43 Folders

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Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.

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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.

Getting Things Done

GTD is a personal productivity system and book by David Allen that we like a lot. Read: Getting Started with ‘Getting Things Done’.

Converting 'waiting on' items

I’m curious about how GTD fans handle their “waiting on” items. I’ve decided to try something a bit different in my own setup, and I’m wondering if others have done something similar with any success.

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How are you using GTDTiddlyWiki?

GTDTiddlyWiki - all your tasks are belong to you

I’m really intrigued by GTDTiddlyWiki, which is a clever wiki for implementing David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. It’s fun to use and a bit of a technical marvel (tip: shutting off animations under “Options” greatly sped things up for me).

Since I’m in one of my periodic “No new tools!” modes, I’m really just playing with it right now, albeit enjoyably. But, from the popularity of the site, I gather that a lot of you are using GTDTiddlyWiki to implement your Getting Things Done system. I’m curious to hear how it’s going for you. Specifically:

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Zanshin: The Remaining Mind

Sort of like “Mind like water”

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Park on a downhill slope

Jeffrey Windsor shares a great tip for making it easy to start work in the morning—by always leaving your work at a point where it will be easy, intuitive, and interesting to pick things back up. Instead of grinding away until you're drained and out of enthusiasm, quit while you're on a roll.

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Choosing a daily GTD action plan

Chris Murtland's "revolving workflow strategies" for GTD

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Giles Turnbull on Macs & GTD

Giles was able to use some bits from email exchanges we had in his very good intro to using Macs for GTD. I especially like the tools overview.

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Mark Taw on GTD contexts and next actions

What context do I put my Next Actions in? :: MarkTAW.com

Mark Taw consistently provides some of the most lucid and realistic productivity advice I’ve come across. Today he eloquently addresses a common question of beginning Getting Things Done nerds.

If you have 15 lists, but they’re all full of things that you can do from the same starting point, you have 14 too many lists. It doesn’t matter if it’s a phone call, email, or going to the printers to pick up your business cards, your lists should contain no more detail than that. And don’t complain to me that your list would be too long that way, breaking it up into more lists doesn’t give you any fewer Next Actions, it just lets you procrastinate some of them more by putting them on a list you’ll ignore entirely.

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Quick tips on processing your email inbox

Follow-up to the email productivity post. Short overview of how I process my inbox.

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Five fast email productivity tips

There’s been a lot of great discussions about email productivity going around on sites I enjoy, so I thought I’d throw in five no-brainers that I’ve seen help a lot of folks.

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Cranking

Merlin used to crank. He’s not cranking any more.

This is an essay about family, priorities, and Shakey’s Pizza, and it’s probably the best thing he’s written. »

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This is the video of Merlin’s keynote at Webstock 2011. The one where he cried. You should watch it. »