I’m now in my second week of indie development, and staying on schedule has proved elusive.
I can get immersed in many, many things. It may be positive like getting into a work groove. Or it may be, um, distracting, like getting hooked on a new game like Fruit Ninja or an oldie-but-goodie like Zynga’s Mafia Wars on my iPhone. How to combat this, and boost my productivity? One thing suggested more than once by others is to set small, achievable goals.

To Do, In Progress, and DONE!

In Bloomberg by Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg suggests: “Start with a small piece; fulfill one goal at a time, on time. Do it with all things in life.” In REWORK, the 37signals guys tell us, “momentum fuels motivation,” and “the way you build momentum is by getting something done and moving onto the next thing.”

I’ve taken this advice to heart in the form of my planning board, and am scratching my own itch by building an iPad app that suits my needs for To Do lists.

But what is it about setting these goals that fuels and fulfills you? And, is there something that this fulfilling goal-setting-and-achieving loop has in common with addictive iPhone games?

Dopamine and Goals: Why Getting Things Done is a High


Science tells us the reason is biochemical: all these activities produce the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is the reward molecule.

What does dopamine do?  Christopher Bergland, in “The Athlete’s Way,” explains:

“[Dopamine] facilitates acheivement, goal-oriented behavior, motivation, mood and movement.  It is the cause for the feeling that floods your body when you accomplish a goal” (Bergland 108).

“Setting goals and achieving them…guarantees a constant supply of dopamine, which is released during goal-oriented behavior and upon achieving a goal” (Bergland 149).

That amazing feeling that washes over you when you fix a bug, cross a finish line, are accepted to the app store, or launch a new business? Thank your trusty neurotransmitter dopamine.


Getting Dopamine the Easy Way: Games & Drugs

And we’re not just talking about huge, ambitious, time-intensive goals.  Not at all: “Making your bed in the morning can be a dopamine releaser if you acknowledge it as such” (Bergland 149). And here is the tie-in: slicing 300 pieces of fruit in a row on fruit ninja can ALSO be a dopamine releaser. And the game does everything in its power to reward you with sounds, colors, prizes and leaderboards.

This is my suspicion as to why we so often hear of Farmville addictions. Games like Farmville provides you an easy win: a quick burst of dopamine for achieving a tiny, tiny, fantasy-based goal, but without all the mess and fuss of exercise, or progressing towards a real-life goal.

Drugs are equally seductive: all the neurotransmitters with none of the effort of exertion!

“Caffeine increases dopamine levels in the same way that amphetamines do. Heroin and cocaine also manipulate dopamine levels by slowing down the rate of dopamine reuptake…. It is suspected that the dopamine connection contributes to caffeine addiction.” (Bergland 263).

Now, drug addiction is more complex of course, and often results from a lack of functional dopamine receptors in the first place (see “Beyond the Influence” p.42 and 50 for more info). But the point is: we like dopamine! It makes us feel good! So we seek it out–be it with iPhone games, with coffee, or with harder substances.


Generate Dopamine the Healthy Way: Music & Exercise

So knowing that dopamine makes us feel good, how do we turn this on its head, and use it to our advantage? If dopamine helps us build our momentum, and creates an environment where we crave crossing items off our list, how can we grease the wheels?

1. Music on Shuffle
2. Daily Exercise

In 2006, Menon and Levitin of Stanford University published a paper in NeuroImage called “The rewards of music listening: response and physiological connectivity of the mesolimbic system.”  They showed that there is a strong correlation between listening to music and the release of dopamine.  And music on shuffle? That produces even more dopamine!

“Randomness releases more dopamine, which is why people like shuffle mode and the radio.  Not knowing what song you are going to hear produces larger amounts of dopamine due to the lottery effect of unpredictability and reward” (Bergland 299).

Dopamine is also a major component of the post-workout chemical brain cocktail.  This is why it features so prominently in “The Athlete’s Way.”  Dopamine “is released during exercise naturally” (Bergland 108).  Dopamine is also released when you ANTICIPATE running or exercising, if you are someone who does so regularly.  And if you’ve ever had a friend, or been a runner yourself, you know how cranky they can get when they miss a run. 

This is drug addiction turned inside out and in your favor.  And this is what I’m looking for.  I want to get so hooked on setting and achieving goals, that I am slicing items off my lists ALL DAY LONG.  Throw in my music on shuffle. Mix it up with 20 mins+ of exercise a day. Top it off with visible goals staring me down from my planning board. I think I can do it, with a little help from my friend (SAY IT WITH ME NOW), dopamine.

Working for myself is an interesting experiment on discovering my most optimal environment, schedule and conditions in order to eek out the highest quality work from my employee #1: me.

I’m only four days in, but there are already two major ways I am able to feel more comfortable in my working environment: my attire, and my space.

For example, take shoes:

I love heels.  I love the way they look.  But I absolutely hate trudging the 3/4 mile I walk to the 2/3 subway line in heels.  And I hate having to change shoes before walking into work.  And honestly, they really hurt your back.  To me, little is better than an easy, comfy pair of Vans.

Next, let’s look at office space:

I adored working on a trading floor.  There was a buzz, an excitement.  But there were downsides, like constant interruptions and many distractions.  And I was restricted to a small sliver of a long, shared desk.  Not so anymore.  I spread out, I move around, I create planning boards on my walls and pepper them with post-its.

