A friend of mine said this today:

I’ve also been mulling the idea of tracking cognitive ‘stack depth’ levels throughout the day. The idea is simple: if you were working on A, then interrupted to deal with B, and while attending to B were interrupted with a question about C, then you attained a maximum CSD of 3. My theory is that if the MCSD exceeds some fixed amount on a fairly regular basis, one’s productivity falls dramatically. It seems to me that I occasionally hit values of 4 or 5…

I think he is absolutely right about this. What do you think?

How do you filter on the Bcc header with procmail?

You don’t.

I had wanted to do this so that I could Bcc messages to myself where I was delegating something or otherwise waiting for a response and have them automatically go to a @Wait folder, but this won’t work.

As an alternative, I’m toying with the idea of processing my Sent folder once a day and moving them into one of:

• Sent (processed)
• @Wait
• etc…

It’s basically processing the Outbox very similarly to how you process the Inbox. I haven’t tried this yet, but it makes sense to me.

Finished listening to David Allen’s GtD Fast CD’s today. They were pretty interesting, although perhaps not as good as I had hoped, but then again I’ve already read his book and listened to Ready For Anything (below) and so maybe a lot of it wasn’t so new to me. It was probably worth it just for the refreshers.

http://www.gsp.com/cgi-bin/man.cgi?section=1&topic=leave

or just

man leave

if it’s already on your system. My FreeBSD system had it by default.

Found this great tip at a post at 43 folders:

Research dashes – I keep a plaintext file with a long-ass list of stuff to learn, fix, or improve on my computer. Stuff like “learn Perl,” “find out why Mail crashes on CTRL-click,” or “research cheap external hard drives.” These kinds of items represent very low-pressure and low-priority on my radar screen, but I do like to make progress on a few of them from time to time. Try scheduling “a dash”, 2 to 4 hours, twice a month for researching and conquering little stuff that’s been driving you nuts. This not only gives you a chance to review, update, and solve the stuff that’s probably stealing seconds from every day, but you can also start to watch for interesting patterns that might indicate bigger problems and opportunities (“Whoa: time to get a new laptop”).

Lately, I’ve been doing something like this. In the past, all of these sort of tasks would end up as separate to do’s, which would totally overemphasize their importance and I’d end up trying to do them as soon as I thought of them, which is very counter-productive. The key for me was to realize that I already spend too much time with computers and having a zillion next actions related to them just exacerbates that. I have to “hide” these sorts of random computer things in a place that I check only occasionally, so that they don’t crowd out more important things.