Getting Things Done?

Dave's cartoons have a habit of hitting the nail on the head, but he has surpassed himself with this one.

And, no. I shouldn't be blogging. I'm supposed to be finishing my tax return.

(Crossposted from connexions)

My name is Richard Hall, and I am a messoholic

I haven't blogged here for ages, and for good reason. How can you blog about getting organized when your noble scheme of implementing GTD has not merely crashed and burned, it has set off a thermonuclear chain reaction which is threatening to engulf the known universe?

It's possible I'm exaggerating slightly. But only slightly.

I used to sign these posts as "Arioch", taking my name from the chaotic demon of the Elric of Meliboné stories, and I think I chose better than I knew, but the truth is that I won't get anywhere with this until I fess up. So that's what I'm doing.

Yesterday, I recruited some willing help, and major advances were made. I'll keep you posted on how it goes.

How to remember stuff

Open Loops begins a series entitled How to remember amazing amounts of information. Should be worth following.

Publishing iCal calendars for free

Systems Boy has detailed easy-to-follow instructions. V cool.

Beating insomnia

I know i haven't blogged for a while. Not that anyone's noticed... :( I've been too disorganized to blog about getting organized, if that makes sense.

Anyway, here are some useful tips for getting a good night's kip from the fine people at 43Folders. You can't be organized if you're too tired.

Maybe that's my problem?

Organizing tips

Open Loops

Good stuff, and lots of it.

Wridea

Wridea looks like it will be worth playing with to test its usefulness. Another web2.0 application, basically an ideas notepad that lets you create multiple pages and categories to sort your ideas out. Of course, there's a blog to chart development progress.

via Web 2.0 Central

Back to paper

Having had an accident with my aging Visor Handspring a few weeks ago (allowed the batteries to conk out - very stupid - but fortunately I had backed it up reasonably recently) I'm very interested in the "pack to paper" movement that seems to going on.
Bill Westerman is clearly serious about technology but has found himself attracted back to quality paper, binding and pen

But it was all too ... digital. All of the nuances of life - the margin notes, the scratched out words and curvy lines - were demoted to little ASCII characters on the screen. Notes were meaningless without that context, splayed out on rigid horizontal lines, one after the other. And then few months ago, I snapped. I went out and bought a bound blank book from Spain (by Miquel Rius), grabbed a UniBall Vision Elite from the drawer, and felt the tension ease out of my shoulders as I put pen to paper, scratching away as I slowly regained my feel for handwriting. It took me a few weeks to remember how to happily form characters again, but now I find myself writing with abandon, hooking the bottoms of my "g"s and crossing the tops of my capital "J"s.

Inspired by this, Mike Rohde describes his experimental weekly planner based on a standard Moleskine notebook. Pictures are, of course, available.

Christian Lindholm is also going retro after years of electronic notetaking.

For my Retro solution I opted for the Moleskin Japanese NotePad in A6 which I modified by cutting out pages which I complemented with a thin notepad A6, where paper is thinner and some can be teared away. For input I acquired a Muji pen with multiple pens, it has black ink, red ink and a 0.5mm pencil. This allows me to make small mind maps with some highlight colour.

No movement is complete without its fundamentalists, and these are surely represented by the Hipster PDA folk. Gadgets don't come any more basic than a bunch of small cards and a bulldog clip.

But none of this is a flight from technology. It is a genuine attempt to harness the best available tools for the task, to pursue elegance, versatility and usability. I've already found benefit from carrying the most basic Hipster and as my journey into gtd continues, I'm looking forward to refining the methods I use for collecting my 'stuff'.

A minor triumph

I had a call from a colleague in my organization yesterday after a copy of a letter I received a couple of months ago. It was quite clear that he was sure I wouldn't be able to find it. "Give me a call when you've put your hand on it," was a bit of a giveaway.

So imagine my pleasure at being able to say, "I have it here, call round anytime."

It was, as Wooster would have said, a juicy moment. A small thing but, to my sense of well-being, very significant.

Thank you, GTD!