trendpreneur

I’ve spent a while, recently, sifting through the joy that is Craigslist’s apartment listings, and noticed a few things that I thought I’d share. Note, a lot of this can be applied to Gumtree — and probably others — as well. I’ve specifically been looking for a room in an existing place, not a whole place by myself, so some of this may vary.

Got a room to rent? Here’s how to get replies:

A picture speaks a thousand words. No, really. There are a lot of listings, and anything that gives an idea of your place is a bonus. Double points if you link to a Flickr slideshow or Picasa album (these seem oddly popular) with more photos. I even replied to a couple of ads with bad photos.

Answer everyone’s questions. I’ve seen many ads with one crucial piece of information missing. How many other people live there? Where is it? When is it available? Is it furnished? (Although the norm is for it not to be, in the UK it’s the other way round, and my first few emails to people with pictures of beautifully-furnished rooms were less than successful.)

Convey personality. Why do you love the place? What do you do? Self-effacing humour about your terrible photos goes down well. Some ads I’ve read and immediately got a real sense of what the atmosphere must be like at the apartment.

Sell, sell, sell. Some people (myself included) are looking for things like a big kitchen, lots of light, etc. Don’t leave this stuff out! In the interests of honesty, do say if the room is small or has some other weird feature, but avoid negative language (”This crappy little place…”) if possible.

Finally, and this is really important, remember your apartment isn’t the centre of the universe. I got an email today from a Craigslist poster I’d contacted. “Sure, you can come see the place if you’re still interested”. WTF? How on earth am I supposed to know which place he means? If he’d replied to my email, I’d have been fine (see below)…

So you want somewhere to live but you’re losing track of all the ads:

The volume of ads is pretty stupendous. I dealt with it by looking in a few very specific places, by doing searches on key words (loft, hardwood, claw-foot) to ensure I’d not missed any stunners, by restricting searches to ads with images, and by google-mapping everything before emailing to check if it was a no-go or not. (Ads without any hint to location: grr!)

A crucial thing for me was being able to reference emails to ads. I initially added a line near the top of my emails that read something like “In response to your Craigslist ad: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/blah”. It sounded a bit poncy, so I changed it to just have the link at the bottom of my email. It’s easy to remember if you paste it in before even writing “Hi”. This makes it super easy to figure out what listing the replies are referring to, unless they send you a brand new email (grr!), and to keep track of what you’ve actually contacted.

Sometimes the listing will expire, so if you’re really keen, you can just paste the body text in a new mail, same thread, change the to: address to your own.

Writing successful emails is a matter of individual style, really. I wanted to include a bit about myself, because you always want some idea of who’s coming round. In cases where the ad was particularly appealing, I’d write a bit more about how I might fit in and why it appealed to me. Some ads specifically ask for a few paragraphs about yourself etc, but I think writing too much can be a red flag as well. For ads I wasn’t sure about, such as the couple that sounded nice but didn’t post a location/availability/etc, I wrote a much shorter mail with the key question first and then a two-sentence “about” to initiate the conversation.

Another matter of personal taste, I included my voicemail number in my signature, but never got too far with the few people who insisted on calling it (or who replied to my email with “Call me on…”). I get that some people are way more “phone” than “email”-y, but the awkwardness of not having a decent US phone and the fact I’m more or less on email 24/7 meant that I definitely leaned towards those respondents who a) used email and b) did so promptly. After all, I’m going to be living with these people, it helps to have them on the same sort of communications wavelength. So if the poster has a phone number and you’re a phone person, that’s probably great, but if they say “Call me on xxx (or email)” and you email, be prepared to not quite mesh so well.

I think that’s it. There are some lovely places in San Francisco; I’ve been to dope-smoking dens and high-ceilinged wonders, to a modern “retro-geek” house and a flat that looked like it might fall apart at any moment. I’ve met some crazy people and some remarkably nice ones. Here’s hoping the apartment I finally went for works out!

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Not only did I commit the cardinal sin of writing a “N Things” article, I even promised a part two that never surfaced. So, here’s the long-promised followup to “5 Time Management Hacks Worth Noting” from March this year, inspired by a recent Dumb Little Man post about creating more time in your day.

As I’ve become more enmeshed in running my company and trying to maintain a healthy interest in the surrounding world, keep a grip on the big picture, stay in touch with what’s around the corner while also ensuring I have clean underwear, my mum remembers she has a daughter and (dare I say it) getting some “me time”, the keen reader may have noticed I’ve had less time to blog over recent months. Poor time management in practice! However, I’ve managed to find a little more time in the day of late.

The key things have been setting a regular time and goal to do things (”blog once a day, first thing”), and scheduling in tasks. Rather than expect I’ll “go for a run sometime this week”, I’ll actually schedule it in for Tuesday afternoon, and suddenly… it gets done.

