Sometimes action is more important than direction

Jonathan Fields, Taking out the Trash

2010 will be the power year for social media, so I’ll be devoting a lot more time and attention to content creation for the new decade. As part of my resolutions, I’ll be updating my twitter feed, my Facebook page, and other social networks I care about.

So, friend me up if you haven’t already, get ready and hold on, cuz 2010 will be a busy year.

I’ve also managed to use my provider’s one click install for wordpress, but I had to manually update to 2.6, which works great over SSL in the admin interface (always nice to have).

On the down side, I had forgotten the nightmare that is operating a website through ftp and web interfaces. FTP takes forever to actually transfer files, how ironic.

Overall, the transfer was a breeze, and I didn’t see any relevant downtime. Did you ?

After trying a couple of methods and improving on my system over six months, I can recommend a system that works for me. A while back I was using text files with the mindset of doing lists, lists and more lists. This is still true. I need to capture all my open loops, thoughts, tasks and projects into lists that I am sure I will review, where review is the key word.

But I realized that text files are not that flexible for certain things, which require some extra markup. I need something I can quickly click to access my GTD Lists. And I need a List that presents me with stuff I can do next (the next actions list). This should all be clickable and fairly dynamic, like a wiki or something similar.

Enter Tomboy Notes. Tomboy allows you to keep a set of notes only a click away. The notes enable linking and formating, and while simple, build a solid foundation for a GTD system.

Life Contexts

To get going with GTD and Tomboy Notes, I use what I call Life Contexts where different projects live, usually Personal and Work contexts. Each of these is a different Tomboy note. I do this because I generally won’t be looking at personal things at work, or work things at home. This is something that annoys me in most GTD applications, since I tend to try and keep these worlds separate, and one context just gets in the way of the other when they appear together. Most applications use location contexts, which i tried for a while, but found out that about 70% of my tasks (personal and work) are “@computer”, making the workflow suck more than less.

The Notes

My system uses one note per life contexts and two special contexts making up for 4 Tomboy notes:

• Work ToDo List
• Personal ToDo List
• Short List
• Inbox

Each Life Context Note, Work and Personal, holds projects linked to that context. There should be as many notes as contexts you need have so that the right tasks pop up at the right time.

The two remaining notes are for reviewing purposes and to increase your trust in the systems.

Projects

Projects appear within there context and should be visually separate from other projects, with a set of common fields. You should keep track of why your doing things (Desired Outcome) and what is the status of it (Current status). The visual separation is pretty important to me, because it enables me to quickly distinguish between projects and tasks, enhancing the review process.

Below is a sample note for your copying and pasting. Look at the image above for the formating.

===========================================================================
Improve GTD Work Flow

Desired Outcome: Get my life in order with GTD
Current Status: Draft of blog entry complete
Next Actions:

- Publish a blog entry
    - Brainstorm the content
    - Write the text
- Organize open loops on physical inbox
==========================================================================

I create projects based on things I have on my mind that require more than a few actions. The extra fields is to help me keep the eye on the ball, and employ the GTD methodology. For further insight, buy the book. When reviewing I always look at the desired outcome, and so should you, regardless of the system you use. Focus is crucial to avoid procrastination.

Items that are very short I keep on a special project which is “Minor Tasks”, both in personal and work contexts. This holds minor projects or errands that will never hold more than a couple of actions. A rule of thumb is if it only has one status (done or not done) and the outcome is the task itself with no grand plan behind it, then it’s probably a minor task.

Sometimes, when projects get too big, I temporarily keep track then in a separate notes, since I don’t want it cluttering the review process, which is the master piece of the system. But, in time this approach gets hard to manage because it makes you explicitly click the note to review project status.This increases the resistance to actually get anything done and leads to failure.

The project oriented view depending on life context makes it easy to create actions, to parse the current status of projects and quickly review them. I can quickly access my work stuff and look at it by clicking the corresponding tomboy note.

Putting it all together with the Short List

The “Short List” is a subset of things to do Next, organized by context. It’s nothing more than a subset of Next Actions (read the book). I use special formatting on the short list entries to keep track of what project they belong to, enabling a quick decision on what to do next. So they end up looking like “Project@Task”, to satisfy my GTD needs.

The special steps are to use the Tomboy linking capabilities and create a few items that help. Both Titles “Work ToDo List” and “Personal ToDo List” take me to the respective life context notes. So keep entries to your contexts on the Short List. And on each note (context) I put a little link at the top that takes me to the short list ([short list]), so I can quickly access it and check what to do next. Look at the list figures above to get the idea.

As I get things done I strikeout the concluded task, and later on, when I review the current status of each project, I remove those tasks. But I always remove tasks from the short list when done, review and update the shortlist so that it’s always clean,updated and as much to the point as possible.

The Inbox Note

Last but not least, there is the Inbox. This is not a real inbox, but rather a temporary placeholder for things you will need to review. Things on this list might end up in the Minor projects, as a new project or even in the trash can. This just assures you that you will make act on the item you put there, but don’t necessarily have the time to it right now. You can also link to this note from the Short List and make entries there to assure you that you will review it.

Trust

All of the suggestions and hints are to help you Trust Your System. By ensuring that you have all the projects reviewed and updated, and a place to check what to do next, you assure yourself that you have all the open loops covered and tied down, resulting in stress free productivity. Isn’t it great ?

And the hits just keep on coming. This time, a gift from a “special someone”. An Ipod Nano Silver. It’s actually quite pretty, and I love it. It’s one of the best gifts ever. Somebody is nurturing my inner geek, and it feels so good.

As for the gadget itself, well, of course there were quirks. I managed to crash Rhythmbox a couple of times. After a lot of trouble trying out Virtualbox with USB support trying to get iTunes to work, I gave up and went to my sister’s which runs Windows natively, and managed to register the IPod there. So it seems, that you need to register it first. After the registration and firmware update, Rhythmbox worked flawlessly and I’m off listening to some tunes. I haven’t tried photos or videos, but all in due time, since I have to jugle this with a Playstation 3, and a newly borrowed F1 game.

I need some time of work to play with all of this. Dgeez…

This was a full weekend. I bought a new gadget, a Sony Playstation 3, which is actually not just another gadget but rather a full fledge media/computing/gaming rig. At least I hope so. I already have PS3 buddies, ps3 downloads, and what not. And all of this in between breaks of Grand Theft Auto IV. Ain’t it cool ?

The gaming experience exceeded what I was hoping for, but the SIXAXIS so far seems to kinda suck. I’m only playing it on a 22″ inch Half HD screen, which isn’t that bad. All around, I’m pretty happy with my new kickass setup. I’ll try to put some Ubuntu Linux magic running on it, but only when I get a break from GTA. I’m still deciding whether to plugin an external hard-drive or to stream from my Linux server, so I can watch some movies/tv-series. But all of this in later posts probably.

So it seems that another year has gone by. Time to blow a couple of candles and worry about things to come. This year I took the time to make some personal resolutions, because birthdays are kinda like New Year version 2.0, full of promise. Don’t tell anyone but they are really a day like any other.

I think I’m getting older… But, then again, aren’t we all ?