Category: GTD

Inbox (almost) zero, x4

I always like to post something when I get my inbox to zero. (It only happens once every couple of years.) Right now, I’ve got my work inbox down to almost zero, and my three personal accounts also down to almost zero. So this may be the first time that *all* my accounts have been completely processed.

I’ve been doing fairly well at keeping my work email inbox down to a manageable size. We have a pretty typical Exchange/Outlook setup, and most of my work falls neatly into project folders, so I just file stuff away in those, and use Outlook follow-up flags to keep track of next actions. And I keep project notes in OneNote, with next actions generally marked in there if they’re not already marked in Outlook. (I use OneNote rather than Evernote at work, since our setup is fairly Microsoft-centric.)

On the personal side, I’m trying to use GMail for all my important mail now. I have a couple of other accounts that were still getting a fair bit of important mail, but I finally cleared that up so that nearly everything is coming into GMail now. Also, I was being fairly inconsistent on the ways in which I was flagging stuff in GMail, sometimes “starring” stuff that I needed to follow-up on, and sometimes applying “Action” and “Waiting For” labels. And then, I wasn’t really following up on either the stars or the labels consistently. Well, I’ve now un-starred everything, and either assigned an appropriate label or processed the starred message. And I’ve gone through the labeled messages and cleaned up all the old ones, so there are now only a few tagged messages, and they’re all recent.

Now, I’m trying to think of ways to *keep* my GMail account clean. First, I’m going to avoid using the “star” feature. It’s easy to fall into the habit of using the “flag” button in the iOS mail app, which translates to a star in GMail. But I’ve been flagging too much stuff that way, and never really going back and reviewing it, to figure out if it’s actionable or not. So I’m going to try to consistently use my “Action” label for stuff that requires an action on my part, and “Waiting For” for stuff that I need to wait on someone else for. And I really need to start reviewing those labels on a weekly basis and clearing them out.

I think it’s actually going to be much easier to keep my GMail inbox clean, given some of the changes I’ve made, and some of the stuff I’ve cleared up. I’ve unsubscribed from several mailing lists, so there will be less cruft to sort through initially. And I’ve set up a few new filters to sort out some stuff into a “Read/Review” label. (I’ve had that label in place for years, but hadn’t been keeping up with my filters, so a bunch of stuff wasn’t getting tagged automatically.)

My big challenge, which I’m still thinking about, is how to manage the various notices I get relating to statements that I need to download. I still get my important bills on paper (credit cards, bank statements, cable & utility bills). But I get only email notification on several other accounts (401(k), EZPass, etc.), which I then need to download, in PDF form usually, from a web site. This has proved to be a challenge for me; I tend to put it off for months. It’s not really a big deal, since there’s rarely anything earth-shattering on my 401(k) statement, or my EZPass statement. But I’d really like to get in the habit of downloading and reviewing these more often. And I’d like to switch some other statements over from paper to PDF, if I can get things to where I can trust myself to download them on a timely basis.

FileThis is an interesting service that will download statements for you, and deposit them into your Dropbox account (or Evernote, or several other places). But, it does this by using your web credentials to log into your accounts, so you have to hand over your user names and passwords to them, and that’s pretty scary. And they don’t say much about this on their site, but I’d guess that I’d have to turn off two-factor authentication on any accounts I use them for, since I don’t see how they could possibly deal with that on their end.

I haven’t found any other good ways to automate this stuff. So, sadly, I think I need to continue to download statements manually. I just need to figure out how to do it more frequently and more consistently. My plan, for now, is to consistently mark the emails relating to this stuff with an “Action” label, and follow up on those emails at least once a month. I’m going to reinforce that with a recurring reminder in either Evernote or the iPhone Reminders app. If I can get in the habit of doing that, maybe I can switch some more stuff over from paper to PDF.

wrapping up the weekend

Well, I got a lot done this weekend, Friday and Saturday. But I’ve spent most of the day today moping around the apartment and napping, since I now have a cold. Darn. I was really on a roll for a while there.

