Inbox zero - zero - at last

November 6, 9:45pm CT:

"No new mail!" Sweet words.

I got to Inbox zero at the office ten months ago, but it was much harder to do the same at home. I couldn't dedicate concentrated time to slashing the backlog, so I had to go at it gradually. It took two months to get through the last ten or so, while also managing incoming email.

Last January I wrote about the techniques I used at work ...

... after 20 years of struggling with email, I have finally figured out how to do it.

... The most important intervention was reducing inflow. Of course I got rid of all email lists, newsletters and the like -- if an organization can't figure out blogs they're unlikely to have anything useful to tell me.

Most of all though, I reduced the number of email replies and misdirected emails that I get. I reduced the number of email replies by, paradoxically, spending more time crafting precise responses, and by being quicker to convert dysfunctional email to a meeting or phone call.

I craft my response to an email so that no further correspondence should be necessary. If an email discussion goes beyond two cycles that's a meeting. It's almost always, in this context, a brief, productive, and satisfying meeting. The body of the meeting appointment, by the way, includes the last email sent. (In Outlook drag and drop the email on the calendar icon.)

I reduced the number of emails I had to reply to by gently educating my correspondents about what goes on the To line. The To line should include only people with tasks - such as the single person who should respond. I reduced the time required to process and triage email by gently teaching about the correct use of the subject line. It should tell the reader what the email is about and what's needed. I change the subject line when I reply to precisely describe my replay -- including an answer summary...

Those techniques still work. I think I've actually improved the quality of all of our division's email -- some memes are contagious.

Ten months later I'm even better at deleting, at cutting off email by going directly to actions, and at scheduling thoughtful responses. The best killer of email noise remains the well crafted reply that allows no response. I'm very good at editing the 'email tail' so it tells a story in a small space.

These are work techniques though. At work productivity is our goal and email is a mixed blessing. It's a means to an end.

Personal email is different. I don't like getting email at work, but I do like to hear from friends and family! I'm not trying to make them better correspondents. (Emily, btw, does email very well.)

So at home I had to use slightly different techniques. I also use different software at home -- Gmail, Toodledo/Todo.app, and Google Calendar. This is what I do at home ...

• I forward email that requires more than a few minutes to my toodledo email connector and archive the message. Then I schedule times to work on those.
• Since Google threads emails by subject, when I replay I expose subject lines and revise them to prevent message loss in threads.
• At home as at work I use iPhone Mail.app to triage messages during down times and write short and quick replies.
• I long ago eliminated any email lists from my personal account. It if doesn't have a feed, it's not for me.
• I'm much better at responding quickly rather than deferring for a time that never comes.
• I keep my replies short - blogs are for rambling on about space, politics and fate.

Inbox zero zero. It's a good feeling.

Update 11/10/10: Past posts of mine, and a PPT shared via Google Docs

• A presentation on inbox zero from early 2010 - specifically for the corporate setting
• Gmail's biggest missing feature - and it's a whopper.
• Getting Things Done and Managing Email with Lookout for Outlook (2004 - now I use Windows Search and my approach is a bit different in other ways)
• Beating email - it's doable. Here's how. (July 2008 - I've moved another notch up since that time)

Nostalgia with Klatchian coffee

Knurd ...

• Being drunk is to be intoxicated by alcohol to such an extent as to be unable to perceive the world clearly through the senses.
• Being sober is to be able to perceive the world clearly through the senses, yet humans are quite capable of giving themselves illusions and little stories to make life more bearable.
• Being knurd is to be (un)intoxicated with Klatchian Coffee to such an extent that all such comfort stories are stripped away from the mind. This makes you see the world in a way 'nobody ever should', in all its harsh reality.

Stross on sympathy for times gone by ...

