Lofi

Palimpsest: the guide to a (mostly) paperless life

norbauer — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:43:11 -0500

It seems that many of us otherwise computer-oriented geeks have a surprising and earth-unfriendly confession to make: we love paper. Notwithstanding the entirely digital nature of my own trade, for example, I'll freely admit that there is really nothing quite like the smooth glide of a mechanical pencil over a big sheet of crisp, white office paper to facilitate good writing and thinking.

I can't plan out a new piece of software—or write an essay for that matter—without first messily scribbling my ideas out as mind-maps or rough user-interface sketches onto paper. My brainstorms are too messy and flow too quickly for the computer to be able to accommodate my chaos, yet that early disorder is essential to crafting the order and structure that will follow.

And yet I used to have serious reservations about this tendency to spoodge my thought process onto tree carcasses. It wasn't until I finally learned how to get rid of paper, that I was able properly to embrace its use in my work.

You see, paper has a number of problems in addition to its environmental implications, not least of which that it tends to hang around and pile up well past its period of usefulness, cluttering offices and making one look embarrassingly Victorian in one's mastery of information technology. Paper also lacks a number of the affordances of its digital counterparts: pen and paper don't offer very good full-text search, for one thing—and the spell check is even worse. But as a medium for encouraging unbounded creative thinking and planning, nothing quite beats a hunk of the old papyrus. As Merlin and Danny O'Brien aptly put it, paper is "the purest and most durable instance of the WYSIWYG interface."

"When working with paper no longer represents a path to messy clutter, one is less likely to avoid using that medium for tasks where it is truly the superior tool."

The trouble seems to be with the shallow-minded Manichean view of paper-vs-paperlessness. Many of us 43folk like to have an omnibus "system" for our work, so we tend to find ourselves in the midst of an awkwardly ambiguous relationship with paper. We seem to want either to turn away from it entirely or to run our lives exclusively out of a Moleskine notebook. However, rather than burning all our old books and "going digital," or insisting on writing our next article solely with quill and parchment, perhaps a slightly more nuanced approach is in order.

For my part, I have recently arrived at a happy hybrid workflow that exploits the best of each medium, thanks primarily to an amazing little Japanese scanner and Amazon's new data backup service. In the process, I have found that through embracing paperlessness in the way my documents are stored, I have freed myself for a more creative and enthusiastic relationship with paper in my actual daily work. When working with paper no longer represents a path to messy clutter, one is less likely to avoid using that medium for tasks where it is truly the superior tool.

The tools of paperlessness

As many before me have pointed out, the key is to recognize that paper is all about process, whereas digital media are all about information and retrieval. One mustn't be afraid to whip out a scrap of paper when it's time to scribble impromptu notes, mark a manuscript for edits, or do some visual thinking. Equally, one must not hesitate to scan or transcribe and then throw away a piece of paper that has value only in the potential future usefulness of the information it represents, once the drafting and scribbling are done. Embracing paperless reference filing is not the same thing as rejecting paper's important role in your work.

Part of my longstanding vacillation on the question of whether or not to go "paperless" with my reference filing system was that, until quite recently, there were no scanners that made this digitization process easy, or delivered a final digital document that was worth the trouble. Flatbed scanners are impossibly clumsy and slow, such that what I always end up with is not a clean workflow for nicely scanned documents, but rather a large pile of papers on top of my scanner so that I can "do them all at once" at some future moment that will never arrive. Just as much, the post-scanning process has been a pain with all of the scanners I've owned in the past. Most scanner software either rams your document through OCR and spits out an RTF with almost all the formatting and images gone, or it requires you manually to open a separate piece of software to convert the image to something useful. Then there is the issue of what to do with the physical document once you've scanned it. I've never previously trusted my backup system well enough to shred my precious documents and trust in the permanence of their digital copies.

