43 Folders

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

How are you using Backpack?

I have had a backpack account for some time, but I have never quite managed to get the hang of it: I really liked the idea of having a set of private, easy to use pages on the web but I could never really fit Backpack into my working practices. At the same time, I have been searching for a way to log the work that I complete and, this weekend, I decided to concentrate on making Backpack work for me. After playing around for a while, I have managed to get a setup that I feel pretty pleased with.

I thought it would be useful to hear how other people on here use Backpack for GTD. Here is what I am doing:

* First of all, I have created a page for each context that I work with.

* Whenever I review my completed actions, I make a note of them on the relevant context page before scoring them out on my 3x5s.

* Whenever I make a project, I give it a separate page and link it to the appropriate context page and I remove it from the sidebar (the only pages on my sidebar are my contexts).

* I tag projects as '!active', '!priority', '!someday' and so on, so that I can immediately get a list of all active projects without searching through the links on each context page (the exclamation mark puts the tags at the top of the list on the 'all pages' page).

* Again, whenever I make any significant progress on a project, I write it up as a note on the project page.

* I have other 'reference' pages. These also do not appear on my sidebar and are not linked to any specific contexts, which keeps them 'off radar' until I need to find them. The tagging system makes that relatively easy when I do need to find something specific.

I have not really used this system much in anger yet, so I will probably modify this system over time. It feels quite promising so far, though.

Over to you...

rmm's picture

Interesting thread. I'm just...

Interesting thread. I'm just using Backpack in the traditional sense for a remote projects for a team, especially since I've just got the free version for now. Unfortunately I'm still not convinced it's what I need; there are features of PBwiki and AceProjects that I really, really like that aren't in Backpack. That's the problem - there are piles of handy features, but they're not all in the same piece of software :(

 
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