Forem: Antonio

[Dev Discussion] Passwordless login?

Antonio — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 06:34:57 +0000

Hello guys! Just a question that popped out of my mind. If hackers usually target email/passwords that would grant them access to a specific service, why not use email + a short-lived credential like a OTP (e.g., the ones generated by an authenticator app)? Wouldn't that be far more secure since the window of attack is considerably reduced? I know that probably that would suck from a usability point of view.

How to automate tasks management, and not to forget about that f*****g task.

Antonio — Mon, 25 Mar 2019 19:54:57 +0000

A bit of context

I wrote, no more than 3 weeks ago, my first blog post on DEV, actually my first blog post ever.

That day I decided to make my days last longer.

Antonio ・ Mar 9 '19

#productivity #technology #tips #challenge

So, in few words, I am still, constantly striving for maximum planning and efficiency. And I am writing these few lines to let you guys know that, if you are looking for a solution to the same or a very similar problem (since the tools I found are quite flexible), then this might help you a lot. At least I would have sent myself a 5$ gift, at least.

The problem

I use Trello as main tool for managing my daily, weakly, repeating, un-deadlined tasks. But there was one task in particular that was bothering me SOOO much, because it has been sitting there for almost one year. I never had time to sit down and dedicate some time to it.

Basically, I wanted to develop a very small system that would, at least, move all my cards from TOMORROW to TODAY every day at 12:00 AM, and from any board to TOMORROW whenever there was only one day missing before due date.

Since I did not want to spend money with AWS or any other provider offering lambda functions, and since I did not investigate whether there were free alternatives, I was thinking to pull out of the closet my old Raspberry Pi, develop the scripts, schedule them with cron jobs, and leave it attached and running forever and ever.

The ACTUAL solution

Today, Mon 25.03.2019, after a very long time, I finally had a spare evening and, especially, the willingness to investigate the issue deeper. That is why yesterday, before going to sleep, I moved the card from the POOL list to TODAY. Now, I was forced by my self-control to take actions in order to move the card to DONE as soon as possible.

That is when I have made a bit of research, and found a solution which solves exactly the problem I wanted to solve, but with 0 lines of code produced (unfortunately 😥).

Step 1: Trello pumped up 💪

First, I discovered the amazing Trello power-up Butler. This already solves 80% of my issues. You can set triggers for newly added cards, expiring cards, or time-based actions on a daily, weekly, monthly basis at a specific time of the day. And it is free, since Trello allows to use one power-up in its free version.

So what I have done with this power-up, is to add 3 simple rules:

With the first rule, which is a expiration date trigger, every day at 12:00 AM any card that is expiring in 1 day, meaning anytime the NEXT day, is moved from any list in the board to the TOMORROW list, which is a list I have made for the tasks (guess what) due the next day. So far so good.

The second rule is a pure calendar (or time) based rule that, every day at 12:00 AM, moves the cards from the TOMORROW list to the TODAY one. I AM SEEING THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL!

The third, and last, rule is an event-based trigger. Each trigger is activated each time a card is moved to the TODAY list. It just sets its due date to today at 11:59 PM (as it is supposed to be). Specific cards can be of course individually adjusted. Veeeery good!

But there was still one, major problem. If there are tasks that I am supposed to do very early in the morning, I would simply forget and remember too late. And I did not feel like setting a reminder or alarm on the phone, since that takes one more step (and I am soooo lazy).

Step 2: IFTTT (If This Then That)

For those of you who do not know what that is, it is just anything you have ever needed.

From the website:

IFTTT (if this, then that) is the easy, free way to get your apps and devices working together. The internet doesn't always play nice, but we're here to help.

Well, okay, the description is not super clear. But IFTTT is a website (which relies on the companion mobile app available for most of the platforms) where you can create many many automated tasks exploiting the APIs of many services, from Spotify to Facebook, from Telegram to Amazon Alexa. It allows, for instance, to get a rain alert from Weather Underground in the morning at a chosen time, so that you do not go out without an umbrella.

I was already using IFTTT for a bunch of other tasks (called Applets), like getting the NASA image of the day, or the Wikipedia word of the day, or the weather in the place I currently live.

But then, I saw that it has quite a good integration with Telegram, even though a not-so-powerful integration with Trello. It is not possible to get, for instance, a daily digest at 8:00 AM in the morning with all the cards in the TODAY list (which have been automatically moved by the Butler automation engine). But, on the other end, it was possible to simply setup a private conversation with the IFTTT bot, and receive a customized Telegram message every day at a specified time.

The result

The final result? I am just Telegrating myself every morning at 6:00 AM with a message that tells me to check the Trello board. The Trello board itself has been updated, over night, by the Butler power-up which I have configure to solve my specific needs.

I find this solution to work very good, potentially better than the alternative emails since (we all know) emails are quite ignored, especially in the morning.

Since Butler power-up and IFTTT are very flexible and offer a wide variety of customization, I think a setup very similar to this one might solve a very big set of similar problems, while still not involving any cost or any specific infrastructure/development effort.

Well, that was all from my side! I wish to hear from you how YOU guys have found the best setup to improve your productivity.

Cheers!

That day I decided to make my days last longer.

Antonio — Sat, 09 Mar 2019 16:47:14 +0000

Hey y'all!

This is my first blog post here on DEV, and actually my first blog post in general!

I just wanted to share some insights that I've collected after making use of some "techniques" to reduce the daily distractions and increase the productivity and time for myself.

