In recent years, I’ve become increasingly concerned about my scatterbrained-ness. I find it hard to focus on a single task for a prolonged period of time: for example, I find it takes me far longer to get through a book, or even read a short passage of text, than it ever used to. I don’t listen to the other person when I’m having a conversation – or rather, I try to listen, but the information somehow always seems to pass through my brain without being stored anywhere. I’m not really present in the moment. My brain gets distracted very easily, and I’ll swear I hadn’t had that conversation with you. My comprehension of texts is perhaps worse than it’s ever been, too. Not all the time, but often, I have to concentrate quite hard in order to actually take in the details of what I’m reading if I want anything more than a cursory understanding. When using the computer at home, I never seem to do anything productive – just follow an endless cycle of checking my feed reader, my e-mail, Twitter, and flicking through my open tabs. Sure, I get things done, but slowly, and piecemeal. My concentration usually feels scattered, my focus divided, my brain like it’s trying to juggle too many balls/clubs/knives/porcupines at once.
The first time I noticed this really happening was after starting university. My arrival at uni coincided (I think) with my first really portable, useful laptop (an iBook G4) with real internet-wherever-I-was; with the rise of update services like Twitter; with the rise of tabbed browsing. More and more things calling for my attention at any given time, and an increasing number of easy distractions. I think taking a laptop into lectures was a big mistake. What with web browsing, instant messaging, and the computer society chat room, I’d often leave lectures not having a clue what we’d just been told about. Closer to exams, I’d be going over course notes and sample exam papers and come across topics that I was sure I’d never been taught. Of course, I had – I just hadn’t been paying much attention.
It’s a problem that feeds itself. Checking your e-mail or Twitter account and finding a new message or some new updates from your friends is very… moreish. Each new ‘thing’ you discover is like a reward for your brain – well done!, it says, you checked for a thing, and you found one!. And so you check again. And again, and again.
Modern technology makes it easier than ever to be distracted; for your focus to be divided. Everything is at your fingertips. The problem is that if you’re trying to write a report on the computer and your brain keeps diving off to skim through some websites, or check your e-mail, or see what your friends are up to, it leaves very little time to actually devote to what you were trying to accomplish in the first place. And every time you check on one of these things, and your brain gets that little reward, it spends more and more time looking at more and more things. Ergo, you don’t finish that report – never mind, I’ll finish it tomorrow. But tomorrow, you’re just as distracted. You feel bad for not finishing, but your brain can’t help seeking its little rewards. It becomes a habit. An addiction. So the downward spiral goes.
I think multitasking’s partly to blame for this detrimental effect. As much as we like to think we can work on lots of things at once, the fact is we’re simply not that good at it - and I don’t think it’s particularly good for us, either. It’s stressful, and it trains our brain that it’s okay to only focus on tasks for a short period of time before switching to something else - but that’s no way to get things done. Even when relaxing, my brain still thinks it should be doing other things. For years, I’ve been overloading myself with information and trying to do too many things at once. Without even noticing it, I’ve been training my brain to always look for opportunities to perform this kind of rapid context-switching, which has left me less and less able to focus on any one thing for any length of time.
And lately, it’s been getting to me. I want to read more (I used to love reading books and would devour them ever-so quickly); I want to write more; I want to create more. Every time I attempt to settle down to do one of these things, that crack-seeking part of my brain gets excited by the slightest thing, pulling my attention away from what I want to do. What was that noise? Have I done this? I should remember to do that. I wonder if I have any e-mails? Are there any updates to my iPhone apps? Has anyone posted on Twitter recently?
I’m genuinely concerned about the effect it’s going to have on my long-term ability to focus on tasks and on my memory. The change I’ve described thus-far has arisen over a fairly short 4 year period. Current research seems to be backing up this idea that multitasking may well be problematic. A recent CNN article covers a study in which multitaskers did worse on attention tests than non-multitaskers. The multitaskers were more easily distracted by irrelevant information, and retained useless information in their short-term memory. Researchers aren’t sure whether these effects are reversible or not – I’m inclined to think they are, given enough time spent trying to correct them. So, I’m planning to do something about it and start trying to reverse the effects. It’s like realizing that for years I’ve been eating junk food on an alarmingly regular basis, and training my body to crave the taste of it. It’s time to throw away the Big Zinger Whopper, go on a diet, and start an exercise regime.
For starters, I’m going to be attempting to take up meditation on a daily basis. After all, applying single focus for a prolonged period of time is part of what mindfulness mediation is all about. Training my brain regularly in this way should help increase my mindfulness and focus when going about my day-to-day activities.
