Sean’s Blog

For a while now I’ve been using Remeber The Milk and while it is useful, the reason I’ve really come to love it is for how it lets me keep track of books.  I read a lot and, like most of you, I am always finding or hearing about books I would like to read.  The problem is that I can never remember them, let alone while I am browsing at the library or bookstore with eight thousand other books staring at me.

Enter Remember the Milk.  Whenever I run across a book that I might be interested in reading, I add it to the list.  Most of the time, I’ll  check  to see if it’s  available at my local library as well.

When I go to the library, I’ll check out some books from the list.  If I see anything that catches my eye browsing, I’ll add it to the list.  This is where the mobile feature of being able to use it on my Blackberry really shines.

When I get home, I’ll add a personal task to return the books I checked out due by the date and mark the books in the list as completed.  This system should really work with any task manager, but RTM just makes it really easy for me.

I almost feel like I’ve been cheating for the past week. After a long time pimping MonkeyGTD, I’ve switched to Remember The Milk. I don’t think I am going to be switching back anytime soon either. After I wrote the post last week about staying organized away from the computer I started to look into applications that would work on my Blackberry.

Remember The Milk got some serious love on Lifehacker’s Best GTD applications and I though I would give it a try. I was pretty much immediately blown away. RTM had everything I was looking for and more.

First off, it is web based and free (for the non-pro version). It easily manages my tasks and has a mobile interface (this was the killer for MonkeyGTD in my book). It integrates with Google calendar and can send me messages when tasks are due.

One of my killer apps was to be able to jot down books I wanted to read and then have access to that list at the library. I simply created a list called Books, and started keeping track of books I wanted to read whenever I came across them. Then when I made a trip to the library, i just logged on top the mobile interface, pulled up my book list and grabbed several of them. I added a couple books on the fly at the library that I didn’t want to take out yet, but wanted to read in the future.

When I got home, I put in a task to return the library books due on the books due dates.

The Pro version has tools that will actually sync with the native Blackberry applications, but right now I don’t need that level of integration.

MonkeyGTD is a great tool, but I am going to be sticking with Remember The Milk. Give it a try. It rocks my geeky world.

I was going to post this in my weekly links post this weekend, but as I started thinking about it a bit more I thought it might make a good post. So earlier this week, 43folders posted a round up of their GTD articles. Alot of these are great tips if you are using GTD or are interested in getting started with it.

About a year ago I started using GTD. And I am still using it, although nowhere near the way I started out with it. This in itself makes it the ONLY system that has ever gained any traction with me, and I think it is a testament to it’s versatility and power. The only reason I stuck with it though is that I made some changes and discoveries about how I work.
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The Limits of Efficiency

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, but I have been crazy busy with the house hunt going on and work. Several weeks ago there was an article on O’Reilly Radar called the Limits of Efficiency by Jimmy Guterman. The gist of the article was that no matter how good of a system you use, you can overextend yourself if you keep taking on more work. There are only 24 hours in a day.

While I agree with the main point of the article, the author went also used a good amount of space to detail what he didn’t like about the GTD system, and basically it was “the cultishness”(as he terms it). Now we all know that anything people really like is going to engender a decent amount of fanboyism. Look at the iPhone, or Macs, or even my favorite Linux. When something works well (as GTD does) it’s pretty easy, especially on the interwebs, to get carried away and see it as the cure for all ills. I’ll admit to doing it several time myself. But just because there is “a cultishness” about a method or product doesn’t detract from it’s value. Mac people can be annoying, but that doesn’t make Macs’ any less of a great machine.

The other thing that the article made me think about was why I like the GTD system. I really like the fact that it is really a method. David Allen sells some GTD products and seminars, but there are a million ways to implement GTD. From the HipsterPDA to MonkeyGTD, it is really platform independent. It allows me to really experiment and find out what works for me without tying me to a product or platform.

So call me a fanboy if you will, but don’t discard an idea because some of it’s proponents are a little over the top about it.

A little while ago, I wrote about using MonkeyGTD at Tiddlyspot for Getting Things Done. I’d like to share a little more about how I use it for blogging as well.

