Tag Archives: GettingThingsDone

GTD Sustaining (Part 4)

Posted by on October 6, 2011 Comments Off

The On Going Battle

As I sit here and write this 33 tasks have become available for me to work on. Oh joy. Will I get 33 things done today? I don’t know. Probably not. More than half will probably get pushed off.

But that in itself is very useful. As I start to see projects being perpetually delayed, maybe I should reconsider them. Things that aren’t worth doing may never be worth doing. David Sparks talks about the value and freedom that comes from DROPPING projects. If you’re never going to get to it, then give it up. Let it go. Free your mind. I haven’t gotten there yet, I’m still coming to grips with all the stuff I diluted myself into thinking I could get done.

I feel like a project junkie. Yeah, I’ll take another hit. Just one more. I am a hoarder of the unfinished. How did we get there? That’s probably another story for another day. But the bottom line is that awareness is curative. Why would I take on one more thing if I’ve got so many things I’m not doing?

But the beauty of GTD is that it’s actually shocking how many things you can get done in parallel if you just tackle things by context. And that gives me hope, and makes me feel better about myself and what I am capable of.

So there you have it, an update about my personal GTD odyssey. I know many people have used the system and I thought I would provide more of a tutorial like David did, but I find the system really effective. I’m just worried whether or not I will stick with it. It’s a lot to manage. And spending so much time planning can be daunting. But I encourage anyone with a bone pile of moribund projects to give it a try. You may surprise yourself with how productive you really can be.

Getting It Done With Focus! (Part 3)

Posted by on September 29, 2011 Comments Off

OmniFocus

I first bought OmniFocus 6 years ago when the OmniGroup first created it. I worked through all the Betas and bought it when it was released. I even got it for my iPhone. But the lack of syncing made it really hard to use. And Man… it was COMPLICATED!

But now… I believed I could make it work. First, OmniGroup had introduced their outstanding free sync service. What’s more, my weeks of using RTM had given me a system. Something to implement. I didn’t want ALL the bells and whistles of OmniFocus. Just one. Folders. I needed to start grouping my projects in a way that I could handle them.

As the scope of my planning grew from a few dozen tasks, to a few hundred, RTM got me over that hump. But when my planning threatened to jump to a few thousand tasks (seriously), I needed more. But why a few thousand?

I’m 45 years old. As much as I’ve tried to pair down, it is unbelievable how many projects I have accumulated. I don’t know what your house is like, but as I walk through mine, I see video games I haven’t finished. Books I mean to read. Pictures that need hanging. DVD’s I’d like to watch. And those are just my personal projects. Then there’s the house stuff, the family stuff – and I haven’t even scratched the surface of work yet.

If you really go through 10 years of accumulated “stuff”, you might be surprised how many “projects” you’ve accumulated. Once I had success managing a few projects, I wanted to do more. And I still have not captured everything weighing on me. My life is fenced in by guilt. I see it in every corner of the house. The storage closet that’s full of broken head phones and cast off sun glasses. Boxes of pictures that need organizing. The Laptops under my desk that – well hell, they should be worth something right? Oh yeah and Linux is cool. I should be able to do something with that.

It’s simply overwhelming… and it’s there. Where I can see it. A daily reminder of failure. A pile of incompetence. Guilt, guilt, guilt. Get to me, get to me, get to me. Argh!

No wonder my brain feels overloaded. How can it possibly remember all this stuff? The answer is it can’t. And it shouldn’t try. But I need a system that CAN hold it all, so I can systematically, relentlessly, progressively plow through all this crap and weed out what I AM going to do and what I am NEVER going to do. Enough waiting. As Yoda said, “Do. Or Do not.” He’s right. There is no try.

OmniFocus Ninja

So once I made the decision to work with OmniFocus, I sought out people who really had used OmniFocus to see if I could learn anything. And what I came across was gold by David Sparks, the genius behind Macsparky.com. David created a series of 3 videos called being an OmniFocus Ninja. The direct link to the three articles are:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

David pointed out some REALLY useful tricks. Among them…

  • Don’t use Due Dates! Use Start Dates to move tasks into the future.
  • Use perspectives to create reports and views to really focus
  • Use Dragon Diction on the iPhone to dictate todo’s
  • Use MailPlane for gmail integration. There’s a brilliant clipping plugin and suddenly my gmail acts like my Mac Mail.

That last tip was HUGE for me. Why? Because it finally allowed me to get my inboxes at home and work to ZERO. How did I do that?

Step 1: Create filters for all the automated emails you get.

