Copper Robot: Mitch Wagner's old blog – go to www.MitchWagner.com

I finished my third business day Monday with my new system for staying focused on deadlines. I’m calling this project a success. It’s now ten after two and I’m starting to write this blog post, which is the very last thing I have to do that has a deadline of today.

I still have plenty of work to do, but nothing I have to get finished before I call it quits.

Friday went equally well. And because I got all my deadline work wrapped up Friday, I didn’t feel like I was required to go into the office and work on the weekend (although I did a little anyway).

Thursday wasn’t quite so smooth — I had a commitment that pulled me out of the office much of the afternoon — but my new system kept it from being quite as long a day as it might have been.

The system has two parts:

- Do the stuff with pressing deadlines first, then tackle the rest. Having a deadline hanging over your head is stressful. If you procrastinate on the deadline, it sucks the energy out of your body.

- When you’re working, work. When you’re taking a break, don’t work. No screwing around on Facebook when working. When working, stay focused. When taking a break, enjoy it for a few minutes, and don’t feel guilty.

I’m finding it much easier to get out of bed in the morning. This is not so surprising in retrospect. The stress of barely making deadlines all day was wearing me down; I felt like I was losing control. I’m much less wound up now, knowing that I can finish what I need to do every day in a reasonable amount of time.

I was unable to eat eggs until several years ago. When I was a kid I had a violent egg allergy and for some years as an adult I thought I had possibly gotten over it. Food allergies do appear and disappear at various times in life. The thing to do, I thought, would be to eat a small forkful of egg on a day when I had nothing planned, and see if I had any reaction.

But I kept putting it off and putting it off and then I realized: There never was going to be a day, not the slowest and most boring Saturday of my life, when I woke up in the morning and said, “Yes. Today would be a good day to risk possibly several hours of projectile vomiting. Today is the day when I will see if I can eat eggs.”

So I just let it go.

Until a few years ago when I ordered something called a “machaca burrito” from a local taqueria, and as I ate it I thought it had an odd texture and flavor. So I Googled and sure enough, machaca is basically half scrambled eggs, half spiced meat, with onions and peppers and stuff.

And I felt fine. So I realized I was no longer allergic to eggs.

I didn’t really love eggs after that. I had discussed this with my youngest brother once, years before the machaca incident, and I mentioned how weird it felt to have never eaten a plate of scrambled eggs or an omelet, something that almost everyone else in America has done many times. He said I shouldn’t worry about it, I wasn’t missing much. Eggs, he said, are kind of rubbery, greasy, and bland; he doesn’t care for them.

I found he was right when I started eating eggs. I didn’t really care for them. And yet I ate them a few times a year afterwards, because they’re easy to cook, often the only thing you can get for breakfast when traveling on business, and (contrary to common wisdom), they’re good for you. Also, people who love eggs REALLY seem to love them. What was I missing?

I discovered that eggs taste better — actually good — if you use a lot of salt and pepper on them, and mix in other stuff.

A short while ago, a friend on Facebook asked whether eggs and salsa were a thing, and I said, “OMG WHY HAVE I NEVER THOUGHT OF THAT BEFORE????!!!!!11111!!!!” Because it immediately sounded delicious.

And I cooked it up for myself tonight, and I was right. Here’s the recipe, if you can call it that. You can vary the amounts as much or as little as you want; this ain’t fine French cooking here.

2 eggs
5-6 ounces of salsa
1 ounce shredded Mexican cheese

Mix up the salsa and the cheese. Pan-scramble the eggs. When the eggs are nearly cooked, salt and pepper them, and then dump in the salsa and the cheese and stir it all around until the salsa is warm and the cheese is soft. Dump it over 1.5 ounces of tortilla chips. Add chipotle hot sauce. Eat. It makes one serving, about 550 calories. Serve it with a fresh vegetable, which you can optionally mix in with everything else to make a one-bowl meal out of it.

I know anyone who knows how to cook is right now saying, “That? That’s it? That deserves a recipe?” But I don’t really cook at all, so this is a big deal for me.

I had the insight Wednesday that I need to fundamentally change my work habits, because right now I put in hours of work after dinner every night, plus big blocks of time on the weekend, and I just don’t want to live like that anymore.

Until Wednesday, I sort of browsed through my to-do list for the morning and much of the afternoon, picking whatever looks urgent or interesting to do at the moment.

Then I say to myself, “Holy crap, it’s 3 pm and I still haven’t written my blog or done any of the other things I have to get done with a deadline of today.” At that point, I focus myself and avoid distraction until dinner, then back into my office for more intense, focused work until I finish at 10 pm.

Wednesday, as I rolled dispiritedly into my office after dinner, I thought: Enough. New system. From now on, I focus on the deadlines first. After that, take a breath, browse through my to-do list, read the news and get all the information together to do my blog for the next morning, so I can get started right away at full speed.

With that settled in my mind, I finished work Wednesday night, then spent a little time with Julie and went to bed.

