The Power of Envelopes

The envelope system is so legitimate it can be found on wikipedia, which passes as a fully functioning argument on today’s internet. Authenticity established.

The envelope system involves placing money into an envelope and then writing on the envelope what the money can be used for. When the envelope is out of money you can no longer do the things written on the envelope. Sometimes at the end of the month you have an envelope with money left over and another one that ran out of money a little too early so next month you do a better job of what envelope you put what money into.

Let’s get all digital modern on this shit and find/replace money with time.

The envelope system involves placing time into an envelope and then writing on the envelope what the time can be used for. When the envelope is out of time you can no longer do the things written on the envelope. Sometimes at the end of the month you have an envelope with time left over and another one that ran out of time a little too early so next month you do a better job of what envelope you put what time into.

What’s that? Time is abstract and can’t be placed into envelopes? Well fuck you, I did it anyway.

Why Bother?

What do you gain out of budgeting your time? Let’s say every week your time income is 168 hours. You love getting 7 hours of sleep every night so you write sleep on an envelope and put 49 hours into it. We have 119 hours left. Where do you spend these hours in your life right now? Look at your life. Look at it.

You may have noticed this with your money income, but if you don’t bother to budget your money you invariably end up wondering where all of it went. Well, you buy a lot of drinks when you go out for dinner four night a week. The sum of your iTunes purchases is a number that you do not know. There are plenty of opportunities to spend your money and there are plenty of people that want you to give your money to them. They don’t care about your budget, they really, truly do not. They won’t help you stick to it, they really, truly will not.

This is how time works, too. Your job doesn’t care about your time budget. They want all of your time. They’re probably paying you for some of your time but every minute after that is gravy, so it’s in their best interest to get a lot of that gravy. Don’t blame them; if you are someone’s boss you should be doing the same thing.

When you budget your time like you budget your money you gain the greatest power known to man: the power to say no. Can I have sex with you? Of your remaining 119 hours maybe you want to spend 40 of them at work. Don’t be a jerk, really truly try to work 8 hours a day. If you spend time sitting at work browsing facebook either budget for it separately or stop spending your work budget on it.

No-ing

What can you do with ‘no’? Let’s say you’re tasked with a task and your company is calling this Task A because it is convenient to my analogy. (Thank you, company.) You’re close to finishing Task A and the company decides that Task B needs to get done by tonight. If you’re not budgeting your time you stay late and do Task B and resume Task A in the morning. If you ARE budgeting your time this gets to happen.

Boss: I need you to do Task B by tomorrow, because the President of the United States wants to see it.
You: I’m scheduled to complete Task A tomorrow so if I do Task B it will delay that.
Boss: Well shit, do Task B and we’ll modify Task A so that it takes less time for you to complete. Putting the doo-dads on the gidgets is just a nice-to-have.

Well look at YOU! This shit is viral, and it made your boss modify his or her time budget on the spot to suit your time budget.

Finding the MVP

Making these sorts of decisions is good for your product. You probably want to launch your product with everything from Task A to Task Z. Your product has to be out by Christmas, so you can work 119 hour weeks or you can say no. You should say no because it turns out all your product needs to attract customers is Tasks A, B, C and Q. This is your Minimum Viable Product. If you launch with more than this you’re stupid. Once you have customers you have real data and you learn that they hate Task F. Nobody is even asking for Task J. Actually, everyone is asking for Task AA which you didn’t even think of.

A time budget is a great way to keep your eye on the MVP. You have to force yourself to make hard decisions so that you spend your time wisely rather than just spend your time. Next product you’ll move some time from one envelope to the other and the whole thing will be a lot easier.

And all your employees get to go home and see their loved ones.

Here is an example. Zero Punctuation, a popular video game review site, opened a contest called the Stonking Great Game Contest where the goal is to create a Zero Punctuation game. The reward for winning this contest? They will review your game, put it up on their website, advertise it, and send you some Zero Punctuation Swag. You gain access to the Zero Punctuation intellectual property for producing your game, but do not retain the rights to any part of the game using that property. This means if you had a good game design and wanted to release it on your own, you would have to redraw the art and re-work game mechanics centered around the Zero Punctuation theme.

Sound like a good deal? It shouldn’t. This is in its essence, contract work. Zero Punctuation wants a game, but they don’t want to pay the prices a contractor would charge to make a game. With this realization, the “prizes” begin to disappear. Even if they contracted this game they would want people to play it, so they’re going to put it on their website and advertise it. What’s left as payment is the Zero Punctuation Swag. Would you spend weeks making someone a video game in exchange for a mouse pad and a t-shirt?

