Category: GTD

Stephen Covey

On the drive home from the airport yesterday, I heard the news that Stephen Covey had passed away. A few years ago, I went on a bit of a self-help kick, reading some David Allen and Stephen Covey, and trying to get myself more organized, figure out what my life priorities were, and so on. While I’ve fallen off the GTD bandwagon to some extent, I still keep the principles of Mr Allen and Mr Covey in mind and try to make decisions accordingly. Most of what Stephen Covey wrote is common sense, but it’s common sense that we need to be reminded of from time to time. 

many things

I feel like things have gotten a little out of control lately.  I’ve been letting non-essential paperwork pile up at home. (Still paying all the bills on time, of course.) And there have been various minor irritants in my life that are making me a bit cranky and jumpy.  (For instance, the nighttime Main St. repaving project that’s been going on right outside my window, and the daytime parking lot repaving project that’s made it hard to find a place to park after work, and other stuff like that.)
I’ve been working this week a bit on “clearing the decks,” to the extent that I can.  I’ve got my old NMS 401(k) rolled over into Merrill Lynch. (That’s a long story that I won’t go into here.) I’m getting my GMail inbox under control (with the help of Other Inbox). And I think I’m about ready for both my NYU iOS dev class, which starts next month, and NYCC, which takes place next month.
I’ve been slacking off on keeping up with my GTD lists, which I generally keep in Backpack, but I think I’m getting them in shape now.
So, I guess I’m doing OK.  I still kind of feel like I need to go on some kind of zen retreat for a few days and find my center. Or something like that. (I should mention that the link above was just found with a quick Google search.  I have no idea if it represents a genuine, legitimate Zen Buddhist organization. Looks legit, though, right?)

Other Inbox

I signed up for Other Inbox today. I’ve been having trouble keeping my GMail inbox organized. I was up to about 500 messages in there last week.  It’s been quite a while since I’ve gotten it down to “inbox zero.” I got it down to about 250 over the weekend, but that’s still too much.

Other Inbox started scanning my account a couple of hours ago.  It seems to have gotten stuck at message #157 for some reason. It has moved a bunch of stuff to folders already though. We’ll see if it ever actually finishes.

One thing I wish I could change with it is the name of the root folder it uses.  It puts everything under a folder named “OIB.” Since the folder list in GMail sorts alphabetically, “OIB” is way down there. I wish I could rename it to “!OIB” or something.

GTD at work

At my previous job, we used Lotus Notes for e-mail, and I had a pretty reasonable system worked out for GTD with Lotus Notes.

I’ve been at my current job for about 5 months now. It’s finally starting to get complicated enough that I think I need to get my stuff a bit more organized, so I’m starting to play around with various GTD options.

We don’t have an internal e-mail server; instead, we use GMail. I’ve been using a fairly simple tag system with GMail: just an “!Action” tag and a “!Waiting For” tag, basically. The problem, of course, has been GMail’s threading. You can attach a tag to a conversation, but not a particular e-mail. This has become a problem recently, as I’ve gotten involved in a few e-mail threads with 10 or 20 messages, where maybe the fourth message was actionable, and the rest were not. That makes it hard to get to the action item easily.

I was about ready to give up on GMail, until I saw this blog post from a few days ago, announcing that it is now possible to turn off the “conversation view”. Well, I did that today, and I think it’ll help. One thing I miss from Lotus Notes is the ability to view messages individually, by default, but also being able to switch to a threaded view when I want to. With GMail, I guess I could switch “conversation view” back on if I wanted to see a thread, but it’s probably not a good idea to turn it on and off frequently. I’m guessing it would mess up the tags. Speaking of which, it does now seem possible to apply tags to individual messages, though they don’t specifically mention that in the blog post. That’s basically my key need in terms of being about to keep track of stuff in e-mail.

I also have my GMail account set up as an IMAP account in Thunderbird. I’ve thought about switching over to using that as my primary e-mail client, rather than the GMail web interface, but there are a few things I don’t like about it. It’s actually very good as a desktop client for GMail, in general. But I don’t entirely like the way it handles GMail labels. It shows them as IMAP folders, which is perfectly reasonable, but I can’t see any obvious way of see which folders a given e-mail is in, or to copy an e-mail into multiple folders at once (i.e. apply multiple GMail labels). (Again, here’s something I miss from Lotus Notes: the ability to right-click a message and select “show folders”.) The way GMail does labels, it’s always easy to see which labels are applied to a given message, and it’s fairly easy to apply (or remove) multiple labels.

