[…] In effort to adopt a new productivity scheme to attack my current problem of no-productivity, I’ve turned to the Seven Things “hack.” Many of the big Getting Things Done followers try this hack, but honestly I don’t believe GTD is for me. It’s far, far, far too involved, and requiring of being part of every section of my life; not something I really want to adopt. […]

One question: what exactly do you use your moleskine for? I’ve carried one for years but haven’t been able to find a use for it since starting GTD. Do you keep your actual lists (next actions, contexts, etc.) in it? Do you use a big one or a small one?

And thanks for turning me on to del.icio.us — it’s great!

what exactly do you use your moleskine for?

It’s not specifically a great GTD tool in general, but it works for how my brain operates. For me, it’s all about capturing and sharing. Writing down music suggestions, jotting things I want to research or settle a bet. Just a reminder of someone’s name and the fact I said I’d email them some information.

I try to carry the smallest note-taking device that I can get away with. A standard moleskine if I have my messenger bag, a notebook moleskine if I’m wearing a big jacket, and more often than not—seriously—ten index cards and a binder clip.

Any kind of processing and storage happens back at the PowerBook. Although, I must admit, I have started fiddling with a Palm again for fun.

And glad you like del.icio.us. Get a bookmarklet and use it! :)

Thanks for your reply — one of the things that GTD really opened my eyes to is that you can have as many note-capturing devices or inboxes or whatever as you want, as long as you look through them once a week and sort them out. I guess I just hadn’t thought about that, re: carrying multiple moleskines! I will definitely start using mine again!

As an aside — if you’re thinking of carrying a Palm again, you should check out MacNoteTaker; it syncs plain text files between your Mac and the PDA. So, if you keep all your lists and notes in plain text files, you have a really nice system for keeping things up to date. I’ve found this simple solution to be way better than LifeBalance, ShadowPlan, etc. I just wish there were an easy way to edit the Palm’s To-Do list on the Mac without using Palm Desktop. Anyhow, it’s a big help.

I took your advice and grabbed a del.icio.us account. Not sure how much I’ll use it; I’ve just plopped one URL in there so far.

My old system for saving URLs was a folder called “URLs??? sitting on my MacOS X desktop. (Actually it’s in Documents with an alias on the Desktop.) When I found a place I didn’t feel like bookmarking but thought I might want to come back to, I’d just drag the URL from the address bar into the folder. Every so often I go through and sort, promote, or prune.

I’ve also got the folder in my Dock, so I can right-click and get a menu of the contents.

Avram, I promise once you’ve started using del.icio.us, you’ll love it. Use the bookmarklets, and it’s magic.

Avram: The power of deli.cio.us comes from tags. Sure, your desktop folder of URL works (I just finished off mine a week ago), but it’s hard to find something you want. In deli.cio.us, I look up “osx software rss” and bam, I have a list of what I want. Hierarchies are very restricting to change and hard to set up. Tags in contrast, are easy to setup (if done right) and modify. Having a URL directory also makes it hard to add comments.
Since del.icio.us it is a large public service, you can see related topics easily and subscribe to them in your inbox. Try the del.icio.us GTD tag, which has lots of neat tips in it, much like this blog.

Also, if you find yourself looking stuff up on del.icio.us alot (I would at least hope you would), get yourself a bookmark like this one: del.icio.us lookup for easyasy2k.
The nutr.itio.us posting bookmarklet is also superior to the standard one.

Leland: Thanks much for the nutr.icio.us pointer. Far superior. :-)

I use Furl instead of del.icio.us for two primary reasons:

1. The damn URL is easier to type. ;-)
2. 2. Furl indexes the full-text of every web page you archive and allows you to search through the full-text of every page in your entire archive. It’s like carving out your own personal subsection of the Web. I’ve written more about this idea of a “personal web” elsewhere.

You can create Yahoo-like categories with Furl, but I’ve found that it’s easier and more efficient to use Furl’s Keywords feature much in the way that you would use del.icio.us’ Tags feature.

Furl does currently lack the ability to search across users link archives, although it’s a planned feature. However, it does have a recommendation engine, that will recommend links to you based on the linking habits of other users (like Amazon’s “Customers who bought this book also bought…” feature).

I had no idea fat kids were so easy to topple. Tubby toppling always seemed like an act that required significant labor.