Last week, I wrote about the centrality of weekly rest in my life. Sundays are precious as days for rest, restoration, and contemplation. In that spirit, I will recycle "Death Action Matrix", an essay I wrote in 2003 (when I was 36 years old) about how contemplating own death could be a possible organizing frame for determining my priorities on various timescales. Even though I often come revisit the ideas I wrote then, I will confess that it's been a very long time since I actually managed to construct a "death action matrix" in the 14 years since I came up with the formulation. Maybe it's not such a good idea after all -- yet it's one that has stayed with me all these years. I will quote my essay here, hoping that my 2017 readers will find it thought-provoking and perhaps action-inducing.

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 21, 2001, while hanging out at the bookstore of the San Damiano Retreat Center in Danville, I came across Wayne Muller's How Then, Shall We Live?: Four Simple Questions That Reveal the Beauty and Meaning of Our Lives by Wayne Muller. For whatever reason, one question stood above the others, riveting my attention for the rest of my day-long retreat. That question was How shall I live, knowing I will die? The other three questions (Who am I? What do I love? What is my gift to the family on the earth?) are undoubtedly significant and weighty ones -- but they just didn't speak immediately to my situation. I suppose that I wasn't surprised by those questions whereas I had honestly never seriously asked myself How shall I live, knowing I will die?

Always a sucker for a good question, especially a profound and new one, I formulated a methodology for tackling How shall I live, knowing I will die? To make the question more concrete -- and therefore more susceptible to my type of analysis -- I supposed that I knew exactly how much time I had to live and asked how would I then live the rest of those days. I tried to be more specific and made that time period one of the following: a day, a week, a month, 6 months, a year, two years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 70 years. To help me think about what I was going to do given that I was going to live another day or another 20 years, I turned to the list of life roles I was carrying around in my head as a way of partitioning my life at any given time.

I thus converted the question How shall I live, knowing I will die? to a series of questions of the form "If I knew I had only X (time period) left, what would I do in life role Y?" Some examples were: "If I knew I had only a week left to live, what I would do as a son?" and "If I knew I had only two more years to live, what I would do as a board member of Westminster House?" I organized my questions into a two dimensional matrix (with time-to-death on one axis and my life roles on the other)-- a spreadsheet that I fondly called a "death action matrix".

The answers I came up with that day were dramatic, deep, and revealing -- and flowed directly out of the breakdown of the question. The prospect of death -- even hypothetical death -- turns out to be acidly clarifying. If I have little time left to live, most of what preoccupies me and seems so important would instantly be reduced to nothingness. I loveed my work profoundly, but when I asked myself the question "f I have a week to live, what would I do with my job?", I answered without hesitation that I wouldn't be spending any time on my favorite project. I would, however, want to say good-bye to my co-workers. Since I was quickly axing various roles I played for cases of a short life expectancy (it's easy to quit my beloved committees when I think I'm going to die in a month!), I was intrigued by the question "how much time do I assume to have in this life (implicitly, most likely) to make a certain activity "worth my time"? For example, how many years would I want to have left for me to consider getting married or having children? If I knew that death was impending for me, would I stop blogging?

As I looked at the answers on my death action matrix spreadsheet, a central theme emerged -- the most important thing in my life, in the face of death, was being at peace with the prospect of meeting my God, Judge, and Maker and letting my family and close friends know how much I loved them. I would add today that I also want to know how much I was loved. The question that raised by my matrix were "Do those close to me know how much I love them? And how do I let them know?"

In spite of the insights that came forth that day, I was too easily sidetracked by the realization that the central assumption of my exercise was merely hypothetical. Most of use do not know the exact day we will die. Furthermore, death is usually not like getting on a plane at a pre-assigned time, leaving us active to the very moment of departure. I kept pondering how I could sustain a life lived a daily intensity that I imagined that imminent death would prompt. Funny, how I don't wonder about that point any more.

