“Ideas are like fish.

If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper.

Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They are huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.”

— David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish

Luke Wroblewski gave an excellent talk called “Design Patterns” at SXSW. A highlight was when Luke presented the results of user interface research into the advantages of various form label alignments.

I’ve condensed the slides from Luke’s talk down to just the ones on form labels because that information holds up particularly well on its own. The information here is based on research and is actionable. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in UI design.

Download Luke Wroblewski’s slides on Form Label Alignment

The full set of slides from Luke’s talk are available on his blog.

1. Active discovery is seeking out a solution to a specific problem you are having. For example, if you were launching a website, google searching a good hosting company is active discovery.

2. Passive discovery is following sources that you trust to report information that is important to you. Reading favorite websites, blogs, and print publications are all passive discovery.

A healthy combination of both is good information management. Active discovery is obviously essential, most of us spend much of our day seeking out solutions to problems. Passive discovery’s advantages on the other hand aren’t immediately clear. They are easily overlooked but are just as important.

The Advantages of Passive Discovery

Passive discovery has advantages that can’t be duplicated by active discovery.

1. Finding solutions to problems that you don’t know you have. In order to solve a problem with active discovery, first you have to identify that you are having a problem. This can be harder than it sounds. It sometimes takes significant imagination to realize things could be better than they are now. Not having to identify your problems yourself means solving more problems with less effort.

2. Creating an awareness of which problems have good solutions. This will sometimes save you from reinventing the wheel, but it also has much deeper advantages. Familiarity with many solutions means you can focus on the relationships between solutions. Most new things are created by combining two things that already existed.

Passive discovery’s advantages show up less frequently than their active counterpart, but when they do their impact is often much greater.

One last point about passive discovery, it is very easy to do. Just scanning headlines and digging deeper when find something is all it takes. It sounds trivial and I’ve never heard it considered “serious work.” But when I look back on what’s had the biggest impact on my work, it’s not the solutions that I was looking for, but the ones that found me.

This screenshot of the homepage should sum up the functionality:

You enter text on the homepage and click translate. A real live native spanish speaker translates the text in under 24 hours. Then you receive the completed translation via email.

Automation and the “True Cost” of Translation

With Lingos.cc, we wanted to charge as close as possible to the “true cost” of translation. The “true cost” of translation is the amount paid directly to the translator for the time spent translating.

Distributing documents to translators, managing translators, sending prices to customers, and managing invoices are all expenses that have nothing to do with the “true cost” of translation.

The Lingos.cc web application automatically handles all of these tasks. As a result, we are offering the lowest price available online from a translation agency.

Time is Money

Bad translations are everywhere. Signs, menus, brochures, web pages, and product descriptions are poorly translated all over the world.

The reason these translations are bad isn’t because people aren’t willing to pay for quality translations. A quality translation costs just a few cents per word.

Translations are bad because working with a translation agency is time-consuming. Time is spent sending sample documents, receiving quotes, discussing quotes with colleagues, negotiating a final price, and sending the full document to the agency. All this lost time adds up and makes getting a human translation more costly than it should be.

At Lingos.cc, we don’t give quotes, we charge a flat-rate per word. We don’t accept documents, you just paste your text on our homepage. We don’t give far away deadlines, your translation will be completed in 24 hours.

Details

To assure the quality of our translations, hand-picked proofreaders read over and correct every translation we deliver.

Distributing the text to translators and proofreaders is automated.

We only support english to spanish right now, but we will be expanding to more languages soon.

I was tempted to add MenuMeters to the “VPZtms Compendium of Tools” post because if I’d added it (and Growl), the list would have included all the applications that I am always running on my machine. I refrained because technically they have nothing to do with information management. But I still wanted to write something about system monitors.

Quicksilver users often say they feel crippled when using a machine that doesn’t have Quicksilver installed. I feel the same way when I use a machine that doesn’t have a menu bar system monitor installed. To me it is like driving a car without a dashboard. Sure, you can guesstimate how fast you’re going just by looking out the window, but what a waste of mental energy that a dashboard just solves.

When is a System Monitor Helpful?

These are questions that come up while you use a computer that a system monitor can answer.

1. Are you really downloading or uploading anything?

   This is particularly helpful when uploading to a website, since web uploads often don’t give any visual feedback as they happen. It is also helpful when loading a web page is just plain slow.

2. Can my computer handle opening another application right now?

   An implication of multithreading is that if you start to open two applications simultaneously, then they will both take longer to finish opening than if you had opened them successively. This is because the more threads you have running, the more of your system resources are devoted to the act of juggling the threads rather than the threads themselves.

