43 Folders

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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Hello, fellow strivers...

Hey folks...

Great board, I really appreciate the community that's demonstrated here.

We're a Lotus Notes shop here at work -- so I'll share my system, and some current struggles.

1. Notes Calendar and email, of course, and I use the "Personal Journal" note function and the address book. I also use the miserable "To Do" function, since it's integrated -- although vastly inferior to Palm Desktop, and many others.

2. This is all synchronized with a Blackberry I carry around at all times.

3. I print my daily calendar each morning, and then write the day's actions on it -- by perusing my electronic To Do. At the end of the day I update the electronic stuff and throw the paper away.

4. Key Lotus Notes tip for anyone who's interested: document links work well when you are @computer -- when you get an email and decide what the next action is, copy the email as a link, file it where it should go, and then paste the link in a new To Do for the action. This goes for projects, too -- I've got some electronic notes with 5-10 doc links to all of the relevant info.

Current struggles:
A. Resisting the urge to constantly check email.
B. Resisting the urge to check email on my Blackberry when I'm not in a convenient place to process it.
C. I've gotten pretty good at identifying and doing today's "must do's", but I struggle with moving to the "next most important actions on the list" without traveling through "significant time-wasting distractions".
D. Following from C., I feel I've got a lot of stuff I'm not getting to -- although I realize it's not time-critical.
E. Managing address information (especially email addresses) between my system at work and my personal email in Yahoo.

That should be enough to get started...

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