Given my own analysis, I continued to wonder a lot about how others would answer the question How shall I live, knowing I will die? On that grim morning of September 11 -- five months later -- I got a partial answer when I learned about the many last-minute love-filled emails or phone calls to husbands, wives, children, friends, or mothers that poured forth from those who knew they were at their end. Few of those who died that day would have parsed the question of how to live into a two-dimensional matrix, but it seems that nearly all of us need to love and be loved as we confront our own death.

How do you organize your digital stuff so that it makes sense for not only yourself but to others, even if you are incapacitated or after you die? I am trying to solve this question for myself, finding it an incredibly interesting and challenging question whose answers would be useful to many others. I don't yet know the answers but I can tell you about a number of things that I think are related in some fundamental ways but whose connections.

I'm excited to work through the Nolo book Get It Together - Organize Your Estate Plan Documents. The book promises to teach us to "organize your records so your family won't have to." After looking through the table of contents, I'm impressed by the breadth of topics covered in the book.

Taking care of the varied types of digital documentation found on typical computers and online accounts is beyond the scope of the book. To jumpstart my study of digital estate planning, I just started studying Joe Kissell's book Take Control of Your Digital Legacy. I recommend watching an interview with Kissell as a accessible introduction to the challenges in digital estate planning. I wholeheartedly agree with Kissell's argument that organizing your digital estate is useful not only for those who come after you but also for the present day. It's much easier to do organizational work when the payoff is not so abstract.

I suspect that digital estate planning has some non-trivial overlap with emergency planning. If you have minutes to evacuate your house because of a fire or earthquake, how do you make sure that you can still access the most important pieces of information if you can't grab your computer? I've been assembling a USB key for my keychain: What should I store on it? how do I keep it up to date? How should I encrypt it? How do I make sure that those who need access to it can read it? The following articles hint at the relevant issues:

• Make an Emergency Flash Drive and Take it With You Whenever You Travel
• Emergency Preparedness with Evernote | Professional Organizer San Francisco Bay Area - Custom Living Solutions

Maybe it's time for me to watch the videos from Personal Digital Archiving (PDA) 2017 | Stanford Libraries:

As the centrality of personal digital archives and the ubiquity of digital content grows, librarians, archivists, scholars, students, activists, and those who fill the role of the "family IT person," have to deal with how to best select, preserve, and manage digital material. PDA 2017 seeks to host a discussion across domains focusing on how to best manage personal digital material, be it at a large institution or in a home office.

If the videos prove useful for digital estate planning, I might make it a point to head to Houston in April 2018 for Personal Digital Archiving 2018 | University of Houston Libraries.

I would like to learn a lot more about how to help older adults and seniors to make the best use of their computers and digital technology. In addition to providing occasional technical support to some older friends and family members, I have helped seniors with using their computers, tablets, and phones for phone banking and text banking. I really like hanging out and working with seniors. (I've been a volunteer with Tele-Care, a program in which we make calls to those who "live alone, are homebound, disabled, or convalescing from an illness, especially if you are retired, widowed, or a senior citizen,")

I'm starting to research the challenges faced in particular by seniors and the marketplace of solutions and solution providers in the East Bay and beyond. I'd like to systematize my knowledge of computing practices for older adults. I'm also keen on making sure that computers stay a central part of my own life as I age. Here's a bit of what I've learned so far.

Looking for an accessible introduction to the topic of elder computing, I turned to Spark with Nora Young on CBC Radio, specifically the segment on Elder tech (audio on YouTube). Some of the issues identified on the episode were:

• many seniors have much greater concern for online privacy than younger generations
• touch and voice interfaces might be particularly helpful to seniors.
• ETAG Online | Enhancing the lives of adults 55+ through technology education and support is a Toronto based non-profit to contact and to study
• The IATSL - Intelligent Assistive Technology and Systems Lab at the University of Toronto is involved in research to support "aging in place"

Now that I'm a member of the AARP myself, I wondered about technology resources available by the organization:

