Surface computing, move over!

For a few weeks now, my two team-mates at work and I have been using a “horizontal” whiteboard, lying across the desk surface between us. I had been wanting to try this for a while, but it wasn’t possible because of our previous desk arrangement. Now that we have this large area of space between us and no partitions, this small whiteboard fits perfectly without getting in the way.

We’ve found ourselves using it virtually every day, illustrating explanations, walking through calculations and brainstorming design ideas. Visitors will intuitively pick up a pen and start using the whiteboard when explaining things. It somehow seems to invite people to use it more than most whiteboards. However, it’s not only a collaborative tool: it also makes a great scratch-pad when you’re brainstorming on your own. To ensure that it stays useful, we make an effort to keep the board clean; nothing tends to stay on there for longer than a day or so.

Overall, it’s being used far more than any wall-mounted whiteboards we’ve had near us, and I think this is due to two key differences to wall-mounted boards. Firstly, each one of us can reach the board very easily without having to get up. You just turn your chair slightly and there it is. Secondly, the whiteboard is between us, so it feels less like a presentation aid and more like a collaborative work surface, accessible equally well from all sides.

If your work involves collaborative problem-solving, and if your desk arrangement allows it, I highly recommend setting up a whiteboard like this. Don’t make it too big, because you won’t be able to reach all corners and it will also eat into your desk real-estate. I think ours is 90×60 cm, which is just right. I also recommend investing in some pens with a finer tip than the standard ones you tend to get. Those are designed to be visible from a few meters away, but you’ll find them too thick for handwriting at a comfortable size for close-up work. Edding do quite a range of dry-erase board markers.

Don’t let it control you

Since I got broadband Internet a few years ago, I’ve had my email client at home checking for new mail every 5 minutes. When I started using a dedicated RSS reader, I also set that to check feeds as frequently as possible (every 30 minutes in NetNewsWire).

Earlier this year, I had to spend a few weeks without an Internet connection at home. I was able to check my email only when I made the trip down to the university library, and I stopped following the news altogether. Although slightly inconvenient, this was not as bad a situation as I had expected, and I felt that I got lots more work done this way.

When I eventually got connected again, I really felt the contrast. The RSS reader in particular was very interruptive. Unlike email, which comes in intermittently, there were updates in my subscriptions virtually every time the program refreshed them, so an interruption was almost guaranteed to happen every 30 minutes, with the green badge on NetNewsWire’s icon tempting me to see what was new. I tried to compensate by setting it to check only every 2 hours. However, it turned out that I had got conditioned to expecting news on a regular basis, and found myself glancing at the Dock icon quite often. I actually lost patience and manually refreshed the subscriptions sometimes, which only resulted in me feeling disappointed with my willpower.

My solution to this unfeasible dependency has been to turn off automatic checking in NetNewsWire. As hoped, this seems to have undone the conditioned expectation of updates, and I now manually refresh my feeds when I’m having a break. I’m sure that’s still more often than truly necessary, but at least I can concentrate on my work when I want to.

I’ve also reconfigured my email client to update every 15 minutes. I don’t want to turn off automatic checking altogether here, because sometimes you do get emails that need immediate attention. It seems that since emails are more sporadic, there is no regular interval to get used to, so you don’t actually notice that the program is checking less frequently.

Another highly effective strategy I use is to minimise the number of RSS feeds I subscribe to by using good news “gatherers” such as John Gruber, and even to dump Flickr contacts (except friends, of course) whose photos I don’t end up liking as much as expected.

If you feel like you’re getting an information overload on your desktop, I recommend you take control and make some changes as well. You’ll be surprised how easy it is to get by without being constantly connected.

John Gruber goes full-time

Following a couple of years of contemplation, John Gruber of Daring Fireball has finally made writing his full-time job.

John is a great writer, and DF is my favourite Mac/technology column. His analyses are always spot-on, making it seem like he has been blessed with an unfairly large share of all the common sense in the industry. Also, through his Linked List he acts as a sort of human news aggregator/filter, saving me from having to read through all those other blogs and news sites myself.

If you make an appropriate donation, you will be rewarded with goodies such as full-text RSS feeds and cool t-shirts.

I really hope this works out for him.