One other tool I messed around with a bit today is ActiveInbox. It’s a Firefox add-in that adds some extra GTD functionality to GMail’s web interface. It looks pretty interesting, but I have to admit that I uninstalled it. I think I may give it another try later this week or maybe next week, if I can find some time to really figure it out.

I’ve also considered using Superstars instead of labels for my GTD “!Action” and “!Waiting For” indicators. That’s something I might play with at some point.

a case study in poor time management

I had a few things I wanted to take care of today. I’m starting a new job on Wednesday, so I just have today and tomorrow left before I’m back at a full-time job, and not easily able to run errands during business hours. Mostly, I needed to work on stuff related to my parents’ estates. To make a long story short, I ended up making three separate trips to the post office, two trips to the bank, two trips to the mail box down the street, one trip to Staples, and one trip to a local UPS drop box. If I’d really thought things out in advance, I could have cut out half of these trips and probably gotten all this stuff done before lunch. Oh well. At least I got a few important things done, even if it wasn’t in the most efficient way possible!

inbox zero

At work, I got my Lotus Notes inbox to zero today, for the first time since March, I think. And I got all the stray paper off my desk. Everything that’s actionable is in the system. Everything that’s not is in reference folders or the trash.

Over the last week or two, I’ve recommitted myself to cleaning stuff up and getting stuff into my system. I’ve also been experimenting with new tools (as I’ve mentioned in previous blog entries), but part of what I’ve learned from doing that is that I needed to tighten up what was already in my current system.

The basic way I’m working that now is that, if something is a clearly-defined programming project, it goes into Jira. If it’s got some parts that don’t fit there, then I also put it in Notes, and reference the Jira issue #. If it’s not a programming project, or it’s at a stage where it’s got too many moving parts, I just put it in Notes. I try to review all my “in process” projects in Jira every day for next actions. And I try to look at the next actions in my Notes to-do list every day too, though I’m not always so good about that.

Back on the subject of tools, I’m still kind of dissatisfied with using my Notes to-do list as my main GTD system. I previously mentioned experimenting with Chandler. I like Chandler a lot, but I still have a problem with the outgoing e-mail, which I mentioned here. I never got any feedback from the Chandler mailing list on this, and I’ve tried a few oddball things to see if I can work around it, but no luck.

Looking around at other systems, I don’t think any of them could be really useful to me, unless they either work well with Notes, or exist within Notes. The only one that could fit the “work well” definition would be Chandler, due to its interesting IMAP setup. For stuff that’s actually *in* Notes, the best system appears to be eProductivity, which is a bit expensive. I’ve also played around with the GTD for Lotus Notes template from Brett Philp. It’s not bad, and it’s free. And it’s just a plain Notes database, so I can go in there and customize forms and whatnot, if I want to.

Meanwhile, I’ll probably be upgrading our main Domino server from 7.x to 8.5 this weekend. I’ve looked at the new mail template, and, while it’s quite nice, I don’t think it really adds anything that will help with GTD. The to-do list, follow-up flags, and folder system all seem to be pretty much unchanged. (I’m kind of hoping that whatever messes up mail from Chandler in 7.x is fixed in 8.5. I’ll have to test that after the upgrade.)

David Allen books

I finally finished reading Ready for Anything today. I started reading it about two years ago. Since it’s just a book of essays, it was easy to put it down for weeks (or months) at a time, and then come back to it whenever I wanted to. I got through the last ten (or so) essays over the last couple of months. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. My pattern with this book was generally to just read one essay at a time, then spend some time thinking about it, using it as a starting point for a bit of self-examination. I’m going to keep it handy, near my copy of GTD. I suspect I’ll return to it occasionally.

I bought Making It All Work for the Kindle back in January; I’ll start reading that soon, I think. I’ve really got no idea what kind of book it is. The reviews on Amazon are mixed. I did notice one comment in there noting that the illustrations in the Kindle version are too small to be useful. That’s disappointing, if true. I’d hate to have to buy a hard copy of it now, after I’ve already shelled out for the Kindle version.

Chandler and Lotus Notes

I had a few spare minutes today, so I installed Chandler on my PC at work. No major problems with the install, or with creating an account on Chandler Hub. I played around with it a bit, and so far, I like it. It’s reasonably fast to load and use. Since it’s a cross-platform app written in Python, I was concerned that it would be slow, and maybe have some user interface quirks. Not that a cross-platform Python app can’t be fast and have a good UI, but a lot of the time, that’s not the case.

The e-mail integration, as I mentioned in my post yesterday, is a little weird. Chandler uses IMAP to create three folders in your mail file, Chandler Events, Chandler Messages, and Chandler Starred. When you drop messages in these folders, they appear in Chandler. That part seemed to work OK with my Lotus Notes mailbox.

