{"id":38,"date":"2012-04-30T01:44:26","date_gmt":"2012-04-30T01:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/bologs\/vng\/headstak\/"},"modified":"2012-04-30T01:44:26","modified_gmt":"2012-04-30T01:44:26","slug":"headstak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/headstak\/","title":{"rendered":"headstak"},"content":{"rendered":"

Oi! Mac users! Tell me what you think:<\/p>\n

Interruptions are the enemy of working effectively<\/a>, especially in my accidental career as software developer. A while ago I tried to come up with a solution to this problem which *didn’t* involve working in a well designed office environment; the world is too fucked to cope with such radicalism at this point. No, we must plod on in our bollocks open-plan, cheap as crap, every fucker in one big room mess. <\/p>\n

So in an attempt to make it better for myself I thought of a simple program that would let you keep track of your own work and remind you where you were *before* the current interruption. So, being a geek, I came up with the idea of a stack<\/a> for your brain: before you start a task, or when you are interrupted while working on a task, you *push* the current job onto a stack. When the interruption finishes, or when the task is complete, you *pop* it from the stack…leaving you facing the job you were working on beforehand at the top of the stack.<\/p>\n

It took me a while to get anything concrete down, but there is now a prototype! ATM it’s only for Mac users (sorry) but you can download it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Run it and it should appear on your status bar as a little stack of stuff on a head. Whenever you are about to start or finish a task you just hit the global hotkey:<\/p>\n

Control-Command-0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(that’s a zero, not an “O”).<\/p>\n

Then you hit a down arrow to push a task, at which point you may optionally describe it. Press escape to get rid of the window.<\/p>\n

If the phone rings, or some fucker in your office comes over to talk to you, push a new task.<\/p>\n

When the most recent interruption\/task is finished, hit the hot key again (Control-Command-0) and hit the up arrow to pop the most recent task. <\/p>\n

That’s it!<\/p>\n

You can push different types of activity onto the stack – at the moment you use the down arrow for a normal task, the left arrow for a distraction and the right arrow for a sidetrack. These are, obviously, arbitrary and ideally they’ll be editable. Either way, it all gets logged in a little database.<\/p>\n

Ultimately headstak will contain tools for analysing how much time you spend on each type of task in some sort of nice graph or something.<\/p>\n

I’ve been using it in earnest recently and have found it as useful as I’d initially imagined! That sort of thing cheers me up.<\/p>\n

Please let me know what you think even if it’s “you’re shit, and your program is shit.” I’d rather know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Oi! Mac users! Tell me what you think: Interruptions are the enemy of working effectively, especially in my accidental career as software developer. A while ago I tried to come up with a solution to this problem which *didn’t* involve working in a well designed office environment; the world is too fucked to cope with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fatsquirrel.org\/oldfartsalmanac\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}