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2016

  • in python
  • 3 min read

Dwayne Crooks on learning Python efficiently

Dwayne Crooks wrote a fabulous blog post this week with his advice on learning Python efficiently.

Being a year into my journey, I couldn’t agree with him more. He lists five mistakes that hamper our ability to learn efficiently. Below I’ve listed his five mistakes with where I am in my journey in italics.

  1. Reading a book cover to cover. I strongly agree with this one. This was the first mistake I made a year ago when I decided I wanted to learn Python. I bought Think Python and Learning Python and quickly realized I am not the type of learner who can learn from reading and trying to follow along.
  2. Diving in without a plan. Check! Yes, I have a plan. I know what I want to build. Whew.

  3. Failing to narrow your scope. I think I’m ok on this one? Let’s just quote this one in full from Mr. Crooks:

    Having clear boundaries makes it easy to decide whether or not a new resource is worth your time. That’s why learning Python by trying to build something in it is a great way to go. You’d realize how much of Python you don’t need to know in order to accomplish any one task. You’ll find that the more you narrow your scope at the beginning, the more you’ll learn and the faster you’ll progress.

    The challenge for me in understanding this one, is if you’re new to Python, how do you know where to draw the boundaries? When I get stuck, I revisit some of the classes I’ve taken or search Stack Overflow. I quickly realize how much I don’t know when I find a new way to do something or come across something related but that I don’t need. But knowing what I want to build probably expands my scope instead of narrowing it.

    • Trying to learn 2 (or more) things at the same time. I’m being very careful with this one. I want to have a prototype of my application working before I move on to my next class, Python for Entrepreneurs, which will teach me how to build my application using Pyramid. The course will also cover CSS, Bootstrap and more web technologies. Where I’m struggling though is on my prototype – do I just build the prototype or do I try and learn some basic SQL, which is what the web app version will need? My head has been in the right spot on this one as I’ve tried to avoid learning SQL up until now.
    • Spending too much time studying before you have experience doing. Mr. Crooks hits this one on the head and is basically describing me: Because we’re afraid to fail, we want to know what we’re doing before we ever try. So we spend a lot of time learning before ever trying to apply any of it. I’m wired to be a “learner” and do a deep dive into anything before I pull the trigger. Whether it’s a ton of research before buying a new TV or learning a new skill, this describes me well. But I think I’m ok on this one. If you were to look through my Github repo for nflpool (please don’t), you would see a mishmash of Python. There’s probably 25 files in my repo that is basically just a scratchpad for me trying to figure out how to parse JSON or trying to write a for loop to get the results I need. There’s nothing Pythonic in there (yet). For example, I’m not using functions like I should. But once I get the different pieces working, I’ll refactor it the right way. You can argue whether I should be starting it right or not, but I’m diving in and trying to figure it out piece by piece. You have to start somewhere…

Mr. Crooks then goes on and shares his five steps to get started. I’m happy to see I’m on the right track.

  • in python
  • 3 min read

One Year of Python

It was Black Friday of 2015. O’Reilly put on a sale of their programming ebooks and I was finally ready to take the plunge and learn Python. I bought three books:

I then signed up for a Coursera class, Python for Everybody, taught by Dr. Charles Severance and started the class. I was ready to do this. I needed a hobby. I had a problem to solve.

Then real life got in the way. A few months earlier, we started building a new house. In January it was time to sell our house, which meant hours of work. Then in February, we moved.

I put learning Python on the back burner. Before I knew it, it was July, and another six months had gone by. It was now fantasy football season and that was the problem I had to solve. I needed a program that would keep track of all football statistics and standings and automatically calculate each player’s points. It was time.

I re-started the Coursera course and spent the time. I was easily spending twenty hours a week reading the course materials, watching the videos and doing the homework.

I confirmed what I knew about myself: I learn best by doing, not just reading or watching videos. The books I had bought were helpful, but just sitting down and reading them, trying to follow along and do the exercises was difficult. Python for Everybody on Coursera was great.

I finished that and moved on to Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps by Michael Kennedy, which I had purchased in early 2016 via a Kickstarter campaign. I’m almost done with that a year after I started this journey.