Chandler can also send e-mail. That, I thought, would be straightforward. It’s just attaching to an SMTP server. I have plenty of apps that use my Domino server to send SMTP mail, so I didn’t expect any difficulty there. I didn’t have any problems just connecting to the server. However, I’ve found that the e-mails sent from Chandler don’t render correctly in Notes. A bunch of XML, which is probably supposed to be hidden, shows up in the message. I did some testing, and the e-mails from Chandler look fine in GMail, and in Apple’s Mail.app. They look like a mess in Notes though. Oh, and I tried Notes 7, 8, and 8.5 clients, and it’s the same either way. I did find, though, that the e-mails in Notes look fine when I’m accessing my mailbox from my iPod or BlackBerry.

When things go wrong with e-mail rendering in Notes, it can be hard to figure out where things went wrong. First, the Domino server may screw something up before it gets to your mail file. If it’s not that, then it might be something related to your mail file template, or to the Notes client software. Since this problem occurs in Notes 7, 8, and 8.5, I’m guessing it’s not a simple client quirk. It could be something in my mail file template. That’s still on version 7, and I can’t really change that without upgrading my Domino server.

So, bottom line, if I can’t get the outgoing e-mail to look OK in Notes, Chandler is going to be mostly useless for me. If I can get that working, then it’s promising.

Oh, and one other interesting thing about Chandler. There’s a book called “Dreaming in Code” about the initial development process on Chandler. This book is frequently compared to Tracy Kidder’s Soul of a New Machine, which is a great book about the development of a minicomputer back in the 70’s. Chandler’s development process, apparently, was a bit rocky. At the time the book was written, the program had been in development for several years, and hadn’t produced a workable 1.0 release yet. I think that the author’s original intention was to document the development of a revolutionary open source app that would really be a killer app that would compete with Outlook and maybe Lotus Notes. In the end, he wound up with a book documenting a lot of things that could go wrong with a development project, which is maybe an even more interesting book than he would have gotten if the project had gone well. (I haven’t actually read this book yet, so I’m generalizing from the reviews I’ve read. I do want to pick up the book and read it at some point.)

GTD

I haven’t spent much time thinking about GTD this year. I’ve got a system going that mostly works, so I have just been working it and not worrying about it. A few things have come up recently that have made me start thinking about it again though.

First, I have started offloading most of my programming-related task management into Jira. This has been working pretty well. I’ve got about 100 issues in Jira right now, over a variety of projects. I’ve got the other two developers in my department using it too. From a GTD perspective, I look at a Jira “issue” as a GTD “project”, though sometimes it’s a pretty small project. (Other times, it’s a pretty big one.) I don’t really have a great way of tracking next actions in Jira, but my basic goal is that any open, in-progress, issue in Jira should have a next action on it. I just add comments to the issue as I go, detailing what I’ve done, and what I still need to do. This has gotten most of the programming stuff out of my previous GTD system, which has basically been the Lotus Notes to-do list. (I’ve set up my to-do list based on the system set forth in this document.)

I just recently listened to a podcast from DavidCo on the eProductivity add-on for Notes. This appears to be a really great package that would take care of a bunch of issues I’m having now. It costs $400 though, and I know my company wouldn’t pay for it, so I don’t think I’ll be going that way.

I’ve also been looking at Chandler, an open-source program that looks pretty interesting. Chandler integrates with your e-mail in a bit of a weird way, using IMAP. It might be workable, or it might be too much of a kludge. I’m really not sure. One of the things I like about Chandler is that it’s multi-platform, and you can sync across multiple installs using Chandler Hub. I think I’m going to try it out, though I’m not sure when I’ll have to time to really sit down and mess with it, and see if it’s workable.

I’ve been trying to come up with a good description of the problems I’m having with my current system, but it’s hard to describe. To some extent, it’s really convenient to have all this stuff right in Notes, in my mail file. But, there’s really no intermixing of the mail and the to-dos, so I find myself copying & pasting a lot, both text and doclinks. Notes has some nice features for copying doclinks, but I run into trouble when I have old projects that I haven’t started yet, and I’m relying on doclinks to old mail messages that I may already have archived. It gets kind of confusing. Basically, I’d like to either move the GTD stuff out of my mail file (which Chandler would do), or just go nuts and integrate completely with my mail file, and just manage it really well, which eProductivity would do.

Oh, and don’t get me started on how I could access or manage any of this stuff on either my iPod Touch or my BlackBerry Storm. I don’t even come close to having a good solution for that!