Today I showed my artist friend Tim Wendorf an art contest that popular casual game site Jay Is Games is hosting. They need a logo and banner for their upcoming yearly competition (which is the GOOD kind of competition) and they’re holding a mini competition to choose that art. The winner will receive $300 dollars, which I’m told is peanuts for the work they want.

Tim couldn’t help but notice the similarity between this new breed of contest and reality television. Where reality television takes real people like you and me and lets us be on television produced by famous networks, this new breed lets real people like you and me perform professional work for famous companies.

I present to you, Reality Work. Like the television before it, you too can scab someone else’s job and be paid with a pat on the head.

Unfortunately for The Pirate Google, their argument is unsound. If you go to their site and type in “Fast and Furious” your Google search becomes “Fast and Furious filetype:torrent” as previously discussed. This is where their argument falls apart; anyone who’s used Google knows that search results change drastically just by adding or removing one word from your query.

I could set up a similar website called The Porno Google and append “hardcore sex” to the end of your search. Guess what will populate the majority of your search results? Sites about hardcore sex. Does this mean we need to ban Google from schools and the workplace, since it contains adult material? No! Google has a feature called SafeSearch that removes search results deemed inappropriate by the system administrator.

In fashion, Google also has a way to remove copyrighted material from its websites. Visiting this Google Help page gives you all the steps you need to take to have Google remove an infringing download from their servers. Other sites commonly targeted by pirates with a similar argument, such as YouTube, Rapidshare, and MegaUpload also have pages where they show their commitment to upholding copyright law.

YouTube Copyright Abuse Form
Rapidshare Copyright Abuse Form
MegaUpload Copyright Abuse Form

Compare these to The Pirate Bay’s page about removing copyrighted material. (Here’s a hint if your work filter doesn’t allow you to the site: they post the cease and desist letters and mock the lawyers who sent them.)

The Pirate Bay Mocks Copyright Abuse

If we were to do a completely fair comparison between The Pirate Bay and Google, we would go to each of them and search for “Fast and Furious” without adding anything else to skew the results. While The Pirate Bay contains nothing but links to torrents that help you download the movie for free (and illegally here in USA), Google’s search results are all completely legal. They are links to reviews, plot synopses, and discussion on the film. Google’s search results don’t contain a single torrent file. And now it becomes obvious why Google is not under the same scrutiny as The Pirate Bay.

I’d imagine it’s a pretty common problem when the backspace key is mapped to your browser’s back function.

The web sometimes meets you half way on this concern. I never worry about my word press blog entries, for instance, because it autosaves my compositions every couple minutes. (Thank you!) Opera tends to let me press forward or back buttons to undo my mistake, and all my work is still there in the text field. This is assuming the website coders allow you to cache the page.

There’s a new kid on the block in web development, though, and he’s not going to play nice with the browser’s back and forward buttons. I’m talking, of course, about AJAX. If I click a link and it pops a fancy AJAX text field into the page, I’m liable to lose my work when the back and forward buttons fail to reshow that AJAX insert.

The solution seems fairly simple. Browsers should support a way to lock a page. Once I’ve locked a page, back, forward, refresh, and close messages sent to my browser should be intercepted by a popup, asking me if I really want to let the message go through. This is similar to the popup in text editors “Do you want to save before closing?”. I can choose to let the brwoser continue processing the command, or cancel it and be looking at the same page.

Opera’s already halfway on this feature; I can lock a page and prevent it from being accidentally closed. I’m sure there’s a Firefox plugin that does the same, if it isn’t built in. I’d like to see built in support from both browsers. I know better than to ask IE for anything useful.

I started looking for benchmarks, and found none. My search string was pretty similar to the title of this post. That’s on purpose, because I want to help anyone else looking for a benchmark on this feature.

THIS FEATURE DOES NOTHING EXCEPT RE-INTRODUCE AN OLD WINDOWS BUG.

That’s right! There’s no performance increase available through this checkbox. It simply reintroduces an old bug that some old software relies on, so that said old software can regain the performance it lost when the bug was fixed. If you’re just an everyday average Joe like me trying to tweak your computer for the best performance, this checkbox isn’t going to help you. In fact, it’s going to hurt you, because if the disk loses power you could lose or corrupt your files.

You can read the full story, courtesy of Raymond Chen, at this link.
Windows Confidential: The Power of Bugs

Special thanks to the members of DriverHeaven for helping me find this article and the real answer to what this Vista feature is all about.