But a confluence of a few wonderful tools has recently turned me into to an evangelist for paperless reference filing. The workflow is sufficiently slick that bumph doesn't stack up "waiting to be scanned," the final product is a PDF document with all formatting and images intact but searchable as text (including via Spotlight on OS X), and it all gets automatically backed-up to a geographically-distributed multiply-redundant remote backup store so that if both my computer and one of the data centers where my backups are stored both simultaneously exploded, I could still hop on the internet anywhere and access my files more or less instantly.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap

The first and perhaps most important aspect of my paperless workflow is my trusty Fujitsu ScanSnap. I have been using my S500M (that's the Mac version) for a few months now and have praised it in the past. I also just recently got a demo model (full disclosure here) from Fujitsu of the rockin' awesome S510M [Amazon, Info.] I never thought I could get excited about something so traditionally mundane as scanner before, but I really, really love this device. In fact, the ScanSnap is probably my favorite piece of consumer electronics not made by Apple. (Check out the video.)

Firstly, they make a special version just for Mac users (yeah, they have a Windows one too,) which is specially designed in sleek white with a tiny footprint. When folded up, the thing is about 11" x 5" x 6". It also integrates nicely into OS X—and from my past couple days of testing, it works as smoothly on Leopard as it did on Tiger.

Here's the premise: the SnanSnap is the first consumer scanner (that I've used anyway) to truly be about information storage. It's not for ultra high-resolution photo scanning; it's all about documents and speed. Firstly, you initiate scans by piling your documents into the stacker and simply pressing the one big button on the face of the device. It then rapidly (and I mean damn fast) gobbles up your papers and spits them out at the bottom. Fujitsu says up to 36 pages/minute in duplex mode, and that sounds about right. The resulting digital document gets dumped right onto your hard drive in searchable PDF format, which every OS seems to understand natively these days. It automatically corrects for mis-aligned papers, auto-detects whether the document is color or monochrome, scans in duplex if it detects a back side to the page being scanned, and detects the size of the paper being scanned and intelligently crops the digital version to the right size. You can mix and match document types liberally and it stitches them all together into one PDF with each page automatically adjusted to its own parameters. I love that there is just one operative button: you just tell it to go to town, and it gets out of your way and makes smart guesses based on what you give it.

My only complaint is that, after a few months of operation, my S500M would occasionally start grabbing two pages together when it should be only grabbing one at a time. But this was only for documents that had previously been folded or stapled together. The new S510M doesn't seem to be doing that, which could mean that they've either improved the mechanism or I just haven't given it time to start having this problem.

Unlike some folks, I'm not especially keen on the concept of keeping multiple DevonThink databases or storing my precious papers in their wonky proprietary format, so I take a cue from Ethan Schoonover and just have the ScanSnap drop my scanned documents into an "inbox" folder on my desktop, which I process every day or so. In this way, the ScanSnap is just like any other GTD inbox for me. Rather than piling stuff up in my physical inbox, if something is scannable and is valuable to me only for its information, I remove any staples and wham it through the ScanSnap and then either act on or file each document as I in-process my digital inbox. For filing, I use a simple old A-Z filing folder in my home directory, which I call "Archive." If a document relates to correspondence, I take David's advice and upload it to the associated contact in my Highrise account.

The originals get recycled (or shredded and then recycled,) so I get to feel better about the environmental impact of the paper that churns through my life. Rather than sitting around in my filing cabinet never being looked at, the paper goes immediately off to another better use.

Nota bene: A lot of people have been linking to the S500M lately, but be aware that one-button searchable PDF creation only comes with the S510M. The S500M can make searchable PDFs, but you have to do several manual steps to run the OCR on them, which kind of obviates the whole point of the otherwise speedy ScanSnap workflow. The S510M also comes with a carrier sheet for irregularly shaped or crinkled papers like old receipts. So if you're going to be buying a ScanSnap I highly recommend opting for the newer model, which is more or less the same price as the older one.

The industrial-grade paper cutter

As if my gay credentials weren't fully established, I have to confess to an extreme affinity for Martha Stewart Living magazine. But perhaps more embarrassing is that I have about 100 back issues piled up in my library. They arrive in my mailbox; I flip through them; and then they go straight onto the shelf. I've always had this nagging feeling that I should really go through those things and get some informational value from the content. But, as readers of any instructional magazine know, it's really annoying to sift through an ad-stuffed rag just to find the three or four pages of interesting, actionable information in a periodical that you browsed a few months ago. So there they sit. They're full of recipes that I'd love to use but could never possibly find if I ever wanted to get to a particular one of them. They weigh a ton, and yet I've schlepped them between five houses in the past few years holding to this ridiculous notion that they'll come in handy "someday." (As you may have noticed, the purely notional "someday" plays a big role in my life.)

