Hi

I’ve successfully implemented GTD, but am having issues translating my reading shedule into any actionable form. GTD works great on chores and projects, but somehow become hard to tick of as complete when they all say “read page 10-20 in book A.”

Studying Psychology we are basically only required to sign a paper at the beginning of the term, and show up for the exams at the end of the term. Which means the usual midterm goals or motivations are all absent. It’s just the student, the non-compulsory lectures and his/her books.  read more »

I received my contributor copy of Garr Reynolds’s Presentation Zen book last week and proceeded to devour it over the weekend. A fuller review is coming to this space soon, because this is the book about presentations that’s needed to be written for years, and it’s just fantastic. Best of all it’s not another recipe book about “how to make slides” — this is about re-imagining how your entire presentation will work together as a persuasive and integrated show, from conception through delivery. Awesome.

Anyhow, with my inaugural Macworld talk looming on the horizon (T-minus 16 days, thanks), I’ve been inspired by Garr’s book (and the top-notch site on which it’s based) to, among other things, try revamping the approach to how slides fit in to my overall show. As I said on the Twitter, that starts with shit-canning the PowerPoint-y Keynote templates I’ve previously torn up and pasted together for stuff like Inbox Zero (here’s the slides for that one, which Garr was kind enough to feature in his book).

But, now, rather than strictly trying to reinvent the wheel, I have a quest. A quest for a crazy-simple, design-centric Keynote template that’s more about composition than gradients and 3-D bullet points. Ever heard of The Rule of Thirds?  read more »

Hey all,

I just went from being a resident with 0 administrative responsibility (except for patients) to being in charge of the pharmacy department of a 220 bed hospital with about 40 or so people I’m responsible for.

Basically I’m freaking out. I need advice and I’ve just bought GTD and am looking for ways to keep up before I inevitably fall behind.

Any advice, suggestions, or anecdotes would be greatly appreciated.  read more »

A brief outline of my experiences so far:

OmniFocus and iGTD

• extremely similar appearance and workflow
• work well
• very quick to enter info
• both somewhat sloppy with the GTD model
• neither provides a proper Waiting For list

Midnight Inbox  read more »

• looks great - brilliant in fact
• has a somewhat in-your-face attitude towards GTD
• seems quite rigid, which may be a good thing or not
• some interface weirdness
• I found it slow to use, because it is often not clear how to do something

David Allen says that there are seven types of things that need to be kept track of:

• projects
• project support material
• calendar
• next actions
• waiting for
• reference
• someday/maybe ideas

But then at the end of Chapter 7 of GTD, he suggests how useful it is to maintain plenty of checklists of creative reminders. So what are these? They don’t fit into any of the above categories, and he doesn’t say how or where there should be organised.

Hi 43f folks,

I come to you with a bit of a question, a bit of a show and tell.

I’ve been hearing since I made the mac switch like 4 years ago that OS X was the best thing since sliced bread, because “look dude, there’s the command line if you ever need it.”

Sigh.

And then I never heard about the command-line except by people who are all about telling me that it’s the best thing since sliced bread. Well, I’ve dug a little bit, and I’ve made some progress I know how to get around, and after a few months of really trying pretty hard, I’m almost borderline competent.  read more »

I have written a GTD application for S60 phones. It’s called MobileGTD and can be found on
http://code.google.com/p/mobilegtd/

It’s very GTD centric and does not have a lot of extra functionality, but it does its job very well. Here is the description from the web page:

MobileGTD turns your Series 60 phone into a GTD notebook on steroids Features  read more »

• Based on a simple file and directory structure (easy synchronization with PC)
• Use your favourite file explorer to browse your actions
• Usable as a simple inbox, allowing you to create projects on the fly

Subject says it all, get it from http://www.igtd.pl/iGTD/iGTD2/index.html

This is definitely alpha software, nothing for real use. But what it shows looks absolutely fantastic to me. It comes with a Leopard’ish interface (in fact, the iGTD 2 alpha runs only on Leopard!).

With V 2.0, iGTD will be no plain GTD implementation anymore. So if you think, DA is the only one to know and following exactly his book is the only way to success, don’t read further. iGTD will probably be not for you, you’d better stick with Midnight Inbox or OmniFocus.  read more »

Crap, I’m posting to 43 folders, I must have passed some invisible line in the sand.

I’ve been doing the GTD thing for about 6 months or so now, and am just starting to get a handle on things, but one thing has bugged me for a while. As I’m creating and using a single system for everything in my life, doesn’t this imply that my life will have even fewer boundaries between work and home than before?  read more »

Good evening everyone, I’m pretty new to GTD, switched to Mac about 8 months ago. I’m reading the book now and am interested to know if there’s a site that has reviewed most of the GTD apps out there. There seem to be a good handful of apps (OmniFocus, iGTD, MidnightBeep) and I’m having a REAL hard time trying to decide which might be best for me. Right now I use Remember the Milk on my iPhone (very nice!), but I find that most GTD apps sync to iCal (events and tasks), therefore I can’t see my tasks on the iPhone.  read more »

If you’re like me, you probably got a whole playing deck worth of gift cards over the holidays, those presents that say, “I felt like I needed to get you something, but put the least amount of thought into it.” And if you’re like me, getting one of these cards is a mixed bag of emotions. For one, there’s the “Woohoo!  read more »

For Christmas, I was quite pleased to get a Zen Stone Plus in my stocking. I'm one of those people - the ones who exist between platforms. (I lost my true allegiance decades ago, and have been a switch-hitter ever since.) One of the things this means is that I do some things by hand that other people - the loyalists - are used to having done automatically.