I’ve also suffered from multitask-focus-drift of late, branching off from task to task in a Choose Your Own Adventure style escapade, then forgetting what the overarching goal was. I started writing down my goal for the morning and afternoon (I operate on a maker’s schedule) and even writing down major sub-goals or separate tasks. Glancing at this notepad when I have thirty-seven tabs open and forget what I was doing really helps. It also helps to use multiple desktops within OS X to ‘hide’ unproductive stuff that can time-sink – I have two separate Firefox windows, TweetDeck and IRC are hidden, etc.

At the very least I’ve also learned to procrastinate productively; it’s got to the stage where pretty much everything I need to be doing has some productive value, so even if I’m procrastinating by answering emails, they’re emails that needed to be answered.

Until I invent a time machine, this will have to do.

I use Remember the Milk, but I never use it to remember the milk.

Ironic.

Here’s why. I’m not a terribly good GTD-aholic. I am forever thankful to the day I absorbed the GTD principle of “don’t worry about stuff before you have to”, i.e. I schedule in tasks in RTM for the day I have to think about them and then forget completely. It’s fantastic. However, I still keep some pretty terrible habits kicking around: one of them is what my mum used to call “the big shelf”. I think visually, so it doesn’t matter if everything’s in heaps on the floor, as long as I remember which things are in which heap, I’m fine.

This pops up in RTM as todo-list-laziness. I have one list. “Inbox”. It contains all my tasks. This is partly exacerbated by the fact I mostly use RTM via the Gmail gadget which gives me no incentive to use multiple lists. But who cares. It’s fine as it is.

Until I want to make a shopping list, and my current system totally and utterly breaks. I can’t add shopping list items as individual tasks, so to speak; my system gets overcluttered and, since I’m date-driven, I basically have to add nonsensical tasks like “milk today” “eggs today”. Even if I created them in a new list that’d still be the case, though at least then I’d have some separation from actual to-dos. The only solution I can see within RTM, specifically date-driven RTM use, is to add a “Sainsbury’s” task and add my shopping list as a note. Makes it hard to see at a glance what I’ve got to buy, hard to note down suddenly-remembered items, etc.

Good thing I’m a paper junkie, really. It just struck me as extremely amusing that I can’t use an app called Remember the Milk to do just that.

I’m surprised there aren’t more hits for “time twacking“. It’s a horrible, horrible phrase, but before you string me up for murdering the English language, let me explain.

Time-tracking is a really cool thing to do. Why? Because we have faulty memories, and we like monitoring and planning. Nobody can reasonably be expected to remember by 5pm on Friday what they were doing on Monday afternoon. But knowing where your time over the week goes is invaluable, whether you’re a run-of-the-mill employee, an entrepreneur, or a freelancer juggling clients.

There are some gorgeous time-tracking solutions out there, yet I personally just have an allergy to typing stuff into a web app.

So this is what hit me last night, at 2am, embroiled amidst caffeinated insomniac thoughts of hair dye and giraffes: why isn’t there a Twitter time-tracking app?

Maybe there is. In fact, I hope there is, because I want to use it. Lazyweb?

In case there isn’t, and someone’s out there looking for something to build (hey, that ’someone’ could be myself in a few months’ time.. who knows):

Let me constantly microblog what I’m doing, in an enterprise context, on a private level, so I can look back and figure out what I’ve done. Use hashtags or another way of formatting keywords to mark out specific types of task and use some simple natural language understanding to automatically graph and plot my time.

Aha! A bit of Googling later and I find Tempo and Twistory. Both potential solutions… but without the latter ‘intelligent’ part, in a way.

The problem with all this is it does require discipline. You gotta tell Twitter, or whoever, what you’re doing. Plus, as you can only go back so far with tweets, I’d suggest setting up an API script to archive your tweets at close of work on Friday (or Saturday, or Sunday…). And yet, the advantage of using a fairly free-form entry method – one that’s close at hand, too – and building your own intelligence around it is you can add in extras, like an end-of-day mood summary, comments, notes, etc. Maybe step 1 is to start tracking now, and step 2 to build in the AI later…

Some productivity (or lack-thereof) lists for you today.

Lifehacker’s “Top 10 Must-Have Firefox Extensions (2009 Edition)” is a post of genius. Rather than deny them pageviews and relist the extensions here, hop over and check the post out. I’ve got pretty much all of them installed (though I’m not so sure about AutoCopy; highlighting text to make a link, the link I had ready in the clipboard got replaced by the would-be anchor text..).

Secondly, a list of 20 must-read blogs for online entrepreneurs that made frontpage on Hacker News twice, so it must be good. On a serious note, I read most of these and they’re great. So, some nice Easter reading there – enjoy!