The goal of this kind of meditation is to bring an inner peace and a lasting happiness. Along the path to that goal, you get a lot of other benefits such as being more connected to your body, more aware of your feelings and emotions, and less caught by your thoughts and what’s called the “monkey mind” – a mind that won’t rest and that, over time, contributes to the kinds of anxiety and stress many of us feel each day. An Introduction to Mindfulness Meditation - Hivelogic
I’m also going to be trying to cut down on multitasking. If I’m doing something creative, or talking to somebody, or reading something, I want to give that my full attention. No aimless web browsing, or e-mail/Twitter/feed checking, whilst I’m trying to half-participate in a conversation with you. That doesn’t mean I can’t browse the web or read my feeds - but there’s a time and a place, and keeping these things distinct means that I should be more effective at whatever it is I’m doing. As with meditation, singletasking should help my ability to focus on a given task. It won’t be easy and it won’t be fast, but I guess it’s a bit like learning to run a marathon - take small, incremental steps, practice as often as you can, and you’ll get there.
After I began drafting this post I bought a book I’d read about online: The Power of Less. It may sound like a load more self-help nonsense, but it puts forward some useful ideas about applying meditation techniques to singletasking in your daily life. Simply focus on the task at hand – if you find your attention drawn away, be aware of what’s happening, breathe, and return your focus to the task. I’ve written the first draft of this blog post with no distractions whatsoever - just me and a text editor. I’ve written nearly 1000 words in about half an hour, because my attention has been on writing, and only on writing. Singletasking might just be the way forward.
These days, my primary computer is a 15” MacBook Pro. It’s an amazing machine, but sometimes those 15” can be a little unwieldy (yes, that’s what she said).
Apple used to make a small, very portable laptop: the 12” PowerBook, which was unfortunately retired during Apple’s switch to the Intel platform. However, the transition did introduce the potential ability to run Mac OS X natively on non-Apple hardware. Whilst Apple don’t (currently) make their own netbook1, a big community has sprung up around running OS X on non-Apple netbooks. I should note from the outset that installing OS X on non-Apple hardware potentially violates the OS X EULA. If you’re going to do this, in the very least ensure you own a legal copy of Mac OS X Leopard.
The current netbook au jour is the Dell Mini 9. BoingBoing’s compatibility list shows it as the only device that currently supports every piece of hardware2 under OS X. And it does.
I bit the bullet and bought a Mini 9, which finally turned up a couple of weeks ago. It has a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom processor, 1GB RAM (user upgradable to 2GB), and a 16GB SSD drive. I ordered it with Ubuntu pre-installed - and let me tell you, this thing is fast. Ubuntu boot time was a respectable 30 seconds, and the user interface felt extremely responsive. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen OpenOffice load so quickly. I’ll go as far as to say that out-of-the-box, this was the best experience I’ve ever had with Ubuntu - things just worked, which has rarely been the case for me with desktop Linux before. I put an SD card in the Mini 9’s SD reader, and it instantly mounted on the desktop; I plugged an external monitor into the Mini 9’s VGA port, opened the display settings, and was able to rearrange the monitors / change resolutions / etc; Flash in the browser worked without needing to install or fiddle with anything; heck, even wifi just worked. If you’re not comfortable with sticking OS X on there, the Dell Mini 9 running Ubuntu is a lovely machine.
So, back to OS X. Aside from a few minor niggles due to my hardware setup3, installation was a breeze. This is one of the things that makes the Mini 9 such an attractive proposition as a Mac netbook - all of the wrinkles have been ironed out of the process by the clever group of people over at http://mydellmini.com. I won’t re-iterate the process in full here (I followed this guide), but in short it’s a case of:
Create a DellMiniBoot boot disc (either CD or USB) and boot from it.
Swap the disc with the Leopard installation DVD and tell DellMiniBoot to boot it.
Install Leopard.
When prompted to reboot, do so using the DellMiniBoot disc, and tell it to boot from your hard drive.
Once you’re in OS X, run the DellEFI application to install the fixes that’ll make sure everything works ok.
If you want two-finger trackpad scrolling, you’ll want to install these trackpad drivers.
It’s fairly straightforward, as long as you follow the guide. I had the odd problem crop up now and again, but a quick Googling saw me through - in particular, when rebooting after the installation, I had to boot into safe mode (using the -f flag) so I could get all the way through the post-install setup process. Other than that, it was pretty smooth.
The Mini 9 runs OS X beautifully. I’ve been using the Mini 9 a lot over the last 2 weeks and haven’t run into anything that hasn’t worked.