So there I was, Christmas afternoon, moving playlists from the iTunes on our Windows machine onto the cute little non-iPod. Grab, drag, copy.

The process immediately reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges' riffs on mirrors.  read more »

Advice for clearing literary clutter | Ask MetaFilter

There’s a thread on Ask Metafilter about book-centric clutter that’s getting lots of good comments right now. It started when matildaben asked for “practical and creative systems for reducing the number of books I own,” saying:

The vast majority of my possessions by weight and volume consists of books. I would like to develop a system for getting rid of them that will have a very practical, behavioral, methodical approach to the emotions that compel me to keep them…

The solutions people offer are thoughtful and suggest that many of the better ideas are coming from fellow bibliophiles who’ve struggled with The Book Problem.

Like several folks in the thread, I think this comment from occhiblu gets to the heart of what makes clutter such an emotionally complex problem:

   read more »

Since reading Merlin’s post here, I’ve been using proxies all the time!

I just updated to Leopard and have one problem: The quicksilver proxies selection doesn’t seem to work in Safari, but it does everywhere else. Anyone know a workaround?

• Dynamism.com - Next Generation Japanese Notebooks and Electronics - New-to-me geek gadget site, highlighting stuff not easily available in the US. Very fun.
• IGDA - Articles - Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work: 6 Lessons - “Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.”
• NPR : GPS Goes Mainsteam - Your author would be one of those alluded-to persons who uses GPS as a “crutch.” I could get lost in an empty bathtub with two St. Bernards and a sherpa guide.
• THE PRAGMATICS OF HUMOR: Representing Communication - “Cleese…says, ‘I think any time I see a possibility of a misunderstanding, I jump on it.’” Cleese once brilliantly pointed out that Basil Fawlty wouldn’t be nearly as funny if there weren’t people standing around watching him make a fool of himself.
• Bacon Cheese Baconburger - “You may think you’ve done a lot of strange things in your life, but until you’ve put slices of raw bacon into a food processor at 10:30pm, you really haven’t even scratched the surface of strange.” [via MeFi]
• The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks - I’m a proud “admin” for a “related” but “unallied” Flickr “group” that I “like a lot” called “Quotation Mark” Abuse. (thanks, mathowie)

I’m looking for a portable tickler file, something I can put 43 folders in or is made to handle 43 folders, and can be portable between my office and home.

Anyone got any tips here?

MacBreak Weekly 70: Happy Life Day!

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Alex Lindsay, Andy Ihnatko, Chris Breen, Merlin Mann, and Scott Bourne

It’s the Macbreak Weekly Year Ender!

Here’s a direct MP3 download of MBW 70.

And here’s linkage to a few of the things I mentioned (adapted from this episode’s show notes):  read more »

I upgraded to the Leopard-Intel MacBook in November.

All of my webarchives are now blank. Everything that I’ve made before or since the upgrade is gone. The lable of the file is the only thing left.

The Yojimbo website mentions nothing about it. Thier support forum looks kind of clunky (I’m no computer geek, though).

As soon as I can get the Mac Book hooked up to the internet I will load the Release Date: 12/05/2007 - Yojimbo 1.5 update.

How should I proceed? I’m dumb about computers so any perpective would help.

Thanks.

I put a post under the bag review article that was removed. It was in response to a point the reviewer made, yet for commenting on it, my post was removed. An explanation is due. It was no more out of place than the reviewer’s comment.

Hello,

I am new to this forum, but have been listening to merlin and reading for a long time. I will get right to the problem.

My data is a mess. I have a 500gb external drive bulging at the seams with duplicate files and folders. The problem occurred because my wife and I both backup to this drive. We now have our own folders full of the same files(mostly music). Now bear with me. I hope this doesn’t get too complicated.

At the moment I have a drive that looks similar to this

z:\my music\joe smith\track a, b, c, d etc.

z:\her music\joe smith\track a  read more »

The ultimate ubiquitous capturing device has the following qualities:

(1) You can take it with you anywhere, (2) It’s always with you, (3) You begin writing immediately (less than 5 seconds).

With all the options out there I’d like to know from others what their #1 choice is for ubiquitous capture. And I’d prefer it came from those who have been using that collecting device/method for over a year.

I thought for sure the one thing that would nag me about the iPhone when I finally got one was its lack of a to-do list app. To my surprise though (and maybe it makes sense, as I’ll explain), now that I have an iPhone I haven’t felt the need for a to-do app at all. It’s an egregious omission for most people to be sure, but for me it’s turned out to be a non-issue. To understand why, I need to provide some context.  read more »

During my normal work day, I do a lot of work in a web-based database application. And for the really repetitive data entry items, I have set up triggers to paste the “canned text” into different fields. But I have yet to figure out how I can paste into multiple fields at once with one trigger. Is this possible?

For example: Right now… I manually place my cursor in a field… hit Cmd+Opt+O to paste the first bit of text… hit the [Tab] key on my keyboard… hit Cmd+Opt+P to paste the next bit of text… hit the [Tab] key on my keyboard… hit Cmd+Opt+[ to paste the last bit of text.  read more »