I have, though, finally gotten all of my old notes out of Backpack and into Evernote, and closed down the Backpack account. I’m still ruminating on whether or not I want to try managing all my tasks in Evernote, or if I want to try using a second app to help with that. I downloaded a trial version of Things, and messed around with it a bit, but I don’t think it’s what I need. For now, I’m just going to keep using the Reminders app on my iPhone for simple reminders, and I’ll keep project lists in Evernote.

Thanksgiving weekend

I spent Thanksgiving day with a friend’s family. It was a good day, but pretty loud and chaotic, which is to be expected when you put sixteen people (including three small children) together in a house on Thanksgiving.

I spent Black Friday home alone, working on some personal organization. I almost managed to update the map on my TomTom GPS, but hit a snag when the new map was too large to copy to the device. That led me on a wild goose chase that ended when I found a notice on the TomTom site that said they were aware of the problem and working on a solution. But it was a fair amount of wasted time. (I’d thought, at one point, that maybe they’d purposely made the new map file just a little too large, to force people with older devices to upgrade to newer ones, but apparently it was an honest mistake.)

I also continued my work on getting stuff out of Backpack and into Evernote. I’m almost done there, and I should be able to close down the Backpack account soon. I’m getting enough stuff into Evernote now that I’m starting to think about how I’m organizing things, and what kind of adjustments I should make. I read the book Evernote Essentials yesterday, and also listened to a podcast with a lot of Evernote tips, so I could hopefully stimulate my brain a bit and come up with some good ideas on how to best use Evernote. I found both the book and the podcast helpful, though there weren’t any earth-shattering revelations in either of them.

I had a page in Backpack titled “GTD”, and I was using it to keep, basically, GTD-related lists, like a “someday/maybe” list, a “waiting for” list, project lists, and stuff like that. But I stopped doing anything resembling a weekly review quite some time ago, and I haven’t really been keeping up the lists. So, for instance, one list item was to use a $10 Best Buy Reward Zone certificate before it expired… in 2011. So I’m not entirely sure how best to clean up and re-structure those lists in such a way that I’ll be more likely to use them.

I really like the general idea of consolidating as much stuff as I can in Evernote, and cutting down on complexity a lot, eliminating OneNote, Backpack,  DevonThink, and whatever else I can. But I also noticed that Things for iPhone and iPad is free this weekend, and the Mac version is 30% off. So maybe keeping my GTD stuff in Things would be a good idea, while using Evernote for reference material and archives. But Things doesn’t have a PC version, or a web version, so I’d only be able to access it on the Mac and iOS. Which probably isn’t really a problem, given the way I’m using my computers these days. (Also, “Things” is a horrible product name, and tends to produce a lot of irrelevant (but amusing) results when Googled.) I’ve already downloaded the iPhone and iPad versions, and have played around a bit, and like what I see. I’m planning on downloading the trial version of the Mac software today, so I can see if it’s going to work for me or not.

Meanwhile, I just ordered two 500GB Samsung SSDs, for $189 each, with the general idea of replacing the old-fashioned drives in my MacBook and ThinkPad. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time now, and I kept putting it off. But I keep hearing, over and over, from friends and random internet sources, about how much difference an SSD will make, so I finally had to go ahead and do it. So next weekend’s project will likely be replacing either the MacBook or ThinkPad drive. Or possibly both, if I have enough time.

I’m also thinking about going to NYC to see The Imitation Game, the new movie about Alan Turing. I don’t think I’ll talk myself into doing that today, given how cold it is outside right now. But maybe tomorrow, if it’s a little warmer.

a bit more on Evernote

I’m making good progress with my efforts to consolidate all my notes into Evernote. All of the notes from OneNote on my desktop PC have been copied over or deleted. And I’m working through my Backpack notes.

I’m still thinking about whether or not Evernote is a good choice for the long term. There’s some interesting stuff in this recent article from The Guardian.

