What the Heck was I Thinking!?

I’ve just started looking at Netvibes (www.netvibes.com), R-Mail (www.rmail.com) and Gmail.

Rmail allows for the automated forwarding of RSS feed updates to an email account. I have Rmail forwarding a copy of blog entries here to my email address so that I can have a copy of every post archived in Gmail.

This could be very interesting…if it works.

Well, with the start of the new calendar year, I have tried a couple of methods - a 3x5 week-at-a-glance calendar and a DIY Planner with week view cards.

The week-at-a-glance book lasted less than a week. It looked nice, it sort of fit in my inside coat pocket, but it needed something more to add note taking and temporary notes into it. It very quickly became too cumbersome.

The DIY planner - 3x5 cards in a holder from Target that lets me display the current week (with next week tucked in behind) on the inside flap, and several more 3x5 cards in the pocket that the flap covers. This has become the easiest for me to use, update and follow. I don’t have a lot of other forms I use from the DIY Planner package, but my HP 3840 printer takes blank 3x5 cards just fine. I’ve printed up about 9 months of cards and put them in a drawer at work. Each Monday morning, when I log in, I update the new week’s activities on the new card and put the old card in the desk drawer right next to the unused cards. This gives me a record of what I’ve done in the past week(s), and I’ve also noted any reimbursible mileage I’ve logged in the past week. That allows me to report them once a month. I have the entire back side of the week’s card for any additional notes I might want to make during the week. I can transfer any other info to permanent cards or to my work or home computer.

This system is fully portable, even into places where I am not permitted to take my Palm T|E. I can take notes on blank cards at meetings during the week, so all I need to take with me is the note card holder and a pen or pencil. If I bring anything else, I still don’t have to worry about having too much in my hands.

A progress report:
I have toyed with the Hipster PDA for several months. I’ve looked at the package of 3x5 card formats, printed samples of nearly all of them to see what works with me, and fussed around with various ways to use them. All, seemingly, to no real avail - I still don’t have a system that I have confidence in.
I should explain, I have a Palm Tungsten E - nice, contains tons of information, has Note Studio 3.1 a very nice browserlike/wiki-like program that’s easy to use. I had used Megawiki before I bought the T|E, but that didn’t work under the new OS. I also cannot take my T|E into the office, nor can I connect it to my work scheduling and contact information - company rules. I also frequently find myself in places where an electronic PDA is not permitted by my hosts. That’s why I had been interested in the hipster - analog is allowed wherever I go.
I think I can make use of the hipster 3x5 format, but I’ve got to find ways to get the information from the 3x5s into my computer so I can do some other organizing with it. I frequently use email (both Yahoo! and Gmail) both at work, when I travel and at home. I’ve seen the articles advocating the use of Gmail for next actions (ala David Allen). Yahoo! also has a Notes section on their web mail, so I can use that. I just haven’t found the right way(s) to record in analog format, find the right place and method to transfer to electronic format (available whereever I find myself, since I can’t predict where, when or in what context I might need some things).

One thing I have come to see - I bought a 3x5 calendar book for 2006. I had found one of those to be very useful in the past. It was cheap, looked nice, and may turn out to be the best way to do things for me. In the mean time, I’m using the week view hPDA cards in a small card holder. I’ve printed enough to use through the end of the year. What I’ve done is printed only on one side, leaving the other blank to write notes on. If this turns out to be the easiest way for me to keep track, I’ll have a nice gift to give someone at the office… the other week-view schedule.
I also have other 3x5 cards in my holder for other kinds of notes, but blank ones seem the kind I like the best.

More later…

Matt Cornell at Matt’s Idea Blog has some very interesting posts about getting things done. One that caught my eye was “Organizing Electronic Documents GTD-style”. He looks at several ways of organizing and tagging files on one’s computer. He has several links to other approaches that might also fit one’s needs.

I first found this from Lifehack.org.