   The same rule applies if you open an application while your computer is already working hard. Basically, the more you tell your computer to do at once, the longer it will take to do everything. (In addition, from my personal experience, overburdening a computer increases its likelihood of crashing.)

   Managing your system resources effectively means not starting new processor intensive tasks when your computer is already working hard.

3. Is the application process that you believe is happening, really happening?

   Encoding video and music, creating archives, and copying large files are all tasks that take a long time and don’t always give good visual feedback. Progress bars, if they are even present, sometimes stop moving even though stuff is still happening. A quick glance at a system monitor tells you if your computer is really doing anything. Another advantage of checking this way is that it doesn’t require finding the process’s window.

How to Configure your System Monitor

There are three pieces of information that I find useful to have my system monitor tell me:

1. Upload and Download Rates
2. Total Processor Usage
3. Number of RAM Pageouts (With all the memory management voodoo modern operating systems do, the actual used/free RAM numbers don’t seem useful to me.)

With MenuMeters configured to show this information, it should look something like this:

With that said, I’ve never been able the shake the feeling that Flash intros did in fact provide some sort of value. I could never put my finger on quite what that value was until recently it hit me: Flash intros are the “grand entrance halls” of the web.

By “grand entrance hall” I mean what you see when they open the front door on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” A huge room with a marble staircase, high ceiling and a gravity-defying chandelier.

The Value of “Grand Entrance Halls” and Flash Intros

The point of a “grand entrance hall” is to immediately communicate your wealth to your visitors. It gets this point across, not only with its extravagant decorations, but also with its utter disregard for good use of space. Having a big open room in your house is expensive, especially one that satisfies no basic human need.

Flash intros do the same thing for your website. They look expensive. For businesses, communicating to your web visitors that you have money is important. It signals to potential customers that you probably aren’t a fly-by-night company and that you’ll be around to continue supporting the products you sell.

The Limitations of Flash Intros

While “grand entrance halls” and Flash intros both provide value, they are also impractical. When you don’t have visitors over, a “grand entrance hall” becomes just a big room that you have to walk through to get somewhere where you’d actually want to spend some time. Similarly, your web visitors are going to be losing time sitting on their hands waiting for your intro to load.

Placing a Value on Web Presence

But the deeper problem with Flash intros is that you get exactly what you pay for. A $2000 Flash intro pretty much looks like a $2000 Flash intro. In my opinion, the #1 search engine in the world got that way from a design. The value of an excellent web presence can be immeasurable. Opting for a fancy hood ornament is just settling.

Definition of Good Software

When selecting software tools, I want to assure the following:

• The software will continue to be available and actively developed.

• The software will be stable and free from memory leaks and other performance flaws.

• The software will be of high quality and avoid common design problems like poor OS integration and feature bloat.

Choosing Good Software

To increase the likelihood that the software I select satisfies the above conditions, I look for software in the following order:

• Stage 1. Built-in to OS X

• Stage 2. Open Source Software

• Stage 3. Free Software or Free Versions of Paid Software

• Stage 4. Shareware and Commercial Software

I suggest only moving up a stage when you have already outgrown the current stage. For example, I still use Terminal.app, despite the fact that iTerm has tabs (and I love tabs), because I don’t use enough terminal windows at once to really need tabs. I also used iChat over Adium X up until I actually needed MSN support, even though I knew in advance that one day I might need that feature.

The idea is that the lower you stay on these stages, the more your computing environment will be stable, of high quality and in continued development.

Finally, these rules are made to be broken. They are just guidelines.

All of these tools satisfy my requirements of being simple, flexible, and easy to use.

Discovery

NetNewsWire - I’ve already written 2053 words about RSS, so I’ll refrain from adding more now.

Safari - I prefer Safari’s simple, straight-forward approach to web browsing over Firefox’s more feature-rich, extension-enhanced browing experience. In my opinion, most Firefox extensions allow you to do things in a web browser that are really better served by separate applications anyway (such as writing, storing notes, and RSS feed reading).

Sogudi - Quick Search plugin for Safari.

fwit - Incremental Search plugin for Safari.

Storage

The Finder - Yes, I use the regular old Finder (with a couple of basic customizations) to manage most of my stored information.

FolderOrg AppleScript - An AppleScript folder action that, when attached to a folder, automatically moves anything placed into that folder into a subfolder named with the current date.