... If the past is another country, you really wouldn't want to emigrate there. Life was mostly unpleasant, brutish, and short; the legal status of women in the UK or US was lower than it is in Iran today: politics was by any modern standard horribly corrupt and dominated by authoritarian psychopaths and inbred hereditary aristocrats: it was a priest-ridden era that had barely climbed out of the age of witch-burning, and bigotry and discrimination were ever popular sports: for most of the population starvation was an ever-present threat... It's the world that gave birth to the horrors of the Modern, and to the mass movements that built pyramids of skulls to mark the triumph of the will. It was a vile, oppressive, poverty-stricken and debased world and we should shed no tears for its passing ...

They also tortured animals for play.

Wolf and dog, Neandertal and human, and the limits of taxonomy

Laypersons think of wolves and dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) as different species. That is not so, though the taxonomy is confused (see wikipedia page on "disambiguation" of the term Wolf).

Canis lupus includes domestic dogs and all "wolves", each as a "subspecies". So Huskies and Great Danes and Chiwawa are all Canis lupus familiaris, whereas the Husky-like wolf is a different subspecies.

A Wolf in truth, is simply a Canis lupus subspecies that is not domesticated, and a Dog is a Canis lupus subspecies that is domesticated (Canis lupus domesticus).

Canis lupus used to be the most widely distributed of all mammals, until humans took that spot.

Humans being "Homo sapiens", sometimes called "Homo sapiens sapiens" (see the problem?);  a species distinct from  Homo neanderthalensis and other Homo.

But if it is accepted that our most common ancestor interbred with Homo neanderthalensis to create us, shouldn't we follow the example of the Canids? Living humans might be considered Homo sapiens domesticus, Neanderthals would be Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, and Homo heidelbergensis would  be Homo sapiens heidelbergensis.

Of course if we follow the wolf example we'd probably start carving up Homo sapiens domesticus based on fur color and ancestral ranges. So at some point we probably need to admit taxonomy has its limitations.

PS. I wrote this post because Google couldn't find any other posts comparing the fraught and confusing taxonomy of Canis lupus with the even more fraught taxonomy of Homo sapiens. I think it's curious that we should have so much trouble classifying the two species we know best.

Middle aged lesson #434: Most contractors don't read books

It took me a long time to realize that most of the contractors we hire don't read books or journals about how to do their work.

Most of our contractors do what they've learned from colleagues, friends and family, and what they've invented on their own. The best of them know local code. Only a very few seem to read books and magazines related to their craft. (Some of which, of course, are nonsense -- this is not a peer reviewed literature.)

This means that contractors practices can be very far from best practices. A home owner can't hire a good contractor until they study books and journals first [1]. Then it's possible to have an informed conversation, and ask a contractor to exlain their (often correct) deviation from what's written.

This should not have surprised me.  North American trained physicians have very strong native study skills and strong legal and strong professional incentives to learn and adopt best practices. But we struggle to do that. Why should contractors, who are not selected for academic excellence, be any different?

[1] Yes, paper. This domain is very poorly represented online.

Understanding the elections - what's really changed

How can we best understand what's recently changed in American government?

First, we need to simplify. Any government, but especially a democracy, is a dynamic and chaotic sum of numerous conflicting powers.

Some of these powers are made of atoms - billionaires, CEOs, the well employed, the weak.

Others rule a different realm. Corporations are partly the will of their managers, partly powerful but dull amoeboid rulers of org space, changing their environment to suit their nature.

I think we should reduce this chaos to three agents: The corporation (private and public), the strong (healthy and wealthy) and the weak (30% of humanity). These agents are not enemies; they are sometimes allies, sometimes frenemies. Some corporations need employees and all need customers. The strong may love the weak, or at least may not want them rioting. The weak need the strong - and they need work.

This is how I imagine the American government was balanced in the spring of 2010:

This is how I think it will look in the winter of 2011, once the GOP takes the House



This was a very good election for corporations. Or so they think, but of course what they want isn't necessarily what they need.

The physics of mind and the limits of AI

Consider these three recent articles together ...

One ...

