Category: GTD

I’ve been fussing around with Backpack some more lately, trying to decide if I want to switch from a free account to a paid one. I think I could get some utility out of having more than 5 available pages to play with. I’m thinking about taking some notes that I have on my old Palm, plus some stuff that I have in OneNote on my PC and/or DevonThink on my Mac, and copying it all up into Backpack. The fact that there’s still no obvious way to sync these notes to my iPod Touch is probably the only thing keeping me from doing that. I can think of some workarounds, but they’re not perfect.

I started playing with the journal feature in Backpack last night. It’s pretty cool, but as I discovered by digging through the forums, there’s a 100 item limit on what you can store in the journal. Past that, stuff just falls off into oblivion. This limit doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere. I wouldn’t have known about this if I didn’t go looking for it. That’s one of the things that’s frustrating about some of the 37 Signals stuff. They often seem to impose weird limits on things, then fail to document them. I’ve also noticed, for instance, that stuff in the journal doesn’t show up in search results, if you use the search box on the main page.

This stuff makes the Journal a good bit less useful than it could be. I was thinking about using the Journal as a kind of log for some key activities that I might want to come back to later, and see when I started them, when I completed them, or when I last did a certain thing. With the 100-item limit, I’m really not going to be able to use the Journal that way, except for short-term stuff. I had been thinking it might be cool to create a Journal entry every time I had work done on the car, for instance. Then, I could get a full service history on my car by just searching on “car” in the Journal. I can still do that, of course, but the history won’t go back that far, depending on how much other stuff I use the Journal for. I guess I could copy and paste old stuff from the Journal into a regular Backpack page once in a while, but that seems like a kludge.

Organize: It’s Your Civic Duty: this is a fun little article from the NY Times. It doesn’t really say anything new or useful about GTD, but it’s pretty funny.

I got my inbox back to zero again today. This is probably because a lot of people took today off, so it was pretty quiet at work. I managed to go through a bunch of unprocessed stuff and sort some of it out into projects & actions. The roads were nice and clear today too, and the parking lot was fairly empty. Overall, a nice day for getting things done.

I haven’t posted anything about GTD in a while. I fell behind in my general filing & organizational stuff back in November, when we were preparing for our big move at work. I’ve gradually gotten things back into some kind of order now, but I’m still behind in some ways. I’ve got about 80 messages in my inbox, for instance, that I haven’t gone through and filed. And I haven’t done a proper weekly review yet in 2008, really. But my desk (and general work area) is pretty well organized now. I know where all the important stuff is. My files are alphabetized and in my drawers. All the books are on the bookshelves. The whiteboard is up on the wall. I have a fair number of random papers on my desk, but not in a big undifferentiated pile, or anything like that.

I just spent some time thinking about GTD Connect, and whether or not I should drop out of it. I’ve decided to keep up with in for a few more months, at least. The forums, podcasts, e-mails, etc, do seem to be helping out a bit.

Wired has an article about David Allen in this month’s issue. I thought it was interesting and reasonably well-written. David Allen himself takes issue with a few things in the article, though. And the Lifehacker post on the article has a few interesting comments.

I’m almost embarrassed to admit this, but I signed up for GTD Connect this week. GTD Connect is David Allen’s subscription service for GTD aficionados. It costs $48 per month, which is a good deal more than I’m accustomed to spending on a web-based service of any kind. I’m planning on trying it out until the end of the year, then re-evaluating it and making a decision on whether or not it’s worth sticking with.

For anyone else out there who might be considering it, I thought I might put together a write-up on what you get through the service. I did a bit of web searching before I signed up, and found a bunch of blog posts on the service back when it just started up, but I haven’t seen much mention of it anywhere recently, so I wasn’t sure how it was shaping up. It looks like it launched about a year ago (August 2006), so now is probably a good time to take a look at it and try to see what it delivered in its first year.

Here’s my take on the service as it exists right now, with the caveat that I’ve only been playing with it for a few days.

While the service is primarily web-based, there is a monthly mailing that goes out to members. The original intention was to do eight audio interview CDs a year and four issues of GTD Quarterly (a newsletter on GTD), so each month, you’d get one or the other. There have only been two issues of the newsletter so far, but there have been some extra CDs sent out, so there’s been something mailed out each month either way. All the past mailing material is out on the web site so new members can download any of the older stuff in MP3 or PDF format.

I downloaded the two newsletters. The first is 16 pages and the second is 20. There’s some good material in there; maybe a little fluff, but overall good stuff. Many of the articles are similar in length and tone to the essays in “Ready for Anything”, for those who have read that book. Some of the articles are less philosophical and more practical.

There’s a podcast feed with all the past audio material, both the interview CDs, and a bunch of other material. If you subscribe to the feed in iTunes, and pull down everything on it, you’ll get about 700 MB worth of audio and video (mostly audio). The videos are just short 2 minute segments with David talking about a single topic. There’s about 30 hours worth of audio out there. (There are some longer videos up on the site that aren’t in the podcast feed.)

The web site includes a couple of interesting features. First, you can set up a weekly e-mail reminder about your weekly review. That’s pretty simple; you just pick the day of the week you want to receive the reminder. The e-mail you get will have a few encouraging words from David, so it’s a bit more than just a simple reminder. Second, there’s something called the “Intention Journal” which is basically an open-ended e-mail reminder system that you can use for anything you want. It has a bunch of GTD-related categories, and suggestions about the kind of things you should use them for, but you can really use it in any way you like. The whole e-mail reminder thing is something you could likely do just as well (and a lot cheaper) with Backpack or Remember the Milk. It’s nice to have a GTD-focused system, though, so you’ve got a framework for figuring out the kinds of things you want to get reminders on.

There are also members-only forums on the Connect site. That’s all done through the same system as the public forums at www.davidco.com/forum/, so if you’ve seen those, you’ll know what to expect. Given the $48/month buy-in, there’s a better signal-to-noise ratio on these forums than probably anywhere else on the internet. You really don’t get trolls or spammers, for obvious reasons. It’s really refreshing to go through the forum messages, and see a bunch of on-topic posts written largely by people who know how to write, and spell, and think.

There are a few other things going on with Connect, but I think that covers the main stuff. Is it worth $48/month? I’m not sure yet. If it was $10/month, I’d say yes, definitely. I can easily wrap my head around the idea of paying around $100 a year for something like this. But paying more like $500 a year is a hard sell.

The last time I blogged about GTD, I was down to 632 messages in my inbox. I got that down to 92 today, probably the first time it’s been under 100 in a long while. (It’s back *over* 100 now, of course, but hopefully I’ll get it cleaned up a bit more tomorrow.) Meanwhile, I’ve been using the To-Do section of my mail file to track my projects and next actions and whatnot. That’s working out OK, but it’s not the most flexible system I could have. I may go back to the GTD for Lotus Notes database, and give that another try.

And I watched Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero video this week. There’s not much new there, really, for anyone who’s already well-versed in GTD, but it’s interesting. I’d recommend watching it, if your inbox is a bit out of control and you’re looking for some help.

I’m down to 632 messages left in my Lotus Notes inbox! I think I’m doing a pretty good job of categorizing things (for reference), getting rid of unnecessary stuff, and culling out the actionable items. It’s taken me a while though; I guess I started working through my inbox about a month ago.

There’s a good new article on GTD over at money.cnn.com.

I like the think I’m doing OK with GTD at work, but I’m definitely NOT stress-free. I think I’m managing my time better, and getting more stuff done, but there’s just so much chaos around me that it’s really hard to get that “mind like water” thing going.