At work, I got my Lotus Notes inbox to zero today, for the first time since March, I think. And I got all the stray paper off my desk. Everything that's actionable is in the system. Everything that's not is in reference folders or the trash.

Over the last week or two, I've recommitted myself to cleaning stuff up and getting stuff into my system. I've also been experimenting with new tools (as I've mentioned in previous blog entries), but part of what I've learned from doing that is that I needed to tighten up what was already in my current system.

The basic way I'm working that now is that, if something is a clearly-defined programming project, it goes into Jira. If it's got some parts that don't fit there, then I also put it in Notes, and reference the Jira issue #. If it's not a programming project, or it's at a stage where it's got too many moving parts, I just put it in Notes. I try to review all my "in process" projects in Jira every day for next actions. And I try to look at the next actions in my Notes to-do list every day too, though I'm not always so good about that.

Back on the subject of tools, I'm still kind of dissatisfied with using my Notes to-do list as my main GTD system. I previously mentioned experimenting with Chandler. I like Chandler a lot, but I still have a problem with the outgoing e-mail, which I mentioned here. I never got any feedback from the Chandler mailing list on this, and I've tried a few oddball things to see if I can work around it, but no luck.

Looking around at other systems, I don't think any of them could be really useful to me, unless they either work well with Notes, or exist within Notes. The only one that could fit the "work well" definition would be Chandler, due to its interesting IMAP setup. For stuff that's actually *in* Notes, the best system appears to be eProductivity, which is a bit expensive. I've also played around with the GTD for Lotus Notes template from Brett Philp. It's not bad, and it's free. And it's just a plain Notes database, so I can go in there and customize forms and whatnot, if I want to.

Meanwhile, I'll probably be upgrading our main Domino server from 7.x to 8.5 this weekend. I've looked at the new mail template, and, while it's quite nice, I don't think it really adds anything that will help with GTD. The to-do list, follow-up flags, and folder system all seem to be pretty much unchanged. (I'm kind of hoping that whatever messes up mail from Chandler in 7.x is fixed in 8.5. I'll have to test that after the upgrade.)

Labels: GTD

I finally finished reading Ready for Anything today. I started reading it about two years ago. Since it's just a book of essays, it was easy to put it down for weeks (or months) at a time, and then come back to it whenever I wanted to. I got through the last ten (or so) essays over the last couple of months. There's a lot of good stuff in there. My pattern with this book was generally to just read one essay at a time, then spend some time thinking about it, using it as a starting point for a bit of self-examination. I'm going to keep it handy, near my copy of GTD. I suspect I'll return to it occasionally.

I bought Making It All Work for the Kindle back in January; I'll start reading that soon, I think. I've really got no idea what kind of book it is. The reviews on Amazon are mixed. I did notice one comment in there noting that the illustrations in the Kindle version are too small to be useful. That's disappointing, if true. I'd hate to have to buy a hard copy of it now, after I've already shelled out for the Kindle version.

Labels: GTD

I had a few spare minutes today, so I installed Chandler on my PC at work. No major problems with the install, or with creating an account on Chandler Hub. I played around with it a bit, and so far, I like it. It's reasonably fast to load and use. Since it's a cross-platform app written in Python, I was concerned that it would be slow, and maybe have some user interface quirks. Not that a cross-platform Python app *can't* be fast and have a good UI, but a lot of the time, that's not the case.

The e-mail integration, as I mentioned in my post yesterday, is a little weird. Chandler uses IMAP to create three folders in your mail file, Chandler Events, Chandler Messages, and Chandler Starred. When you drop messages in these folders, they appear in Chandler. That part seemed to work OK with my Lotus Notes mailbox.

Chandler can also send e-mail. That, I thought, would be straightforward. It's just attaching to an SMTP server. I have plenty of apps that use my Domino server to send SMTP mail, so I didn't expect any difficulty there. I didn't have any problems just connecting to the server. However, I've found that the e-mails sent from Chandler don't render correctly in Notes. A bunch of XML, which is probably supposed to be hidden, shows up in the message. I did some testing, and the e-mails from Chandler look fine in GMail, and in Apple's Mail.app. They look like a mess in Notes though. Oh, and I tried Notes 7, 8, and 8.5 clients, and it's the same either way. I did find, though, that the e-mails in Notes look fine when I'm accessing my mailbox from my iPod or BlackBerry.

