I have decided to implement GTD both at work and at home after listening to the Getting Things Done Now Seminar. I just borrowed the Getting Things Done Unabridged Audiobook and am going through that now.

However, I feel like my own work is conspiring against my successful implementation of GTD.

First off at work we use Lotus Notes. I thought at first I could use Notes for my organization, BUT I have 2 major issues:  read more »

Part of my job is to read/review/assimilate long articles, white papers, short manuals, et cetera. I have a GTD context for “Read/Review” and guess what? Things stay there like they’re in quicksand. I need a way to “grok” big documents. Anyone got any tips or links? Something step-by-step would be helpful. I’m not talking about simple speed-reading; I’m talking about reading and evaluating but not spending all day on a single tome.

I was watching E! News last night (my wife was controlling the remote control, honest!) and saw Merlin’s doppleganger, who is a correspondent for that show. Is it just me? Am I crazy, or do Merlin Mann and Marc Malkin look related in some way? Maybe it is just the glasses…and the initials! Too coincidental to be happenstance…

God grant me the serenity not to constantly pursue the best way to get stuff done; courage to accept the best way for me; and the wisdom to know the difference.

Hi all.

I’ve read through most of Getting Things Done about twice now, thought about implementing it quite a bit, and even posted here once or twice. I’ve bought a filing cabinet (something I swore I’d never do), a stack of folders and adhesive labels, and a bunch of index cards. I’ve decided to give it a go, since I’m in my last year at uni, working part-time, and usually have a few personal/freelance projects on the go at any one time as well as a social life to keep a grip on, so there’s a lot of stuff to manage there.  read more »

Over on my blog JobMob, I posted the above question for my readers:

http://jobmob.co.il/blog/ask-the-readers-what-are-your-favorite-job-search-tools/

Which tools, websites, software, etc., have worked for you or your friends?

thanks,

Jacob

Via a Toot by Jeff Atwood comes this thoughtful post by Tantek Çelik on how email is no longer working for him. His first reason is a biggie:

1. Point to point communications do not scale.

All forms of communication where you have to expend time and energy on communicating with a specific person (anything that has a notion of “To” in the interface that you have to fill in) are doomed to fail at some limit. If you are really good you might be able to respond to dozens (some claim hundreds) of individual emails a day but at some point you will simply be spending all your time writing email rather than actually “working” on any thing in particular (next-actions or projects, e.g. coding, authoring, drawing, enjoying your life etc.)

This is one reason I’m getting attracted to using Get Satisfaction as a way to expose help issues to a large group of helpers and helpees (BTW, we’re just getting started on GS — FAQs and more will be coming soon). I’m also realizing that this is why I (and Jonathan Coulton and probably you) struggle with holding up dozens of one-on-one conversations — it locks up your attention and its fruits in thousands of inaccessible alcoves. And truly, that does not and will not scale.

---

But, y’know, as I read Tantek’s post, alongside his “Communication Protocols” notes, I found myself returning to a pet theory that I’ve been too embarrassed to lay out in a real post. But what the heck, I’ll capture some notes and you can tell me what you think:

I suspect that email encourages people to act insane.  read more »

Is there a mobile only based GTD application. I am on the road most of my time and have no internet access for better part of my day. So any web app will not work for me. I would like to use a GTD app which is purely Mobile phone/PDA based and does not require an internet connection.

• V

This afternoon 43 Folders had a temporary caching problem that resulted in some posts being inaccessible to users who were not logged in. Sorry about that.

I think this problem is fixed now. If it’s giving you any trouble, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

As of next Sunday, our lovely daughter will have been with our houshold for six months (Happy Half-Birthday, Eleanor). It’s a good arrangement, and we’re all pretty happy about the whole thing so far. But, to look around our house, you’d think we were raising a small army of babies, each of whom has their own Amazon Prime account and an addiction to things that are shaped like giraffes.

Oh my, the stuff. The baby stuff. Everywhere. Means of conveyance, swingy seat, Bumbo, squeaky toys, fuzzy toys, toys for biting and bending, jammies, jackets, socks that do and don’t look like shoes, amusing hats, blankets, books, rattles, pacifiers, cleaning supplies, extra diapers — plus of course, there’s the raw tonnage of stuff belonging to the caretaking adults that has been displaced or disused as a result of the occupying baby’s needs. It is a scene, man, I can assure you. And there’s not an iota of blame to place on the actual baby; it’s all us (and mostly me). [By the bye, for an illuminating look at the perils of the creeping ParentCrap industry, have a look at Parenting, Inc. It’s chilling. And, for me, personally damning.]