• Intro to iPad — AARP Academy
• Public Wifi Safety — AARP Academy
• [AARP TEK Workshops: San Francisco, CA](http://aarp.cvent.com/events/aarp-tek-workshops-san-francisco-ca/event-summary-b85f309655fd40bbb2cbc6a7f5b59aa0.aspx#San Francisco Public Library Golden Gate Valley Branch): in person workshops for learning about such topics like the iPad.
• Online Safety Workshop (on-demand) vidoe

What books are geared towards seniors and computing. A quick search of Safari books turned up such books as:

• My Social Media for Seniors, 2nd Edition
• My Smart Home for Seniors
• My Digital Travel for Seniors
• Facebook for Seniors
• My iPad® for Seniors, Fourth Edition

I've started looking at potential volunteer gigs to work with seniors in the East Bay:

• Technology/Electronics Volunteer - Ashby Village
• I can fill out the City of Albany Volunteer Corps application to work at the Albany Senior Center, there is:
  

  Computer Lab & Tutoring 3 computers are available at the Senior Center for self-serve 30 minute sessions. Free tutoring appointments available Mondays and Fridays. Call (510) 524-9122.

• I can volunteer to run a computer lab at the Berkeley Senior Center: Volunteer and Make a Difference! - City of Berkeley, CA.

• There are Computer Classes & Cyber Cafe at at the El Cerrito Senior Center

For use with BigQuery, there is an associated collection of quite useful public datasets. If you ever want to use any of these datasets, you should know how how data is contained in each because Google charges by the amount of data processed. If you're learning how to use BigQuery, start with smaller datasets so that mistakes will cost a lot less money and time.

I wrote some Google Apps Script code to compile spreadsheet of all the tables in the public BigQuery datasets. Tables range from 0 bytes to 7.5 terabytes in size. Here's a histogram of total database size of Google BigQuery public datasets (log scale):

There's a lot more to say; in the days to come, I will unpack this thumbnail sketch of my computation and lay out possible future directions.

Tonight I attended the session Productivity Hacks for the Digital Age, sponsored by Evernote at the San Francisco campus of General Assembly. I was happy to talk briefly with Joshua Zerkel, the Director of Global Customer Education & the Evernote Community. I quickly asked him whether there would be a niche for productivity consultants who are also able to develop software integrations or for Evernote trainers focused on helping seniors. Joshua provided some good encouraging tips.

Two organizations that I learned tonight:

• National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals (NAPO)
• Crystal | The world's largest personality platform | Free personality test -- a creepy sounding tool that profiles people based on public information about people -- see Crystal knows best … or too much? The disconcerting new email advice service | Media | The Guardian.

I went down the road of studying BigQuery and Google Sheets, inspired by a suggestion from Michael Manoochehri:

a powerful and lucrative integration is BigQuery/Google Sheets via Apps Script. Some of our customers use this combo for report generation once we (Switchboard) provide foundational data in BigQuery

What is BigQuery?  |  BigQuery  |  Google Cloud Platform:

What is BigQuery?

Storing and querying massive datasets can be time consuming and expensive without the right hardware and infrastructure. Google BigQuery is an enterprise data warehouse that solves this problem by enabling super-fast SQL queries using the processing power of Google's infrastructure. Simply move your data into BigQuery and let us handle the hard work. You can control access to both the project and your data based on your business needs, such as giving others the ability to view or query your data.

What have I done so far and what are the next steps?

As a learning exercise, I'm using Apps Script to write out data about all the public datasets into a Google Sheet and creating a visualization of the datasets: BigQuery Learning (public view with Google account). Most of the code in the project is borrowed from the sample tutorial code listed BigQuery Service  |  Apps Script  |  Google Developers. When I run the sample code, whose core functionality is in the SQL query:

'SELECT TOP(word, 300) AS word, COUNT(*) AS word_count ' +
      'FROM publicdata:samples.shakespeare WHERE LENGTH(word) > 10;'

Roughly translated into plain English, this query says: Compute the 300 most common words whose length is greather than 10 (and the number of times the word occurs) in the public Shakespeare corpus. The rest of the code then stores that list in a Google Sheet. Here are the top ten words:

word    word_count
counterfeit 28
remembrance 24
countenance 24
acquaintance    23
satisfaction    20
entertainment   20
displeasure 20
sovereignty 19
imagination 19
disposition 19

Of the many public data sets to play with, I've chosen the Shakespeare data set, not only because it is used in the Google tutorials, but is small (and therefore you're less likely to spend too much money accidentally doing an inefficient query).

