Blog
Friday, May 25, 2007
GTD progress - weekly review
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!
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!
Friday, May 18, 2007
GTD and Lotus Notes
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.
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.
© 2008 Andrew Huey