At any rate, as we approach that august 183-day mark in our little girl’s life, you might be able to guess where my head is right now. Yep. It’s on clutter, and on what I need to do to get my face back into Peter Walsh’s excellent de-cluttering book as a means for regaining domestic sanity and striding toward the possibility of a life without tripping, piling, or losing what’s left of my sleep-deprived mind.

But let’s start with first principles:  read more »

gtd-php v0.8, has just been released. It's a free, open-source web package to help you manage your next actions, projects, lists, references and more.

You can download it from the gtd-php download page, and there are tutorial screencasts on youtube.

If you have any questions, please pop over to our forum and ask them.  read more »

I'm looking for index cards with graph paper lines printed on them. The ones I've found in staples are quad (4 boxes per inch) which is too coarse, and the lines are too dark. Is there any place where I can buy these cards with smaller boxes and finer/lighter lines? I'd rather buy than print them myself.

• NEAT Receipts Scanner - Sharp-looking receipt scanner for the Mac, coming soon. I tend to avoid one-off gadgets that have any kind of permanent footprint on my desk, but this looks pretty handy if it works.
• Footers In Modern Web Design: Creative Examples and Ideas | Design Showcase | Smashing Magazine - Inspiring collection of ways to use the space at the top and bottom of a web page. The first advocate for this approach that I can recall is Derek, who always uses his footers to such lovely and functional effect.
• A Pattern Language for Productivity - Gah! I feared I’d waited too long. I’ve totally been meaning to start something like this on the 43f wiki for a couple years. (curses self). Nice start, here. Should be useful for folks.
• The Fishbowl: Twitterpated - I get a surprising amount of flack for not following more people on Twitter. Which dumbfounds me. It’s like being angry at someone because they aren’t watching enough TV. Anyhow, some of these hyper-following people strike me as either nutjobs or cynics, e.g. “in one case, 34,000. If you were truly following all these people, and they updated only once per day on average, you would be reading a Twitter message every two seconds.” Yeah. That sounds really fun and enriching. [via anarchaia]
• Word Spy - speed mentoring - “Getting advice in a series of short conversations with experts and other mentors.” I need me more of this.
• BENTWOOD by contexture design workshop - My gosh, what a lovely idea; a wooden bangle that turns into a coffee cup sleeve. Smart. [via Erika]
• Ten typographic mistakes everyone makes | Life, Tutorials - Guilty as charged on a number of these. I think the one I’m laziest about is straight quotation marks (“"”) where I really mean inches (“″”). I do love that people care this much about this stuff (most of the time).
• Mac Mini Media Centre / journal / hicksdesign - Jon has been sharing how he’s setting up his Mac Mini as a home entertainment juggernaut. This post outlines his basic setup, the apps he uses, etc. He also has a companion Flickr set. I’d love to hear more from folks on workflow. How — hypothetically — an AVI from out in the wild gets downloaded, encoded when necessary, and then dropped into the “~/Movies” folder. Maybe Automator? As a new Mini owner with the same goals, I’d love to hear your tips here in comments.
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Event Video/Audio) | Berkman Center - Clay’s book is justifiably hyped right now, because it’s just so damned good. If you enjoyed seeing the Claymeister General on Colbert, you might want to catch this swell talk, where he gets a bit more room to say his piece on a world where things get organized without organizers.
• Spark | CBC Radio | Disaster Preparedness Kit for your digital life - “…Nora and Merlin Mann (of 43Folders fame) are putting together a ‘Disaster Preparedness Kit’ for your digital life. Do you have a tip, trick, or tool that puts your mind at ease and keeps you from worrying about data loss?”

 read more »

So I’m trying to figure out a low-budget way of essentially getting my palm m130 to carry a calendar and my to do lists. I even have DataViz’s Beyond Contacts software. The problem is the BC software doesn’t want to talk to my Outlook on my work computer for some reason, and I am not really sure how to narrow down what’s going wrong.  read more »

MacBreak Weekly 85: You Look Mac Today

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Merlin Mann, and Andy Ihnatko

Wombats, Pystar clones, Back to My Mac, Aussie iPhones on Vodafone, and more.

Here’s a direct MP3 download of MBW 85.

