GTD implementations are far from single-app static systems. As I struggle to fine-tune my GTD focused methodology, my tools and processes keep evolving along with my ninja skills. In the last couple of years I’ve been taming my Mac based system, resulting in a three-fold workflow:  Project and task keeping with Things, meetings and hard commitments on iCal, and a set of text/brainstorm tools for gathering and reviewing, especially Freemind (brainstorm, mind maps, life organization), Evernote (for all types of lists, reference and bookkeeping) and TextMate (for almighty text files that track my high level focus) stand out. But keep in mind: these are only small cogs in the wheel.

Things

Projects and Areas in Things

Things is a GTD flavored task manager, where I keep track of my projects, next actions or scheduled/someday/maybe lists. Deciding what to do is crucial in GTD, but keeping it somewhere you can trust is essential, and for me that’s Things. The best thing about this tool is its simple yet powerful user interface, with dead easy tags quickly defining contexts at the reach of a keystroke. Recurring and future tasks are also a huge feature of this task manager because it builds your trust and confidence in the system. It’s easy to stay organize with Things, and that is possibly the best compliment I can make, specially with such an easy to use inbox for all sorts of collecting on-the-fly, tightly integrated with the Mac (ctrl+space).

Freemind

Freemind is a simple yet rewarding mind map tool. It’s my go-to tool for project and idea brainstorming. But more than that, I use it as a way to stay organized. Beyond the normal brainstorm activities, I keep two separate mind maps that allow me to keep track of my life and areas of influence, in an easy-to-review form, implementing my horizons of focus.  The Life mind map has a broad view of my current and future goals, making it the perfect place to retreat when I need to evaluate things and get perspective. This allows me to ask the hard questions, and make the tough decisions, whenever I need to. The second mind map contains my Areas of Focus. I keep this as a separate mind map because it plays a part in my weekly review process, to make sure nothing relevant slips through the cracks.

Life Mind Map

Evernote

Plenty of lists in evernote.

Any solid GTD system must contain something to hold notes, random thoughts, meeting minutes or even lists that you want to check later. Evernote sports a easy and powerful note mechanism, that can moonlight as a list holder, and as general filling system. Which is precisely how I use it: reference notes and lists. In Evernote I great lists such as loans, to buy, GTD lists, and several reference notes (making use of Evernote’s category system). I also use it as my main idea pool for work, hobbies, fun, etc. Evolved note-taking, small ideas, big ideas, future stuff, even brainstorm can go into Evernote. I even use it to capture some hard copy notes through iSight (the macbook’s camera) so I can capture jotted down ideas any other type of collectable information.

TextMate (Text Files)

Text File Brainstorm

What better place to write down high-level objectives than in free-flowed text files that harnesses an almost magical flexibility. I have a TextMate project, holding several files were I write down my goals without being bound by a list format. This is probably the best place to release some steam, and get back to basics. Even though I don’t review this often, I review it as often as I need, and when occasion arises because some hard decision crept up without notice. Beyond writing down my long-term objectives, the most important part is the reasoning behind them, which is all about being true. This is the “honest” bucket, and even though it’s hard to get going, once you get it done, it’s an eye opener, making you clearer and more focused. TextMate just gives me a nice project where I can plot my Mission Statement, Life Objectives, or any guiding document I need.

iCal (Calendar)

Last, but not least, comes iCal, which is my calendar of choice. This is where meetings, appointments and hard-deadlines go. A calendar is so vital that if you don’t have one, you should stop reading and go get it, quick! The nice thing about iCal is that I can sync everything to my phone, and get some nice on-the-go reminders and alarms, which really increase my confidence in the system (confidence is key)!

Wrap Up

To all of these tools, there is a physical counterpart, one in/out-basket at home and another at work, that keep in, out and current reference (it has three tiers) for paper based physical stuff. Paper based material is disappearing, but it still exists and must be handled.

And there it is, my current Mac OS X based GTD implementation. I’ve build up quite a few parts over the years, perfecting and adapting it to my liking and workflow. And this is what I recommend you do. Make your system work for you, build your trust in it and the just use it. Nothing else.

In a knowledge work economy, ideas are what drive progress. They are the money makers and the purple cows. All too often they distinguish failure from success, good from great, average from extraordinary. This is especially true in research (computer science, networking or any other field). Research is the purest form of knowledge work. We create knowledge, fabricate ideas, and try to imagine what doesn’t exist yet. This is also what business is turning into. It’s becoming imagining what can be before everyone else gets there. Making value where there was nothing, especially in the Internet economy.

There is a common parallel between these two worlds. Ideas are the main driver. But, with the constant information overflow we are running out of time to have ideas. Simply put, there is far too much on our minds. We can take steps to become offline and play dodge with a world of interruptions, but even then our brain is tied up with a million different things.

Quoting David Allen in Getting Things Done (GTD), “Brain is RAM“. And as computer RAM, it’s random and it disappears when you reboot it. Ideas slip out of our mind. We forget things. We wonder off with our creative self. It’s not hard to imagine that as ideas crawl up inside our head, we become cluttered. We don’t have enough space for all our ideas, preventing new ones from popping up.