So I decided for an extremist approach to my magazine problem. I figured since I had this awesome scanner that I have been using to digitize my paper filing system, it might be worth experimenting with attacking these old magazines too. The potential payoff was great: I would both eliminate many pounds of paper that have been hanging around in my life, and I would actually start to make use of the information in these magazines that I've been collecting for so long. So I decided to spring for a super-fancy, and fairly intimidating, paper cutter, the "Come 2700" (I shit thee not.) This contraption will literally and effortlessly slice the spine off a phonebook (I tried it!) So it certainly has no trouble cleanly removing the spines from my old magazines.

With the spines removed, I sit down and leaf through the pages in my spare time. I find the three or four pages that either inspire me to actually undertake a project, or that I want to keep for reference. I run these through the ScanSnap, file them as searchable PDFs in my digital reference filing system, and then recycle every page from the magazine. Not only am I far more likely to use this information than I ever was, but I can actually search the information without having to remember what appeared in which issue. It is, as it were, a good thing.

This also works really well for all the sorta-kinda-maybe-someday-useful appliance and electronics manuals that hog space in physical filing systems. Just hack the binding off, scan, and jettison.

Just mind your fingers.

Amazon S3 + JungleDisk

Now that you have all these sublimely useful digital documents, you need to feel comfortable recycling the paper originals or you're only getting half the benefit of this whole paperlessness thing. It wasn't until S3 backup came along that I really felt OK with the idea, and to be honest, without those backups I'd would have been very uncomfortable letting go of as much paper as I have.

I use JungleDisk to automatically back up my "inbox" and "Archive" folders to S3 each night (not to mention iTunes and iPhoto.) Now it actually seems more dangerous to keep a single physical copy of a document than to have digital copies on my hard drive and redundantly backed up to S3. You can read here all about the baroque lengths Amazon goes to in order to safeguard your data on S3.

Oh, and it's really cheap.

ScanCafe

As I mentioned previously, I've also ditched all of my paper photographs by commissioning ScanCafe to cheaply digitize the negatives. I figured since I keep all of my new digital-camera pictures in iPhoto, I might as well have everything in there (with the appropriate backups in place, of course.) Photographs may seem like they have physical emotional value, but unless we're talking daguerreotypes or something, pictures are really just a way of recording visual information. So there is no reason why not to store them digitally. This is particularly the case of you use Leopard's built-in iPhoto library panning screen saver, because it means you'll be far more likely to actually look at the photos than if they were sitting in some shoebox.

Leopard (QuickLook and Preview)

The crema on this particular paperless espresso is how easily Mac OS X Leopard makes it to zip around, search through, and rejigger PDFs. Before Leopard, my biggest complaint about ScanSnap-generated documents was that if I wanted to rearrange or delete pages in a PDF I had to open Adobe's god-awful and painfully-slow Acrobat Professional 8.0 software, which I was actually dumb enough to buy a few months ago. If you've ever used Preview on a Mac, you know how snappy it is to navigate around PDFs. Acrobat is just the opposite, because it ponderously reloads the thumbnail cache every time you scroll around a document. Now in Leopard, Preview includes the ability to delete and rearrange PDF pages, and it's just as speedy as ever. Goodbye Acrobat!

Armed with these tools, I think you'll find, as I have, that paper is nothing to be reticent about. Use it when you need it to be creative or to collaborate, but then just don't keep it around. Scan in those mind-maps, or transcribe their information into a more useful format. Then throw them away (preferably into the recycling bin.) If you have neglected documents that have been lying around forever, figure out how to extract the useful, actionable information from them and then get rid of them too. Not only will you be unburdened of their physical presence, but you'll find that you're actually in a far better position to use the information those documents contain.