Dienekes' Anthropology Blog: Brains to Hand-axes quoting Science Daily

Stone Age humans were only able to develop relatively advanced tools after their brains evolved a greater capacity for complex thought, according to a new study that investigates why it took early humans almost two million years to move from razor-sharp stones to a hand-held stone axe...

Two ...

Gordon's Notes: The new history is deep history

... What did humans do in Georgian caves for 30,000 years? Thirty thousand years of waving and sewing and nothing changes?! They could not have had the same brains we have ...

Three ...

Optimization at the Intersection of Biology and Physics - Natalie Angier - NYTimes.com

... the basic building blocks of human eyesight turn out to be practically perfect... Photoreceptors operate at the outermost boundary allowed by the laws of physics, which means they are as good as they can be, period. Each one is designed to detect and respond to single photons of light — the smallest possible packages in which light comes wrapped...

... Photoreceptors exemplify the principle of optimization, an idea, gaining ever wider traction among researchers, that certain key features of the natural world have been honed by evolution to the highest possible peaks of performance ...  Scientists have identified and mathematically anatomized an array of cases where optimization has left its fastidious mark, among them the superb efficiency with which bacterial cells will close in on a food source; the precision response in a fruit fly embryo to contouring molecules that help distinguish tail from head; and the way a shark can find its prey by measuring micro-fluxes of electricity in the water a tremulous millionth of a volt strong — which, as Douglas Fields observed in Scientific American, is like detecting an electrical field generated by a standard AA battery “with one pole dipped in the Long Island Sound and the other pole in waters of Jacksonville, Fla.”

... Simon Laughlin of Cambridge University has proposed that the brain’s wiring system has been maximally miniaturized, condensed for the sake of speed to the physical edge of signal fidelity.

According to Charles Stevens of the Salk Institute, our brains distinguish noise from signal through redundancy of neurons and a canny averaging of what those neurons have to say...

Photoreceptors are a specialization of brains. Brains have been evolving for a very long time.

Long enough, perhaps, for brains to run up against the constraints of physics.

It's not something most of us have contemplated. It is probably misleading, it might be more true that brains have run up against the constraints of room temperature physics operating on biological systems. Still, it's interesting.

If true, it doesn't mean that an artificial brain couldn't be substantially smarter than the smartest human. It might suggest, however, that it could't be qualitatively smarter. The Ais might think us a bit dull and slow, but they might still want to talk ...

The GOP likes a fight

A neighbor of mine has edited the autobiography of Walter Mondale (our copy has both Mondale and Hage's signature).

Reading Mondale's story, you learn two things.

One is that progress happens.

The other is that it's always a hell of a fight.

Some people get energy from fighting. Those people enjoy AM talk radio. You may have noticed this talk radio is almost always radio GOP. It's a trait of American conservatives; they like the fight. They like to win most of all, but they get energy from the battle.

My mates don't get energy from fighting. We get a headache. We want to figure things out, then find a solution. We enjoy intelligent debate, we can even appreciate discussions that run into the wall of pure belief, but we don't like the shouting matches and the purely irrational.

So we have a natural disadvantage when it comes to dealing with the GOP. The GOP loves a fight. In Minnesota they lost a tight election to Senator Al Franken in 2008 and they fought like rabid wolverines in a leg trap. This week they lost to Governor Dayton and they swear they'll scream ten times as hard.

We can't fight like that, but we can't give up either. We don't have to scream, but we have to fight.

Staying home is not an option. We have to be the parent, but not the pushover.

Like Mondale.

That's how progress happens.

The Health Savings Account preventive visit scam

I got stung this time. I was a mark.

Darn it.

My excuse is that this scam was a subtle one. I'd classify it as an occult emergent fraud. It's the third one I've met from Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield; health insurance is a breeding ground for these things.

The trick starts with making a "preventive care" or "routine physical" visit a "free" part of a health savings account insurance plan. These are commonly included in HSA plans ...

