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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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.