”Palimpsest: the guide to a (mostly) paperless life” was written by Ryan Norbauer for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 06, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Making friends with paper (again)

Merlin Mann — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 10:03:07 -0400

Information R/evolution

I really enjoyed this video presentation by Michael Wesch on how we make, find, and share information in a world where we’ve shed the idea of paper as our sole medium for storage and communication — where ideas can munge and mix freely, thanks to digital collaboration.

Gorgeous.

Now, of course, as a fan of paper for certain kinds of work, I always feel like jumping in at this point to defend our pulpy little friend from what sometimes turns into a blanket party.

See, the key is to use paper for what it’s great at and to avoid relying on it for what it famously sucks at — the second part of which I think this video does handsomely.

Still, for thinking, capture, and live collaboration, paper is one of the best friends you’ll ever have. And as long as we use it properly, it’s going to continue to enhance the creation of all downstream media. Even the shiny, embeddable, Web 2.0 kind.

Danny and I did a column about this topic for MAKE a while back, and I still feel like it’s a point worth underscoring (again).

Friends, we’re here today to unveil the august secret that we hope will save potentially dozens of Important Technology Writers from needing to produce another wide-eyed report on how very odd it is that all these geeks seem to love paper so much. The trick is that there is no paradox, no more so than suggesting that people who buy screwdrivers must necessarily hate drills.

Geeks rely on paper for the same reason that the normals do: paper — along with conceptual cousins like whiteboards and magnets — is simply the most efficient tool for completing certain kinds of cognitive work. And no amount of enhanced technology will likely diminish this anytime soon.

And, I have to say, I still love that line I’d quoted from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Social Life of Paper. Wraps the central point up with a bow:

It is only if paper’s usefulness is in the information written directly on it that it must be stored. If its usefulness lies in the promotion of ongoing creative thinking, then, once that thinking is finished, the paper becomes superfluous. The solution to our paper problem, they write, is not to use less paper but to keep less paper. Why bother filing at all?

And ain’t that really the heart of the matter?

When we rely on a paper document as the final, unique destination for information, we create physical and cognitive limitations that seem crazy once you’ve spent a chunk of your life living on Google. No one disputes that.

But as an intermediary medium between thinking and a final draft, I still just love what you can do with a stack of index cards and a little spare time.

No content types. No taxonomy. No typefaces. Just you and your ideas — in a bunch of little piles that make sense to you.

Final funny thing: As the putative “inventor” of The Hipster PDA, I still get the odd phone call from some doofus journalist who wants to write yet another penetrating piece on how people decide between paper and digital as The Way to run their world.

And somehow a special irony is almost always lost on these folks. Who use a mobile phone to call me. To ask about paper fandom. Who record our conversation to a digital device. While taking notes on a sheet of paper. Who then type the draft into a PC. And then proof a paper print-out before deadline. Who then submit their completed story to a multi-bajillion-dollar networked CMS. And who then finally get to read their clever work the next day at Starbucks — thanks to the papery dead-tree edition that has filled newspaper boxes throughout their city.

I’d call that a blended approach to media that — while showing much potential for streamlining and improvement — perfectly illustrates how paper spackles the cracks between cognition and creation and dissemination.

Paper’s not perfect, but it’s perfect for what it does.

[video link via Boing Boing]

”Making friends with paper (again)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 22, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Peter Walsh's clever hanger trick

Merlin Mann — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 06:39:40 -0400

Here’s one of my favorite life-hacky tips from Peter Walsh (guy from Clean Sweep, author of It’s All Too Much, and inspiration for my recent War on Clutter).

After you’ve done a major purge of your closet, remove all the remaining clothes that live on hangers, and put them back in backwards, such that the open end of each hanger now faces you. Got it?

Then, mark your calendar for six months (or whatever) from today, and go back to your business as usual. Except that after every time you wear a shirt or a jacket or a skirt or what have you, when you replace the item, make sure the hanger faces the opposite/usual way (with the opening in the back).

When your n months have passed, and your calendar reminds you that it’s time, open your closet and remove every piece of clothing on a backward hanger; the chances are good you can give it away without the slightest pain, because you just clearly demonstrated that you don’t wear it.

Here’s why I love this.

I’ve said before that, in my estimation, a life hack is any kind of trick that forces the Smartypants part of your brain and the Dumbass part of your brain to stay in proper communication.