I mean, this is stuff I’m interested in or care about. But it hijacks my attention every time I go into my email. So I want those things to go into folders where I can view them at my discretion. Much to my chagrin, my supposedly 7 automated emails… turned into nearly 70 categories of newsletters, notifications, and ads. This doesn’t even include receipts (I want to see those. If I spend money I figure I better pay attention).
Guess what. My work email was the same! So a HUGE chunk of my inboxes got cleared out, and stayed cleared out.

Step 2: Start clipping into OF

The key here is that if an email requires an action, then I can clip a link to the email into OmniFocus for follow up. And sure enough, many email relate to projects I’m working on. This handily little thing really dramatically changed how I viewed my inbox. Suddenly I wasn’t relying on my inbox to remind me of things I needed to do, or remember (like the piles of unfinished detritus scattered about my home). Things I need to remember are in OmniFocus. Things I need to FILE go into Evernote.

Step 3: File Emails into their proper Folders

Once I’ve touched an email, I file it. Or Delete it. But there’s NO REASON to leave it in my inbox. It’s either something I need to do, file, or delete. Those are the only options. At home it took me about a day to get to Zero because for the most part I was on top of everything, I just needed to pair down the inbox of read but un-acted on emails.

Work was a lot harder, because I got in the habit of ignoring it. I had 800 unread emails in my inbox. Well after running 70 odd filters to get rid of the automated mails, and then dumping anything and everything more than 60 days old – I mean really, what the heck do you say to someone you haven’t talked to in two months? – I got down to 50. Then a few days later 40, then back up to 60, then down to 30, and finally by Monday I got down to zero.

Step 4: The Daily Battle

Some days I get 20 emails or more in each email box! That’s when plowing through stuff is hard. But I can use my GTD rules. Send to my Task Manager (OmniFocus), File it, Delete it. That’s it. Of course, I can choose to act on an email with a reply, or some other quick action and then just get rid of it. But on the whole, I try to stick to the discipline of not leaving things lurking around.

Getting It Done With Milk? (Part 2)

Posted by on September 22, 2011 Comments Off

Starting GTD in RTM

Like I said in my previous entry, I’d tried to get into GTD before, and I’d even used RTM to try it. It’s really nifty how you can share tasks with another person. However, without a real system to use it, it always died on the vine. Sometimes you just need someone else to show you the way. And This time however, I had an approach and I started small. The general idea was to just focus on my personal life, and slowly but surely start to integrate the things I needed.

First off, I found this excellent blog on implementing GTD with RTM. That was a great start.

I would use Tags and smart searches to create the functionality I needed. Each project would be a list, and I would tag each action with a context. Then, I would create a smart search for each context – these were dynamic lists. The key to making RTM work initially was the idea to keep the context tags simple (web, calls, errands) and likewise I had a few stock lists to dump stuff into (ps-Daily, wk-Daily, ps-Someday, wk-Someday). If you start with those, it’s shocking how much stuff you can get done.

Then, for projects (despite RTM not explicitly handling projects), you make a list then I would prepend each list with a letter to indicate what it was. [P] for a project list, and [L] For a check list. I realized that I could use RTM to hold my check lists. Another thing that I think is really important and many, many ToDo apps have no clue how important this is to staying organized. Despite the fact that they have the ability to handle creating lists of things with check boxes, they don’t seem to grasp the significance to difference between a Task List and a Check List.

But I digress. Sufficient to say that I find it tremendously useful to have lists of items I can check off when I am trying to complete tasks. My sorry old soggy brain can’t remember very many details. In fact, it reminds of something I heard in college. I had a classmate who posited the “Conservation of Stupidity”. He argued that we all must carry a finite amount of ignorance around us our entire lives, so as we learn new things we have to jettison old things.

So I got into the GTD dance with Remember The Milk. And it worked really well.

RTM Strengths

Like I said, with RTM you really can enter new tasks FAST. Their short cuts make it simple to capture a lot of information with your keyboard. And being able to save intelligent searches effectively made RTM a nifty database for tasks. If I could organize my projects by step, then use the search to display reports by Context. I could make it work! And it did.

RTM Weaknesses

However, RTM does has it’s limitations. The more I used the tool, the more unwieldy it became. First, list management is a pain. It’s part of the Settings, not really part of the task management process. And as I started to follow the true GTD process… capturing everything, I mean ALL of my projects and lists… I discovered that the number of lists became unmanageable. Suddenly I had 5 rows of Lists, projects, and context view reports. Just trying to find the thing I was looking for became a chore. I needed something more. And trying to use Due Dates a surrogate for Start Dates created another problem. How did I really know what was due? I ended up with lots, and lots of badges warning me that I was LATE.