Learning to code in Python is hard. I don’t have a background in computer science and with some of the concepts that the books and courses teach I just don’t have the base knowledge necessary. This sometimes makes it harder and takes longer to understand the concepts. I’m lucky that my wife has worked professionally as a programmer in multiple languages, including Java and SQL. But I drive her crazy when I ask her questions about concepts I clearly don’t understand. I use the wrong terminology or fail to grasp what I’ve been taught.

I don’t know how much I’ve retained from the classes and books. I’m trying to build my application in parallel with my learning. I’m convinced the only way I’m going to learn is to build something, which is a piece of advice most often found online for people aspiring to learn programming. I’m constantly hitting up Google and Stack Overflow when I get stuck. I’ll copy bits and pieces of code from these search results and I’m always doubting whether I understand what I’m copying. I’ve signed up for multiple newsletters and bookmarked dozens of websites with articles on how to learn, code snippets, programming challenges and more. I’m overwhelmed with the concepts I’m learning and I know I don’t understand, let alone use, these concepts.

But I’m going to keep trying. The only way I’ll learn is by building something. The code will be ugly. It will break. And I’ll keep updating it until it works and as I learn more, I’ll make it more elegant.

Here’s to another year.

  • in python
  • 3 min read

Importing Team Data into NFLPool

Last weekend I discovered how to pretty print the five JSON files I get from MySportsFeeds. This was helpful to understand just how much data is nested within each file. I also spent a good chunk of the weekend writing in a notebook. I mostly did some data modeling on what each table in the database should store and what their primary keys would be. I also captured things I need to research and started breaking the project into chunks. As I tweeted out over the weekend:

Monday was a holiday so I did the first four courses of Python Jumpstart. I took a break and went back to the JSON files I had worked with. My goal was to build with what should be the easiest table and pull the team data out. This is a dictionary that includes the team name (Texans), city (Houston), abbreviation (HOU) and id (64). The ID number is supplied in the JSON feed and is unique, so I will use that as the primary key. There will be two more columns in the table for conference and division, but I wanted to deal with that later.

I wrote a for loop to try and pull out each team’s information. I quickly got stuck and nothing was working. At one point, the loop I had written worked, but only pulled out the data for the first ranked team. I showed my wife my code and she pointed out that it wasn’t iterating in a loop.

I was stuck for two nights working on this after dinner. I finally stepped back and modified my pretty print Python program and started breaking down all of the information in the JSON file again. I figured out what was a list and what was a dictionary and what was nested where. (It looks like I didn’t commit this to the git repo, oops! Will have to fix that.)

After doing this last night, I found the list I needed to work with. I then re-wrote my for loop and I was able to iterate through all 16 teams in the AFC:

for afc_team_list in teamlist:

afc_team_name = data["conferenceteamstandings"]["conference"][0]["teamentry"][x]["team"]["Name"]

afc_team_city = data["conferenceteamstandings"]["conference"][0]["teamentry"][x]["team"]["City"]

afc_team_id = data["conferenceteamstandings"]["conference"][0]["teamentry"][x]["team"]["ID"]

afc_team_abbr = data["conferenceteamstandings"]["conference"][0]["teamentry"][x]["team"]["Abbreviation"]

print((afc_team_name),",",(afc_team_city),",",(afc_team_id),",",(afc_team_abbr))

x = x + 1

I then copied and pasted and did it again for the NFC. I did try, unsuccessfully, to modify the conference list – “conference” – so I could just write one for loop instead of one for each of the two conferences. But it was working, so I’ll leave it for now. (I’m sure my code is ugly, but hey, I’m just starting).

After that it was all about writing the SQL insert statements to put this into a SQLite3 database. (For now, later it will go into MySQL). That took me a an hour, but at the end, I got it working and was even able to add the conference name to each row.

Next up, I need to take the data in the Division standings JSON file. In it is stored the division name for each division in a conference: AFC/AFC-East. I’ll need to write a for loop to grab it, slice it to remove the “AFC/“ and then stick that in the Division field for each team in the Teams table. I’ll also need to stop dropping and re-creating the table each time I insert data, but it’s working.

Progress!

  • in python
  • 3 min read

Building the NFLPool webapp – Starting with JSON

I’m glad I started with the Python for Everybody specialization at Coursera before jumping into Python Jumpstart by building 10 Python Apps by Michael Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy moves fast. I’ve completed the first four apps and it’s good to get a refresher on the information I learned in Python for Everybody.