Stuff I like:

  • “We don’t data-mine your information, we’re not selling you to anyone. Our fundamental belief is that we make money when our users say ‘we love this product and we want to pay for it’.”
  • “It takes longer to get started, but ultimately it gives us a shot at building a 100-year startup.”
  • “If a third-party developer makes something great that gives people a great experience, we make more money. Other companies have this love-hate relationship with developers. For us it’s just easy: it’s love.”

Stuff that I’m maybe a little worried about:

  • “We’re about work. Last year we made the decision to really focus on work. We don’t really talk about Evernote [as something] for your hobbies any more.”
  • “We’ve never changed our price: we launched seven years ago at $5 a month, but we realised a couple of years ago that it was the wrong price.”

So, basically, I’m glad to see that they’re thinking long-term, and trying to monetize via paid subscriptions rather than selling info to advertisers, and I’m glad to see that they’re still supportive of third-party developers. But I’m a little concerned that they’re focusing on business rather than personal use, and that they may be mucking with the subscription price next year.

Evernote for Mac 6

I’ve been making steady progress on my project to consolidate all my notes into Evernote. As I’ve said before, there are a few things that I don’t like about Evernote, but I’ve decided that it’s the best solution for my needs.

Last night, I got the usual client software upgrade pop-up on my Mac; Evernote updates their client pretty frequently, so that’s generally not too exciting. But in the release notes this time, I saw that it was a major version upgrade (5.x to 6.0), and the top item in the feature list was “Sleek new design inspired by OS X Yosemite.” I groaned a bit, but went ahead with the upgrade.

The new version is, indeed, more Yosemite-like, with diminished contrast between foreground and background, making it harder for old folks with poor eyesight like me to use. I’m having the same problem with 1Password.

There’s a good overview of the upgrade at MacStories. Other than the unfortunate Yosemite-inspired design changes, the client still works fine, and they didn’t make any unnecessary changes to keyboard shortcuts or anything else that would affect my ability to use the software productively, so that’s good. (When did we get to the point where the main thing I hope for in a software upgrade is that they don’t make it too much harder to use, though? Was it the Office ribbon? The all-caps menus and horrible color scheme changes in Visual Studio 2012? iOS 7? But I digress.)

I’m also not terribly excited about the new features they’ve added to Evernote recently. Over the last few versions, they’ve added a presentation mode, work chat, and now “context“. None of those things really helps me use the software for its main purpose — taking notes and organizing them. But they’re easy enough to ignore. (I’d be even happier, of course, if they’d let me remove the buttons for these features, so I could use the space more effectively.)

And I’d be really happy if programs like Evernote and 1Password would introduce options in their software to switch to an alternate color scheme, like Visual Studio did after enough people complained about VS 2012’s default color scheme.

Meanwhile, I’m wondering if messing with the system font on my Mac will make things easier to read or harder. I want to try out Fira and Input. While replacing the system font probably isn’t something Apple wants you to do, it’s simple enough and appears to be easily reversible, so I might as well try. (I miss the old days, when you could use a tool like Kaleidoscope to change practically everything in the UI!)

rearranging the deck chairs

I’ve been working on a few things lately to improve the way I keep things organized. I’ve already blogged about my move from KeePass to 1Password. I’m also working on consolidating all my personal notes in Evernote. And I spent some time this weekend cleaning up my GMail inbox, and reviewing my use of OtherInbox Organizer, and thinking about whether or not I want to keep using that.

All of this “work,” when viewed from a certain perspective, looks a bit like pointless busy work, “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” as it were. GMail, for instance, gives me enough space that I really don’t ever need to delete an email. And the search tools in GMail are good enough that I really don’t need to categorize anything, if I don’t want to. If I need an old email, I can probably find it in a few seconds with no problem. Evernote is almost as good. The limits on even a free account are generous enough that I’m not going to hit them, and the search is good enough that I can find stuff quite easily, regardless of how little I’ve bothered organizing things.