When things go wrong with e-mail rendering in Notes, it can be hard to figure out where things went wrong. First, the Domino server may screw something up before it gets to your mail file. If it's not that, then it might be something related to your mail file template, or to the Notes client software. Since this problem occurs in Notes 7, 8, and 8.5, I'm guessing it's not a simple client quirk. It could be something in my mail file template. That's still on version 7, and I can't really change that without upgrading my Domino server.

So, bottom line, if I can't get the outgoing e-mail to look OK in Notes, Chandler is going to be mostly useless for me. If I can get that working, then it's promising.

Oh, and one other interesting thing about Chandler. There's a book called "Dreaming in Code" about the initial development process on Chandler. This book is frequently compared to Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, which is a great book about the development of a minicomputer back in the 70's. Chandler's development process, apparently, was a bit rocky. At the time the book was written, the program had been in development for several years, and hadn't produced a workable 1.0 release yet. I think that the author's original intention was to document the development of a revolutionary open source app that would really be a killer app that would compete with Outlook and maybe Lotus Notes. In the end, he wound up with a book documenting a lot of things that could go wrong with a development project, which is maybe an even more interesting book than he would have gotten if the project had gone well. (I haven't actually read this book yet, so I'm generalizing from the reviews I've read. I do want to pick up the book and read it at some point.)

Labels: GTD, software, Windows

I haven't spent much time thinking about GTD this year. I've got a system going that mostly works, so I have just been working it and not worrying about it. A few things have come up recently that have made me start thinking about it again though.

First, I have started offloading most of my programming-related task management into Jira. This has been working pretty well. I've got about 100 issues in Jira right now, over a variety of projects. I've got the other two developers in my department using it too. From a GTD perspective, I look at a Jira "issue" as a GTD "project", though sometimes it's a pretty small project. (Other times, it's a pretty big one.) I don't really have a great way of tracking next actions in Jira, but my basic goal is that any open, in-progress, issue in Jira should have a next action on it. I just add comments to the issue as I go, detailing what I've done, and what I still need to do. This has gotten most of the programming stuff out of my previous GTD system, which has basically been the Lotus Notes to-do list. (I've set up my to-do list based on the system set forth in this document.)

I just recently listened to a podcast from DavidCo on the eProductivity add-on for Notes. This appears to be a really great package that would take care of a bunch of issues I'm having now. It costs $400 though, and I know my company wouldn't pay for it, so I don't think I'll be going that way.

I've also been looking at Chandler, an open-source program that looks pretty interesting. Chandler integrates with your e-mail in a bit of a weird way, using IMAP. It might be workable, or it might be too much of a kludge. I'm really not sure. One of the things I like about Chandler is that it's multi-platform, and you can sync across multiple installs using Chandler Hub. I think I'm going to try it out, though I'm not sure when I'll have to time to really sit down and mess with it, and see if it's workable.

I've been trying to come up with a good description of the problems I'm having with my current system, but it's hard to describe. To some extent, it's really convenient to have all this stuff right in Notes, in my mail file. But, there's really no intermixing of the mail and the to-dos, so I find myself copying & pasting a lot, both text and doclinks. Notes has some nice features for copying doclinks, but I run into trouble when I have old projects that I haven't started yet, and I'm relying on doclinks to old mail messages that I may already have archived. It gets kind of confusing. Basically, I'd like to either move the GTD stuff out of my mail file (which Chandler would do), or just go nuts and integrate completely with my mail file, and just manage it really well, which eProductivity would do.

Oh, and don't get me started on how I could access or manage any of this stuff on either my iPod Touch or my BlackBerry Storm. I don't even come close to having a good solution for that!

Labels: GTD

I just installed FrontPocket on my iPod Touch. I stumbled across this program yesterday while I was working on my MobileMe issue. FrontPocket is an application that gives you (almost) full access to your Backpack account on your Touch (or iPhone). This is something I've really been looking for since I got the iPod Touch. I was hoping somebody would get around to coding something like this, and now someone has!