... A recent industry survey found that in July 2007 over 80% of HSA plans provided first-dollar coverage for preventive care. This was true of virtually all HSA plans offered by large employers and over 95% of the plans offered by small employers. It was also true of over half (59%) of the plans which were purchased by individuals. All of the plans offered first-dollar preventive care benefits included annual physicals, immunizations, well-baby and well-child care, mammograms and Pap tests; 90% included prostate cancer screenings and 80% included colon cancer screenings ...

At first, and even second, glance this looks like a nice benefit. After all, HSAs are all about having individuals feel the true cost of care, so we will inevitably reduce our use of preventive services. Making those "free" seems to make a care plan less harmful.

The catch is, as I recently discovered, is that it can be quite tricky for an adult to get this benefit. The responsible physician has to choose to bill a care episode as "preventive". These visits, however, pay poorly -- they're only cost effective if they can be done very quickly. A physician, meanwhile, is legally and ethically responsible for overall patient health. Any adult over thirty, and many younger, has health problems that can, at the least, be reviewed to confirm all is well enough.

So the physician is biased to doing at least a moderate amount of work, which makes the preventive care payment uneconomical. So these visits will usually be charged as something other than preventive care, which means they come from the general HSA pool -- not the free preventive care visit. (Immunizations and such will be covered, but not the physician fee.)

This should be possible to study. What percentage of adult males, we could ask, actually manage to get their visits billed as preventive care services?

In my particular case I was steamed about being charged a Level III fee when I had worked quite hard to get my "free" preventive care visit -- including confirming with Anthem that it would be covered. I even complained about it to the physician's billing office. It was only when I worked out the angles that I realized I'd been stung, and that I just needed to shut up and pay up. It wasn't my physicians fault, or the fault of their billing office. It was just the way the system works.

I doubt anyone planned this out. It's just a happy coincidence that an expensive (to Anthem) benefit ends up not being used. The emergent fraud aspect is that once an unintended scam like this emerges, nobody will work very hard to fix it.

See also:

• Verizon scam: Emergent fraud earns a fine
• Emergence: how entropy and incentives create scams
• Emergent fraud: Anthem and automatic payment denials
• Memphis mortgages, complexity attacks and long term consequences
• Anthem - Putting the Hell in Health Insurance
• Causes of the crash of '08 - how much fraud?

Update 11/7/10: The "13 month preventive medicine" visit is a variant of this scam. Marketing and legislative presentations will claim a yearly physical is part of a plan. This does not, however, mean that one can schedule a covered preventive medicine visit on Nov 1 and March 3rd. In practice a "year" means "no less than 365 days apart". Many people fall prey to this trick.

Midterms 2010

So far I've found three things that seem novel about the American 2010 midterm elections.

The first is that the federal results were unsurprising. In the blog age any interested person has access to the analytic work once limited to a few newspapers or to major political campaigns. We knew what would happen, and it happened. This is different.

The second is that the results, at first glance, seem to be very much to the taste of the Corporate Entity (CE). I have more to say about this. The CE should not be confused with shareholders, the board, or the CEO. The CE interacts with our material universe, but it's not made of atoms.

The third is that candidates identified as crazy by the national media lost. That's interesting.

Looking for glimmers

About as bad as expected nationally, worse than expected in my home state of Minnesota.

Two glimmers of hope:

1. The average voter has a 3 month memory. In 2012 there is now a chance that they'll remember the GOP.
2. In Minnesota the GOP will have to balance the state budget. This will be a disaster for special needs education, but they'll have to make some very hard choices that they would prefer to avoid.

Any other glimmers?

A NYT job interview and capitalism 2010

Emily told me of a lightweight NYT piece on job searching describing the clever and industrious things a young man did to land a job in a competitive marketplace. She was appalled by the implications -- the job market for bright young men is lousy.

Emily missed the darker subtext though.

The job is in search engine optimization (SEO).

