Category: GTD

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!

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!