You think to yourself “Oh, I wear this all the time. I couldn’t possibly throw it out.” But humans are notoriously awful at accurately estimating these kinds of things — I know I am anyway. And it takes stupid tricks like this to prove what inevitably happens when we let our Dumbass run off-leash.

In the same way that you can’t lie to your iPod, a good behavior-based life hack like this one will ensure that what you think is happening is supported by the evidence of what’s really happening. Just a trivial bit of physical-world intervention will — as my friend, Mr. Veen says — make the right thing into the easy thing.

”Peter Walsh's clever hanger trick” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 13, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Jeff Veen on simple tools, meetings, and leveraging the commute

Merlin Mann — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 06:48:11 -0400

009: Interview: Jeffrey Veen, Part 2 | The Merlin Show

Click To Play

In this second segment of our interview with Jeffrey Veen (here’s the previous one), Jeff talks about making the best of meetings (and the time around them), lofi capture, and the beauty of simple tools — including both paper and UNIX apps.

I especially like when Jeff discusses how he uses his shuttle commute time; by knowing that he can rely on firewalled time to bookend each work day, Jeff can confidently lob tasks out of the moment and into that quiet and reliable commute session. I find this a very GTD-like practice in that it sets aside time for processing, organization, and reviewing — leaving the hectic work day free for pure doing.

(BTW: here’s the book on writing that we talked about: On Writing Well by William Zinsser)

Jeff Veen: Part 1
Jeff Veen: Part 2

”Jeff Veen on simple tools, meetings, and leveraging the commute” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 19, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Active Voice's free Hipster PDA templates

Merlin Mann — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 13:11:12 -0500

Active Voice Writing & Editorial Services in Baltimore — Downloads

Cool-looking collection of CC-licensed Hipster PDA templates include iconic “capture notes,” research notes, and (here’s a new one for me) a “yarn sorting card.” Neat stuff.

Simply drag and drop them to your desktop, or right-click and “save as.” Templates are formatted as .png graphics and can be printed as-is or inserted into a formatted document. They can be resized to fit everything from a 3x5 card to a daily organizer to an 8.5x11 sheet.

Kvet.ch features an excellent article on how to print D*I*Y Planner HPDA cards (see the end of this page) directly to 3x5 cards for Mac users. The technique should also work nicely with the templates offered here.

”Active Voice's free Hipster PDA templates” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 20, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Introducing the Hipster Shuffle

Merlin Mann — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 21:50:58 -0500

Restless Dreaming » Hipster Shuffle

The crickets. Awesome.

[ via Daring Fireball ]

”Introducing the Hipster Shuffle” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 29, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Remember names at meetings by making a map

Merlin Mann — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 14:41:52 -0500

Meeting Tip: Learning Names | Gurno.com

As someone who suffers from frequent encoding errors and buffer overflows, I love Adam’s idea to start a meeting by mapping the name and location of each attendant, along with their title, etc. Adam writes:

Step 1 - Reconnoiter

Draw a quick map of the table/layout of the meeting. Place yourself on it, to give yourself a reference point.

Step 2: The Combatants

As people introduce themselves around the table, fill them in. If you feel last names are necessary add those too, but don’t do it at the expense of writing down someone else’s name. You can guess at the last names later. If you miss one, leave it blank and fill it in as soon as you can - if someone else refers to them, etc, etc.

In the times I’ve used similar tricks, like Adam, I also go a step further by adding some “file card” sort of fact that will help jog my memory about who was who months later. E.G. “Jim - weird frat ring; Kathy - said she likes applesauce; Bob - Tall with a toupee.”

I think making everyone into a character of some kind also tends to help me digest their thoughts and ideas more completely.

Good post, Adam.

”Remember names at meetings by making a map” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 12, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Tips from Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools

Merlin Mann — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 10:47:42 -0500

Cool Tool: Tips 22

I love when Kevin posts these collections of tips from his readers. They’re cut from the same cloth as our life hacks on the wiki.