If you can’t tell, I’m terrible when it comes to being regular with updates on this site. It’s not that I don’t have ideas, it’s that I think of something and write it down on a scrap of paper or in a notebook and promptly forget about it. Alot of my blog posts actually happen when an idea hits me and I am currently able to access my site.

What I have started to try to do is to use MonkeyGTD to Get Things Blogged. I created a context called @Blog and as an idea hits me, be it one word or a full article, I add it to the Someday/Maybe list. When I have all the content finished, I just pasted it into Wordpress, link it, tag it and I’m done.

So far, this has worked out pretty well for me, and hopefully it can help some of you who have the same problem.

I’ve recently started using MonkeyGTD with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system.  While it is not as fluid as paper lists, it has a really slick interface, it’s available on and off line, and it forces you to be a little more formal with the system then a bunch of paper lists.

It is available as one  of the default choices at TiddlySpot, a great site that will host several different types of Wikis.  One of the really cool things is that it resides in the browser, so you can work online or off.  You do need to remember to save it to the server when you are done.

If you are looking for a pretty cool tool for GTD, I would definitely take some time to checkout Monkey GTD which you can host on your own server if you want, or you can use at TiddlySpot.

I’ve been reading the next couple chapter in Getting Things Done, and writing up some note to publish, but it seems to me that this is not really the best use of my time or yours.  There are alot of great resources by others out there (just today, Leo at Zen Habits published a pretty massive GTD FAQ).  So what I think would be of most use to everyone would be my implemetation of GTD, that way you could see what I am doing and if it might be helpful for you or vice versa.  So I will continue to plow through the book and work on the system and let you know how it all turns out.

Yesterday turned out to be the nicest day weather wise we’ve had in a while, so I spent almost all of it in the garden which is why I didn’t update.  So without further ado here is Getting Things Done, Chapter 1:

A New Practice for a New Reality

Our jobs and lives have become less defined, according to David Allen.  As knowledge workers, we are given tasks without clearly defined ends or steps.  This a a change from the traditional model of work where the steps are clearly defined and the goal is apparent.  And it turns out that we are not very good at handling this ambiguity.   The tools we have (weather they are email, dateplanners, PDA’s etc) are insufficient to help us keep up.  Our jobs keep changing as well.  I can relate as almost every job I have had has morphed into something completely different to what I was hired to do.

Allen thinks that top down approaches (ie big picture) are too easily disrupted by the day to day details of work and life.  What we need to do is to achieve a “Ready State” where we can focus our attention 100% on the task at hand without distraction.  We need to be able to enter this state whenever it is needed, or ideally constantly be in it.

“Open Loop” is the term used for any sort of commitment that you have.  These open loops, if not handle in the right way will always be pulling us out of our focus and creating stress.  We need to manage these loops.

The first chapter seems to be really a problem statement with a high level view of how we are going to solve it.  Keeping things off your mind and in a trusted system, defining action, and defining a finished state or success, seems to be where we will spend the rest of our time.

Anybody that knows me or has been reading this blog knows that I’m a bit of a scatterbrain.  I have a million things that I would like to do, but for some reason I never seem to get around to finishing them.  This has been the case for as loong as I can remember.  At school I would forget or push off projects until I had no time left and then have to rush through them, not doing as good a job as I knew I was capable of.  In my professional life, I’ve been better about it, but I still feel like I am hanging on by my fingernails.

I’ve tried various methods and tools before.  I’ve used calendars and day planners haphazardly, been the proud owner of 2 different PDAs that spent a couple months gathering dust before being sold off, and most recently I’ve been walking around with enough marked up paper todo lists to make the Sierra Club weep. What I’ve come to realize is that I need a system, not just a tool to get myself together.

I had heard about David Allen and Getting Things Done for a while, but it was finally when I read a review by Trent over at The Simple Dollar that I decided that this might be something I want to look into.  So I picked up a copy and decided to give it a shot.  And being a child of the Web 2.0, i decided that I’ll blog about it as I’m learning so any GTD blackbelts can offer tips or pointers and other people can have some idea what the system is (or just laugh at my attempts to get organized :)  )

What I plan to do over the next couple of weeks is blog Getting Things Done chapter by chapter and let you know how I’m applying it and how it is working out.  Tomorrow, chapter 1