A really good task management system should reduce stress, not increase it with artificial warnings. I needed another tool.

I was ready to step up to some heavy duty planning tool.

Enter OmniFocus

Getting It Done… Again?

Posted by on September 15, 2011 Comments Off

Okay, it was about a month ago that I got back on the GTD train. I’m not exactly sure what caused it, but I think was really starting to feel overwhelmed and I had a number of personal projects that were driving me crazy. Strangely I was being pretty productive with my coding projects, but stunningly ineffective with everything else and the stress was getting to me.

Now this is probably my third trip to the GTD dance. I first learned about it 6 years ago, and I thought it was the bees knees. But the incredible attention to detail usually overwhelmed me and I’d give up. But then life would completely overwhelm me and I would come back to it. So this time, instead of being completely doe-eyed that I’d convert everything I started small.

So I started in my personal life. And I started to go through all the todo apps I’d started to collect. I realized that perhaps some software had advanced since I’d last taken a tour through the world of todo apps.

What I needed (or wanted) was something that would let me enter tasks on my Mac, then take them with me on my iPhone. If there was an iPad version that was a bonus. But the goal was to be able to quickly capture information with a full sized keyboard, access to online resources, and then be able to take those lists of tasks with me where ever I went.

I knew the one important thing about Getting Things Done, was that I needed contexts. The ability to look at my tasks from a different point of view. In fact from a very specific point of view, the environment or context by which they would be executed. Having two points of view was critical to effective GTD for me.

The other thing I really wanted was the ability to set a start date for my tasks. One of the best, but hardest to implement ideas I found in GTD was the idea of the tickler file. You stick tasks you can’t act on yet into a future folder. That way you don’t have to think about it until the task comes into a time frame when you can actually do something about it.

For example, every two weeks I have to open the flood valve in our back yard to irrigate our lawn. I want to be reminded the day before but I don’t want to see that reminder in my to-do list every day. Or perhaps there a BluRay movie I want to buy. It won’t go on sale for a few weeks, and it doesn’t really matter which day I buy it, but I don’t want it to show up on my BestBuy shopping list until I can actually buy it. I love start dates. Very few systems seem to support them.

I think it’s important to point out that a start date is not a due date. A due date is something that REALLY has to be done by a certain day. Things like this probably really belong on a calendar, but if you have to complete a task by a certain date (like turn in a homework assignment) having it in your daily tasks is better than sticking it on a calendar in the future where you may forget about it.

The key difference is that a start date constrains WHEN you can act on a task (and when it takes up precious room in your brain) and a due date constrains when a task MUST be completed. After watching an excellent video series by David Sparks of Macsparky.com, I now rarely use due dates. I employ start dates religiously to help manage my mental load of what I’m going to get done and when.

So, where to start?

To Do Apps

I’m looking for todo apps with a Mac client, and an iPhone app. A web based client is okay, as long as it’s easy to use and quick. The apps I looked at were:

Things
Toodledo
Remember The Milk
ToDo
Get It Done

Initially, I completely discounted OmniFocus as being way too complex and expensive. Ironic, as in the end that is the tool I use daily. But I’ll get to that.

What worked what didn’t

Things – I love the look of things, it’s simplicity, and the power of tagging. What absolutely kills things is the lack of syncing. While I can sync between home and work – oh yeah, another critical requirement. Their syncing between iPhone and mac is atrocious. They really need a syncing solution and they don’t appear to be working on one. Plus it’s expensive. Boo Things.

Toodledo – Was absolutely one of the best solutions I looked at. While they don’t have a desktop client, their website in general is excellent and they supported all the features I wanted. Except, their syncing with the iPhone just didn’t work. If you created a project on the web, it didn’t show up on the iPhone and changes on the iPhone didn’t sync back to the web. It was crazy. What’s more, they had SO MANY options for each task, entering tasks on the web felt clumsy. Despite Toodledo’s great features, I can’t use something if it doesn’t work and the sync killed it for me. Rats Toodledo

ToDo and GetItDone Looked promising. I didn’t like GetItDone’s $40 a year subscription fee. I’ve had OmniFocus for 5 years. At $40 a year, would be like spending $200 for an app. Heck, I don’t like paying that for Office. I’m not paying that for a task manager. ToDo looked promising but was slow.

Remember The Milk The winner for me was Remember the Milk. Bar none it had absolutely the fastest mechanism for entering tasks (capture is important) and it was simple. There was an outstanding blog post by a user who explained how he used RTM for GTD and that gave me the handle I needed to start using it. The iPhone syncing worked flawlessly and once I got the idea down I could begin using it.

Next… How I started with RTM.