The program uses the Backpack API to access the info in your Backpack account, and pull it down to the iPod over the air. It caches the info locally, so you can still have access to it when you're not connected to WiFi. I just did some testing, and it doesn't look like the program automatically sucks down your whole Backpack account; it seems like you only have offline access to stuff that you've previously viewed online, and only the version you've most recently viewed, not necessarily the current version on the web. And it seems like you can't add new notes or edit existing ones offline.

While online, you can add notes, edit notes, add journal entries, and add reminders, so you can do pretty much anything you'd want to do. The program does not, though, render Textile or HTML, so you're just viewing the text of your notes. And URL links are not active links, so you can't click on them and have them open in Safari or anything like that. (And, of course, the iPod Touch still has no copy & paste functionality, so you can't just copy & paste an URL out of FrontPocket and into Safari.) Oh, and it doesn't render photos that you've stored in Backpack either.

So, overall, there are a number of limitations to this app that I really wish they could find a way to fix. Some of them are likely related to limitations in the Backpack API. Others could be fixed, though they might be non-trivial. The app's only on version 1.1, so maybe we'll see some new stuff added in the next iteration. (I wonder if there's an open source Textile rendering engine out there somewhere that they could convert for use on the iPod/iPhone and just drop into the app?)

The thing I'd most like to see is a full sync option, where my entire Backpack site would get pulled down to the device. I'd even be OK with having to press a button in the app to initiate the sync, though it would be cool if it could be done automatically in the background.

The app does have calendar functionality, by the way, but I don't use Backpack calendar, so I can't say much about that works. I haven't seen any indication that it integrates with the standard device calendar app, though I wouldn't expect it to; Apple probably hasn't made it easy for third-party apps to update the built-in ones.

Labels: Apple, GTD, software

I've been using MobileMe to sync contact & calendar data between my MacBook and my iPod Touch for a while now. It works pretty well. Today, I decided to go one more step, and set up MobileMe on my Vista desktop machine to sync with Outlook. The contacts were no problem; they synced up fine the first time through, and I then went through them and weeded out a few duplicates.

The calendar was a little trickier. I have three calendars in MobileMe: Home, Work, and Birthdays. The birthday calendar is populated automatically via MenuCalendarClock, a shareware program that just pulls birthdays from the Mac address book and puts them into iCal. These calendars all now show as separate calendars in Outlook. I had to basically push them down to Outlook, rather than doing a straight merge, though, to get them to show up.

There's a default calendar in Outlook called "Calendar" that has now synced up the MobileMe (and hence my Mac and iPod). I never used the calendar in Outlook before, so this is just an empty calendar. There doesn't seem to be any obvious way to delete it in Outlook, or to tell the MobileMe control panel not to sync it up. Not a huge deal, but a little annoyance.

And repeating events seem to be treated a little differently in Outlook vs. iCal. After I pulled stuff into Outlook, then synced back to MobileMe, then synced my Mac, every repeating event on my calendars showed as changed. I'm hoping this is a one-time thing, and I'm not going to have to push & pull every repeating event at every sync.

I'm also a little worried that, when I go to http://www.me.com/calendar/ to check my calendar online, I just see "Loading Events", and nothing ever comes up. I think when something this has happened in the past, it would generally clear itself up overnight. Here's hoping. Looking around online, though, this may have something to do with the way Outlook messed with the repeating events. I may have to do some work to straighten this out.

My reason for setting up Outlook with MobileMe, by the way, is because I'm thinking about replacing my old Motorola cell phone with a BlackBerry in the not-too-distant future. If I do that, I'm going to want to do full contact & calendar sync with the BlackBerry, and it seems like the easiest way to do that might be through Outlook. It seems like it's possible to sync a BlackBerry directly with a Mac, but I figured it couldn't hurt to set up my PC with all my data either way.

Labels: Apple, GTD, software, Windows

I posted a couple of weeks back that I would likely pick up David Allen's new book, Making It All Work, whenever the Kindle version dropped to $9.99. Well, it just did, so I bought it today. I just just thinking that our new president could probably use a bit of organizational help from David Allen. He's got such an ambitious agenda, and in such a challenging environment, that I really think he should put a personal productivity guru of some sort on his staff. (Who knows, maybe he already has one.)

I'm not sure when I'll actually get around to reading this book, though. I'm in the middle of a Doctor Who novel right now, plus I just started reading 1776, and I have John Adams on the Kindle too. Plus a boatload of SF and fantasy novels, both dead-tree and Kindle format, waiting to be read.

