Right Now: Notes & Credits
“Right Now: What Are You Doing?” is an astonishingly simple web page that was created by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders as a way to develop more mindful use of his time online. [Learn more »]
The JavaScript clock thingamajiggy was found by Merlin after two minutes of frantic Google searching. It was written by someone called Sandeep Gangadharan in 2003.
The photo of the brain in a jar is a leitmotif that Merlin uses in his popular talk about Time & Attention. You should hire Merlin to give this talk. That way, his daughter can keep wearing amusing hats and eventually go to good schools where she'll be nurtured by cool, attentive teachers who aren’t nuts. The photo itself was purchased and licensed at Merlin’s expense from iStockPhoto.
The wildly inefficient HTML and style sheets were put together in about an hour by Merlin, who also hosts the files on a combination of his personal site and Libsyn.
When time permits, Merlin may try make these files less personally embarrassing in the eyes of his peers who make clean, efficient, and accessible code for a living. With that said, Merlin could give a shit if Joe Clark likes it.
The phrase, “Right Now,” was intuitively adopted by Merlin as the first thing that came into his head to describe the mindfulness that he hoped to achieve with this little page.
The name is very much not inspired by the execrable Van Halen song from 1991. Sammy Hagar brought out the worst in Van Halen’s other members, while David Lee Roth — at least in the band’s early days — helped them to achieve a cockrock grandeur that reflected every American teenager’s innate and noble desire to have sexual intercourse with someone attractive in the back of a sweet Trans Am. If you don’t already own Van Halen I, you need to get on that shit. Now.
The internet itself is something that’s still being made every morning by a bunch of engineers, designers, writers, parents, hucksters, douchebags, crazy people, geniuses, and — increasingly these days — you. Please try to make something awesome with the attention we helped you save today. The internet needs you. Big time.
Remember: the less you see the page, the better you’re doing.