Life is expanding, and getting simpler, all at once.

At last count, my Gmail had 39,216 unread messages in it.  I am currently using 32% of my free allocated space.  And I have absolutely no plans to do anything about this.

Yesterday, on a car ride home from a wonderful Sunday outing, one of my former work colleagues was explaining his system for managing his email.  He insisted that everyone who works for him must also have a system to manage their email–that otherwise, nothing can get done. I could not disagree more.

My email “system” goes as follows: if the email is important, I read it. If it is trash or unimportant, I ignore it.

Deleting an email I don’t need to respond to takes time. Ignoring it costs nothing. Gmail has a rich, fast search capability. If I need to track something down, I can. The noise doesn’t matter.  Unsubscribing from lists I don’t care about (like Banana Republic’s mailing list they fire out weekly or more) is more time consuming than either ignoring the mails, or setting them to spam.

And I don’t worry about missing things, because I am constantly checking my iPhone for new messages.  Mobility has enabled me to avoid missing important missives. If I need to respond to an email but don’t want to do it right away, if it’s important enough, I will remember to do it, or I will put it on a To Do list. If it’s not important enough, I don’t need to reply. And if it IS important, and I do miss it, someone will call me. Or @me. Or otherwise track me down.

Time is my commodity. Managing my email is a waste of resources. Search, and forget.

I’ve turned in my blackberry, my laptop, and cleaned out my desk. Colleagues and employees have been told. Contact information has been exchanged. I’ve sent out my goodbye emails, completed my exit document, and turned in my ID. Leaving drinks were arranged, delivered and enjoyed (THANK YOU!).

It’s official:

The adventure starts now. GIDDY! UP!

I have finally finished up my video blog of Apple’s 2010 Worldwide Developer’s Conference.

The vlog features interviews with six women developers, highlights from the keynote queue, WWDC parties, and general commentary into the conference experience itself. This goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: the video contains auxiliary info only; nothing specific to the content under NDA.

Many thanks to:
Iman Yusuf of RMIT University
Marn-Yee Lee of Twinkle Toes Software
Zara Aida of Terato Tech
Brittany Tarvin of FadingRed
Miwaza of DuoPlus! and miwaza.com
and Melody Wang of the University of New South Wales.

And thanks to everyone else who helped in the making of this video. Hope you enjoy!

I am hard at work on a vlog of my WWDC experience, including mini-interviews with six wonderful women from WWDC.

In the meantime, here are two pictures from our group photo. For the record, this is nowhere NEAR all the women at the conference. Just the most women we could rally together on short notice:

I was seeing a very strange description for an NSMutableArray object in XCode.  Instead of viewing the array’s count, as I expected, I was seeing some garbled message that said {(int)[$VAR count]} objects:

A quick google search pointed me to a conversation about this on stackoverflow. The key point in that link is this, made by Quinn Taylor:

it’s possible that the object has been reclaimed (either by -dealloc or GC) so check to make sure it’s retained if needed.

AH-HA!!  I am screwing up my memory management again!

For some context, I went back to the Objective-C bootcamp chapter of the iPhone Developer’s Cookbook, and sure enough, Erica Sadun talks about this on page 112:

Retaining objects set to autorelease allows them to persist beyond a single method.

The problem? My array was created by calling [NSMutableArray array], which returns an autoreleased NSMutableArray object.  Thus, it was disappearing once I left the method where I created it.

Changing my code from:

To:

solved my problem.  Huzzah!

So you may have heard the recent rumor that Ballmer is supposed to take up 7 minutes onstage at WWDC. I’ve spent the morning asking myself what this could mean.

If VS 2010 supports developing iPhone/iPad apps, what dose that mean in terms of language? Will VS 2010 support Objective-C? Or will C# compile into binaries that can be run on iPhones? The latter blatantly violates what Apple stated in the iPhone Developer program:

“Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

So the only thing this COULD mean, if this is true, is that VS 2010 will support Objective-C, and load in all the Apple CocoaTouch frameworks, so you can develop in Objective-C and CocoaTouch, on a PC and in Visual Studio. This would mean Apple sees the future as mobile, and not Macs, but we knew that already when Apple announced the only design awards for WWDC 2010 would be given out to iPhone/iPad apps, not for Macs.

In the course of doing recipes for the Erica/Alexis project, I have learned that there are several things I need to be sure to do before modifying any of the base templates Apple provides.

1. Remember to add the app delegate string to main

When starting a new project, I am often faced with a black screen.  Despite the fact that this has happened to me three times now, it still takes me a bit of hair tearing before I remember it’s because I need to add the app delegate to the fourth parameter in the main method.

The solution to this, of course, would be to update my user templates so I don’t have to remember to do this every time.

2. Set the file’s owner to be the view controller

By default, the File Owner’s type is set to NSObject. When I have ViewControllers I want to use as a basis for my project, I need to change this so the File Owner’s type is set to my custom Root ViewController.

3. Remove the main xib line from info.plist

After changing (1) and (2), I was still getting this error: “2010-05-07 15:12:55.632 TwoItems[21829:207] Failed to load NSMainNibFile MainWindow.”

The problem was Read more »