I also spent part of the weekend sketching in a notebook. I did some brainstorming about the database design I’ll need for NFLPool. I learned one of the bigger differences between MySQL and Postgresql is that MySQL does not have the ability to use foreign keys but MySQL is much faster. The lack of foreign keys may make the design a bit tougher, but more on that later in a different blog post.

I also sketched out some ideas for the functions I’m going to need to write so I’m not writing the same bit of code over and over again. From there, I created a to-do list of things to start working through. I find this whole process of building an app overwhelming. I never thought I’d be using paper and pencil so much, but I’ve found it helpful to break this into smaller chunks and attack them one at a time.

Then I started working on the import process for the JSON. This quickly derailed as I realized just how many stats MySportsFeeds captures from an NFL game. That quickly turned in to writing a JSON pretty print statement so I could see how the five different JSON files nested their dictionaries.

I currently download five JSON files every Tuesday via a cron job with all the statistics. I know my app won’t be ready for the 2016 season and my hope is by having 17 weeks of data, I can re-create the season to test my app to make sure it’s scoring each player correctly as we move through the season week by week. When I download the JSON via curl, it includes all the web headers, such as:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2016 12:16:07 GMT
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
Cache-Control: must-revalidate, no-store, s-maxage=0, max-age=0, private
Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Origin, Content-Type, Accept, Accept-Encoding, Accept-Language, Authorization
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Content-Encoding: gzip
Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=B7548F2309747418749B5421282A5E08; Path=/leaguemanager-web/; HttpOnly
Vary: User-Agent
Connection: close
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

And then the JSON starts right after that with curly braces. I was proud of myself as I wrote an if statement to load the file, read the lines, and load the JSON when finding the curly braces. Then I wrote code to first print out all the statistics categories (commented out below) and pretty print all the JSON:

import json
import pprint
import os

#Open the JSON file that includes headers


#Change the name of the file to open to match the query below:
with open('json/20160921-division-team-standings.json') as file:
    alltext = file.readlines()  #Put each line into a list

# division-team-standings.json
for lines in alltext:
    if lines.startswith('{'):
        rawdata = lines
        data = json.loads(rawdata)
#        for stat_categories in data["divisionteamstandings"]["division"][0]["teamentry"][0]["stats"]:
#            pprint.pprint(stat_categories)   #Print all the categories in "stats"
        pprint.pprint(data)  #Print the JSON

I had five files to review and I just manually changed the code to the file I wanted and had a code block for each of the files. I know I probably should have just wrote a function, but I was in the zone. (My code probably isn’t very Pythonic either, but I have to start somewhere on this journey). I also know that when it comes time to build the real app I’ll be loading the JSON across the network and not from a local file, but future Paul gets to deal with that.

I also spent some time playing around with the nflgame and mlbgame Python modules. I need to spend some more time with them and I’ll share some thoughts on those in another blog post.

  • in python
  • 3 min read

Next class up: Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps

I’ve completed the Python For Everybody course taught by Dr. Charles Severance at the University of Michigan on Coursera. All that’s left is the capstone project to put into practice what I’ve learned, but as I’m doing this to learn Python and not for the official certificate, I’m going to skip it. The course is taught in Python 2.7 and I want to shift to Python 3.x.

Python For Everybody was great. The pace and the exercises were perfect for the class. I wish I had realized sooner that there were additional exercises in the textbook that were not part of the required Coursera class. The fourth class, Python and Databases, was intense. The speed of the class was accelerated with teaching you SQL and how Python connects to databases (SQLlite specifically). The homework was much more simple in Python for Databases compared to the first three sessions. You usually had to only make some minor changes in the SQL syntax to complete the grade.

The two things I’m going to need to focus on to have success in building the two apps I want to build are dictionaries (from importing statistics via JSON) and databases. If I walked away from one thing from the Python for Databases class is that I’m going to need to spend some time with paper and pencil and plan my information architecture and database models if I’m going to be successful.

Next I’m going to start Python Jumpstart by Building 10 Apps by Michael Kennedy of the Talk Python podcast. I supported the Kickstarter earlier this year and am excited now that I hope I have enough of a base understanding of Python to tackle this. This will be taught in Python 3.x (yay!) and I’m hoping now that I have that base knowledge, building these apps along with the tutorials included will give the practice I need to later build a real app. It’s also going to go into a little more detail than what I’ve learned so far on list comprehension (which makes my head hurt), BeautifulSoup for web scraping, and Classes.

