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Best Practices

Provide context for better ubiquitous capture

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

 read more »

13 Comments

Conversation View Based E-mail

Like many things on the iPhone, I realized how much better SMS is on the iPhone after trying to go back and use it on any other phone.

On the “other” phone, I lost all context for the conversation when my sent messages and my received messages were separated from each other, while having messages from other people dispersed in between.

And then I thought to myself.

Self…  read more »

Dear Idiot Future Self,

Man, there are a lot of calendar apps out there—Rembember The Milk, 30Boxes, Google Calendar, Yahoo, Remind—but none of them can do very well the one thing for which my brain is totally useless and with which my GTD system struggles: reminding me of things exactly when I need to remember them.

The Ubiquitous Capture problem I have solved. I carry a hipster PDA (thanks, Merlin) and my trusty phone with Jott on the speed dial. At any time and place, my clever present self can delegate work to my idiot future self (IFS).  read more »

1 Comment

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

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:  read more »

56 Comments

Ideamatt on GTD with support staff

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:  read more »

9 Comments

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

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.  read more »

21 Comments

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

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.  read more »

21 Comments

Vox Pop: Sell me on manual email filing

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.  read more »

66 Comments
 
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Inbox Zero

The original 43 Folders series looking at the skills, tools, and attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way. Don’t miss the free video of Merlin’s Inbox Zero presentation.

Get Started with ‘GTD’

David Allen’s popular productivity book and the system on which it’s based help turn ‘stuff’ into actions that support valuable outcomes.