Category: GTD

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.

I signed up for a Jott account today. Jott is a service that lets you send e-mail to yourself (or others) by calling a toll-free number from your cell phone. The email gets run through a speech-to-text translator, so you read it, or click a link in the e-mail to listen to it.

I stumbled across this service today while I was looking for something else. It might come in handy. Part of the whole GTD idea is to have a way to capture thoughts pretty much wherever you are. Jott could be useful for that, if I’ve got my cell phone on me, but no pen & paper.

And I’m hoping Jott doesn’t sell my cell phone number to anyone for marketing purposes. (I’m pretty sure they won’t; they do seem to be a legit company with a reasonable privacy policy.)

So today was basically the end of week 2 of trying out GTD at work. My desk is pretty clean now, and my files are labelled and organized. I’m keeping track of my projects and action items in Notes, in the To-Do section, per the GTD and Lotus Notes doc from DavidCo.

I’m still a long way from cleaning up my Lotus Notes e-mail inbox, though. In the past, I’ve basically used a system where I flag any actionable items using Notes follow-up flags, and just leave everything in my inbox. What I’m trying to do now is go through my inbox for 2007 (2006 is archived in a separate database) and either move messages to a reference folder, delete them, or put them in an “action” folder. My plan is to continue using the Notes follow-up flags (to indicate priority, at least), but to try and get a functional folder system going so that I can get that inbox to empty. I’m not terribly worried about getting to empty real soon, since I’ve already got myself well-trained to either (1) act on a message immediately or (2) mark it for follow-up. I’ve been doing that for a couple of years now, so it’s not like there are a bunch of actionable items hidden amongst the 5000 messages in my inbox. Anything that’s actionable is already flagged.

I took at shot at my second weekly review today, too, but it was a half-hearted effort. I’ve been fighing allergies for the last few days, and I’m just out of it. And I’m still way behind on a number of projects. I’m taking steps to try and get things moving, but there’s still a lot to do.

Well, I suppose this post was more of a “personal journal” entry than a useful blog post that others might find interesting, but I felt I needed to write it, just to review this stuff myself, and get it out of my head.

I finished reading the GTD book today. I picked up Ready for Anything last week, so I guess I can start reading that now. I’m doing well, I think, with implementing GTD at work. I have my files organized. I have a project list. I have a “next actions” list, organized by context. My Lotus Notes inbox is still a bit of a mess, and I wouldn’t say that I have *all* my projects in the project list yet, but I’m off to a good start.

Last night, I started trying to use Backpack for organizing some lists related to implementing GTD for personal stuff. Backpack seems like a good choice, since it’s web-based, and hence available on my PC or Mac, and also at work if need be.

The first thing I figured out is that the to-do list functionality in Backpack is interesting, but mostly useless. It looks nice, but it’s really missing a log of functionality. You can reorder lists, for instance, but you can’t easily move an item from one list to another. (I could get Backpack to let me do this occasionally, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it consistently.) Also, you can’t move a list from one page to another. It’s a lot easier to manage lists simply as part of the body text on a page, in either a plain old bulleted list or numbered list. You can move stuff around easily, just using good old cut & paste. You don’t get the fancy checkboxes this way, but I can deal with that.

I’ve also considered something like GTDTiddlyWiki, or one of its variants. The idea there would be to stick the HTML file into my FolderShare directory. Then it would, in theory, get replicated between my desktop PC, iBook, and work PC, so I could access it from any machine. I’ve heard that all of the GTD wiki variants tend to bog down if you stick too much stuff in them, though.

I cleaned out the top drawer in my main file cabinet at home today. I labeled all my folders, nice and neat. I threw out a bunch of stuff I didn’t need. I shredded a bunch of old credit card bills and other stuff like that. It took me about three hours to do all this; from around 8 to 11pm.

I don’t think I’m going to go much beyond this in terms of organizing my “stuff” at home. I just don’t think I really need to go nuts on the personal stuff. It’s mostly the work stuff that’s out of control.

I really need to get back to reading the GTD book. I just haven’t had time to pick it up in the last few days. Well, I’m tired and I’m heading off to bed now. Remember, there’s a three-day weekend to look forward to at the end of this week…