Labels: books, GTD, Kindle

David Allen's new book just came out. I'll probably pick up the Kindle version at some point, though I think I'll wait and see if they drop the price on it. It's $14.27 right now; the hardcover is $17.13. I'm assuming the Kindle version will drop to the usual $9.99 eventually.

I still haven't finished reading Ready for Anything , actually, so I'm in no hurry to start the new book. Along similar lines, I'm almost done with the audio version of Stephen Covey's 7 Habits.

I don't know if all this book-reading is doing me any good, really, but I like to think it's helping.

Labels: GTD, Kindle

I've been fussing around with Backpack some more lately, trying to decide if I want to switch from a free account to a paid one. I think I could get some utility out of having more than 5 available pages to play with. I'm thinking about taking some notes that I have on my old Palm, plus some stuff that I have in OneNote on my PC and/or DevonThink on my Mac, and copying it all up into Backpack. The fact that there's still no obvious way to sync these notes to my iPod Touch is probably the only thing keeping me from doing that. I can think of some workarounds, but they're not perfect.

I started playing with the journal feature in Backpack last night. It's pretty cool, but as I discovered by digging through the forums, there's a 100 item limit on what you can store in the journal. Past that, stuff just falls off into oblivion. This limit doesn't seem to be documented anywhere. I wouldn't have known about this if I didn't go looking for it. That's one of the things that's frustrating about some of the 37 Signals stuff. They often seem to impose weird limits on things, then fail to document them. I've also noticed, for instance, that stuff in the journal doesn't show up in search results, if you use the search box on the main page.

This stuff makes the Journal a good bit less useful than it could be. I was thinking about using the Journal as a kind of log for some key activities that I might want to come back to later, and see when I started them, when I completed them, or when I last did a certain thing. With the 100-item limit, I'm really not going to be able to use the Journal that way, except for short-term stuff. I had been thinking it might be cool to create a Journal entry every time I had work done on the car, for instance. Then, I could get a full service history on my car by just searching on "car" in the Journal. I can still do that, of course, but the history won't go back that far, depending on how much other stuff I use the Journal for. I guess I could copy and paste old stuff from the Journal into a regular Backpack page once in a while, but that seems like a kludge.

Labels: GTD

Organize: It’s Your Civic Duty: this is a fun little article from the NY Times. It doesn't really say anything new or useful about GTD, but it's pretty funny.

Labels: GTD

I got my inbox back to zero again today. This is probably because a lot of people took today off, so it was pretty quiet at work. I managed to go through a bunch of unprocessed stuff and sort some of it out into projects & actions. The roads were nice and clear today too, and the parking lot was fairly empty. Overall, a nice day for getting things done.

Labels: GTD

I haven't posted anything about GTD in a while. I fell behind in my general filing & organizational stuff back in November, when we were preparing for our big move at work. I've gradually gotten things back into some kind of order now, but I'm still behind in some ways. I've got about 80 messages in my inbox, for instance, that I haven't gone through and filed. And I haven't done a proper weekly review yet in 2008, really. But my desk (and general work area) is pretty well organized now. I know where all the important stuff is. My files are alphabetized and in my drawers. All the books are on the bookshelves. The whiteboard is up on the wall. I have a fair number of random papers on my desk, but not in a big undifferentiated pile, or anything like that.

I just spent some time thinking about GTD Connect, and whether or not I should drop out of it. I've decided to keep up with in for a few more months, at least. The forums, podcasts, e-mails, etc, do seem to be helping out a bit.

Labels: GTD

Wired has an article about David Allen in this month's issue. I thought it was interesting and reasonably well-written. David Allen himself takes issue with a few things in the article, though. And the Lifehacker post on the article has a few interesting comments.

Labels: GTD

When I left work today, I'd gotten down to about 10 messages in my Notes inbox. Everything else was filed away into appropriate folders. I decided to pull up Notes on my iBook just now, and clear out the rest of my stuff. I have now achieved an empty inbox, for probably the first time since 1997, when we first installed a Notes server. Yay!

I did a pretty good weekly review today too. Probably closer to an ideal weekly review than I've done before, but still not quite what I should be doing.

