The healthcare industry is starting to see benefits from being honest when they make mistakes. Denying that doctors and hospitals ever screw up has been the historical approach to avoiding malpractice suits; yet by being more honest, hospitals are seeing a decrease in such lawsuits.

If doctors can do it, why not software authors? Own up to your mistakes. People will trust you more in the long run.

EVDO cards rule. The speed and latency are good enough for working over ssh and other common development tasks like pulling up documentation on the web or installing a small gem or two. (Though I don't recommend doing a git clone of Rubinius over EVDO). At Railsconf I used my EVDO card instead of the spotty wireless and was tapping away happily as everyone else struggled to load google.com.

Mine is from Verizon, $50/mo, worked on my Mac without as soon as I plugged it in, no software installation or configuration of any kind. So far I've been able to use it everywhere I've traveled (all within the US so far, though I'll be racking up some of those $0.002/kb roaming charges in Canada on my way to Rubyfringe next month).

During a road trip to Santa Barbara last month, the pager went off right in the middle of farm country. I was able to crack open my laptop and take care of the problem without even pulling over. sshing at 75 mph is a whole new experience. (No, I wasn't driving.)

EVDO has changed the way I work and travel. Cutting the tether means I'm no longer afeared of getting stuck in a waiting room for an hour - that's just enough time to crank out a cool new feature.

Tiny projects keep it new, for sure. It seems to tie in a little bit with proof-driven development and personal projects - in each case, you're escaping the mental cage of a monolithic, mature product to start something new. (Even if the "something new" is a component that's going to plug in to said mature product.)

Recently I've been dividing up the the Heroku architecture more finely. We've gone from about three repositories to over a dozen. Each time we carve off a new piece, it's a chance to freshen things up. A new revision control system, a new framework, or even just a new class hierarchy. Breaking free of the past is liberating.

One of my favorite life hacking tips is how to use your morning time. (By morning I mean whenever you get up - for me, it's technically afternoon.)

Recently, I've taken to using this time to jot down a simple plan for the day. Before anything else I ask myself: What's one thing I could do today that would make me completely satisfied with my productivity for the day?

This is no doubt influenced by The 4-Hour Workweek's suggestion that you ask this question of yourself throughout the workday. At each moment you should be doing something that, were it the only thing you accomplished today, would leave you satisfied with the day. This is a great way to avoid excessive rabbit-trailing; but I think it works even better if you make the plan first.

This only works if you write down your plan before you let any distractions into your mind. That means: do not open your feed reader, do not check your email, and do not look at your phone to see text messages or calls that came in overnight. Do not open any program except a blank page in your text editor, where you'll write the plan for the day. And make sure you left no windows open on your screen the night before. When you sit down for this you should find yourself before a blank slate, with a zen-like mental state to match. Only then can you focus clearly on the big picture and decide your most valuable short-term goal.

By the way, when I say "plan," what I mean is a few words of shorthand notes for each item, and no more than three or four items. Something like:

- proof of concept for widget manager
- fix the gadget tracker page not found bug
- email joe to schedule that meeting

Short, sweet, to the point.

This moment of calm reflection brings incredible clarity. It's so tempting to think "I'll write this stuff down as soon as I check for that important email that should have come in this morning," but resist that temptation. If your inbox is anything like mine, as soon as you open it your focus is forcibly zoomed in on a flurry of user requests, questions from your coworkers, exception notifications, and so on. Within minutes of facing this hailstorm of information, the valuable clarity and perspective is whisked away, not likely to return again until the following morning.