But there is a real point to smoothing out the kinks in the system, reviewing old notes, and cleaning up old cruft. It’s a way of reviewing my own recent history, maybe seeing some patterns that I didn’t notice before, or remembering projects that I had abandoned but would like to pick back up, or sweeping away old projects that aren’t relevant or interesting to me anymore. And, even if none of that mattered, it’s still something to do that just makes me feel a little better about myself and my control over my own life, so it’s worth it just for that mental benefit, even if it’s fleeting and possibly illusory.

So, having said all that, I’m now going to bore anyone still reading this with some details on what I’ve been doing. First, with 1Password, I am now about 80% of the way through moving everything over from KeePass. I have the iOS, Mac, and Windows clients all installed and running, and the Firefox extension installed on my Mac & Windows machines. I’m not sure if I’m entirely happy with the Firefox extension, and its ability to automate logging in to a site; it seems to get that wrong most of the time. That’s probably something I can straighten out with some more work, though I’m not sure if it’s worth spending too much time on it.

With Evernote, I’m trying to convince myself that I can use it to replace Backpack, and I want to try and consolidate all of my random notes from various other systems into Evernote. Backpack is a product that has been pretty much retired by 37signals. They still keep it running for existing users; I pay $7 per month for it, and it works fine. But I know it’s not getting any new updates or features, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they decide to shut it down entirely at some point. So it seems prudent to get my data out of it and into a more actively-supported product. A while back, I paid a flat fee to set up a personal Basecamp account, which is now 37signals’ only active product. I haven’t really done anything with it though. While I could shoehorn my Backpack data into it, it’s not really appropriate as a general note-taking and reference tool.

Looking at some other options, I would be tempted to go with OneNote, since it’s now freely available across Windows, Mac, and iOS, but I’m not convinced that Microsoft isn’t going to pull the rug out from under the Mac and/or iOS versions at some point. Their commitment to alternative platforms comes and goes, so I just don’t feel like it would be a great idea for me to commit to a product that might disappear in the next management shake-up.

Evernote, on the other hand, is (of course) the main product for Evernote, the company. They’ve always been cross-platform, and I can’t think of any reason why that would change any time soon. And they seem pretty stable as a company, and not not likely to run out of money, or get acquired and shut down, or any of the other things that tend to happen with small, young, Internet start-ups.

There are two things, functionally, that I don’t like about Evernote. First, I don’t entirely like the simple linear organization of notes. As stated above, yes, you can easily search through the notes to find what you need, but I still like to have a bit more structure. (OneNote is really good on that front.) And it bothers me a bit that they don’t support plain-text notes, only rich-text. That might not seems like a big deal to most people, but it can get in the way when I want to paste some source code into a note. The “paste as plain text” option helps out there, but I’d really like an option to just have a new note be either rich text or plain text, and maybe to set an entire notebook to be plain-text by default. But I think I can live with both of these slight annoyances.

What I’ve decided to do with Evernote, in terms of imposing some organization on it, is to create multiple notebooks (but not too many) to sort things out into a few major buckets, then use tags to make it easier to find certain things, such as all notes related to comic books, or all notes related to F# programming. I’ve renamed my default notebook to “Inbox”, and I’ll be using it as an inbox in the usual GTD sense (though maybe not being as strict as I could be). New stuff will go in there until I sort it out somewhere else or delete it. The other major notebooks I’ve set up are:

  • Lists: various active lists, such as my list of which Dresden Files books I’ve read and which I haven’t.
  • Reference: various notes that I may need for reference in the future, such as the note reminding me that “sudo killall coreaudiod” is the command I need to use on my Mac whenever sound stops working.
  • Archive: old notes that I probably won’t ever need again, but maybe I will, so I might as well keep them.

That’s probably all I need, but I’ve also created a “Travel” notebook, for travel-related notes, and I may create a few other topic-specific notebooks.