I also supported Mr. Kennedy’s next Kickstarter, Python for Entrepreneurs. This also has me excited as the second phase of building my fantasy sports app will be deploying it on the web. The description looks perfect for what I’ll need, in addition to learning the web framework Pyramid:

You will learn to build and design your web app

This course will teach you how to build a data-driven web application in Python.

We will:

**• Build our web app with the Pyramid web framework, "the Python web framework that supports your decisions, by artisans for artisans."

**

• Create and connect to our database using SQLAlchemy, the most popular data access layer in Python 

**• Learn the core elements of web design including CSS and front-end frameworks such as Bootstrap.

**

Time to get to work.

  • in python
  • 2 min read

Web Scraping and Python

I’m flying along in the Coursera course Python for Everybody, from the University of Michigan taught by Dr. Charles Severance. I’ve completed the first two of four courses which give you an introduction to Python.

I’m now on the third course, Using Python to Access Web Data. This and the fourth course focused on databases, are the two key foundations for the web app I want to build. I just finished Chapter 12, which introduces the BeautifulSoup library for scraping web pages. This is going to be huge – I’ll be able to scrape ESPN to find which MLB or NFL teams lead their divisions or leading in the wild card races.

Being on vacation this week, I’ve been able to complete a few chapters and am now a couple weeks ahead of schedule. I’m tempted to pause and see if I can take what I’ve learned with BeautifulSoup and actually write some small Python programs to actually scrape and print the results. It might be good practice to reinforce what I’ve learned.

The next two chapters are key as well. XML and then the one I’m most looking forward to: JSON. I’ve already signed up for a developer account with MySportsFeeds and am receiving JSON data for player stats, teams and conference standings. I’ve spoken in the past with one of their lead developers and they don’t currently keep statistics for wildcard or playoff standings, so I’m going to need to use BeautifulSoup in my app to get those. I’ll also need to make a decision if I’m going to use that JSON data for player stats and query against it myself or just use the nflgame or nfldb libraries that have already been built. The biggest challenge their is that both of those libraries are written in Python 2.7 and I really want to write my apps in Python 3.x.

I know I’m getting ahead of myself. Every time I learn something that will be applicable to the app I want to build and I talk to my wife about it, she tells me to slow down. My mind is always racing with how I can apply what I’m learning and how it will affect the architecture of the app. Some people say the best way to learn a programming language is to build something and learn as you go. I can’t wait to put all this Python learning to practice.

  • in python
  • 4 min read

Python for Everybody at Coursera with Dr. Chuck

tl;dr: I’m spending the time to learn Python primarily using the free course available at Coursera taught by Dr. Charles Severance of the University of Michigan and am really enjoying it.

The good news: I’ve committed to my goal of learning Python and I’m sticking to it.

The bad news: I haven’t been writing about my progress as much as I should be. Hey, learning this stuff is hard and takes time. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

As I mentioned in my last post, I re-enrolled in the Coursera course, Learn to Program and Analyze Data with Python, from the University of Michigan taught by Dr. Charles Severance. It includes five courses, with each one lasting about six weeks, with the last course being a capstone project. You can audit the course for free or pay for an official certificate and I’m auditing the course.

I flew through the first course and am now 60% of the way through the second course, Python Data Structures. In the first course you learn the basics of computer science and Python – print statements, expressions and variables, loops and functions.

In the second course, Python Data Structures, you continue to build on that, learning how to slice slice strings, searching within strings, and working with files. This is where it is finally coming together and you’re writing a real program for homework assignments.

I am enjoying Learn to Program and Analyze Data with Python on Coursera. I find the professor’s video lectures easy to follow and understand. The conversational tone is helpful and I appreciate how he talks about a concept and also shows slides in the video that he draws on to help illustrate his point. I believe this helps those who learn by listening and those who learn visually.