On an unrelated topic, I picked up the Heroes season one DVD set today at Target. I was trying to resist it, since I already have all the episodes on my computer via iTunes, but Target had a special edition set with four notecards illustrated by Tim Sale, and I'm a sucker for Tim Sale stuff.

Labels: GTD, scifi

I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, but I signed up for GTD Connect this week. GTD Connect is David Allen's subscription service for GTD aficionados. It costs $48 per month, which is a good deal more than I'm accustomed to spending on a web-based service of any kind. I'm planning on trying it out until the end of the year, then re-evaluating it and making a decision on whether or not it's worth sticking with.

For anyone else out there who might be considering it, I thought I might put together a write-up on what you get through the service. I did a bit of web searching before I signed up, and found a bunch of blog posts on the service back when it just started up, but I haven't seen much mention of it anywhere recently, so I wasn't sure how it was shaping up. It looks like it launched about a year ago (August 2006), so now is probably a good time to take a look at it and try to see what it delivered in its first year.

Here's my take on the service as it exists right now, with the caveat that I've only been playing with it for a few days.

While the service is primarily web-based, there is a monthly mailing that goes out to members. The original intention was to do eight audio interview CDs a year and four issues of GTD Quarterly (a newsletter on GTD), so each month, you'd get one or the other. There have only been two issues of the newsletter so far, but there have been some extra CDs sent out, so there's been something mailed out each month either way. All the past mailing material is out on the web site so new members can download any of the older stuff in MP3 or PDF format.

I downloaded the two newsletters. The first is 16 pages and the second is 20. There's some good material in there; maybe a little fluff, but overall good stuff. Many of the articles are similar in length and tone to the essays in "Ready for Anything", for those who have read that book. Some of the articles are less philosophical and more practical.

There's a podcast feed with all the past audio material, both the interview CDs, and a bunch of other material. If you subscribe to the feed in iTunes, and pull down everything on it, you'll get about 700 MB worth of audio and video (mostly audio). The videos are just short 2 minute segments with David talking about a single topic. There's about 30 hours worth of audio out there. (There are some longer videos up on the site that aren't in the podcast feed.)

The web site includes a couple of interesting features. First, you can set up a weekly e-mail reminder about your weekly review. That's pretty simple; you just pick the day of the week you want to receive the reminder. The e-mail you get will have a few encouraging words from David, so it's a bit more than just a simple reminder. Second, there's something called the "Intention Journal" which is basically an open-ended e-mail reminder system that you can use for anything you want. It has a bunch of GTD-related categories, and suggestions about the kind of things you should use them for, but you can really use it in any way you like. The whole e-mail reminder thing is something you could likely do just as well (and a lot cheaper) with Backpack or Remember the Milk. It's nice to have a GTD-focused system, though, so you've got a framework for figuring out the kinds of things you want to get reminders on.

There are also members-only forums on the Connect site. That's all done through the same system as the public forums at www.davidco.com/forum/, so if you've seen those, you'll know what to expect. Given the $48/month buy-in, there's a better signal-to-noise ratio on these forums than probably anywhere else on the internet. You really don't get trolls or spammers, for obvious reasons. It's really refreshing to go through the forum messages, and see a bunch of on-topic posts written largely by people who know how to write, and spell, and think.

There are a few other things going on with Connect, but I think that covers the main stuff. Is it worth $48/month? I'm not sure yet. If it was $10/month, I'd say yes, definitely. I can easily wrap my head around the idea of paying around $100 a year for something like this. But paying more like $500 a year is a hard sell.

Labels: GTD

The last time I blogged about GTD, I was down to 632 messages in my inbox. I got that down to 92 today, probably the first time it's been under 100 in a long while. (It's back *over* 100 now, of course, but hopefully I'll get it cleaned up a bit more tomorrow.) Meanwhile, I've been using the To-Do section of my mail file to track my projects and next actions and whatnot. That's working out OK, but it's not the most flexible system I could have. I may go back to the GTD for Lotus Notes database, and give that another try.

And I watched Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero video this week. There's not much new there, really, for anyone who's already well-versed in GTD, but it's interesting. I'd recommend watching it, if your inbox is a bit out of control and you're looking for some help.

Labels: GTD

I'm down to 632 messages left in my Lotus Notes inbox! I think I'm doing a pretty good job of categorizing things (for reference), getting rid of unnecessary stuff, and culling out the actionable items. It's taken me a while though; I guess I started working through my inbox about a month ago.