Like many of 43f’s readers, Kevin’s contributors also obsess about shaving:

When your container of shaving oil is empty, try filling it with olive oil from the kitchen instead of spending $15 on a new stuff. I discovered that when I ran out a few years ago & I haven’t looked back since. Olive oil does just as good a job and costs almost nothing per shave. People have been shaving with olive oil for thousands of years, there’s no reason not to continue doing so.

— Mark James

Many more on Cool Tools (here’s the CT “Tips” category).

”Tips from Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 03, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Podophile on Actiontastic for GTD with your iPod

Merlin Mann — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 08:24:08 -0500

Getting Things Done With Your iPod

My head swims with the number of Mac GTD apps that have sprung up over the last year or so, one of which is the Quicksilver-friendly Actiontastic. Although I haven’t spent more than a few minutes playing with Actiontastic, as described by Podophile it appears to merit a look for Hipster PDA-centric iPod fans:

Syncing to my iPod is obviously another big feature for me. At the click of a button, all of your Projects and Context Lists are sent to your Notes folder, making it easy to review them anywhere you happen to be. Obviously, you can’t add or edit items directly with your iPod, but that’s why I always carry my Hipster POD with me. It’s easy enough to input any new items when I get back to my computer.

Funny thing. My newish Treo died two weeks ago, and I’ve been too busy to get it fixed. Yet, pretty much as I’d predicted to myself when I bought it late last summer, I’m not really missing it. I still was using index cards for on-the-go capture, and, thus far, since the Treo’s demise, I find myself no poorer for not being able to check email on MUNI. Yeah, I definitely will get it fixed (Man, I love having Google Maps with me everywhere), but it is interesting how fundamentally a Hipster POD-esque approach must have been encoded on my brain.

[ via LifeDev - GTD for iPods ]

”Podophile on Actiontastic for GTD with your iPod” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 28, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

HOWTO generate a kGTD Project list for your weekly review

Merlin Mann — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:01:22 -0500

While OmniFocus is under development (and yes, friends, I have seen it: it is actual software that does things), we Kinkless users will have to make do as we can for now. And while I still find my own kGTD setup oddly stable given its byzantine under-the-hood workings (think: innards of Cylon Raider meets Brazil’s pneumatic tubes), there are definitely times when I crave just a bit more canonical GTD functionality.

One of the most vexing shortcomings in kGTD (God bless it) is the lack of a formal Project list — one easy location to glance just all of the obligations and desirable outcomes that are on your horizon, without reference to the tasks that comprise them. David Allen has repeatedly said that the project list is critical (as I recall, his quote in our interviews was “…the Project list is king.”), and, honestly, lacking an all-in-one Project list for your weekly review is kind of like sitting down to the SATs without your two sharpened #2 pencils.

My solution for this has two components — one mostly behavioral and one mildly technical. Both are squirrely and lofi and your mileage may vary. As ever.

1. Brutal pruning

First, as part of my weekly review, I relentlessly weed from kGTD any Project that I know doesn’t belong there. This could include:

projects that died or have gotten cancelled or rescheduled
projects that have gone hopelessly and irretrievably fallow (functionally dead)
projects I have no real intention of working on (for at least the next month or two)
projects I’ve kept around because of sentimentality, affection, laziness, or just too much ambition

Bottom line: if the Project doesn’t have a legitimate next action that I intend to complete in the next couple weeks? Gone. Deleted or moved to “Someday/Maybe.” Next, please.

This, as David is fond of saying, clears the decks by removing any distractions or baseless claims on your attention. And while it’s not so novel a concept (everyone’s weekly review should include this step in some way), it’s critical for part 2 of my kGTD Project list hackination. (Plus, yeah, it just feels really good to do)

For our purposes, it also ensures that you’ve completed all the obvious pruning before creating your new Project list and delving further.

2. Copy and Paste

<background> As you add projects, actions, and contexts in kGTD, the AppleScripts that keep its lights on are populating the different parts of your document with multiple synced versions of your information. The ability to view, for example, just actions associated with a Project versus just actions associated with a context are arguably the coolest and most useful features of kGTD since it mirrors GTD’s ninja shifting between horizontal and vertical focus. </background>

But what it took me a fricking year to figure out is that I already have a project list — it’s just that it’s hiding in a dropdown menu.