Where, coincidentally, I read this terrific blog by my imaginary friend Lisa Dilg^[1], “The Way I Am Working Isn’t Working.”^[2] Seems she’s going through the same work issues I am, and has a solution, based on a session she attended at the South by Southwest conference in March. Tony Schwartz, who spoke at that session, advocating “sprints” for work.

The reason we procrastinate — and that’s what my morning browsing was, procrastination — is because work is never-ending. There’s no finish line. You’re always working. And because you’re always working, you instinctively hold energy back for when you’ll need it later.

Instead, you should work in sprints, says Schwartz via Lisa. Give it everything you have for 90 minutes, take a break for 10, then do it again. And at the end of the day, be done. When you know there’s a finish line, and breaks along the way, you’ll be able to give work your all when you’re doing it.

I don’t know about the 90-10 bit, but the rest sounds exactly like what I’m talking about. Stay focused on work in the morning, until it’s done, but be sure that you walk away when it’s time to walk away.

That was Wednesday night. How’s the experiment going?

Well, it got off to an unusual start. Thursday was my presentation for an Internet marketing class^[3], so that ate into a big chunk of my afternoon. But I stayed focused on deadlines from the first thing in the morning and all through the day. Writing this blog is my last deadline and it’s 9 at night, and I’m just about done..

After I’m done with this, I’ll go sit with my iPad in the rocking chair in my office, organize my to-do list for tomorrow, then read some blog posts and prepare to write tomorrow’s blog when I get in in the morning. I’m looking forward to having a night off, and a weekend.

1. ^[1] An Internet friend you’ve met only briefly or not at all in person. ↩
2. ^[2] Great headline. ↩
3. ^[3] It went great, thanks. And if you were one of the students in that class, and you’re checking out this blog for the first time, welcome! ↩

Later today, I’m heading over to Grossmont College to give a presentation at an Internet marketing class on the subject of blogging for business, a subject I know something about. This is going to be the longest presentation I’ve ever had to give, 50 minutes, and yet I’m pretty confident. The presentation is mostly done, it’s a subject I’m very familiar with, and I’ve been told I’m good at giving presentations, even though I don’t have a lot of experience.

I do not share the common American fear of public speaking. I love an audience. I do love to hold forth, as anyone who’s been in my company will know quite well.

I’ve sat through a great many presentations, starting with classes in school and numerous presentations at conferences and meetings. I like the way designers do presentations, which is the way I’ve seen them done at O’Reilly Media conferences, with not a lot of text, and lots of pictures — interesting pictures, not just your basic clip art.

I do want to do more presenting, and from what I’ve seen, the way to do that is get practice, and build up a body of presentations that you’ve rehearsed and can pull out at any moment.

And now (now being Wednesday night, as I write this for posting Thursday morning, which is how I do this blog), it’s time for me to get back to work on my presentation. Curtain time is 2:30 PDT today. Wish me luck!

I’ve been a professional writer most of my life. I’ve been a daily newspaper journalist, written for the business-to-business computer technology press, and done marketing writing. I’m extremely good at it. I can say that with absolute certainty because, unlike creative writing, there is an absolute standard of quality for commercial writing, which is the kind of writing I do. That standard is financial. I’ve remained employed, and actually done pretty well as a writer all this time. Because I work in a very competitive field, therefore this demonstrates I am extremely good at what I do.

Some of my friends want to be creative writers. They think of writing differently from the way I think about it. I think of writing as my job, it is what I am required to do to get my paycheck regularly, like showing up to meetings and filing expense reports. This doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy writing; I do, a lot of the time. (I also enjoy some meetings. But not expense reports.)

People who want to be creative writers have different motivations for writing than we commercial writers do. They look to it for personal fulfillment. I find that alien.

And yet not so alien. Because in addition to being a commercial writer, I also have ambitions to be a creative writer. The writing I do here is creative. I’ve also been writing fiction for the past few years (and talking about writing fiction since childhood).

People with ambitions of creative writing often find writing extremely difficult. The simple act of stringing together words into sentences is difficult for them, because they’re not used to doing it. I do it regularly, every day. But sometimes it’s been very hard. Really, until last year, I found writing to be difficult, even though it’s something I did every day.

The way to make writing easier is to do more of it. Last year, I blogged at Computerworld. I had to write about 500 words every business day, plus quite a lot of additional writing I did for other clients. Even though I’ve had to write that much at other times in my career, for some reason last year doing all that writing chipped away at the difficulty. Now, writing is coming easier to me.

It’s not always easy for me to write creatively. I think this blog helps with that. Also, I finally got the discipline about four years ago to put myself on a schedule and sit and write fiction almost every single day. Now I’m on a 300-word-a-day fiction quota.

I’m finally getting to the point where writing fiction is not painful. The pain came from being completely stuck on ideas of what to write next. I’m getting confidence to realize that if I’m completely stuck on an idea, if I just write anyway, I’ll think of something. Sometimes I surprise myself, and what I write on those occasions — when I’ve come to the keyboard completely dry of ideas, when I have no clue what I will write that day — actually looks pretty good to me. The confidence that I’ll be able to think of something has made writing fiction less painful to me.

