Crystal Williams

The title is not a cop-out, this is a post about stuff. My stuff, specifically.

I’m getting a bit introspective and over-caffeinated, starting in on the pre-moving process. Again. I’ve learned that there is a major difference between moves where you see your stuff the next day, moves where you see your stuff the next week, and moves where you throw everything in a portable box and hedge your bets before getting on a plane.

I’m prepping for that last type again, though there’s going to be a truck involved. I have a reasonable (or unreasonable) amount of experience with this already, but it’s still not easy or worry free. I was 25 the last time I did this, and honestly, the only large item I’ve acquired since then (not counting my car) is one (1) Ikea bookcase (the large, chunky – could also be a bench model). I have still yet to muster the will/acceptance of terms to buy a couch. Couches are symbols of sedentary lifestyles to me. I’m more in the hot-swapping countries camp.

So the process goes something like this:

• Sort everything into “need on a weekly basis”, “comfort items I want to keep”, and “purge”
• Pack, Clean, Pack, repeat as necessary
• Take care of every last lingering piece of paper, to-do item, to-mail item, etc. (This step sucks, btw)
• Freak out a bit, grasp tightly at LA a bit, remember WHY I’m doing this and move forward
• Spend a much caffeinated couple of hours in front of computer changing address on EVERYTHING
• Party with friends I’m going to miss
• Give things away or sell them until it’s just me and the boxes
• Put things in truck, hope for the best
• Put me on plane, ditto

I’ll be traveling up to Seattle via Foo Camp. So if you see me there and think “man, that chick REALLY overpacks” you’ll please understand. We fly up to Seattle on Sunday night and start work again Monday. Last couple of weeks of July will be work-heavy, first couple of weeks of August are owned by Black Hat, Defcon, and some sort of decompression post-con. The plan is to move into a guest-room-enabled place after that, retrieve my stuff, and proceed with a life devoid of 7am Monday morning flights. imagine!

I’ve grown less and less attached to ‘stuff’ in general. My books (by replacement cost) are by and large the most expensive thing I own. My bought-for-$200 stainless steel dining table is by far the heaviest, but it’s so solid and versatile (look ma, no coasters!) that I keep moving it. I’ve opted for plastic stacking drawers instead of a dresser. I haven’t owned a couch or a bedframe since 2004. I don’t collect anything but books and plants. (and the plants can’t be moved.) There’s a lot that I keep/move not because the replacement cost, but simply because I don’t like unnecessary buying.

Here’s to starting fresh.

So basically, if I have ever emailed with you at all, you’re in my gmail address book. And if you are in my gmail address book, all 600ish of you, around the first of September, you got a message that looked something like this:

“cleverclevergirl” would like you to join them on Zannel

Zannel is a mobile community where you can meet people, send messages and share photos and videos on your mobile phone. Share your life in real time.

Click here to join and accept the invitation.

And then if you also follow me on twitter, you shortly after received a few frantic, apologetic tweets from me explaining that some UI had malfunctioned and to please ignore the bother. I try to be exceedingly careful with my contacts and tend to never invite people to things unless I’m positive they want to be invited. I hate email, I assume you hate email too, and I try to avoid sending any unless it’s necessary or just purely pleasant.

So I was pretty devastated that this happened, especially since I generally consider myself savvier than that, but figured I’d done what I could and it was done with.

Until I got a message on the site from Zannel’s CTO the next day.

Hey there – I’m with Zannel, and I’ve heard some buzz about our friend invite feature – r u open to discussing?

Uh oh.

Chris Messina was amongst the unintentionally-invited. Chris, thankfully, has a pretty low tolerance for bad UI, so he made some screenshots

This was noted by Tantek Çelik, who asked Chris to submit screenshots to the wiki he’s been working on, documenting Social Network Anti-Patterns, something expecially useful in the wake of the Quechup disaster. (Incidentally, Chris has a whole collection of these screenshots here)

Zannel’s PR folks had picked up on the grumblings, traced it back to me, and now wanted to chat.

So we chatted. First off, they were genuinely apologetic. This was really an unintentional effect of the common mobile design strategy of reducing page length by having many small pages of information, and definitely not a ‘strategy’ of any sort.

