Hasta La Ideas

I feel like I have been unintentionally collecting links to great articles recently. I’ll spot something clutter/organizing/productivity-related in the news, immediately think it would make such a terrific topic for an Unclutterer post, save the link to a text file of post ideas, and then do nothing further. Apparently, I want ALL the links for myself. All of them. Mine.

Since this is ridiculous and there is no good reason for me to be collecting all these links and not sharing them, I thought an ol’ fashion link roundup post was in order. Please enjoy all of these links that have been catching our attention:

• “Why aren’t hoarders bothered by all that junk? Scientists find a clue“
  This article from NBC looks at a recent brain study by psychologist David Tolin that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. According to the research, clinically diagnosed hoarders’ brains respond differently to physical stuff than the brains of the general population. As a result, their ability to make decisions is significantly limited.
• “Three habits that drive down productivity“
  I’m still trying to decide what I think about this article from the Memphis Business Journal. The article references a study that analyzes the work product and attendance records of employees with very different lifestyles at three large corporations. The article concludes that healthier people are more productive workers and it specifically names smoking, poor diet, and lack of exercise as productivity killers.
• “Plan of Work for a Small Servantless House (3 or 4 in family)“
  After the war in Britain, many homes and estates that once had servants found themselves unable to afford any servants in the house. To help women learn how to keep house, someone (the British government?) published this guide for how a woman should spend her time. My friend Julie introduced me to this page from the I Love Charts tumblr, and I think it is a fabulous look back in time. I’m still confused as to how a woman with one or two children only seems to attend to them for an hour and a half each day “if necessary,” but maybe “servantless” doesn’t include nannies?
• “Re:Re:Fw:Re: Workers Spend 650 Hours a Year on Email“
  This article from The Atlantic confirms that most people with desk jobs (referred to as an “office stiff” in the text) spend “13 hours a week, or 28 percent of our office time, on email.” A quarter of one’s job is consumed with reading and answering email. The article also reports that time spent on tasks specific to one’s role at the company only consumes 39 percent of one’s time at work.
• “You Probably Have Too Much Stuff“
  This short piece from The New York Times looks at the burdens of being “over-prepared.” I like the use of the phrase “over-prepared” in the article because it so aptly reflects the “I might need this one day” mentality.

As you also know, I’ve been doing some writing for the Women and Co. website lately. Most of what I’ve been writing continues to be about home and office organizing, but they’ve been letting me branch out a bit and pick up some other topics. It reminds me of the days I wrote the Sunday news for the local commercial radio station in Lawrence, Kansas, so very, very, very long ago …

Anyway, this is what I wrote in July:

• “Is Your Child’s Lemonade Stand Against the Law?“
• “Tips to Staying Sane When Working from Home“
• “Resources for Walking and Biking in U.S. Cities“
• “How to Organize Your Back-to-School Shopping“

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.

Helicopters and airplanes both fly, but obviously their physical designs dictate they achieve that flight in very different ways. “[A] helicopter is working very hard just to keep itself in the air,” explains Nick Roy, head of MIT’s Robust Robotics Group, whereas the gliding capabilities of a fixed-wing aircraft enable longer flying times. Yet common sense dictates that if you need an aircraft to navigate a constrictive, dense environment awash with obstacles, you’d opt for a helicopter.

But the eggheads at the Robust Robotics Group aren’t interested in yielding to common sense. That’s why after winning the last engineering challenge held by the Association for Unmanned Vehicles System International, a sort of obstacle-course competition for autonomous mini-helicopters, RRG decided to up the challenge ante. “The fixed-wing vehicle is a more complicated and interesting problem,” says Roy, explaining why they decided, in the absence of any design competition, to see how tight a space they could get an autonomous model airplane to fly within.

The results are stunning. Through a combination of clever aeronautical design, algorithm-writing, active laser scanning and data-crunching computing, the RRG team produced two-meter-wingspan airplane that cand do this, all by itself:

The team did have to cheat it a little bit by giving the plane a map of the environment ahead of time, a luxury they were not allowed in their AUVSI helicopter challenge, but they’re keen to remove that particular crutch:

The MIT researchers’ next step will be to develop algorithms that can build a map of the plane’s environment on the fly. Roy says that the addition of visual information to the rangefinder’s measurements and the inertial data could make the problem more tractable. “There are definitely significant challenges to be solved,” [Aeronautics and Astronautics graduate student Adam] Bry says. “But I think that it’s certainly possible.”