Labels: GTD

There's a good new article on GTD over at money.cnn.com.

I like the think I'm doing OK with GTD at work, but I'm definitely NOT stress-free. I think I'm managing my time better, and getting more stuff done, but there's just so much chaos around me that it's really hard to get that "mind like water" thing going.

Labels: GTD

I signed up for a Jott account today. Jott is a service that lets you send e-mail to yourself (or others) by calling a toll-free number from your cell phone. The email gets run through a speech-to-text translator, so you read it, or click a link in the e-mail to listen to it.

I stumbled across this service today while I was looking for something else. It might come in handy. Part of the whole GTD idea is to have a way to capture thoughts pretty much wherever you are. Jott could be useful for that, if I've got my cell phone on me, but no pen & paper.

And I'm hoping Jott doesn't sell my cell phone number to anyone for marketing purposes. (I'm pretty sure they won't; they do seem to be a legit company with a reasonable privacy policy.)

Labels: GTD

So today was basically the end of week 2 of trying out GTD at work. My desk is pretty clean now, and my files are labelled and organized. I'm keeping track of my projects and action items in Notes, in the To-Do section, per the GTD and Lotus Notes doc from DavidCo.

I'm still a long way from cleaning up my Lotus Notes e-mail inbox, though. In the past, I've basically used a system where I flag any actionable items using Notes follow-up flags, and just leave everything in my inbox. What I'm trying to do now is go through my inbox for 2007 (2006 is archived in a separate database) and either move messages to a reference folder, delete them, or put them in an "action" folder. My plan is to continue using the Notes follow-up flags (to indicate priority, at least), but to try and get a functional folder system going so that I can get that inbox to empty. I'm not terribly worried about getting to empty real soon, since I've already got myself well-trained to either (1) act on a message immediately or (2) mark it for follow-up. I've been doing that for a couple of years now, so it's not like there are a bunch of actionable items hidden amongst the 5000 messages in my inbox. Anything that's actionable is already flagged.

I took at shot at my second weekly review today, too, but it was a half-hearted effort. I've been fighing allergies for the last few days, and I'm just out of it. And I'm still way behind on a number of projects. I'm taking steps to try and get things moving, but there's still a lot to do.

Well, I suppose this post was more of a "personal journal" entry than a useful blog post that others might find interesting, but I felt I needed to write it, just to review this stuff myself, and get it out of my head.

Labels: GTD

I finished reading the GTD book today. I picked up Ready for Anything last week, so I guess I can start reading that now. I'm doing well, I think, with implementing GTD at work. I have my files organized. I have a project list. I have a "next actions" list, organized by context. My Lotus Notes inbox is still a bit of a mess, and I wouldn't say that I have *all* my projects in the project list yet, but I'm off to a good start.

Labels: GTD

Last night, I started trying to use Backpack for organizing some lists related to implementing GTD for personal stuff. Backpack seems like a good choice, since it's web-based, and hence available on my PC or Mac, and also at work if need be.

The first thing I figured out is that the to-do list functionality in Backpack is interesting, but mostly useless. It looks nice, but it's really missing a log of functionality. You can reorder lists, for instance, but you can't easily move an item from one list to another. (I could get Backpack to let me do this occasionally, but I couldn't figure out how to do it consistently.) Also, you can't move a list from one page to another. It's a lot easier to manage lists simply as part of the body text on a page, in either a plain old bulleted list or numbered list. You can move stuff around easily, just using good old cut & paste. You don't get the fancy checkboxes this way, but I can deal with that.

I've also considered something like GTDTiddlyWiki, or one of its variants. The idea there would be to stick the HTML file into my FolderShare directory. Then it would, in theory, get replicated between my desktop PC, iBook, and work PC, so I could access it from any machine. I've heard that all of the GTD wiki variants tend to bog down if you stick too much stuff in them, though.

Labels: GTD

I spent some time today screwing around with different ways of doing GTD stuff in Lotus Notes. I tried the free GTD for Lotus Notes database created by Brett Philp. I also played around with Things To Do 2 by Chuck Connell. Both of these databases are well-done and interesting, but neither one quite worked for me.

