Best Practices

Provide context for better ubiquitous capture

Merlin — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 10:01:55 -0500

Although the ﬁrst priority in ubiquitous capture is getting it down, the red-headed stepchild trailing in at number two is providing context. And I don’t mean the GTD kind of contexts, but the kind of context that minimally explains what this information means, where and when you collected it, why it matters, or anything else that will help you ﬁnd a meaningful place for it in your life later on.

Example? Sure. Here’s one from my real and recent world. Index card with one word on it:

Once

Okay, there you go! “Once.” Good night, everybody!

Just a tiny bit more information would have made that note a lot more useful to me. How about:

“Once”
- movie KK likes
- Irish band “The Frames”
- DVD -> 12/18

Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Now I know that this is that movie my friend Kristine likes with music from that band she told me about. Without that bit of context, the word “Once” will mean nothing to me later on.

Think you’re immune to the need for this kind of frippery? Try this handy home test.

Ever ﬁnd a scrap of paper in your life that looked something like this?

408
996
1010

Ah, the classic 10 digit problem.

While a nutritious breakfast and a sound public school education can help me to deduce that this is very likely a phone number, the paucity of contextual data on whose number it is or why I wrote it down leaves me with a problem. It also suggests that my current system for capturing information ubiquitously is either incomplete or badly implemented. And, I have about 30 years of 10-digit scraps to prove it.

You don’t need to go nuts with extra data, but just remember: you may really need this information later on to take some kind of action or just to decide whether and where it ﬁts in your world.

If it’s worth capturing, it’s worth capturing well, so take the extra couple seconds to remind yourself what the hell you were thinking about.

”Provide context for better ubiquitous capture” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 17, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Pop: Your best "best practice" for email?

Merlin — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 12:34:17 -0400

Short Subject: Now You’re Talking (1927)

prosaic [on email]

Chris Streeter picks up on a thread that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (and he’s kind to mention the relationship to Inbox Zero).

He reminds us that the etiquette for using a telephone was once well-established enough to earn a place in the encyclopedia:

the encyclopedia told you how to answer the phone. not how to pick it up and dial or how the phone switching system worked, but what to say. it even had illustrations (little susie picking up the phone, announcing her residence, listening attentively, etc.). anyway, the point is, nobody ever set the ground rules for email. nobody ever said, this is what the subject line should cover, this is how many sentences an email ought to be, this is how long you should reasonably expect a person to wait to reply, etc. they just threw it at us and let everyone make up their own rules. of course, everyone will make up their own rules anyway, and that encyclopedia sure did a helluva lot of good with our phone manners, didn’t it? but still, the idea that we have never, ever, worked out a set of rules or mores for email is kind of incredible.

I think a lot of people would scoff at the idea of a standard for email communication, and I’ll admit that I’m not sure what a truly comprehensive – or even 80-percent-universal – set of best practices would look like. But, that, in some ways is the problem.

“Netiquette” was pounded into my head from day one on the ‘net, but I’ll freely admit I’ve never been 100% – at least partly because email was clearly the Wild West from a lot of people’s perspective. We’ve each been free to evolve or fall ass-backwards into an understanding of how email should be used. How would we begin to ensure that any two given strangers could be on roughly the same page about what email is even for?

I doubt this is a problem that has one answer, but I’m intrigued to consider how we might start solving it if it were. So…

The Question to You:

Think about what you’d do if you ran the world. If you had to choose a single best practice for email usage — format, length, subject matter, even when not to use email.
If you could wave a magic wand and put one guideline in place that would be honored by 80% of civilized people, what would it be? Be creative as you like, but remember: it has to be generic enough that it would work for 80% of email communication everywhere.

What should almost everyone start doing differently with their email today?

”Vox Pop: Your best "best practice" for email?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 05, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Ideamatt on GTD with support staff

Merlin — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 06:11:10 -0500

Matt’s Idea Blog: Best practices for GTD and administrative assistants

Matt Cornell has posted some useful notes on emerging best practices for doing GTD with an administrative assistant. There’s some practical and thoughtful stuff here, and I recommend having a look.