I wrote a non-trivial query on the database to calculate the number of words in each of the corpora: Shakespeare corpora by descending word count.

Does the BigQuery API provide access to saved queries? That is, can list my saved queries, read the content of my queries, write saved queries and even run them? (The last function is, on second thoughts, such a big deal since there is already functionality I know in the API to run queries.)

 /* list corpora by descending total number of words */
SELECT
  corpus,
  corpus_date,
  SUM(word_count) AS num_words
FROM
  publicdata:samples.shakespeare
GROUP BY
  corpus, corpus_date
ORDER BY
  num_words DESC

From the query interface, you can see a number of options for what to do with the output of the query, including:

• download as CSV
• download as JSON
• Save as Table
• Save as Google Sheets

After dipping my toes into using BigQuery on public data sets, I wanted to learn more about the data sets themselves that Google has made available. And not surprising, you can use BigQuery to learn about the data sets. Stay tuned for a write up on what I learned.

One of the most important and useful applications many of us encounter every day are various productivity tools offered by Google, aimed at either the individual or to organizations (businesses, educational institutions, non-profits). The nomenclature around Google products is complicated.
In terms of the commercial offering from Google, I'm referring specifically to G Suite:

G Suite (formerly Google Apps for Work and Google Apps for Your Domain) is a brand of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed by Google, launched on August 28, 2006. G Suite comprises Gmail, Hangouts, Calendar, and Google+ for communication; Drive for storage; Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Sites for collaboration; and, depending on the plan, an Admin panel and Vault for managing users and the services. It also includes the digital interactive whiteboard Jamboard.

Many of the constituent products of G Suite are also available to individuals at various pricing levels (including a free tier). For example, I've been using the free tier version of Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and GMail.

A lot of people use Google Drive:

As of March 2017, Google Drive has 800 million active users, and as of September 2015, it has over one million organizational paying users. As of May 2017, there are over two trillion files stored on the service.

Just as I am planning how to help clients with Evernote automation, I've been learning how to automate G Suite, and when I get proficient at doing so, will be looking for clients wanting help to automate their use of Google services.

In the next days, I will write more about various aspects of the G Suite and the types of problems I hope to solve:

• the API of G Suite products, including Google Apps Script and its REST interface
• how to use G Suite products as part of one's own personal information management: calendars, contacts, collaborative editing of documents
• specific cases of programming the API in political organizing and small business collaboration
• what clients can do with G Suite with any programming at all -- for example, with GMail filters
• BigQuery and Sheets integration

When I set myself the goal of writing something coherent every day of November for #MyBizWriMo, I debated with myself whether to set the goal to every day, every weekday, or every day except Sunday. I consciously decided to choose every day (including Sundays and days around Thanksgiving and other particularly busy days) but was hoping that I would actually write enough articles ahead of time so that I wouldn't have to work on Sundays.

I'm letting myself off the hook a bit today to write this post about rest on this day of rest. As long as the writing process is smooth and I could keep myself from getting tangled up weaving together too many complicated ideas, I will take to heart what Jesus is reported to have said (Mark 2:27):

The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath

We rest from striving to be productive in order to lay our work down in joy and health. It's possible (and likely) that resting is even good for our productivity in the long term -- but that's not the ultimate point of this Sunday party. For someone who has been fortunate enough to love my work, ceasing my work is not easy. Observing Sunday Sabbath has been a on-again off-again affair over the years. But whenever I am disciplined in keeping Sunday as a day of rest, I have been the profound beneficiary.

