Graham English

LifeHacks

Fail In Search Of Something Bigger

The object isn’t to be perfect. The goal isn’t to hold back until you’ve created something beyond reproach. I believe the opposite is true. Our birthright is to fail and to fail often, but to fail in search of something bigger than we can imagine. To do anything else is to waste it all.

“I Can Do That” Syndrome

You’re listening to a piece of music and it sounds so simple and easy that you say to yourself, “I can do that.” But can you really? And if you can, how come you haven’t yet? Read on…

How To Rescue Your Time And Get Your Life Back

Rescue time is an application that has become very important to my weekly GTD review. It’s helping me put some metrics to my writing goals. Read on…

GTD: Integrating Remind, iCal, GCal, Quicksilver

A Unix program called Remind is one of the greatest tools for keeping your goals and projects on track. Where calendars like iCal and Google Calendar come up short, Remind fills in the gaps.

The Zen Of Attraction

If Less Is More, Then Nothing Is Everything.

Update Twitter, Facebook, iChat, Adium, And Skype With Quicksilver

I’m a Facebook fanatic. I joined immediately after they opened to the public. In the beginning, there wasn’t much to talk about. None of my friends had joined and there really wasn’t that much I could do there. But since then, the buzz has caught my friends’ attention and Facebook’s extendibility has grown consistently, giving [...]

Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies For Your iPhone

In an attempt to hack their creativity and artistic output, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created a deck of cards they called the Oblique Strategies. Whenever they came up against a creative dilemma–and especially while under a moment of pressure or deadline–they would pull a card and follow the directions.
I’ve used this technique constantly in [...]

My New Method Of Automated Journaling

I’ve been hacking this auto-journal script for a while and I’ve recently settled on using a local install of WordPress combined with AppleScript and Quicksilver. It’s really pretty easy.
Follow MacZealots’ tutorial on Installing WordPress on Tiger. If you have any trouble along the way, you might need to check out Mac OS X Server 10.4.4: [...]

Append To Inbox Quicksilver Action

For some people, Quicksilver doesn’t work as advertised. For example, I can’t get the ‘append to…’ action to work as a trigger. And since there’s one file that I’m continually appending, I wanted to customize my workflow. That’s why I created my own Quicksilver append action.
I’ve recently started using TextMate’s GTDAlt bundle for a number [...]

Blogging With Quicksilver And AppleScript

Quicksilver gets more powerful everyday. I make it a point to learn something new about it almost daily. And it never ceases to surprise me with it’s power.
And I can say the same with AppleScript. Anything I do repeatedly, I see if I can script it. And when I combine AppleScript with Quicksilver… I feel [...]

Guess What… I’m Blogging This From Quicksilver Using AppleScript

Now this is an awesome Blogging hack. It’s not that flexible. I can’t choose categories or add excerpts but the novelty of it is just plain cool.
Plus, I tend to be more of an article writer and not so much of an off-the-cuff blogger like Scoble or Winer. Twitter has given me a voice for [...]

Update Twitter With A Finder Dialog Plus A Timed Repeat Function

Here’s a cool little AppleScript that allows you to update Twitter using a Finder dialog. Click here to open the script in Script Editor. Change the username and password and hit run. A dialog will open asking, “What are you doing?” Type your update and hit Tweet. That’s it.
Put this script anywhere you can get [...]

Automating The Quality Of Your Attention

I’ve been thinking more and more about focus. So much competes for my attention second by second (that’s you, Twitter and BlackBerry) that it’s never been more important to practice sustaining focus. The quality of my consciousness and the quality of my attention determine the quality of my life.
What needs to remain a touchstone in [...]

Automation As Part Of An Integral Life Practice

Most repetitive tasks are energy sucks. Opening the same web pages every day, clicking our way around the cybersphere, answering the same questions to our customers, all of these tasks are relatively low-value and cumulatively add up to a large chunk of our lives. The 80/20 rule tells us that 20% of the things we [...]

IM Status: Update Your Skype, iChat, Or Adium Status With Quicksilver

I got really tired of updating my online status on Skype and iChat every time I had to step away from my computer. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be cool if I could update all my instant message apps at once with a few keystrokes using Quicksilver?

GTD: What Are You Doing Right Now Redux

My previous attempt at a time-tracking script worked well for a while. But I wanted something that was self-contained so I could share it with my friends and coworkers. I also wanted to cut down on key strokes.

Information = Energy

Information takes energy to create. It takes energy to consume. And it takes energy to manage. Information is energy. I see great opportunity and challenge in this.
The challenge on a personal level is that you need a sustainable source of personal energy. No, I don’t mean a refrigerator stocked with Red Bull. But because information [...]

GTD: Automator Wants To Know What You Are Doing Right Now

I’m into systems. I love figuring out how to get from point A to point B and then optimizing the process as efficiently as possible. Better yet, I love being able to turn a system on and not have to think about it again.
This is one of those systems. I’m an entrepreneur. I don’t have [...]

iQuickTwitter – My Quicksilver + Twitter + iChat + Growl Hack

When I read that you could use Quicksilver with Twitter, I felt as excited as Jack Bauer in an interrogation room full of terror suspects. It all started with Twitter Fan Wiki. And then I lost myself in hours of troubleshooting as I tried to force hack after hack to work the way I wanted them to. As these things are, it wasn’t nearly as hard in the end as all the work that led up to the final result.

NLP Pattern: Aligning Neurological Levels

This exercise builds your resources and congruence. Start by standing in a place where you can take 5 steps backwards.

Think of a situation in which your behavior is not representative of who you really are, or who you would like to be, and you would like to have more choices.
Standing in position one, a place [...]