Toss The Kitty – The Definitive Rules

Let’s get things clear at the outset: no cats are actually tossed in the game of Toss The Kitty. In fact, tossing a cat disqualifies both players for an entire week (for first offense), month (second), or for life.

With that out of the way, I propose a scoring system for the delightful (but sometimes intrusive) presence of the feline administrative assistant blessing your office.

The point of the game is to control the clear space between your keyboard and your screen. The cleaner and neater the desk is, the easier things are for the feline participant. Owing to the nature of the game (controlling space) and participants, it is something like playing Go with thumbtacks.

To start, begin working on a project. Your opponent’s goal is to occupy as much desk and screen space as possible. Yours is to keep this space clear and catless.
Cat gets one point for every time he (or she!) obstructs your vision or sits or stops moving on the game board. Cat gets five points for every time he sits or lies down on the board. You get one point every time you evict the feline contender from the space (nicely). Cat gets twenty-five points if he falls asleep on the board. Cat gets two points if you get up from your chair to provide him with treats, food, water, or toys (have them in your desk drawers before the game starts). You get five points for completing your work, time, or project with the board under your control.
Double the points for a rush-rate project, and during the last twenty minutes of available working time (before the kids get back from school, before a dentist appointment, etc.).

With love for Mikey, RedHat, and Cisco, my three winners.

Brain Silt, Brain Clearing

“How’s that empty inbox doing?” is a question that I have (surprisingly) not been asked. My friends and co-workers, who are used to my initial enthusiasm for tools and concepts and ideas and systems, have tended to back off and watch the tool-adoption process take its course.

Some tools seem like a great idea (low carb diets) but are too hard to implement (for a vegetarian) or lead to impermanent results (eat one cracker and gain all twenty pounds back). Some tools work beautifully (7 Habits) but lose efficacy over the long run. And some are fine (KeyNote. I *love* KeyNote) but aren’t contagious.

The big one I’ve been working at for the past couple of weeks is David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. It seems to come from a fairly simple set of suppositions: you can’t keep everything in your brain, because it silts up; you can’t afford to forget important things; thus, you’ll be in constant tension unless you find a good way to remember important things when and where they are necessary – a way that your brain trusts. And he proposes such a system.

I love it.

The tension of trying to balance a load of contradictory and important thoughts and projects and ideas and lists in one’s mind has been addressed by Robert Frost in his Armful. Frost’s solution, of course, is to restack the parcels. Allen’s solution is far more radical: he says we should drop and stash them, and create a reliable system of revisiting the dropped ideas. Reliable enough for the overwrought, overthought brain to be able to trust.

The geeks of the world have seized upon this system with delight. Not only can it be reduced to a three-letter acronym, the exuberantly joyous GTD, it can be hacked, sliced, changed, reviewed and in many ways, automated. Searching for GTD in the blogosphere brings up loads of good information and people grappling with the concept of dropping things out of one’s brain and checking up on them periodically (a weekly review is what the doctor orders).

Translators – often running small businesses, always fielding multiple requests – stand to benefit from the orderliness of the GTD system. We need our brains clear enough to be able to come up with just-the-right-word. Thousands of times a day.

Watch this space for some thoughts about negging (a courtship practice where the suitor obtains the attention of his quarry by insulting her publicly) in trade, commerce, and flamewars.

As to my inbox, which you were wondering about since the beginning of this post, it is still at zero, and now my desk is clean (clean! only a cat between me and my screen!) and so are the kitchen island and the kitchen table. Think I can keep this up?

Email is a killer app

Email is a killer app.
That used to mean an application that works so well that people get computers and internet connections in order to use it.

Now it means something more like this: “I spend so much time handling my email that I have far less time and attention available to work and play offscreen and offline”.

By its very compelling nature, email and the chance of getting some interesting, worthwhile, or fun messages works to undermine whatever boundaries you may have put up around your time. Much the way a ringing telephone is still seen as a compelling reason to stop a conversation, the knowledge that an inbox may have material in it is seen as a good reason to go and check it.

Again. And again. And again, and again, ignoring any plan you may have had for your own time because, hey, the inbox may have something inside it.

That’s a fine way to lose control of your time, but in terms of living a satisfying and effective life it seems like an all-drawback, no-benefit proposition.

But work comes in by email. So many translators manage todo lists, calendars, addresses, miscellaneous information by keeping them in our inboxes, which is where they came to in the first place. And since they’re there, we leave them there in the digital equivalent of a sort of searchable mind-dump. Sometimes we even have fabulous, color-coded schemes of message handling, with start and stripes and patriotic music (or just a different blip for every type of sender; you’ve gotta love Thunderbird… …it’s the ideal of any ol’ geek).

It’s still a mess. And since it’s a mess, we know that spending time on it will help. So we go back and spend, and spend, and spend… ….time, not money, but that’s a finite resource. Even you-know-who only has sixty minutes every hour. And I’ll bet he’s got a much better system for handling email.

And as of yesterday, I do, too.

For the first time since 1984 I have an empty inbox.

The zero inbox movement has intrigued me for a while. ‘How do they do it?’ I wondered. Battling inbox clutter has been a major part of my life for years. I used all the technology I knew, but I’d still end up with a few tasks to handle, a few social letters to respond to when I have time (more, I suppose, than the 24 hours allotted to me as a daily stipend) and a few pieces of urgent information.

Then I read Bit Literacy. In that slim book, Mark Hurst of Good Experience maps out another way of handling all the email. His company runs an online to-do list service which solved my first misuse of the inbox. All my tasks do, now, belong to me, and I can access them conveniently, email tasks to myself, email tasks to later dates (how cool is that?) so they won’t bug me when I’m trying to focus on today.

The question of handling social emails becomes obvious separate folders for “yet to answer” and “answered and done”. When I visit with my aunt I don’t want lots of stuff around me reminding me of work – and vice versa. Contact information goes into a contact management program. Lists and stuff to remember sit in KeyNote.

There is a place for everything, and everything is in its place.

And by golly, I’ve got clarity, focus, an empty inbox and control of my tasks.

Now I can take on the world.

What you don't learn at law school - continuing ed for laywers in a big good way

Off in Colorado lives and works a very cool lady, Nina Ivanichvili, who runs a fine translation establishment geared to the lawyerly crowd, All Language Alliance by name.

Working with lawyers has taught her some things; not least of which is that attorneys don’t typically get cross-cultural training at school. What with globalization, this becomes a handicap. How can they be trained?

Nina is not the sort of person who would shy away from a challenge. She has written an online Lawyer’s Guide to Cross-Cultural Depositions, and responses to it have been such that she has embarked on an ambitious new project: a blog for lawyers about translation.

Friends, translators, multiculturals – this blog is the cat's pyjamas, the bee's knees, and the owl’s unmentionables. It is a resource unlike any other, geared directly to the people who need it most. I won’t be surprised when this becomes required reading for advanced courses in international litigation.

Of course, there is a certain bunch of attorneys in Maryland which could have used Nina’s whitepaper. Everyone else is talking about it, so I won’t belabor the point. My favorite statement on the debacle and ways to prevent it was made jointly by the ATA and NAJIT, who have put together a resource for attorneys and court clerks, to help schedule interpreting in rare languages (also known as languages of limited diffusion).

This ties back in to Nina's blog and white paper. Any attorney dealing with a case that has multilingual implications should read these. Prosecution, as well as the defense.

Now all we need is a good language resource for judges. Anyone want to take on the challenge?