Category Archives: GTD

E-mail & what can do it better . . cont

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I have a well defined, high stakes, major project, with several members in the team, complexities around goals, timelines an politics: the Moodle trial.  A dead sitter for a better way to work.  I am going to find another way.

Week 8 with Luis on his “experiment, or initiative, at work where (he has) diverted most of (his) conversations into social computing and social software tools, both internal and external” is written up here: www.elsua.net/2008/04/07/giving-up-on-work-e-mail-status-report-on-week-8/

And here are the stats:

E Mailinput

I couldn’t do this of course.  Yet. I have fallen off the wagon again (I have got over 50 e-mails in my intray), but a passing comment to Diane at work (Thursday last week, about Luis) resulted in a passing comment today (“I thought about sending you an e-mail, but decided you didn’t need one”)  Cool eh!!  But this has set me thinking.

Collaborating around a wiki: the meeting scenario

I spent some time today trying to share a new way of working with our team.  When working on this well defined project, Lets use a wiki and a forum. Lats take minutes as we go: simple actions who, what, by when – we got a wiki set up, even has a nice WYSIWYG editor, and made a start.

Things that slowed us down.

  1. Failing to distinguish between Wiki and Page on wiki.
  2. Not knowing when a page is required, and when just some more text in the page is needed.
  3. Worrying in detail about formatting while we were merely getting down a few bullet points.
  4. Too small a font on the data show.

It was cool, and we made good progress.

However: last week, one post to the project forum lead to three personal replies to my intray (all of which should have been in the forum), and one in the forum, and one person saying “I did reply to you (didn’t I)?”.  Five interactions. I bet we can use the forum better.

I’m just deciding: do I have the nerve to say

“For this project, communicate ONLY via the wiki, the forum and the file sharing area (with it’s comments)”
Unless (as Luis says) it is a personal e-mail.
OR – wander into my airless hole of an office and talk to me.  (Just don’t send me e-mails)

This would save a LOT of hassle.

Luis has made his post on Twitter.  I will get to it.  One question I have is this: How do we keep up with each other and what we are all working on, feed in comment when something may be of interest . .   maybe a twitter-like blog of some kind?

Scenario, in the Moodle trial: Say in one day, Glen has made five discoveries on different topics (some bad), he has solved three problems, done a Moodle hack (or two), heard back from a consultant, will need to leave a meeting early.  I need to tell him about a CSS problem, a setting I cannot find and I’m interested in half the things he’s worked on.  I’m sure there is a better way to work than each of these needing an e-mail  Have Skype open?  Dunno. Yet.

Free tools

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PDF writer.

sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57796&package_id=53473

Quite a nice little programme: automatically installed as a print driver in Word.  Have created several PDF’s and they all seem very fine.

Evernote

This is like a personal receptacle for all your thoughts and ideas with a flexible tagging classification system.  Quite remarkable.

From the PR: “EverNote is an ambitious attempt to categorize the uncategorizable. The good news is that with a few exceptions, it actually works. EverNote makes it easy to quickly store and later access typed and handwritten memos, website excerpts, e-mails, phone messages, addresses, passwords, brainstorms, sketches, documents, and much more.”

There are a few people talking about it:

Slacker Manager | Lifehacker | theOfficeWeblog

It’s Windows only (sorry).  There is a new version that will run from a flash drive ($19.95US) It could be what I need to manage the many fragments of work and thinking I generate.  Much better than a folder of files.  It’s OK finding things – search is great, but to flip from item to item quickly is still not seamless.

GTD (3)

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Stuff is the problem

What is stuff?  All those things that are left unfinished, half through through, embarked on then dropped;
Things that need fixing, replacing, maintaining, tidying, finding . . .
Projects you may or may not do.  Books and papers. . . .   (you get the idea)
Adapted from the 43 Folders blog:

So how does GTD work?

  1. identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
  2. get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
  3. create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
  4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently
  5. do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
  6. review projects mercilessly:
    periodically re-examine your now-organized stuff from various levels of granularity to make sure your vertical focus (individual projects and their tasks) is working in concert with your horizontal focus (side to side scanning of all incoming channels for new stuff)

So, basically, you make your stuff into real, actionable items or things you can just get rid of. Everything you keep has a clear reason for being in your life at any given moment—both now and well into the future. This gives you an amazing kind of confidence that a) nothing gets lost and b) you always understand what’s on or off your plate.

Several jargon terms:

  • Open loops.  What is in your mind and is unresolved. The first step in getting sorted is to get all your open loops in one place.
  • Next action.  For each project, decide on the next action.  Group these in contexts.  Separate out rigorously the planning and the doing.

Creating the ‘right place’ is one challenge.  The blogs are full of comment son the system.  Web based?  Paper/electronic?  Hipster PDA?  Electronic PDA?  Memory stick based?

GTD (2)

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This is much later than I intended for a Part Two.  There is much more of a psychic challenge than I ever thought possible.  Dave Allen has talked about this in one of the podcasts done with Merlin Mann.  Someday Maybe.   This basically says “Give yourself plenty of time to come to grips with this and you may need to go round a few times to really ‘get it’ “.  It’s the same old question of creating radical change: there is NO easy option, whether you are loosing weight, exercising or trying to get organised.
MY INITIAL THOUGHTS: After some thought – I want a paper based system that links into electronic/online. I think I’m not really suited to a PDA. Probably web based.
It needs to be a system I can pick up when I lapse. My motto in the homework/study workshops I take is “If you lapse, don’t collapse”.

MY FINAL THOUGHTS (six weeks on) the same but not web based.
From my surfing:

I have actually made huge progress in six weeks.  But more on this another time.