"Network Solutions - Small business conversations and working together for small business success" - 2 new articles
Year with GTD - 3 Months in and falling off the wagonAs you all know, I began my journey to incorporate the “life management” methodology of David Allen's Getting Things Done or GTD. I spoke about my beginning the journey on January 1. During the last three months I have learned a lot about myself, my approach to time management and that not everything can be automated with a piece of software. Here is what I have learned that you might benefit from. Lesson #1 - Keep Your Contexts SIMPLE One of the main things in GTD are Contexts. These are how you will handle the task. After consulting friends who have used the GTD system and reworked it over and over, they all said to keep it simple. Otherwise you will spend more time classifying and categorizing things than actually doing them. So I kept to the three areas of my life - PERSONAL, WORK, MOVIE (PWM) - these three major areas are essentially the major buckets. That’s it. Just three. Then I looked at how I handle the information. Again KEEP IT SIMPLE. I do four primary things - Run Errands, Email, Phone Calls and Using my Mac. Hence the contexts of EMAIL, ERRANDS, PHONE, MAC. When you incorporate the three simple categories you get this final list: Email: Personal A note on the Mac category. I didn’t want to break it down by PWM because the real differeniation of using your computer is whether you are doing something where you need to be on the Internet or can be offline. This helps when you are in place without connectivty and have time to get a few tasks done or to group your tasks and stay offline and not distracted by everything. Lesson #2 - You can’t automate everything with software The whole point of GTD is to process something, get it out of your brain and into the system immediately to be organized later. I use three tools - OmniFocus, Evernote and iCal/Google Calendar. OmniFocus is awesome and with it little auto entry tool I can live GTD when I am on my computer. I hope to use the iPhone software when I get one in the next few months. In the meantime, I sync it with iCal and sync that with Google Calendar. I have three calendars - personal, work, movie (sound familiar?) and I use Google Sync on my BlackBerry so I am pretty efficient. I use Evernote to capture project information and organize it in the same context when I am using my Mac. Notice I said a lot about “when I am using my Mac”. I thought I could use only technology, but as my friend Jessie Newburn showed me, you need paper. She is my opposite in that she is all paper and almost no computer. What I have done is picked up a small moleskine notebook that fits in my pants or coat pocket to jot things down. This seems to be working. I just need to keep on doing this every day. Lesson #3 - Do this every day or you will fall off the wagon This is where I am. Like every New Year’s resolution we start with gusto and great energy and somewhere along the way you let the busy tasks of life get in the way. Like all good habits, you must reinforce it every day or at least every other day to make it stick. When I started I felt this release to get everything out of my brain. Over the first month I never felt more productive in my life. However, over the last month, I seem to have fallen back into plugging tasks into my calendar again and not getting them into GTD. Where I leave you now is a recommittment to use GTD again every day and find my balance of effectiveness and happiness. If you have any advice on how you have been using GTD and what things work and don’t please leave comments. This Space Intentionally Left Prank: April Fools’ Day Tech RoundupGenerally, I’m kind of a curmudgeon when it comes to April Fools’ Day. I tend to think of it as a day where people and organizations who aren’t funny, try to be funny. And fail. Having said that, it’s unavoidable (I woke up to WAMU’s Power Breakfast item on Congressional calisthenics), and I guess it’s useful to ratchet up the degree of skepticism and incredulity that we should bring to bear when faced with everyday ludicrousness. On the corporate side, it’s a chance for companies to drum up some publicity and show off their “wackiness” (e.g. BMW announces Magnetic Tow Technology). Usually, it’s the equivalent of easy money, though there are times when the joke doesn’t go over so well (c.f. AOL News announces in 1996 that life was found on Jupiter). It’s kind of a delicate balancing act — too obvious, and it’s not funny; too realistic (or too close to home), and people get mad. Anyway, check out April Fools’ Day tech prank roundups from CNET, TechCrunch, and PaidContent.org. Some of the more notable items: * The ThinkGeek shopping site main page features a Tauntaun sleeping bag (pity about the smell), the anti-buzzword shock bracelet (it’s a real value-add*ZZAAPP*), and Squeez Bacon. * Contrary to this Conficker report from the Washington Post’s Security Fix blog (which basically says the end is nigh), the Conficker worm has not blown up the world. Yet. * Warner Brothers acquires Bittorrent tracking site The Pirate Bay for $13 billion. * Protip: All many some of the April 1 stories on Slashdot main are jokes. * Browser maker Opera announced browser navigation via facial gesture — which would actually be kind of neat, and may actually just be a few years early, instead of being a “prank.” * Google announced that its artificial intelligence, CADIE had taken over. (Question: How would you tell?) Included was an “autopilot” feature for GMail, and a Google Mobile brain search. Also, videos featured off of YouTube’s main page had the text flipped, which, oddly, made the comments more intelligible. * Speaking of Google, the Register (UK) announced Google video Street View for London. This joke plays on the recent dust-up with privacy concerns about Google Maps Street view, as well as the fact that central London is one of the most heavily CCTV monitored areas in the world. * TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington seeks wife. This is probably not just a joke. * The Wikipedia main page has a slew of headlines that are, at the very least, misleading. * The Guardian (UK) newspaper switches to an all-Twitter format. * Fark.com’s Drew Curtis announced a series of changes to the social linksharing site, including a “preview” of the new look. This actually followed on the heels of a few changes he teed up during an interview at SxSW. (Unless it was all a setup for 1 April.) * Another social linksharing site, Reddit, rolled out front page changes. With an alternate view. Things that sound like April Fools’ Day pranks, but aren’t * BBC News reports that baby chicks can count. * The Department of Justice is dropping charges against former Senator Ted “Bridge to Nowhere” Stevens * Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak kicked off Dancing With the Stars. Actually, the joke is that he lasted so long in the first place. * Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is an actual book, soon to be an actual movie. What was your own favorite? Please leave a comment below. More Recent Articles
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