Here is an example of the second course’s syllabus for week three that I just completed. As you start the week, you easily get an overview of the week ahead:

  • The lecture videos you will need to watch and how long they are
  • A wiki page of notes related to the lecture created by students
  • The assignments you will need to complete
  • A video showing the worked exercises to watch after the assignment is completed
  • Bonus (optional) material for the week

There are two downsides to the course. The first is that it is being taught in Python 2.7. One of the best parts, though, is that Dr. Severance has made the course and the book available in a Creative Commons license, which is awesome. You don’t necessarily need to do it on Coursera as the course materials are available on his website at Python Learn with the videos also available on YouTube. If you visit the site, you’ll see the book has been rewritten for Python 3 and the materials are now being updated and I’m hopeful that the course on Coursera will be updated in time as well.

The second downside is more of a personal thing. The course has a neat autograder online:

As you can see in the screenshot in the upper left, it tells you what to do to complete the assignment. Just below that is the editor that gives you some code to start. You edit the code and press “Check Code” and the output is displayed in the upper right box. If the output matches the assignment, the grade is automatically updated on the server.

I learned in this week’s assignment that I need to write my code in an editor and save it rather than just doing it in the browser. I had to go back and re-watch the worked exercises for the previous chapter to review the code from the last homework assignment as this week’s homework built upon it. I won’t make that mistake again! Also, if you are really stuck with a homework assignment, there is a discussion forum where you can ask questions and get hints to what to focus on to complete the assignment.

As I’ve worked through a couple of the books I’ve bought and proceed through this course, putting the concepts into practice is the hardest part. While I understand the concepts, or at least think I do, putting it into practice and writing a real program is where I struggle. As frustrating as it can be to go back, re-read a chapter or re-watch a video when I can’t write the code, I firmly believe I am going to learn best by practicing writing actual code over and over again if I ever want to meet my goal of writing the program to calculate the fantasy pool scores. I am finally making the time commitment to learn Python and enjoying the process thanks to Dr. Chuck and Coursera. (You can follow Dr. Chuck on Twitter at @drchuck).

  • in python
  • 1 min read

How time flies (or why I still haven’t learned Python)

A constant staple of this blog’s life over the last 10-plus years have been the constant breaks and then the “I haven’t blogged in forever!” blog posts. And here we are again.

After starting my journey to learn to program, I went a couple of months and then we sold the house and moved. That really did occupy a large chunk of time, but then all the usual excuses set in. I’ve been telling myself the last couple of months I would start and never do.  Now we are just six weeks away from the football season and if I don’t learn Python, I can never build the application I want to automate the scoring of my football pool.

Nothing like the NFL season starting to get you motivated. I’ve re-enrolled in Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python) at Coursera and have decided to use Python 3.x over Python 2.x. I’m also going to work my way through Think Python (2nd Edition) by Allen B. Downey, which also focuses on Python 3. I have a few ideas for what I’ll do next, but I need to do it one step at a time.

I’ve also been doing more research on how I’m going to pull the NFL stats in, but more on that later. I’m just happy to be motivated again!

  • in music
  • 6 min read

Prince Rogers Nelson 1958 – 2016

Prince has always held a special place for me. I spent my summers growing up with grandparents, an hour north of the suburbs of Milwaukee, where I lived. In 1984 I was 11 and I still remember walking to the record shop to purchase my first record, Prince’s Purple Rain. Years later, I would joke that if my grandparents or parents knew of some of the lyrics on that album, I would never have been able to buy it.

Darling Nikki

I knew a girl named Nikki

I guess you could say she was a sex fiend

I met her in a hotel lobby

Masturbating with a magazine

She said how’d you like to waste some time

And I could not resist when I saw little Nikki grind

Growing up in the golden age of MTV, my fandom would continue. Raspberry Beret continues to be one of my top ten songs of Prince. U Got the Look, his collaboration with Sheena Easton, will always be emblazoned in my mind from the video. In 1989, when the first Batman movie was released starring Michael Keaton, Prince’s Batdance was a sensation. There was nothing like it on pop radio. Diamonds and Pearls was released in October 1991, a month after I met my girlfriend and later wife. The Love Symbol album was released just a year later in October 1992 and both of these albums would feature singles that I would sprinkle through the mixtapes I made Kelly over this period.