Getting your Project List liberated

Backup your kGTD document, then do a Sync and Save
- Backup is good. Repeat, repeat.
From any Project or Context view, select the “Projects” column head
- Should be the third column after “Action” and “Context”
- After you do this you should see the column get highlighted (mine’s blue) with one of those pretty OmniGroup-y, rounded corner highlights
Reveal the “Column Type” Inspector window
- Either by hitting “COMMAND-3” or by selecting “Column Type” from the “Inspectors” window
- You should see two drop-down menus (“Type” and “Summary”) and then a big-ass bulleted list of all your Projects
Select the first bulleted item in the Projects list
Scroll all the way to the last item in the list, then hold down “Shift” and select that last item
- This should highlight all of the projects
- Again, you should see lots of those pretty rounded selection highlight thingees
Hit “Copy” or “Command-C” to snatch the Projects to your clipboard
Open a new, blank text document in the text editor of your choice, and hit “Paste” (or Command-V)
- (I like TextMate but TextEdit will do fine)

And that’s it.

“WOW, thank you: you’ve taught me to ‘copy and paste.’ So, now what, Admiral Obvious?”

The first thing you might want to do — depending on your personal brand of anal-retentiveness — is to tidy up your new Project list document a bit. Personally I Search & Replace all “…”s into TABs, which provides a prettier outline. At a minimum, get the document to where it’s visually sensible for you. Then print ‘er out.

Cosmetics aside, you do what you need to do with a project list. You let it jog your memory. You use it to find time sinks and attention holes. You scout for dead wood. You comb through it for missed actions, meetings you forgot to schedule, and reminders of things you said you’d do a week ago. This is your outcome-centric viewport into all the projects and actions that need to be added to or removed from your kGTD list. Be courageous.

“No, seriously. Why bother?”

I’ll just speak for myself here, but I think that once you’re out of the ad hoc procrastination mind set of the task list, you permit a more strategic part of your brain to take over for a while. Your mental CEO gets to take a crack at all the projects, deciding who gets the deep-six versus who’s not getting the attention or resources they deserve, and then you can return to your task list with a rejuvenated sense of do-ability, focus, and mission. I call it “Manager Mode,” and it’s something I really need.

Also, from a tactical perspective, I like to use the Project list as a way to identify my “focus projects” for the week. If you have more than a few dozen projects (and share my own dearth of non-computer contexts), you probably crave some way to narrow your focus. A weekly review of the list can give you the confidence to call out the stuff that must see motion this week. You can even use to pull up what Gina calls your “MIT” (or, most important task of the day).

Regardless of your approach and preferences, if you’re attempting some flavor of GTD, it’s well worth your time to generate a task-less Project list and review the crap out of it as often as you need to. Because, if you aren’t occasionally alternating between the tasks “on the runway” and the larger outcomes of higher altitudes, you’re not only not doing GTD; you’re probably wasting a lot of time and missing out on some cool opportunities.

Addition, 2006-12-20 10:08:27

Based on comments, I should clarify why a plaintext list of your current projects (without tasks?!?) has value in a GTD review (although David covers the concept nicely in the book, if memory serves). Thus, I will embrace vanity and quote myself at length:

The Project list — in David’s canonical description — represents the “10,000 foot” view. It should exist as a list unattached to child tasks someplace and then be reviewed and updated as a thing-in-itself on a regular basis. It’s not about the tasks per se; it’s very much about evaluating how your Projects map to what you want to be doing at 20k [feet] and higher.

My gut sense is that a lot of the folks using kGTD use it as a fancy to-do list. Which is in a sense, what it is. But you mustn’t just stop there. It’s critical to not spend your whole life shoveling tasks and vaguely hoping that they map to some kind of outcome. That’s the Bad Old Days simply relived with updated software.

IMHO, GTD works best (and only) when you periodically take a formal step up and off of the runway to ensure the projects themselves are worth doing (and have a place in your bigger plan).

I love that the weekly Project review also generates new tasks at the runway level; but that’s mostly happening specifically because you set aside the time to not focus just on the stuff that’s already in front of your nose.

”HOWTO generate a kGTD Project list for your weekly review” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 20, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"