Getting things done with Flock and Meebo

Brian Dillard, Monday, September 8, 2008 @ 3:01 pm

During a recent GTD weekly review, I suddenly realized how many distractions had worked their way into my daily office routine: personal email, personal instant messaging, entertainment feeds, Facebook. I suspect such time-wasters pose a bigger danger to web developers than to other professionals, if only because the programs they run in are so central to our work. I run Firefox for web development, Adium for instant messaging, and NetNewsWire for industry news all day out of necessity. If I allow my personal distractions to jump out at me from those programs, my productivity plummets.

This weekend, I worked hard to de-tangle my professional and personal lives. My tools? Flock, the Mozilla-based "social browser," and Meebo, the browser-based IM aggregation service. My goal was to separate all personal bookmarks and RSS feeds from NetNewsWire and Firefox into Flock, then move all my personal IM accounts from Adium to Meebo. The end result was a self-imposed firewall between productive time and fun time. (Thanks to many a Lifehacker article for the basic idea, if not the implementation.)

Getting started with Flock

Flock represents a noble attempt to shoehorn social networks and other web utilities into the chassis of a Mozilla-based browser. Sure, many of its features could be achieved in a standard Firefox install. But I didn't want to have to run two copies of Firefox, one for work and one for play, and manage separate user profiles for each. Besides, my goal was to create a hub for my online social activities, so why not use a browser specifically designed for that purpose?

I also could have moved my social stuff to Safari, but that would have required adjusting to the quirks of a browser I'd previously employed only for cross-browser development. Flock 2 beta is essentially a tricked-out Firefox 3, so it offers a pretty seamless transition for this Mozilla. It even runs my essential Firefox 3 extensions, such as Foxmarks and Tab Mix Plus. With those in place, Flock looks like a souped-up sedan version of Firefox - slower, sure, but with more bells and whistles and a pretty coat of paint.

One feature that especially interested me was Flock's RSS integration. Sure, Firefox does this, too, but Flock's interface is nicer. You can interact with your feeds in a familiar two-pane interface rather than simply viewing headlines from a Live Bookmark. Flock's UI doesn't yet match the convenience of the keyboard-friendly NetNewsWire, but that's fine. I can live without power-user features when I'm just perusing The Consumerist or Whedonesque.

After a few days of using Flock to browse Facebook, scan FriendFeed, check Gmail, update Twitter and attend to my online banking, I'm sold. I don't really use the widgets on the My World splash page very much, but the integrated toolbar for interacting with Web 2.0 destinations works seamlessly. It's nice to be able to check for unread mail without firing up the entire Gmail interface. And I'm certain I'll use some of the blogging tools pretty frequently. One downside, though: You can't adjust fonts in the People Sidebar and other Flock-specific XUL widgets. My poor, aching eyes will forgive this misstep for now.

Getting started with Meebo

Instant messaging wastes as much time as it saves. Commingling of friends and coworkers on the same buddy list has always been dangerous. But even if you're careful, you'll get bleedthrough. Today's valued colleague often becomes tomorrow's high-maintenance friend once somebody switches jobs. Unless you want to give everybody you've ever known equal power to interrupt your work, you need a strategy for separating IM accounts. Creating a new account each time you start a job isn't enough. Hence my decision to segregate my accounts into two separate programs.

Cross-platform IM clients continue to proliferate, but web-based Meebo offers an interesting take on the concept. With its clean interface, soothing palette and lightning-fast Ajax interface, Meebo applies tried-and-true Web 2.0 design techniques to dowdy old chat. I used to have five IM accounts in my local Adium instance, but now I've moved four of them into Meebo. When I want to chat with friends, I can fire up Flock and open a Meebo tab. But when I need to focus on work, I can just shut it down and leave Adium open for agile team interactions at Pathfinder.

As with Flock, there's nothing about this setup that I couldn't have accomplished without Meebo. I could manually log off my non-business IM accounts whenever I want to focus on work. But I'm sufficiently prone to procrastination that such measures don't work. I need to trick myself psychologically, creating a completely different context for work chat and personal chat. Warm, inviting Meebo generates some much-needed contrast with cold, functional Adium.

Now the hard part: Sticking to the rules

Of course, prying apart the personal and the professional does no good if you're constantly firing up your fun apps alongside the work ones. Now that I've segregated all my time-wasting feeds, distracting chatter and enticing games, I've got to stick to the single rule that makes everything work: Only run Flock-plus-Meebo at specific intervals. I'm giving myself 15 minutes during morning coffee, 30 minutes at lunch, and unlimited time once I'm home at night.

It may seem counter-intuitive to get down to work with the help of two applications designed primarily for fun. But the work/play firewall helps me stay disciplined.

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Comments: 3 so far

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1. 

   I too face this dilemma, but my distractions are not social networking, just email and even sometimes my GTD system as I seem to want to review too much. I worked with a printable system, which seemed even more time consuming before finding an electronic application that allows me to view my entire GTD at work on my Win machine, at home on my Macs and even on my cell phone. And another app lets me call in tasks to my GTD without any writing or typing, great for those thoughts that hit me while driving. I’ve written about my experiences with GTD in a blog post at http://johnkendrick.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/more-getting-things-done/ John

   Comment by John B. Kendrick, Tuesday, September 9, 2008 @ 4:35 am

2. 

   Flock can follow the firefox 3.1 OGG MULTIMEDIA work for a great update to their codebase, for the next multimedia enabled version. OGGTV.COM can have a Flock bookmark for the open-social users.

   Comment by William Lacy, Tuesday, September 9, 2008 @ 1:39 pm

3. 

   Brian,
   Awesome stuff. I’ve been meaning to get Flock, and now you have totally convinced me. I love to find new ways to be super productive online, so I appreciate you and this post.

   Dali Burgado

   Comment by Dali Burgado, Wednesday, September 10, 2008 @ 12:33 am

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