I moved from Milwaukee to Madison in late 1992. I worked as a supervisor in a Best Buy store and Barb, a customer service rep, worked for me. If I had to guess, she was in her early 40s and worked Monday through Friday from 9-2. She knew I was a Prince fan and one day, out of the blue, she asked me if I wanted to join her and her husband on a trip up to Minneapolis. It turns out her son, Jamie, was a choreographer working for Prince’s new protege. Jamie didn’t have any formal dance training. Every day growing up, he would come home after school, turn on MTV and learn the dance moves to all the videos playing on MTV. Jamie would later go on to become one of the five touring dancers on Michael Jackson’s Bad tour.

I joined Barb and her husband on the trip to Minneapolis, my first time there. It was about a four to five hour drive. A local radio station was hosting there annual party called the Star Party. We had a VIP table close to the front where it was Jamie, Barb and her husband, and…. Carmen Electra. (I bet you didn’t remember that Carmen Electra started as a protege of Prince, did you?)

The Star Party was at Glam Slam, the club owned by Prince in downtown Minneapolis. Carmen Electra was slated to go on second to last and we sat at the table watching the other acts performed. Shortly before Carmen Electra was to go on stage, two huge bodyguards approached our table:

He is going to come to the table in a few minutes. You don’t look at him, you don’t talk to him. Understand?

And then he was there. You knew Prince was short but he was even smaller in person. He ignored all of us and whispered in Carmen Electra’s ear. She giggled, clearly enjoying the attention. And just like that, he was gone. A few minutes later Carmen would go backstage to get ready for her performance, of which I remember very little as it was forgettable. After the show, she came back, signed a record for me in lipstick, and kissed it. For years, as I moved apartment to apartment, cross country and back, I kept that sealed and signed record. At some point, I got rid of it. I kick myself on two fronts for that: first, the novelty; second, I would buy a turntable in 2008, and would have been able to actually listen to it.

After the show, we drove out to Chanhassen to drive by Paisley Park, before driving back to Madison. I only remember that I was very tired and it was a half hour drive to his studio through corn fields out in the suburbs. Who knew that in 1999 I would buy my first house just ten minutes from Paisley Park, where I still live to this day.

A few years later when watching the Oscars telecast, I noticed in the credits:

Choreographed by Jamie King

Hey, I met him!

A year or two later I would move to Minneapolis with my future wife. I was still working at Best Buy, and now so was she, in stores about ten minutes apart. There was a security guard who worked at both of our stores who also moonlighted as security at Paisley Park, where Prince would throw impromptu concerts from time to time. This security guard had a crush on Kelly and even asked her out. I didn’t hold this against him as he got me on the list for Paisley Park a few times.

Seeing Prince perform at Paisley Park is like nothing you’ve ever seen. He would rarely play any of his hits. Most times it was things stored in the vault or it was a one hour jam session with his band playing whatever he wanted. Whatever it was, it was magical and special and I’m so glad to have been one of the hundreds in attendance at those shows.

I would only be in Minneapolis for a year or two before moving for another promotion at Best Buy. Two albums would get me through the cross country drive. One was The Hits, a three album best of and a disc of B-sides, released in 1993. The other was ABBA’s Thank You for the Music, their four disc best of collection. (Don’t judge me).

In 1996 I was now a district operations manager for Best Buy in Philadelphia. The Gold Experience, released in September of ’95, was my constant companion in the car as I drove from store to store.

We would move back to Minneapolis in 1997 and in 1999 we bought our first house in Chaska, just ten minutes and one suburb over from Paisley Park, which we still drive by all the time.

In 2008, I would buy my first turntable. Searching through all of the record stores in Minneapolis, I was always on the lookout for Prince albums. Being in Minneapolis, Prince albums, with the exception of Purple Rain, were usually difficult to find and overpriced. But I would buy every one I could get my hands on.

Prince Vinyl

After years away in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Prince returned to Minneapolis in a big way the last few years. He would throw more parties and concerts at Paisley Park. There was little notice given – usually a week to just a couple of days and you had to follow social media to find out. I would tell a co-worker who lived in Silicon Valley that he had to come out, as he really wanted to go to one of those shows. But buying a plane ticket on short notice? Ouch. You never knew if Prince was actually going to take the stage or not, and if he did, what time he would. Some of those first shows when he was back, doors would at 10 p.m. and he wouldn’t appear until 3, 4 or 5 a.m. I kept telling myself I would go back and never did.

Now I never will.