[Off-Topic] One thing I find that helps me sift through several blogs daily is Sage for Firefox. Sage is an RSS aggregator/reader that is really simple (no pun intended) to use.

I was talking with my wife over morning coffee today. She said, “I’ve got all these piles of things I need to get put away and organized. They’re driving me nuts. I wake up in the night and these worries invite themselves into my mind.” She and I are both horizontally organized, so we have at least one stack of things to organize.

I mentioned the interesting thoughts that Terri, at From the Belly of the Beast among others, about the Ready for Anything notes that Buzz Brugman posted on his blog.

Her eyes lit up when I described the concept that your mind is always working at some level on any unfinished task. That eats up time and attention better spent somewhere else.

She’s decided to implement the concepts David Allen describes in his book “Getting Things Done” in a novel way. She works around the house, either caring for our grand children and caring for three girls (sisters) with special needs, or taking care of the house. She’s decided that the “contexts” that work for her are the rooms. She’s going to put a small spiral notebook in each room with the projects and next actions (she hasn’t digested all the koolaid yet, so she’s not calling them that…yet) listed for that room.

She’s also one of those people who doesn’t like to finish a task/project without having another task/project lined up, and preferrably started. This will give her mind the “tactile feedback” of having proects started all over the house, so that won’t upset her. By the way, for those of you in management school, her type in Myers-Briggs-speak is ISFP. The —P says she likes the idea of doing things, not completing things. —Js like to get done with things.

Well, the long awaited DIY Planner website, spun off from A Million Monkeys Typing, is finally up! This site promises to be a great boon to those who’ve overdosed on digital planning and want to regroup around analog methods. Of course, for those of us adictive personalities, we’ll be able to OD on the creative variety we will surely find on this site. But the first step in any recovery program is to admit the problem is mine, not the sites. I can quit any time too…

This will be fun to watch. I can’t wait until the PocketMod guy gets together with the DIY Planners and comes up with some nifty new tricks that none of us has thought of.

I just found a fascinating web app through Lifehack.org. It’s called a PocketMod. The website is at PocketMod.com. It’s still in beta, so there are a few glitches, but it’s fascinating to try out and create a pocket sized folded, multi-page organizer. The next step should be to enable dropping or entering text into the app before printing. How creative!

Throw out your old hipster! No, wait that’s with software. Analog devices don’t usually require that. Anyway, an advanced hipster PDA user has come up with a novel web app - a cover personalizer! He has set up a web page at
“http://www.eleven21.com/hipster/” where anyone can upload a picture and other information and then have the web app print a personalized cover page for the Hipster.

The Hipster website isn’t up yet, but Doug Johnston at A Million Monkeys Typing “http://www.douglasjohnston.net/weblog/” has a great article about the “why” of creating the site. If the cover web app is any indication, the creativity of this effort will be fascinating to watch.

Maybe that’s one of the attractions of open source - the ability to see the creativity in action, since the intellectual property doesn’t need to be “protected.”

Gerard Van Der Leun at americandigest.org
posts a refreshing return to simplicity and sanity for the Hipster PDA. I first saw the post at 43 Folders and jumped to the site to see what the new modification to the Hipster was. Typically for most of us who tinker with the Hipster, I’ve looked at new and more interesting ways to add to or modify the basic tool. Can’t leave well enough alone! Then along comes Gerard with the Occam’s razor for the Hipster - You’d be successful if you got just three of your To Do items done today, which are they? This also helps to prioritize the next actions (or is that Next Actions? What is the orthodox way to refer to next actions?). And, assuming you got all three done before bed time, what are the next three? Bring them forward!

What a concept. Why didn’t I think of that, myself? Why didn’t I invent velcro?

I just read some posts over at 43 Folders that resonated with my on-again, off-again relationship with Getting Things Done. In particular, the “A Year of getting things done…” posts made too much sense to me about not being able to stick with the program.

Is there an online group for GTD-anon? Maybe we should start one - put that in my someday-maybe folder that I should look in once in a while.