This week my Audible pick is That Mitchell and Webb Sound, and my application pick is TimeMachineEditor. The former is a wonderful radio series by two British comics that I’m currently obsessed with, while the latter is a very handy app for manually setting how often Time Machine backs up your Mac.  read more »

I keep my notes on 3 x 5 index cards, quasi-hipster-pda style, but basically just a lump of cards with a rubber band around them. The cards keep getting bent and messed up, so I’m looking for a simple, but good-looking, card holder. I’ve seen Levenger’s, but that’s too complicated. I don’t need pockets & pads.  read more »

So I recently realized my LG Verizon phone cannot use iSync and chooses not to acknowledge the Mac OS at all. Crap.

For the time being I have to stick with Verizon (for my job), so I can’t get on the iPhone train just yet. Anybody have any good luck with a Verizon phone? Preferrably not a Blackberry (yuck).

Is your car smoking from the exhaust pipe?

Reader wemerson was kind enough to correct me on my metaphor in the previous post about tracking down the sources of whining in your life. Turns out that my use of “white smoke” was incorrect. Many thanks — and I made the correction.

To share the information and prevent future slightly-appropriate-metaphor-makers from repeating my error, here’s how to tell what’s wrong with your car based on the color of smoke coming out of your tailpipe. From trustmymechanic.com:

• White smoke: White smoke is caused by water and or antifreeze entering the cylinder, and the engine trying to burn it with the fuel. The white smoke is steam…
• Blue Smoke: Blue smoke is caused by engine oil entering the cylinder area and being burned along with the fuel air mixture. As with the white smoke, just a small drop of oil leaking into the cylinder can produce blue smoke out the tailpipe…
• Black Smoke: Black smoke is caused by excess fuel that has entered the cylinder area and cannot be burned completely. Another term for excess fuel is “running rich.” Poor fuel mileage is also a common complaint when black smoke comes out of the tailpipe.

Related: in the event that a conclave at the Sistine Chapel has been voting on who the next Pope shall be, here’s what Wikipedia says to watch for in terms of smoke (emphasis added):  read more »

Hi all! I’m currently reading through GTD and trying to figure out my setup. I’m a part-time SAHM with a son i 1st grade, a daughter in preschool, and a son who will be 2 this summer. Needless to say, I have my hands full! On top of that, my husband works long hours and I handle all mail and billpaying.  read more »

I have been using a very simple single sheet PDA. I dislike the amount of ‘work’ that some of the PDA version require…taping card together etc.. This is a bit more open to chaos and is also designed to drive reflection / modeling of the world around us.

http://dromologue.wordpress.com/the-modster-pda/

D.

Has anyone taken a look at the iPhone specific 43 Actions tool? (http://43actions.com/)

I just found it and am doing some digging. Just wondering if anyone else has any thoughts on the tool.

I’ve been working on a bunch of (non-43 Folders-related) stuff lately, but I started feeling that hankering to come back and write something new here. To get the engine started, I went through some old posts and turned up a few (oddly self-inspiring) ideas that I want to re-share. The topic? “Getting unstuck.”

• Hack your way out of writer’s block - “Literally. Put five completley random words on a piece of paper. Write five more words. Try a sentence. Could be about anything. A block ends when you start making words on a page.”
• Solve problems by writing a note to yourself - “Seriously, open up your email program, type in your own email address, then choose a brilliant subject line that perfectly encapsulates your particular problem.”
• Do a fast “mind-sweep” - “And as long as you let that stuff accumulate as chunky deposits on the edges of your perception, it’s very unlikely it’ll get done since — well — they won’t get done until they’re been captured and properly started, right?”
• Cringe-Busting your TODO list - “Per cringe item, think honestly about why you’re freaked out about it. Seriously. What’s the hang-up? (Fear of failure? Dreading bad news? Angry you’re already way overdue?)”
• Patching your personal suck - “Every patch that fails teaches you a little something that might come in handy some day. Mistakes, as they say, can be a buddhist gift.”

I guess all I’d add — since it’s on my mind today — is that I’m learning how much it pays to listen whenever you hear yourself mentally whining.  read more »

hey guys

I would like to know what your habits are in tagging files.

I found this very cool app, Punakea. It’s a tagging software, basically similar to Yojimbo, Journaler,…and I’m thinking of tagging all my documents and files and have them organized by Punakea (instead of sorting them manually into folders)

So do you have a certain system or what is your thinking process when you tag the files.

thanks for any suggestions

simon