While I have a gut feeling most 43f readers probably don’t have/are not a dedicated admin, I know that most of you do work on teams and do have support staff (or are support staff). And one of the constant themes I hear from people is the need for more advice on how to implement GTD practices outside one’s own half-acre (here’s my interview with David Allen about just that issue). Articles like Matt’s can be useful in considering how information might ﬂow with less friction in your workplace. Great way to get the conversation going, for sure.

I think the theme I like best here may have virtually nothing to do with GTD, strictly speaking, but has everything to do with informal standards, team culture, and divisions of labor. As David said numerous times in our recent interviews, you want to get to the point where you don’t need to interrupt one another to trust that any new input makes a responsible entry into a team member’s world. But that requires certain shared expectations and, in many cases, a physical external system that everyone understands and utilizes.

To this end, I like Matt’s notes on collection:

AA answers phone, takes messages. exec gives personal # out to those requiring direct access. NB: ‘phone logs’ not recommended

similarly, AA might process email. controversy: possibly better for exec to see all emails herself (only she knows importance)

exec has an OUT box on desk that is AA’s IN box (AA checks regularly during day)

AA and exec communicate using inboxes (helps reduce interruptions - for non-urgent items)

exec dictates notes, AA transcribes

use secretary to ﬁlter reading material (should know preferences) when exec’s away: AA sorts mail into three priorities. look at in ﬁrst hour after getting back

I suspect that bringing back the physical inbox – and then (importantly!) deriving a shared set of team expectations about how to use it – might be the most profound and least costly thing that could be done to improve productivity in the physical ofﬁce workspace.

And some of the tips under “Final points” can be useful as best practices in any team workplace.

Grab-and-Go Strategy #25 (from Morgenstern): “Create a clear division of labor - specify who is responsible for what.”

get AA up-to-speed on own process, e.g., GTD. Might use a simpliﬁed system, since the AA’s project is the exec. for example, create ﬁle folders for mail passing: urgent, to do, to approve, to sign, to read, to ﬁle, to toss.

give the AA some interrupt-free, private time blocks - have someone else cover the phones

let others know your AA is your surrogate

keep each other informed - where you’re going, when you’ll be back, etc.

don’t interrupt AAs unless urgent

if giving too much to AA, prioritize it

How are you implementing GTD on your team? Whether you are or have support staff, talk about how you delegate work and use inboxes – both physical and digital – as a trusted system.

”Ideamatt on GTD with support staff” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 11, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Productive Talk Compilation: 8-episode podcast with GTD's David Allen

Merlin — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 09:05:34 -0500

Productive Talk Comp.: Episodes 01-08 on Odeo

As promised, here’s the single-ﬁle compilation of the Productive Talk podcast interviews I did with David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done. The ﬁnal version’s eight episodes clock in at a considerable one hour and twenty-six minutes, so this should give you plenty to listen to while you’re in line at the DMV.

Some editing misadventures stole the time I’d set aside to write up my ﬁnal comments on the series, but those will be coming along soon, I promise. In the mean time, as I said in the podcast ep., I want to sincerely thank David, Rick Kantor, Robert Peake, and Zircon Skye Studios for their participation and help with the Productive Talk series. David in particular was unbelievably generous with his time, and I’m very grateful to have had this opportunity to interview him.

Hope you all enjoy hearing the whole series, in order, all in one place. There’s some nuggets of GTD gold in there, if I do say so myself.

Please note: the version included in the podcast feed is a lowly but compatible MP3 ﬁle; Apple-y folks with iPods and sexy AAC support can grab this tastier m4a version, which includes chapter markers that make it easy to ﬂip through the individual episodes quickly.

You can learn more at Odeo.com, download the MP3 version, or just listen from here by using the Flash player below:

”Productive Talk Compilation: 8-episode podcast with GTD's David Allen” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 28, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

David Allen on GTD's future (and why it just works, as is)

Merlin — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 09:27:21 -0500

Productive Talk #08: GTD 2.0?

43 Folders and The David Allen Company present the eighth in a series of conversations that David and Merlin recently had about Getting Things Done.