Few non-geeks know what SEO is. SEO is about fighting a war with Google. Google wants to give us answers to our questions, SEO wants us to read marketing material. SEO geeks make their living exploiting flaws in Google's search algorithms.

SEO is about making my life worse. It's not unique. A vast amount of American intellect, from Wall Street to SEO, is not delivering value. It is engaged in making all of our lives worse.

We are pouring our water into the sand.

Apple's share price, market movers, and the latest market bubble

Two fragments that I like to consider together. One is an anonymous comment on an Irish Economy blog called out by Paul Krugman ...

What markets want ...

... The markets want money for cocaine and prostitutes. I am deadly serious.

Most people don’t realize that “the markets” are in reality 22-27 year old business school graduates, furiously concocting chaotic trading strategies on excel sheets and reporting to bosses perhaps 5 years senior to them. In addition, they generally possess the mentality and probably intelligence of junior cycle secondary school students. Without knowledge of these basic facts, nothing about the markets makes any sense—and with knowledge, everything does.

What the markets, bond and speculators, etc, want right now is for Ireland to give them a feel good feeling, nothing more. A single sharp, sweeping budget would do that; a four year budget plan will not. Remember that most of these guys won’t actually still be trading in four years. They’ll either have retired or will have been promoted to a position where they don’t care about Ireland anymore. Anyone that does will be a major speculator looking to short the country for massive profit.

In lieu of a proper budget, what the country can do—and what will work—is bribe senior ratings agencies owners and officials to give the country a better rating. Even a few millions spent on bumping up Ireland’s rating would save millions and possibly save the country.

Bread and circuses for the masses; cocaine and prostitutes for the markets. This can be looked on a unethical obviously, but since the entire system is unethical, unprincipled and chaotic anyway, why not just exploit that fact to do some good for the nation instead of bankrupting it in an effort to buy new BMWs for unmarried 25 year olds...

The second fragment comes from an analyst ...

asymco | Apple trading even with the S&P 500

if you had invested $100 in the S&P 500 in September 2005, you would have $103 now. If you invested $100 in Apple in September 2005, you would have $529 now....

... Although Apple received a premium valuation to the S&P prior to October 2008, it has traded at a discount or in-line with the S&P since then...

Another way of putting it is that the P/E ratio for large companies has returned to pre-recession levels. The P/E ratio for Apple has not...

However, in terms of reward for earnings ... For much of 2009 and early 2010, Apple was considered to have a far less promising future than the average large American company...

Asymco makes a persuasive case. Apple is valued as though it were a quite mediocre company.

Now consider this.

No publicly traded company in history is as studied and dissected as Apple. It is analyzed from a thousand directions. The "market", in the case of Apple, is not made up of "junior cycle secondary school students".

On the other hand, the share price of most companies, as best I can see, bear little resemblance to value delivered. I can believe those prices are largely determined by the hormones of young traders.

So perhaps it is misleading to say that Apple is undervalued compared to the average publicly traded company. It may be more enlightening to say that the average publicly traded company is now grossly overvalued. Apple is fairly priced.

Bubble.

Greg Bear: City at the End of Time - A review

I gave Greg Bear's City at the End of Time three stars; five for ambition, two for execution...

Amazon.com: John Faughnan "John G...'s review of City at the End of Time

Bear aimed high with this one. Very high.

It's something between science fiction, magical realism, and hard fantasy. I think it's primarily science fiction; an abstract description of a reality and technology vastly beyond human compression.

It's dark, like much of modern science fiction it shows the influence of horror and zombie. It's densely written, with eloquent phrases and language that sometimes works and other times struggles.

I was never captivated by any of the characters. It was a relatively easy book to put down, but I pushed through to the end out of admiration for Bear's ambition. If you want to stretch a bit, and need a dense book you can put down when its time for sleep, this one has a heart.

I do respect the ambition. Death, creation, murderous struggle, the root of all evil and the wellspring of young love and the nature of reality transposed to a human perspective -- that's extreme ambition! The execution could have done with fewer zombies.