I explained that the problem had occurred while using their mobile interface. I had wanted to *check* if anyone I knew was already using this service, but only intended to invite one coworker. Unfortunately, the default state for “send invites to everyone” was set to TRUE, and that option was on a separate page than the main confirm screen. So by requesting and confirming to invite one friend, everyone else got dragged into it. They admitted that this was a problem and one that had been discussed internally.

They also agreed to fix it. Quickly.

And I’m very pleased to say that they did! The fix has been in place now for about a month and apparently now, users complain, if anything, that it is too difficult to add a bunch of friends at once. So far, though, everyone seems to agree that this is a better problem to have.

They were also kind enough to send me some screenshots of the new interface:

Congrats to Zannel for making this right, and a big thanks to Chris and Tantek for their zero-tolerance policies.

Go Check them out.They’re getting nods from the likes of TechCrunch, Mashable, and The LA Times.

Ok, so, I’m avoiding the seven or so very relevant and probably no longer timely posts I have drafts of in order to jot down these notes, because despite all the wonderful events I’ve been attending and all the ideas I currently have buzzing around in my little head, what I’m really obsessed with right now is calendars.

That’s right. Calendars.

See, somewhere in the past six months or so, I got incurably busy. I’ve known this state before, but it has always been temporary. And I’m just getting the hunch that it isn’t temporary this time.

So besides the sleep deprivation, the coffee dependency, and the general sense of twitchiness (apologies to those who’ve seen me recently), what’s been really driving me crazy and impeding further productivity is fear. That’s right, you know this fear. You find out about an event, a party, or a project you want to do and you really want to say yes and make firm plans, but you stop short because you’re not entirely sure if you can. It’s pretty easy to check the calendar to see if you’re supposed to BE somewhere at that particular point in the space time continuum, but what about mental bandwidth and deadlines? Can I schedule a trip to Texas to see my family if I can’t get a good idea of what projects I’m launching then? I’m constantly trying to not be out of town for a major site launch or milestone, but those move often, so how does one guess?

You can see the loop forming here and it generally results in a semi-catatonic state followed with “I need coffee. Let me get back to you.”

This is not really ok anymore.

So the key problem to be solved here is “How do I get an accurate, at a glance idea of how busy I am for any 2-3 day period?”

I have a job where I’m, at any point, responsible for 5-12 active creative projects. (Currently, it’s about 9). Timelines slip, usually not because of our team, but projects tend to evolve as they progress and sometimes small changes have big effects. Therefore, it’s crucial to have a system that ties into my current professional workflow, but can also integrate with my personal schedule since I’m also co-organizing two conferences in LA, working on contributing a Drupal theme, and attending a large number of fun/learning/networking events here, and in SF and SD. (Not to mention the occasional, purely social outing)

My tools:

• My work laptop (PC)
• my Stickerbooked Mac
• Blackberry 8800
• gmail
• gcal (I have two – one hosted calendar that we use company wide where we are all subscribed to each other, and also my personal calendar, which is also subscribed to things like the barcamp global schedule, the Boston Red Sox season schedule, and my Upcoming.yahoo.com events, as well as my work calendar)
• MS Project
• Basecamp
• upcoming.yahoo.com
• twitter

The Process::

• Work Projects are scoped and then scheduled dynamically in Project. Major milestones and deadlines are then manually entered and assigned to people in Basecamp by Client and Project. (Note: I know this is a main bottleneck) Milestones are title by “Initials of milestone owner” – “Project” – “Description of Milestone”. ICAL feeds are then generated by individual project (and also one master feed). These are then subscribed to through my work calendar and color coded by client. I only subscribe to the full-on, mother-load schedule from my personal calendar.
• As I commit to public events and publicly promoted social events, I add myself to the Upcoming.yahoo.com page so it gets added to my personal calendar.
• On the fly, small social things, such as dinner with a friend, get added to my personal gcal via twitter via gtalk IM on my blackberry if I’m out and about (or just through the browser if I’m at the computer). (How to do this)

The end result of this is a personal calendar I can look at (on screen or blackberry) and gauge, just by how many lines of stuff I see, whether or not that’s a good day for me or whether I’d best lay low. It also creates a master schedule that my office can selectively share with outside contractors and clients and gives everyone in the company a 5 second glance at how many deadlines each person has for a given day or week, which is necessary for committing resources to a project.

Just starting this system, so I’ll let you know how it goes. Any further integration ideas are much welcome.