Summary

In this episode, Merlin asks David one of the most popular questions about GTD; if he could write the book all over again today, what would he do differently? David addresses how people’s understanding of GTD evolves on repeated exposures, as well hinting at future plans for making GTD easier for people to start and maintain. He makes some great points on learning to pay attention to your “higher altitudes,” and wraps up by underscoring the importance of not having to rethink every task throughout the day. (13:11)

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen here (after the cut).

Merlin’s comments

If you bend David Allen’s ear for more than 30 seconds about GTD, you’ll hear some variation of a phrase that I heard a lot over the couple days we hung out in Ojai: “It’s all in the book!”

Say what you will about The David, but he is not a man who suffers from The George Lucas Complex. Much to the consternation of his publishers, his fans, and – one suspects – even some of his colleagues, David feels like he has already written the complete and deﬁnitive work on the Getting Things Done system. And he very clearly has no desire to futz with that basic system without a good reason; it’s sound and complete, as is, and there you go. Next subject.

And, I have to say, in a lot of ways, I’ve come to really admire this.

For one thing, it was immediately clear to me that, although David heads up a smart and growing company that enjoys a ravenous fanbase, his interest in the strictly pecuniary aspects of his work sometimes seems hilariously modest. While he long ago could have ﬂipped DavidCo into a Shake-and-Bake franchise of ghost-written paperbacks (an idea I apparently once thought was a pretty great idea myself), David and his staff usually have more interesting things in mind. And while I can’t say that I think every idea is a guaranteed winner from my own perspective, I really respect the fact that DavidCo seems unwilling to sacriﬁce the quality of their product and their message for a fast buck. Not something you see every day.

I’ll admit that there’s still a part of me that thinks both David, the fans, and the system itself could beneﬁt greatly from more examples of and options for sane GTD implementation and maintenance (and how to narrow the options to what’s best for my particular hang-up). Funny thing, though: in talking to David, it became clear to me that, on some level, that dearth of “ofﬁcial” material on implementation options was an undeniable factor in the early success of 43 Folders. So, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t complain too much.

In many ways, though, David’s right; it is all in the book, even if you aren’t yet at a place to understand how it potentially ﬁts together in your world. So, in this episode, I really like how he highlights the way repeated readings and exposures to GTD inevitably lead to “getting” some part of the system that used to seem corny, pointless, or hand-wavey (God knows that’s been true for me). So, I guess I do see part of the challenge from David’s point of view; how do you get somebody quickly ramped-up into a system that may not reveal its best stuff to you for two or more years? Deﬁnitely tricky business.

But for those of you out there already doing GTD and feeling like you sometimes miss the “there,” I think this particular ep provides some very sound insight into how these pieces down on “the runway” are inextricably and necessarily tied to “the higher altitudes.”

Last planned episode….but wait…

Although this eighth episode of Productive Talk is our last in this series (yep, we’re already talking about doing it again), I do encourage you to stop back by next week.

In addition to offering my own thoughts on the series and what I learned from it (hint: a lot), I’ll also be sharing the (very very highly requested) single ﬁle download of all 8 episodes. Yes, it will have iTunes chapters. No, it won’t have bonus footage or director’s commentary. But it will make it a bit easier to take Productive Talk with you and listen to the whole series at a sitting. Subscribe via iTunes to receive the last last episode as soon as it goes live.

Listen to Episode #08 of Productive Talk

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen from here:

powered by ODEO

”David Allen on GTD's future (and why it just works, as is)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 21, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Pop: Sell me on manual email filing

Merlin — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 08:25:42 -0500

tow.com » MsgFiler

Lots of the kids are excited about the arrival of MsgFiler, which is a neat litte app for helping you ﬁle away your messages in Mail.app:

MsgFiler is a plug-in for Apple Mail which quickly ﬁles emails into existing mailbox folders. MsgFiler’s fast searching means you just have to type a few characters to ﬁnd the right mailbox. Move selected messages with a click or open a mailbox without having to navigate the mailbox folder pane. MsgFiler is optimized for keyboard-only usage, perfect for Apple Mail power users.

Zesty.

But I’ll just play devil’s advocate on this one: if you ﬁnd yourself inordinately excited about the arrival of this (admittedly clever) application, there’s an excellent chance that your email archiving system is unnecessarily complex and, in fact, is in need of a major streamlining. Discuss.