And yet I still need the constant reminders. Tonight I thought about skipping the fiction quota, because it’s late and I’m tired and I can’t think of what to write next. Then I re-read the previous paragraph.

A “British firm is currently looking for female web coders who have no problem baring their assets in a working environment,” according to Tom’sGuide.com.

Clothing is forbidden in the Nude House, which is looking to hire a partner, sales manager (preferably female), salespeople (men and women), and web-coders (women only).

Owner Chris Taylor’s “company page has no problems indicating that he’s favoring female employees. Why? Because he’d rather look at breasts than a man’s family inheritance. ‘I don’t want to look at men,’ he said, following up on the website by saying the company pays very well and ‘everyone will enjoy themselves.”

This is one way to solve the problem of employees pilfering office supplies.

I wonder how they observe Casual Fridays?

I don’t want to be the person who has to clean the desk chairs.

OmniOutliner, the nifty outlining app that I started playing with on Sunday, is now available as an iPad app.

The iPad version has the core capabilities of the desktop version. You can create an outline, edit it, indent and outdent items (is “outdent” a word? My spellchecker seems to think so). You can format text about eighteen different ways from Sunday, and attach photos to your outline items.

The user interface is extremely well done, which is exactly what I’d expect from an Omni Group application.

It’s missing a few things from the desktop version. You can’t attach file types other than images. The desktop supports attaching plain text files, video, PDFs, and more.

I’m primarily using outlines on the desktop as containers for all the documents associated with particular projects. The iPad version doesn’t work for that. It’s probably unreasonable for me to expect that it would, given the iPad’s limitations.

The other limitation: Synch. The iPad version synchs with files on the Mac, which is great, but it only works through WebDav, iDisk, and email. It doesn’t support native synch with Dropbox. That service has become my hub for synchronizing documents between my Mac, iPhone, and iPad, as well as sharing docs with colleagues; any iPad app without Dropbox support is crippled.

Still, overall it’s a nice app, and I’m pleased to add it to my iPad. I’m not sure how I’ll use it, but I’m sure I’ll figure something out.

It’s priced at $19.99.

Disclosure: I got a review copy of the app for free from The Omni Group a few days ago, and I’ve played with it since then. However, yesterday I deleted that version from my iPad and downloaded and paid for it from the App Store, same as any consumer. Because even on this blog I like to avoid conflict of interest, and disclose them when they come up.

Every once in a while I send a famous blogger a link to something I wrote. Not often. Not even if it’s one of the famous bloggers I also consider a friend. I know they’re very busy and get a lot of email, so I hang back and try to avoid adding to their already overflowing inboxes.

But when I do send that email, I always feel uncomfortable, like I’m asking them for something. Which I’m not. I’d be thrilled if they linked to my work with their powerful social network mojo, but if not, well, that’s cool too. If they don’t read the link, I’m fine with that. The reason I sent them the link is because I’m a fan, and I thought they’d enjoy it, not because I’m asking for or expecting anything in return.

This is what the whole “Retweet this!” “Like this on Facebook!” culture has done to Internet discourse. Too many people seem to be walking around social networks with their hand out. It can be like going to a party where everybody is a used car salesman and they’re always closing.

There’s less of it now than there was a year ago, but it’s still annoying.

This isn’t about me and how important I am. You probably feel the pressure too.

The latest iterations in this phenomenon are podcasters who interrupt their podcasts to beg you to rate their podcast on iTunes. But at least podcasts are free, so I shouldn’t begrudge them a bit of self-promotion. What’s worse is app vendors who nag you to rate their apps in the App Store. I already paid for your app; I’ve done enough for you.

This is one of the reasons I don’t have a Facebook “like” or Twitter “retweet” button on these blog posts. It’s not the main reason — the main reason is I have other things to do, and I expect I’ll get to it eventually. But, for now, I’m glad to have this as a begging-free zone. If you enjoy these blog posts, and you feel the urge to tweet or like them on Facebook, well, you know where the tools are and you know how to use them. If not, that’s cool too; thanks for reading.

I attended the local TEDx conference here in San Diego Tuesday. TED is this high-end lecture series featuring great thinkers, artists, and entrepreneurs working for social change and to improve the world. Speakers talk for 15 minutes or so, and the talks are grouped together in themes. There’s a national conference, and then there’s TEDx, a series of local events, affiliated with the national event but operated independently.

Marketing and presentation for TEDx is very slick. This is a high-end event. There’s competition to get in, so you feel like part of an elite when they let you through the door. Stage management is pretty smooth (although Tuesday’s event had some problems with the A/V).

The elite air annoys some people, but the content is great. Don’t let the marketing bother you, just go with it. It’s worth attending if you get a chance.

I was looking for a few things from Tuesday’s conference, and I think I got them.

Mainly: I was looking for opportunities to volunteer in the community. I’ve been looking for that for a few years. I found a couple of candidates: Second Chance is an organization for the homeless and people with criminal records, looking to help them find jobs and housing. And High Tech High is a school designed to teach science, math, and technology to an ethnically and economically diverse group of students. I’ll be looking into both.