Once I get to the point where I feel like I’ve got a good system going in Evernote, I’m going to want to consolidate the notes that I have in other systems into Evernote. I’ve already mentioned Backpack; that’s been my primary GTD and general note-keeping system for some time now. Copying stuff out of there and into Evernote shouldn’t be too big a problem.

I also have a bunch of old notes on my Mac in DevonThink. I actually really like DevonThink, and I kind of wish I could use it as a front-end to Evernote, but it’s really a Mac-only solution. What I have in there, at this point, is mostly software license info (which could go into either Evernote or 1Password), and some miscellaneous lists and Mac-specific reference info.

And, finally, I have a fair amount of stuff in OneNote on my desktop PC. This all dates back to a time when I was using that desktop PC a lot more often than I am now. I don’t recall entering any new info into OneNote this year. So, again, it shouldn’t be too hard to get that stuff into Evernote, mostly into the ‘Reference’ or ‘Archive’ notebooks.

The benefits of doing all this will be:

  1. I’ll have all my notes in a single store, accessible on my Mac, PC, and iOS devices, and via the web. (The stuff that was previously only on the Mac or PC will now be available everywhere.)
  2. I can discontinue my $7/month Backpack subscription. (I don’t currently have a paid Evernote account, and I probably don’t need one. But if I want one, it’s still a bit cheaper than Backpack was.)
  3. I don’t have to worry about relying on a product that’s not really supported anymore, and might get discontinued at any time.

So this has turned into a pretty ridiculously long blog post, but writing it helped me straighten a few things out in my head, and maybe reading it will help someone else out someday. (Or at least amuse someone slightly.)

contact and calendar management

A few years back, I wrote up a couple of blog posts on my search for the “holy grail” of contact and calendar management. Back then, I had a BlackBerry, and I was hoping to find a good way to keep things in sync between the phone, my PC, and my Mac. I went through a few less than perfect options, which aren’t worth going into at this point.

Nowadays, I’ve got an iPhone, and I’ve found that iCloud does a fine job of keeping the iPhone, iPad, and Mac in sync. On the PC, I really don’t bother trying to keep a full set of contacts in Outlook anymore, nor do I keep my calendar there. I can always look anything up on icloud.com or on my iPhone. And, while I use Gmail for most of my mail, I don’t really feel a need to keep my Gmail contacts fully up-to-date either. There’s really only a small set of people who I e-mail regularly, and they’re all in my Google contacts, so there’s no problem there.

So, since everything’s working so well, of course I’m starting to mess around with it. I installed the vipOrbit app on my iPhone this week. It’s a program for managing contacts and calendars. Right now, the iPhone and iPad clients are free, the Mac desktop client is $30, and the sync service that I would need to subscribe to is $45/year. So I thought I’d start out by trying the iPhone app, and see if it was worth going any farther with it. The app imported my contacts from the main iPhone contact app with no problems. But, I found that it did not import all the fields. In particular, it didn’t import birthdays or the free-form notes field from contacts. The app has several user-defined fields available, so maybe there was a way to map those and import the birthdays and notes into them, but it wasn’t obvious how I could do that. I played around with the app a bit, and, while I think it might be useful for a salesperson tracking leads and/or customers, it’s not really useful enough for me to justify both the price and the inconvenience of keeping my contacts and calendar outside of the normal default iPhone apps.

Next, I may choose to try out fruux. Fruux is just a sync & backup service for contacts, calendars, and tasks. So, I’d keep using the default iOS apps, but would keep things in sync with fruux instead of iCloud. I honestly have no good reason to do this, except “just for the hell of it”. Or maybe so I can say I’m not 100% tied in to the Apple ecosystem.

no more Backpack

I’ve been using 37signals’ Backpack product for several years now, since February 2007. It turns out that 37signals retired the product back in June 2012, and is no longer accepting new customers for it. It still works fine for me, and they haven’t said anything about shutting it down entirely. I don’t recall ever seeing a notice on my Backpack page letting me know that they were retiring the product, but maybe I missed it. And, when I go to my account maintenance page now, there’s no indication there either; it still shows the same plan upgrade options that it always has. I’m still on the $7/month plan, and happy with that. If they’re not actually going to shut down the service for existing users, I might as well stick with it for the time being.