Things I like
Tiny and light. This is überportable. I’ve been chucking it into my work bag and taking it to the office with me every day. By comparison, I’ve taken my MBP in twice in the last 6 months because it’s just a hassle.
Silent.
Fast. Very fast. Fullscreen HD flash video gets a bit stuttery, but hey, this is a netbook. Streaming 480p H.264 movie trailers works brilliantly, however.
Convenient. For small tasks around the house, taking to work, to a friend’s house, going home for the weekend, surfing in bed, and assorted other scenarios, this is a brilliant solution.
A built-in SD card reader. Works flawlessly, and is extremely useful.
Cute. C’mon, look at it! It’s tiny!
Issues
Somewhat cramped keyboard on the right side. For some reason, our UK keyboard seems to have had an extra key squeezed into each row, meaning that the keyboard is a little more cramped than the US one. It took a little adjusting to - the tiny right-hand shift key, which is the one I usually use, was quite easy to miss at first.
Screen size is a limitation in some situations, although for what I’m using it for it’s generally fine.
I’ve had one occasion where the mouse didn’t work properly after waking, and one or two other assorted issues where it hasn’t-quite-woken-up-properly.
Very very occasionally, it doesn’t boot (the spinner doesn’t appear on the boot screen). If that’s the case, just turn it off and on again.
One final point it may be worth making is that this is not a replacement for a full-size Mac. This is a netbook, and a compliment to an existing machine - don’t go thinking you’ll get the same experience you will from a full-sized MacBook, because you won’t. Rumours are that Apple may be creating their own netbook-like device to be introduced later this year. Time will tell whether this is true or not - I’d be very much interested to see Apple’s take on the whole netbook thing.
I was going to finish off by filming a walkthrough showing how well things run on the Mini 9, but Mr Andy Ihnatko does a sterling job of it himself:
There’s the MacBook Air, of course, but that’s thin - whereas the most important factor for portability in my opinion is width and depth. A Macbook Air, whilst lighter, takes up essentially the same amount of space as a normal MacBook - you’d still need a > 13” bag.
Note that their caveat beneath the compatibility table is incorrect - you don’t need a replacement SSD for sleep to work. Just make sure you get a 16GB or bigger SSD in it. 8GB just doesn’t cut the mustard.
You need an external DVD drive to load the Leopard installation DVD, and I was using an internal IDE DVD drive with an IDE -> USB convertor. The Mini 9 didn’t want to boot from this, though - so I had to copy the Leopard DVD image to an external hard drive, and boot from that.
Over the last week or so, I’ve migrated this blog from WordPress to Jekyll - a ‘blog-aware static site generator’, written in Ruby.
Jekyll takes a directory of posts and layouts, runs them through various converters, and produces a static website. Posts are stored in plain text files written in Markdown which makes it super easy to write HTML documents without the need to actually write HTML (and thus lose your flow). For example, making bold text is as simple as **this**. When Jekyll runs, it takes these posts, converts them into HTML, inserts them into an HTML layout, and produces a static HTML file. It’s really rather neat. If you want to see an example of how the back-end’s organized, check out this example of a Jekyll website on GitHub.
The main advantages, for me, are:
It’s much faster than a PHP/MySQL based website like WordPress. You can’t really get much quicker than plain ol’ HTML files. There’s nothing for the server to process other than serving up the files the user requests.
Posts are all stored in plain text files, which means they’re instantly accessible and usable anywhere I may want them - I don’t need to worry about having to export/convert posts from a database. I can also write my blog entries in my favourite text editor, TextMate - which is good, as I really don’t like blogging via a tiny textarea on a web page.
Because the posts are in plain text, I can very easily version control my entire site; everything’s kept neatly in a Git repository and I can roll back to any previous version of any file/post if I need to.
It’s ultimately a much simpler, smaller solution than using WordPress: I know exactly what’s in every file that makes up my website (and there really aren’t that many of them). WordPress is a much more complex system, and I really don’t know what half of it does or how it works.
It makes blogging fun again!
One downside of static files is that this means that the site can’t run its own commenting system. However, I’m using Disqus (a javascript solution) which seems ok. It’s a little more intrusive than I’d like, but I can live with it.
Using Git allows me to automate the regeneration of my site when I write a new entry. I write the post in a local clone of the site’s Git repo (or, on my server if necessary), commit my changes, and push them to the master repository on the server. When the server receives the changes, a handy little Git post-update hook that I wrote pulls the changes into the ‘live’ repository, and runs Jekyll to regenerate the site. It’s rather cool.