It's not just Bear. There are far too many zombies in the science fiction of the past five years. Give it up guys, it's time to move on.

Words we need to add to English

In a list of novel words from around the world, I found six we should add to English, and three in bold I have added to a list of words I practice ...

Language Log » Translating the untranslatable

• tartle (Scots): hestitate while introducing someone because you forgot their name
• Torschlusspanik (German): gate-closing panic as age begins to close off opportunities
• wabi-sabi (Japanese): way of living that peacefully accepts the natural cycle of growth and decay
• dépaysement (French): the feeling of not being in one's own country
• tingo (Pascuense): obtain desired objects from a friend by borrowing them one by one
• l'appel du vide (French): that "call of the void" that makes you feel you want to jump when you look down from somewhere up high

Is Quebec why Minnesotans drive on the right side of the road?

It finally occurred to me to wonder why Americans, and especially Canadians, drive on the Continental (right) side of the road instead of the UK/Commonwealth standard. I believe the UK practice was well established in the 18th century, so the US should have followed that convention. Canada was an English possession until 1867, so the Canadian deviance is even more puzzling. (When Newfoundland left the UK for Canada in 1945 they had to change driving habits.)

This article came up early, but is a bit vague ..

Drivers.com: Driving on the wrong side

Today, most of the countries that adhere to left side driving are those that came under the influence of British rule during the 19th Century. It would seem likely then that the USA, having been once a British colony, would have retained the driving on the left rule. However, in his book The Rule of the Road: An International Guide to History and Practice (now out of print), author Peter Kincaid states that he could find no evidence that left side driving was ever widespread in the USA. He attributes this to the influence of European settlers used to driving on the right, and also the fact that vehicles such as carts and the postillion-controlled Conestoga Wagons were popular in the colony and favored right-side driving. However, there may have been some parts of the country that did adhere to left side rules for a time.

In Canada, the evidence is that Ontario and Quebec, which started out under French influence, always had right side driving. Other areas such as British Columbia and the Atlantic provinces, remained staunchly English in their influence and drove on the left. They switched to the right in the 1920s to conform with the rest of Canada and the USA."

There's a bit more here ...

Why do some countries drive on the right and others on the left ?

... In addition, the French Revolution of 1789 gave a huge impetus to right-hand travel in Europe. The fact is, before the Revolution, the aristocracy travelled on the left of the road, forcing the peasantry over to the right, but after the storming of the Bastille and the subsequent events, aristocrats preferred to keep a low profile and joined the peasants on the right. An official keep-right rule was introduced in Paris in 1794, more or less parallel to Denmark, where driving on the right had been made compulsory in 1793.

Later, Napoleon's conquests spread the new rightism to the Low Countries (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg), Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Russia and many parts of Spain and Italy. The states that had resisted Napoleon kept left – Britain, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Portugal. ...

... In the early years of English colonisation of North America, English driving customs were followed and the colonies drove on the left. After gaining independence from England, however, they were anxious to cast off all remaining links with their British colonial past and gradually changed to right-hand driving. (Incidentally, the influence of other European countries’ nationals should not be underestimated.) The first law requiring drivers to keep right was passed in Pennsylvania in 1792, and similar laws were passed in New York in 1804 and New Jersey in 1813.

Despite the developments in the US, some parts of Canada continued to drive on the left until shortly after the Second World War. The territory controlled by the French (from Quebec to Louisiana) drove on the right, but the territory occupied by the English (British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland) kept left. British Columbia and the Atlantic provinces switched to the right in the 1920s in order to conform with the rest of Canada and the USA. Newfoundland drove on the left until 1947, and joined Canada in 1949.

I wonder if this understates the influence of Quebec and Louisiana on the adaptation of right hand driving in North America. Quebec was very dominant along the river routes of (future) American and the northeast region through the 17th and early 18th centuries, and Louisiana would have had a similar influence from the south.

Any Quebecois historians out there?