So far today, I observed All Saints' Day at my church this morning. I was blessed to be a reader of names of those people dear to parishioners that died since the previous All Saint's Day. I got to speak the names of my three beloved recently departed (Anthony Jerome Smith, Walter R. Hearn, and Virginia K. Hearn) before the congregation and shed tears of sadness, joy, and remembrance. Once I post this piece, I will back away from the keyboard to cook lunch, read Alias Grace, glance through the Sunday New York Times, and laugh with my Sweetie. There is no end of work to do (and many more articles to write for #MyBizWriMo), but those are concerns for tomorrow and the day after.

I've been trying to define my business for a while. As a way of getting help to create a business that will be truly useful and have some staying power, I decided to ask my friends on Facebook for help. Here's what I wrote:

I'm about to launch a consulting/training business to help people use their digital technology (computers, phones) more productively. As I start out, I need help myself in figuring out how to be truly useful to others.

I'd like to focus on helping people to manage and automate their entire range of information: email, to do lists, notes, files, photos, and calendars to complex documents and datasets. That work includes getting people unstuck with whatever computer problems they may have so they can accomplish their productivity goals. I've loved working with teenagers to seniors, the most to the least computer savvy. No problem is too trivial or too grand for me to see what I can do to help.

I hope that you won't mind my reaching out to you individually to ask about the computer challenges you face and ways in which I might be of service to you. I'm starting out by providing some free consulting to friends and family. We'd actually be helping each other because you would be letting me understand the problems you deal with in your lives. So please don't hesitate to contact me.

My friends have been very supportive, and I've started having specific conversations about my business. I am very grateful.

Yesterday, I wrote about how I use Evernote to support my use of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. I also mentioned how I plan to help others to use Evernote with whatever organizational or productivity schemes they use, especially GTD. Today, I write a bit about what GTD actually is, why I use it, my genuine struggles with GTD, and the reasons why I stick with it in spite of the challenges I've had with GTD.

What is GTD

I use GTD to manage the flow of information in my life, especially information that requires action on my part. The GTD method guides what items to put on my to-list, how to categorize those items, and how to sequence the actions. The Wikipedia article on Getting Things Done highlights a distinctive element of GTD:

The GTD method rests on the idea of moving planned tasks and projects out of the mind by recording them externally and then breaking them into actionable work items. This allows one to focus attention on taking action on tasks, instead of recalling them.

To enact GTD, you don't need to use a computer, tablet, phone or any digital technology; paper probably works fine. I've long embraced using a computer to manage my tasks. I use Evernote as the substrate for my GTD system. (Since I started using GTD in 2004, long before the launch of Evernote in 2008, I started using GTD on Ecco Pro.) One reason I use Evernote for GTD is that Evernote runs on my all of my devices: my MacBook Pro laptop, my Android phone, my iPhone, on the Web, and as a data service via its API. Evernote is also scriptable, which allows me to write programs to compute on the information I have in Evernote. Computing on my GTD system is of great interest to me, something I'll write about later this month.

Once I get my stuff into the "Inbox" of Evernote, I then apply the GTD decision tree/workflow, summarized in the following diagram:

I present this diagram to give a flavor of the workflow. Don't worry if it doesn't make sense by itself. The Wikipedia article from which I borrow the diagram actually narrates the workflow. For someone like me who read the first edition of the GTD book (published in 2001) and is now reading the second edition (2015), the diagram serves as a memory prompt for the questions used to process items in a GTD system.

Even though I first learned about GTD 13 years ago, I can still remember how eye-opening it was for me. That I should work bottom-up instead of top-down was an important change in how I managed my commitments:

Unlike some theories, which focus on top-down goal-setting, GTD works in the opposite direction. Allen argues that it is often difficult for individuals to focus on big picture goals if they cannot sufficiently control the day-to-day tasks that they frequently must face. By developing and using the trusted system that deals with day-to-day inputs, an individual can free up mental space to begin moving up to the next level.

It was also from GTD that I learned to think of a project as a sequence of two or more tasks with a defined outcome. For example, getting a new mouse for my computer is a project because I need to not only order the mouse but then pick it up from the UPS store -- making for at least two steps). A project doesn't have to be a grand production. Once I grokked that I actually had dozens of projects on the go, I no longer neglected to explicitly manage commitments that I had previously thought as too trivial to track.