I use Satchel on my iPhone and iPad to access by Backpack account. It also still works, but hasn’t been updated since 2010, and likely won’t be updated again. In fact, I don’t see the full version as available in the App Store anymore, so I guess I need to be careful not to lose the copy in my iTunes library.

Since 37signals is still charging for Backpack, and since it (likely) runs on the same platform as their other services, I imagine they’ll keep it running for the foreseeable future. There’s no reason for them to shut down a service that’s generating revenue, and probably not costing them much money to keep running.

Still, it seems prudent to look into alternatives. 37signals would probably like people to move from Backpack to Basecamp, but that wouldn’t make much sense for me. Basecamp starts at $30/month, and isn’t really meant to be used as a single-person personal organizer.

Likewise, Papyrs would probably like to grab up some of Backpack’s customer base. They actually have a blog post about Backpack’s retirement on their site that’s interesting and well-written. Papyrus isn’t a good fit for me either though. It starts at $49/month and is really meant to be used for small company intranets.

There’s a good list of Backpack alternatives at http://alternativeto.net/software/backpack/. The first item on their list is Evernote, which I do use. But I’m not sure I’d like it as a replacement for Backpack. Second on their list is OneNote, which I also use, but also isn’t quite what I would want as a Backpack replacement.

From a GTD usage standpoint, I’ve tried Nozbe, and I’m curious about Asana. Maybe a combination of Evernote and Nozbe would work out for me?

I may write up some more notes on this subject, as it’s the kind of thing I enjoy messing around with and writing about, but for now, I’ve got other stuff to do today…

paperwork

I just spent the last couple of hours cleaning up old financial paperwork. So, if you’re not interested in that kind of thing, move along, nothing to see here, etc, etc.

I’ve blogged before about my continuing struggle to keep up with my Merrill Lynch accounts, in terms of entering the statements into Quicken. For quite a while, I’ve resisted letting Quicken download those accounts, since there tended to be some annoying little problems with that process. So, I kept manually entering them. Well, I fell off that bandwagon at the end of 2010, and had just been letting the statements pile up since. As David Allen would say, I’d gone numb to it.

I used to just have two accounts with Merrill — a catch-all account (called a CMA), and a Roth IRA. Well, now, I have the CMA, the Roth IRA, a traditional IRA (created when I rolled over the 401(k) from NMS), and an inherited IRA (from my Mom). So, that’s really too much to keep up with. Today, I decided to “clear the decks,” as it were, and get everything set up to download into Quicken. I started by shredding a bunch of old statements, from 2008-2010, that were in my filing cabinet. Then, I sorted out the big pile of 2011-2012 statements, and put them away, organized in a reasonable fashion, in the filing cabinet. Then, I set up all the accounts to download into Quicken. The result (in Quicken) is a little messy, but it all adds up correctly, and I guess that’s all I need.

My plan from this point forward is to open each statement as I get them, review it at a high level, then file it away. Meanwhile, the activity will get downloaded into Quicken any time I’m in there, balancing my checkbook, so that will be at least once a month.

I guess the main reason for this blog post is so that I can remember what I did, and when I did it, so that I can review things later in the year, and see if this system is working out. My main goal for this year is to actually look at the statements when I get them, so I can call Merrill if something is wrong, or if I need to change anything. Now that I won’t feel burdened by the need to do data entry every time I get a statement, hopefully I can avoid the temptation to just pile them up without looking at them!

inbox zero

I always feel compelled to write a meaningless blog post every time I get my inbox to zero. So, here it is: I got my e-mail inbox at work down from about 400 messages to zero today. Everything’s been tagged and filed, or deleted.

My personal email inbox is up to 600 messages though. I cull stuff out of it periodically, but I haven’t gotten around to *really* attacking it in quite a while. Maybe that’s a project for next weekend!