The background

I am originally from (south) Italy, but constantly moving around Europe and changing my "habitat" every 6-9 months for the last 3.5 years. At the moment, I am completing my M.Sc Computer Science degree in Helsinki, and joined a company in January as an intern to (also) work on my thesis.

I have always been interested in psychology and psychological "tricks", self-improvement techniques and ways to change/improve habits. I was also quite "unhappy" with the amount of time I was spending doing tasks that were bringing no concrete value to my life, e.g., scrolling Instagram/Facebook feed WAY TOOO MUCH, accessing emails several times per day, trying to reply to messages as soon as they arrive so to always be responsive and available.

The only two things that I was enough good in doing were to plan my time every week in a very detailed way and stick to the plan, and to focus while I was studying and/or working on something that required full attention.
For the former, I have been using a tool as simple as Trello with a combination of boards and lists to prioritize items over the day, the week and the month. Lately, also to set monthly goals and to check how close I went :D.

A screenshot of the Trello board I use for daily/weekly/monthly tasks management and prioritization.

Concerning the latter, the capability of deep-focusing on a task, by following the pomodoro technique, I have been turning notifications off from all my devices for the whole time I needed to focus. Of course in periods of high stress and heavy workloads, that meant also 12+ hours per day for a couple of weeks including weekends.

Nevertheless, using this approach I was able to keep focus for almost the entirety of the time, while also enjoying side effects like drinking more water (during every small break I would fill my bottle of water and put it next to my pc, well under my eyes. So benefits of drinking A LOT of water and also to stand up and walk very often). Mates and people around me started to understand that if they needed to reach me for non-urgent matters, they could either send me a message (that I would visualize in batches afterward) or talk to me during the breaks. It was kinda "weird" seen from the outside, but once I made it routine I managed to get lots of work done.

There is no end to self-improvement

Being a very critic person, towards others and also towards myself, I was quite happy with the level of productivity I reached during focus periods. However, I started to feel quite uncomfortable with how I used to spend my time when I was NOT focusing on some deadlined task. With this, I mean that there was still lots of junk time in my day that I could have spent in much better ways than I was doing. For instance, daily commuting time was entirely spent looking at what other people were doing on social media rather than analyzing how my life and my week were going.

But then, after it had been laying on the shelf for too long, I started reading the amazing book "The power of habit", written by a New York Times reporter named Charles Duhigg. It has been very very very inspiring and insightful about how 90% of the things we do are nothing more than habits, and not the result of more or less complex brain activities.

I am not going to give in-depth feedback of the book since it is not the main goal of this article (even though I STRONGLY recommend it). Anyway, the book needed to be read, and even though I had promised myself several times that I would start, I never managed to. I thought I was "too busy". So this time I was very motivated to start reading it, and I forced myself to allocate ~ 30 mins every evening before going to sleep, as the very last activity of the day. In this way, I finished the book in ~ 1 month, reading at the average pace of a dozen pages per time, usually from Sunday evening to Thursday evening. 30 mins were something which was not too superficial that would not get me "into the zone", but at the same time not too hard to keep doing it every day.

What changed

The book makes a very insightful example about mobile notifications: once we see that we have received a notification, our brain starts craving to read that notification. This goes totally subconscious in our brain and surely affects all the other functions of the brain, including focusing at 100%. So, for instance, even if you want to ignore notifications, but your phone screen keeps lighting up or keeps vibrating (if you put it screen down without disabling vibration), your willpower will in the end be defeated by your brain or, in order to resist the temptation, you could not allocate 100% of the brain energies to the task at hand.

So, after finishing the book, I decided to make concrete steps towards improving my time when I was NOT focusing on anything specific. And since the main problem for me was exactly the impulse that I needed to answer messages as soon as I received them (especially if coming from "desirable sources" ehm ehm), what I did was to keep the iPhone in "Do Not Disturb" mode 24h. If properly configured, it still forwards notifications from, for instance, calls from favorites list or from numbers that try several times in a limited timeframe to reach you. Another action I took, was to set time limits to the applications that were decimating my time the most. Such applications were basically Instagram and Facebook. Messaging applications did not need time limits since for them the story was different, and improvements could be made just by allocating slots of time to answer messages in batches (and fortunately I do not receive thousands of messages per day :D).
SPOILER ALERT: the average daily time went from > 1h to < 30 min, quite a good achievement so far.

Fast-forward to the present

More than one month has passed since I tried to introduce the aforementioned changes. The amount of joy coming from the fact that you are succeeding in something you wanted to succeed in, is probably the best fuel to keep going on, as also explained in the book. A habit can be changed only if there is an appropriate reward. In my case, the reward is two-fold. The main one involves the better ways of spending spare time without being obsessed and possessed by the devices that you are supposed to possess. Secondly, an increase in self-confidence since I now understand that, in the proper way, any good habit can be introduced and any bad habit can be removed/changed. Overall, I managed to concretely increase both the QUANTITY and the QUALITY of my time, as well as the perception I have to not continuously waste a lot of time anymore. Of course, by nature, I will keep monitoring how I am doing, what could be improved and what further waste should/could be removed. But over the last month, I can consider myself already lucky enough to have made some of the right changes, at probably the right time, since currently working hours take already a huge part of the day out.

Conclusions

I enjoyed so much the process, that I even decided to write a short and simple blog post about it. Something that would have never crossed my mind before last month :D
I did not spend a lot of time in refining the text and taking care of minutia, but I hope it is easy to read and understand :)

I am so much willing to hear your stories, what your main pains were, and how you managed/are managing to transform them to gains :)

Cheers from the cold, snowy Finland!