I wound up going back to the method detailed in the GTD and Lotus Notes document available from DavidCo. The basic idea there is to use the to-do functionality built into the Notes mail template, with a few tweaks. That works pretty well, but there are still a few things I don't like. I'm going to try and ignore those things for now, since I'm the kind of person who can easily spend *way* too much time just messing with my "system", and never get any real work done.

Once I got a bunch of data into the Notes to-do screen, I did my first weekly review. It was definitely an incomplete review, since I really haven't gotten everything into the system yet, but it was kind of instructive. I really do have a lot of stuff on my plate right now. I'm somewhat intimidated by the prospect of getting everything into one system and really getting my head around it all. I definitely haven't experienced the "stress-free" part of GTD yet, though I think (and hope) that I'm on my way!

Labels: GTD, Lotus

I cleaned out the top drawer in my main file cabinet at home today. I labeled all my folders, nice and neat. I threw out a bunch of stuff I didn't need. I shredded a bunch of old credit card bills and other stuff like that. It took me about three hours to do all this; from around 8 to 11pm.

I don't think I'm going to go much beyond this in terms of organizing my "stuff" at home. I just don't think I really need to go nuts on the personal stuff. It's mostly the work stuff that's out of control.

I really need to get back to reading the GTD book. I just haven't had time to pick it up in the last few days. Well, I'm tired and I'm heading off to bed now. Remember, there's a three-day weekend to look forward to at the end of this week...

Labels: GTD

I picked up a Brother PT-1950 labeler from Staples yesterday, then went into work and labeled and alphabetized all my files. I've got two file drawers in work with old reference material, so it's a bunch of stuff but not a ton. It took about two hours to work through. I also managed to throw away a couple of boxes full of stuff, and got some stuff off my desk and into folders. Sunday night might have been a weird time to do all this, but spare time during normal work hours is hard to come by. I haven't really gotten started yet with the whole inbox processing thing. Oh, and I'm about halfway through the book.

Labels: GTD

I downloaded the GTD and Lotus Notes guide from DavidCo today. I'm not quite sure if was worth $10 for a thirty-odd page PDF file, but the system it laid out made some sense. There's another system available here that might be better, and doesn't cost anything, though.

One hang-up I've always had with any kind of productivity system is that so much of my "stuff" lives in Lotus Notes e-mail. I've looked into ways to embed links to Notes documents into an external system, but I've never found a good way. Notes doclinks work great in Notes, but if you try to paste one into, for instance, OneNote, you just end up with a little block of XML. (I know that I can save the doclink to a file, then attach the file to another application, but it's not real useful for me if I need to go through that extra step.)

Well, I haven't gotten past chapter 3 in the GTD book yet anyway, so I probably shouldn't be worried about implementation details like this yet.

Labels: GTD, Lotus

Well, I went out and bought the GTD book today. Let's see if I can finish reading it in a reasonable amount of time.

So far, it seems like a worthwhile read, not just some mushy new-age stuff, or patently obvious stuff, or completely impractical advice that would never work in the real world. It does seem to contain practical advice that might actually be useful in my day-to-day work.

I'm kind of curious about how I might get some of this to work with my existing software tools. I'm currently managing my priority list via my Lotus Notes inbox, using follow-up flags. That's not the best system possible, but it has the advantage of residing directly in the system where most of my to-do list items originate (i.e. e-mails from other people).

Labels: GTD

I'm usually not much for productivity systems of any kind. It all seems to me like it should just be common sense. Keep track of your to-do list, prioritize, and so on and so forth. I'm falling so far behind at work now, though, that I'm actually starting to look around to see if there's anything out there that could help. I know there's no magic wand I can wave that'll get four months worth of work done in a week, but maybe there's something out there that could help me whittle down the list a bit, and take some of the stress off me.

I've seen the "Getting Things Done" system mentioned a lot over the last couple of years, and I've been somewhat curious about it. I think I'm finally desperate enough to start looking into it. An excerpt from David Allen's book is available from Business Week. I read that, and it makes some sense to me. There's a page of links and stuff about GTD up at 43 Folders. There's a link there to a podcast series, interviewing David Allen, that might be interesting. I think I'll give that a listen, after I catch up on DNR.

I'm not sure if I'm ready to buy the book yet. Maybe.

Labels: GTD

Style: Normal Basic