An empty mind is full of space for new ideas.

We need to make space for ideas. Having a serene, clear and sharp mind is one of the single most important assets for creativity and readiness. A clear mind is able to react. An undisturbed thought is more valuable that ten contending interruptions. It’s by freeing ourselves of the mundane that we can focus on that which is truly important, like great ideas.

And this is where GTD helps out. We need to clear our mind of the little things, of the bigs things, of all things. And GTD gives as a formula for it: Write it down.

Write your ideas down. Take notice. Focus on what’s poking your mind. How are you going to get to the great idea if you are stuck with  the bad ones clogging your precious RAM? Write it down. Good, bad, simple, complicated, ingenious , stupid – it doesn’t matter. It’s OK if they look silly on paper. Just. Write. It. Down. And this is especially important in truly creative environments, like research demands.

Why have one when you can have many?

What happens when you do that? Bad ideas are weeded out,  labeled and their space freed. One idea becomes many,  leading to even more ideas. Eventually a great idea comes along, and you are ready for it: you write it down! And your  life picks ups new steam. Before you know it, you’ll be a brainstorm tycoon, transpiring ideas out of every creative pore in you mind. And that’s not only rewarding but good clean fun. So what are you waiting for? Grab a pen, a blank sheet of paper and write those ideas down. You never know when you’ll stumble upon a greatness.

With all the possible interrupts, judging by the amount of friends you have, on different time zones, it’s safe to assume that you can’t go more than a few minutes without one of these apps (especially twitter and IM) firing up a notification: “You have 3 new messages”. Have you tried not clicking that little bouncing icon with an attractive red number? Try it, it’s really hard! And what happens? After 30 minutes of trying to focus you get into “the zone”, feeling like a productivity tycoon, and all of the sudden the little twittie bird starts bouncing. There goes “the zone” and there you go off to check the latest tweets. And your feeds. And your mail. What just happened? 30 minutes lost, that you won’t get back. This happens all to many times. And we need an answer. Welcome to my offline project.

The offline project

So, to be productive, and have time to check twitter, feeds, IM and the sorts, I’m getting offline and you should too.

The idea: maximize my online time by spending most of my time offline, specially at work.
The trick: Disconnect your network cable/wifi card at pre-determined times.

Time Slots

9h-9h30: Online. Mail, news, twitter check.
9h30-11h30: Offline! Focus! Work!
11h30: Online. Mail check. Available for instant messaging annoyance, lunch arrangements, social connecting.

Rinse and repeat in the afternoon, after you had lunch.

13h00-13h30: Online Stuff.
13h30-17h30: Offline!
18h00-18h30: Online Stuff and Home.

Fit this to your schedule, and there you go. No more time lost on Youtube or random chat on Facebook. This also educates your colleagues co-workers so that they know what to expect from you: you don’t have to constantly be hitting the “Send and Receive” button on your mail client to answer that one important mail that is coming down the pipe. People will get used to you replying at specifc times and thank you for it. If something truly important comes up, someone will call (this can also help you sort out what is important or not).

The importance of focus

The offline project was motivated by a need to focus, because focus is becoming more important than ever. Especially if you open many direct channels to you. And Leo Babauta of Zen Habits and mnmlist has nailed this on the head by publishing an online (free) ebook called the Focus Manifesto. This manifesto discusses the benefits of disconnection, which makes up for 95% of the inspiration for the offline project. Quoting some wisdom straight from the source:

“The Benefits of Disconnection: Why should we even consider disconnecting from the grid of information and communication? Let’s look at just a few reasons:

• You shut off the interruptions and distractions of email, Twitter, IM, blogs, news, and more.
• You give yourself space to focus and work.
• You allow yourself space to create.
• You can connect with real people without distractions.
• You can read, you know, books.
• You can accomplish a lot more.
• You allow yourself a break from the stress of overload.
• You can find quiet and peace of mind.
• You can reflect and contemplate.”

So tracks going on your Ubunty Hardy you just need to install a few packages, most importantly ruby, ruby gems and sqlite 3 support. Then you just need to enable the sqlite3 gem for Ruby on Rails. Copy paste commands below:

sudo apt-get install rake rubygems libsqlite3-ruby
sudo gem install sqlite3-ruby

Then just follow the instructions on the tracks website. But, if your are lazy as me you can just copy paste the information below, which is a nice quick cheat sheet:

Get tracks, unzip into a folder. Go into that folder and edit the configuration file, making it look like the example shown here for sqlite3:

gedit config/database.yml

development:
adapter: sqlite3
database: db/tracks-dev.db

test:
adapter: sqlite3
database: ":memory:"

production:
adapter: sqlite3
database: db/tracks-main.db

Change a variable in config/environment.rb by putting whatever in it:

gedit config/environment.rb

SALT = "MakeThisYourRandomPhraseToGenerateSalt"

Build it:

rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

Run it:

./script/server -e production

And that’s it, you should just be able to point your browser at http://localhost:3000 and give it a try. I personally don’t think that Tracks is my cup of tee, but it’s worth a shot.

One a side note, this is probably my last post before my summer break, so I’ll be back in a couple of weeks, I hope.

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 ?