GTD has not been a panacea

As much as I love the GTD system, I have not yet realized the level of organization that I believe is produced by a more disciplined application of GTD. I see this month as a prime opportunity for me to scrub down and fix up my GTD implementation, which has been running like an unturned car.

Even though I've been unsatisfied with how GTD has been working for me, I was still shocked when I reviewed for my past writings about GTD. To wit, in Feb 2005 I wrote in Getting back to GTD and the desire to be visibly productive all the time:

Last year, I found the Getting Things Done system very helpful in getting me on track. I will focus some hours on getting my GTD system back on track.

and in the same month (Don't overdo the GTD):

It was nice to be reminded by The New York Times: To Do More. Or Less. Or Something, that in the end, I should not take any system, letting alone the very useful Getting Things Done approach too seriously!).

By the end of 2005, I wrote:

The Getting Things Done system is supposed to keep me on top of tasks large and small, but I need to intervention of a higher power and intelligence to get me back on track with GTD.

And in early 2006 -- you can hear the sighs -- I wrote:

GTD has certainly helped me get better organized, but it hasn't been a panacea. I don't blame GTD for my problem since it never promised to let me squeeze five elephants into a clay jar. Instead of aspiring to grow large enough to envelope elephants, I need to accept that I am just an ordinary clay jar.

Eleven years later, while still finding great value in GTD in tracking my personal information, I still struggle with taking on too much work in progress. Earlier this year, I wrote in Don't be WIPed:

Do you struggle with having more projects than you can productively work on simulatenously? I certainly do. That's why I have been attracted to the Personal Kanban productivity system, which puts a lot of emphasis on visualizing, pruning, and limiting one's "Work in Progress" (WIP). I've not been sufficiently serious about setting realistic limits on my WIP: witness my overflowing list of projects started but essentially zombified. How many projects survive on my list when I have neither the energy to advance them nor the will to kill them?

A natural question to explore soon is: how can one make GTD and Personal Kanban work together?

Blame the implementation not the system

After trying a system for thirteen years without accomplishing the level of mastery I had hoped, perhaps I should abandon the "cult" of GTD and look for a system that works. I won't until I push myself to implement GTD with the rigor to which I aspire. To that end, I've already identified some of the areas that need work:

• I have been far from "Inbox Zero" in GTD, let alone my email system.
• The notes I have written to myself alone take up significant room in my Inbox. Surely, I should be able to control that flow of materials coming in for processing!
• I find conducting periodic weekly or monthly review difficult to pull off systematically.
• As mentioned above, I have too much work in progress. What does GTD have to say about this problem?
• I've not clearly articulated my desired outcomes for all the projects in my GTD system. I certainly have many projects without next steps identified.
• I also have many "orphans": actions without associated projects and projects without any actions identified.

I hope to explore is whether software such as OmniFocus - task management for Mac, iPad, and iPhone that has been designed specifically for GTD enforces some systemic integrity that would obviate some of the problems I've encountered. My GTD on Evernote system is a bit freeform; I am searching for a better balance between rigor and regimentation.

Spreading the OK News of Productivity

As a consultant searching for clients wanting help with Evernote and GTD, I might have an easier time if I could claim loudly that the combination of Evernote and GTD has worked miracles for me and that it will work miracles for you too. Just let me show you. But it's good to read what Warren St. John in early 2005, concluded about productivity books, including GTD:

Not that nothing is to be gained from reading, as I did, a pile of contradictory self-help literature. The exercise can lead to all sorts of conclusions about how to live and perhaps even New Year's resolutions. Here are a few I came up with. Following Mr. Tracy's advice, I am writing them down, to imprint them on my subconcious mind.

1. I will not tell people I have all the answers. It's annoying, and people don't believe you anyway.

Nonetheless, I hope to teach GTD to others because GTD has a lot to offer even if you pick up only parts of the system. There is nothing like teaching to deepen one's own understanding of a topic. I'm longing to apply GTD in greater depths to benefit own life and work and to serve the ambitions of others.