I drove out to Paisley Park mid-day yesterday after the announcement of Prince’s death. There were already hundreds gathered, grieving. The tributes along the Paisley Park fence were touching.

After the news broke, I was trying to explain to my oldest son what Prince met to me, and I broke down. 89.3 The Current played Prince non-stop starting in chronological order at 1 p.m. yesterday, and at 4 p.m. when Purple Rain hit the airwaves shortly after I got home from Paisley Park, I choked up again. Just writing this, tears come to my eye. Only one other artist’s death, Freddie Mercury in 1991, touched me in the way this has.

I’m so glad to call Minneapolis home. The impromptu concert last night on the streets of Minneapolis, as the city closed off blocks downtown surrounding the legendary First Avenue nightclub where Purple Rain was filmed, was awe inspiring as thousands filled the streets. First Avenue opened a dance party at 11 p.m., which was packed all night with people still waiting to get in at 3 a.m.

Prince called Minneapolis home, but he belonged to all of us, all over the world.

Photo: Prince by Peter Tea under a Creative Commons BY-ND 2.0 license.

  • in General
  • 4 min read

Rebooting my productivity without technology

Early last year I ran to Target on a Sunday morning on the spur of the moment. I wanted a Moleskin notebook, the small one that fits in your back pocket.

I wanted to get in a habit of writing down everything, especially ideas for writing prompts.

That lasted about a week for me. This is typical for me, especially when I try to create a new habit impulsively.

For the last couple of years, I’ve also been a huge fan of Wunderlist as a to-do application. It has great app support, working on the web, Mac, Android and iOS with instant sync. I had a number of lists and sub-lists within those and would capture all of the to-do items for each category.

It even worked great when we were selling the house late last year. My wife installed the apps and we shared a to-do list by room for everything that had to get done in order to sell the house. This was a big deal as she is a big fan of writing everything down and gets great pleasure in physically crossing off each action item.

The challenge I have is that I use Wunderlist in fits and spurts. I don’t capture everything I want to do as it happens. When I’m on top of my game, I’ll do two things. At the beginning of each week, I’ll first review all of my lists and the action items in them. I’ll update and check off anything that is done and I’ll add everything I want to get done. Each morning after that, I’ll sit down and review the lists, making sure to add anything I want to get done that day. The challenge I had is there were some days where I’d have the Mac app open and check things off as I would get things done. But I lacked discipline and wouldn’t do it every day and then weeks would go by and I’d have to start over. The bigger challenge for me was that I wasn’t adding things to my to-do list during the day. I was using it as a tool to get things done that I had already planned.

I’ve always been a big fan of Getting Things Done by David Allen. I read the book years ago and I took away three things:

  1. As soon as the idea hits you, write it down. Keep your mind uncluttered.
  2. If it takes less than five minutes, write it down and then just do it.
  3. Create a tickler file aka a long term file for things you want to get done in the someday pile. But write it down and get it out of your head.

That’s why Wunderlist wasn’t working for me – I wasn’t reaching for the Mac app or my phone the moment something hit me that I needed or wanted to do. I don’t always have my phone on me. I don’t take it to meetings when I’m in the office and if I’m at my home office, I’ll leave it there when I go to the kitchen or if I go for a walk. If I think of something at a particular moment, I’m not writing it down right then and there.

So now I’m going old school. I grabbed the small Moleskin notebook I had abandoned and over the last couple of weeks, I’m filling it as fast I think of something that I want to do or needs to be done.

I have also added two tabs to my notebook. The first 70% of the notebook will be dedicated to my to-do list (and crossing them off!). I then have a tab for “Big Projects”, things that aren’t going to be done on a specific day. It needs to be more than a “someday” list, but I haven’t figured it out yet. Then there is a third tab, a “notes” tab. This tab is for anything I want to capture – ideas that I might want to write about; story ideas; or just random thoughts. Anything goes.

I think my wife might be on to something – the mental pleasure you get by crossing something off. Wunderlist makes a nice little ding when you check something as done and then archives it, making it disappear. Having the ability to see a page of things that have been done and crossed off makes you feel more productive. (Though there is an advanced feature in Wunderlist to make them not disappear, it would quickly be cluttered).

Like any productivity tip or tool, it’s about what works for you – and then sticking with it. I’m finding that not using technology for the first time in a long time is making me even more productive.