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Well folks, as images from the Mars Curiosity Rover continue to come in, they’re as disappointingly anticlimactic as the landing procedure was thrilling. With the amazing technological prowess demonstrated by pulling off the landing procedure, many will wonder: Why do the photos suck so much? A measly 2-megapixel camera with 8 gigs of memory, are you kidding me? Why don’t they just cover the Curiosity with an array of $300 GoPro cameras?

The answer of the limitations is twofold (and the second part might be familiar to any ID’ers who’ve worked on projects with horrendously long development times). First off, NASA’s sole option for getting images sent from Mars to Earth is to use a UHF, or ultra-high frequency, transmitter. That’s basically radio waves, it’s not like they’ve got a really long fiber-optic cable lying around somewhere. The Rover beams the signal to two relay spacecraft orbiting Mars, and they bounce the signal all the way back to Earth. And there’s not a lot of bandwidth in there, particularly since the other non-camera instruments need to send data back too.

The second part is a bit more disappointing, and it has to do with the Curiosity’s long lead time. “These designs were proposed in 2004, and you don’t get to propose one specification and then go off and develop something else,” Malin Space Science Systems’ Mike Ravine, who helped develop the cameras, told camera-reviewing website DPreview. “2MP with 8GB of flash [memory] didn’t sound too bad in 2004.”

We’ve oversimplified the answer a bit here. Camera and technology geeks interested in all the gory details can read a more in-depth explanation here.

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Is this…

…made by this?

Once you design a bag and want to go into mass production, chances are you start looking at China. But that’s not an option for the U.S. military, and since seeing military gear designer Rich Landry’s IFAK project, we’ve been wondering where they mass produce their stuff once Landry perfects the prototypes.

We can’t say for sure which company the Army contracts, but we believe we’ve found the American company that at least makes the machines to manufacture the stuff. A New-Jersey-based company called Camatron combines CNC and pneumatic technology to modify industrial sewing machines for highly specific purposes. The results are like a wickedly cool descendant of Steampunk, where compressed air and electricity drive precisely-machined parts to perform pre-designed operations. As one example, check out this machine that’s been modified to double-fold and stitch shut the ends of webbing straps at industrial speeds:

Once the straps’ ends have been “sealed” thusly, to prevent fraying, they can then be incorporated into a larger design. Again we’re not 100% sure the item being constructed in the video below is the actual IFAK bag, but it certainly has the MOLLE strap system and looks similar:

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Several years ago, I purchased David Allen’s landmark productivity book Getting Things Done. Allen describes an elaborate and effective method of, well, getting things done. One ingredient is the “ubiquitous capture tool,” which you can think of as a mobile inbox. It’s something that’s always with you, ready to capture anything you need to remember (David uses “capture” as a fancy way of saying, “write it down.”).

When I finished reading the book for the first time, I was inspired and eager to start. I bought some equipment, like a plastic in-tray for my desk, some 3×5 index cards, a label maker and a pricey Palm Treo (I realize I just dated myself). The Treo would be my ubiquitous capture tool. It was sleek, powerful and portable. I imagined myself using it to complete important and productive tasks. I’d whip it out at meetings with an air of gainful nonchalance. “This thing? Oh it’s just my electronic capture tool. Watch as I use it to get many things accomplished.”

Two months later, I recognized what was really happening: I was making lists. I was using a two-hundred dollar PDA to write lists. In other words, I was swatting a fly with a Buick. I sold it on eBay, put a stack of index cards in my pocket, and haven’t looked back.

Today, I use a pocket-sized notebook and a Fisher Space Pen (they write in any condition or orientation). That experience prompted me to examine other areas of my life in which I was prone to overkill. Computers are one of those areas. As a nerd, I’m often tempted by the latest and greatest piece of technology. Yet, I keep an 8-year-old iMac around because it’s great for writing. (The keyboard attached to it is 20 years old.)

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having fun toys, especially when it comes to productivity. If you like the tools you have, you’ll be more likely to use them. So use what you like. At the same time, be aware of any instances of overkill.

So, are you swatting any flies with Buicks?

Like this site? Buy Erin Rooney Doland’s Unclutter Your Life in One Week from Amazon.com today.