Me? Here’s my own folder hierarchy (and the Mail Act-on key I use to send selected messages there.):

INBOX

To Respond (CTRL-R)

Archived (CTRL-A)

Receipts and things I Bought (CTRL-B)

Passwords and account info (CTRL-P)

That’s it. Personally, I abandoned the byzantine ﬁling system quite a while ago, and so far – given a mindful combination of Smart Folders and Spotlight – I’ve yet to ﬁnd a compelling case for manually ﬁling beyond a depth of more than one folder.

So, my larger question for you guys with more than, say, ﬁve or so archive sub-folders:

How often are you using your archiving hierarchy to retrieve old mail? In other words, give me your success stories and best practices by which the time spent on meticulous manual ﬁling has paid outsize rewards in ﬁnding stuff later. Or, perhaps better put: what are the limitations of Smart Folders, and what would need to change about them to get you out of the manual ﬁling routine?

Because, I gotta tell you, it kinda seems like a lot of busy work given what seems like modest functional pay-off. But you school me…

”Vox Pop: Sell me on manual email filing” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 17, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

David Allen on best practices for implementing GTD

Merlin — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 11:31:34 -0500

Productive Talk #07: Implementing GTD

43 Folders and The David Allen Company present the seventh in a series of conversations that David and Merlin recently had about Getting Things Done.

Summary

In this episode, David and Merlin look at best practices for implementing Getting Things Done. David shares some great advice on ﬁrewalling review time and warns us how to avoid the perils of “cruise control.” (9:37)

More at: http://www.davidco.com/ and http://www.43folders.com/

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen here (after the cut).

Merlin’s comments

My favorite bit in this one (jump to 1:38) is where we learn that some of David’s best stuff seems to have had a genesis in an unlikely place – from his tenure as the manager of a gas station, back in the day.

This is important, not just because we get a candid glimpse of a very fun guy who’s too often pegged as just another business consultant – I love that David demonstrates how most any job will beneﬁt from ﬁrewalled time to do your meta work.

Note especially that, contrary to what one might call “worst practices” of GTD, DA is not suggesting you spend your day obsessing over GTD and trying to perfect your “system.” You set aside time to clear the decks, as he likes to say, so that you can work – really work – and not just live in a perpetual twilight of productivity futzing.

Building those walls and really honoring them from day one may be one of the best ninja tips you can learn for responsibly implementing GTD.

Listen to Episode #07 of Productive Talk

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen from here:

powered by ODEO

”David Allen on best practices for implementing GTD” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 13, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Populi: How are you using Mail Tags?

Merlin — Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:26:58 -0400

I open the ﬂoor to all of you on a question of particular personal interest to me: How are you using Mail Tags?

While my uses of it to date have been helpful, I keep getting the feeling I’m not getting all that I can out of it – especially since the ability to associate Projects, Priorities, etc. to a message could make for some really enticing Smart Folders.

I wonder if my question is ultimately more taxonomic in nature – ultimately more about Spotlight in general or Tags in very very general: When tagging items on your Mac, what kind of ‘-onomy’ are you using? How strictly do you enforce your vocabulary? What are the best practices for someone who’s new to this?

Conﬁdential to Mr. Thomas Vander Wal: if you turn up here and school me a bit on this, I’ll totally buy you a Coke. If you write a guest post on it, I’ll buy you a beefsteak and two cocktails. Seriously. Steak.

”Vox Populi: How are you using Mail Tags?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 18, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Best Practices

Provide context for better ubiquitous capture

Vox Pop: Your best "best practice" for email?

The Question to You:

Ideamatt on GTD with support staff

Productive Talk Compilation: 8-episode podcast with GTD's David Allen

David Allen on GTD's future (and why it just works, as is)

Summary

Merlin’s comments

Last planned episode….but wait…

Listen to Episode #08 of Productive Talk

Vox Pop: Sell me on manual email filing

David Allen on best practices for implementing GTD

Summary

Merlin’s comments

Listen to Episode #07 of Productive Talk

Vox Populi: How are you using Mail Tags?