Refinement

VoodooPad - Danny O’Brien’s research of “prolific alpha geeks” found that large numbers of his interviewees stored their information as plain text. VoodooPad’s wiki functionality combines most of the advantages of plain text with the incredibly powerful ability to dynamically add any number of hierarchical sub-levels to any piece of text. VoodooPad is at the heart of my time management system.

Roaring Penguin’s Remind - I use Remind in conjunction with VoodooPad’s built-in “run” functionality to give follow-up dates to to-dos.

iCal - I use iCal to manage to-dos that must happen on a specific date, or at a specific time, such as scheduled meetings. iCal is missing a key software calendar feature, namely a way to automatically add reminders to all events, but I stick with it anyway hoping one day Apple will give it some attention.

I-Search - I navigate my to-do list using incremental search. This wonderful system-wide plug-in gives incremental search to most Cocoa applications.

Presentation

I am not going to list any presentation tools because these applications depend entirely on which medium you are presenting information in.

General

Apple Mail - An email client has three roles under my system: a searchable database of information, a way to manage a list of people to email back, and an application for reading, writing and sending email. These three roles commingle discovery, storage, refinement, and presentation, therefore, email will be an exception to many of the information management rules that I recommend. Later I’ll write about why I think breaking these rules is a good idea for email.

TextPander - Automatically expand user-customized abbreviations to longer pieces of text in any application. This is very flexible functionality that works as both a typing-aid and an information storage/retrieval mechanism.

Quicksilver - Quicksilver needs no introduction, so I’ll just point out that even Tog, who has written extensively about disproving that the keyboard has advantages over the mouse (although personally I think his research is inconclusive), acknowledges a speed increase when using this kind of keyboard-only tool:

“I haven’t performed or reviewed a stopwatch test, but LaunchBar [same concept as Quicksilver] should be able to outperform a visual interface for complex, repetitive switching sequences by an expert user.”

Summary

This is just a quick introduction to the tools that my information management system uses. Future topics in this series will cover both the details of how this system works, and general tips, tricks and observations about using these tools to manage information.

I chose the term “time management” for the title of this series because that’s the term that has been popularized recently by David Allen, 43 Folders and the like. But my system covers more than just managing to-dos, so I am going to introduce a new term, “Information Management,” to describe it. The goal of information management is simple:

To make sure that the information that you need is right in front of you when you need it.

This means having your next to-do in front of you when you are ready for it and pulling out that “Perfect Mouse-Trap” article, from four months ago, the second your cheese goes missing.

The Four Areas of Information Management

The first step in improving your information management is to understanding the different ways that you can manage information.

1. Discovery

   Discovery is seeking out and finding information, such as through RSS, Google, or Wikipedia.

2. Storage

   Storage is putting the information that you don’t need now, but will need in the future, somewhere where you can find it again. Most bookmarks, Ebooks, and your own not actionable notes are examples of storage.

3. Refinement

   Refinement is the process of actually doing stuff. This is the area that traditional time management focuses on. It includes to-do lists, and your own actionable notes.

4. Presentation

   Presentation is putting information into a form to share it with other people. Blog posts, Word Documents, Email, PDFs, and PowerPoint presentations all fall under presentation.

The VPZtms includes tips for managing each of these areas, but much of the trick is just keeping these areas separate from each other. Nothing bogs down a refinement system like a bunch of storage.

More coming soon.

There are three (closely-related) reasons that incorporating a new tool into your time management system often fails:

1. It is too complicated

2. It is too inflexible

3. It is too hard

Too Complicated

A tool is too complicated when it does too many extra things that you don’t need.

For example, the much heralded Kinkless GTD is too complicated for me because it is based around contexts, and I don’t use contexts.

When you are talking about software, too complicated can also mean that it uses too much system resources for the benefits it affords.

Too Inflexible

Too inflexible means that the tool has limitations that prevent it from being useful in enough situations.

For example, iCal’s built-in to-do system doesn’t give me a way to associate additional information with to-dos (such as links and my own notes), so it is too inflexible.

Too Hard

It is too hard to use a tool when you don’t use it in an appropriate situation because of the effort it requires.

When advising clients on their office arrangements, David Allen says that one of the first things he does is position their filing cabinet where they can reach it without getting up from their desk. Because a filing cabinet on the other side of the room is too hard.

Balance

These probably sounds like common sense, and they are. The idea is being able to quickly identify when and why something isn’t working. These are the distillation of the many specific reasons that tools or approaches haven’t become permanent parts of my system over the years.

The VPZtms is about striking the perfect balance. Receiving the maximum benefits of structure, without going too far in any of the above directions.