to remind myself to read something in a few days, or tomorrow, or at the end of the day.

Usually, I’m reading though a list of stuff, and I’m trying to make it go away. Stopping and reading a long post or an article someone has sent me keeps that form happing.

My mind isn’t in the mindset to learn new things, or to consider creative actions in response to the message. How does this article, this post, or email message translate into something that I can do to make the world a better place?

I put it in a bucket somewhere, it becomes a task, something that I must do, and I already have enough things to do. If it reappears in my stream of information, it feels like it’s a living project. It gets me thinking about it. Eventually, it will occur to me, how this bit of information relates, or else I’ll grow tired of hearing about it.

In applying getting things done, I’m finding that I’m capable of piplineing tasks, in the way that processors pipeline instructions, or better still, the way the salesmen pipline sales. Things happen in parallel. You move each as far as you can go. Because of Getting Things Done organization, you can work on the next action, inching along. Then you’ll find that there are bunch of tasks that need a nudge and they’re finished. Suddenly, you’re getting a handful things done every day, because they are at the end if their pipeline.

“The best is the enemy of the good.” A quote from Voltaire.

I’ve been considering my points of failure, and the one that is most internal, as opposed to social, is the concept that everything I do is too little, too late.

No accomplishments, no credentials, everything is instead a sunk cost.

Lately, Voltaire’s quote has been on my mind.

• I’ve delayed the Daily Beta for months, since I didn’t want to produce it on Windows 2000, too old fashioned, rather wait until I can find or afford a Windows XP machine.
• I delay almost any new weblog until I can find a new, attractive, obscure template.
• I cannot take a project seriously until I’ve commisssioned a professional weblog design and business cards.
• Podcasts have waited on my learning more about mixing.
• I have dozens of unposted blog entries, waiting for a final rewrite, so they will be pithy and punchy.

In Getting Things Done you are supposed to look at the information that accumulates in your inbox, and determine the next action. What do I have to do next to get this done? If there is something you can’t do now, that’s cool. You’ve already done the hard part. You defined the task. You know what you need to do next. You’ve removed an unknown.

I need to take an extra step, and question the task. If the next action is something herculean, or requiring resources that I do not have, what can I do to move things forward.

Ask myself, what would be good? Use the word good. Strike an ballance between the effort spent and outcome desired.

Best is petty. Best is arrogant. Best is insecure.

Good is good.