GTD – What’s working for me

“There is one thing we can do, and the happiest people are those who can do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present. We can be all here. We can…give all our attention to the opportunity before us” – Mark Van Doren

That pretty well sums up the goal of Getting Things Done (GTD:) allowing you to always be able to focus on the task at hand, whatever it may be. The idea is to put everything you need to do or remember into a trusted system. As long as you use it all the time you will trust it enough that your brain can let go of trying to remember everything; thus allowing you to focus on whatever you need or want to focus on. The best example of this (from David Allen’s follow up book “Making It All Work”) is a calendar. If you have a lot of appointments that you keep on a calendar you probably don’t stress about remembering all of them; you just look at the calendar. But how would you feel if your calendar got lost? A little panic probably. The point is that everything should be stored in a trusted system; not just future appointments.

To do this you need a way to capture and then review everything: to-do items, projects, notes, things to buy or read or investigate and so on. So here’s an explanation of what I’ve been using to do that.

Since I use FogBugz for software project management at work and I found this nice post on GTD with FogBugz and they are kind enough to offer a free version hosted online for up to two people, I thought I would start there. So far so good. The main reason why is that while FogBugz is designed to be a full fledged project management system, it is also designed to be fast and easy to use and to stay out of your way. So it’s flexible enough to deal with large projects, yet still very quick when dealing with even the tiniest day to day tasks.

Adding items into the system is flexible and easy. Typically I use the quick add method when using a computer. This little trick was designed to be quicker than adding lines to notepad.

If I’m not at a computer then I use my phone. On of the most clever parts of FogBugz is its ability to sort incoming email into something like 12 categories. So I setup my commonly used categories as areas in FogBugz: At Home, At Work, At Church, Errands, To Buy…Then I can just send an email from my phone with the category in the subject line and that’s it. The next time I check my lists in FogBugz the new item will be there in the proper area, well at least most of the time it’s sorted correctly. I like this method because I always have my phone with me. An alternative solution is to simply keep a notebook with you at all times and use it to capture everything. I just couldn’t figure out a good way to do that. So the phone method works great for me.

When it’s time to actually do things I make use of the filtering capabilities to look at only the items of current interest. You can filter on pretty much everything, and then search after that if needed. Filters can be saved too, so if I have a few minutes to make phone calls before my next meeting then I can just look at my To Call filter. The filters also allow me to view my FogBugz items from my phone. Since I have a Blackberry, which isn’t known for optimal web browsing, this was the part I was most concerned about when I started trying FogBugz. What I ended up doing was saving filters for all of my commonly used categories and then setting up a bookmark to each category page using Opera Mini’s speed dial. The FogBugz site works fine on the mobile browser, but it’s too clunky to navigate the filter menu with the Blackberry. So this little work around lets me view items from anywhere without much hassle.

One of the great new features in the latest FogBugz is subcases. Just select a case and then add subcases as needed using the same quick entry method as shown above. I’ve been surprised at how useful this is. It makes it easy to turn a reminder into actual steps that need to be done. Or to track a small projects like our recent remodel job.

Other handy features include tags to further categorize items (like agenda items for an upcoming work meeting), a full blown wiki to take notes or track larger project info, file attachments on any case or wiki entry, and due dates. I still use my calendar for appointments and anything that absolutely must be done at a certain time, but the due date option is still nice to have. I use it for remembering loose deadlines, things like when I promise to send somebody something by around the middle of next week. You can get a daily email with items due today and overdue items so that’s handy too.

If I hadn’t been so familiar with FogBugz (boy I wish they would change that name, especially after just typing it 59 times), before I started I probably would have just tried using the tasks features in Outlook or Gmail along with Google Docs. But so far it’s working great. If you haven’t read Getting Things Done yet I highly recommend it. And if you’re feeling adventurous sign up for a free FogBugz account and give it a go.

Worth a look

Seth has done it again, more amazing material for free. Read about the free ebook here:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/what-matters-now-get-the-free-ebook.html

Read it online here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/23711234/What-Matters-Now

Download the pdf here:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/files/what-matters-now-1.pdf

GTD Basics

GTD has become quite popular among software groups. I’ve been hearing about it for years, but only recently actually looked into it. It was worthwhile, I should’ve read the book years ago.

To get started with GTD I read the original book by David Allen of course, along with a book called “Zen To Done”. It helped me to read them both.

Here’s a mindmap I created to help me understand the key concepts:

There is an abundance of GTD tools out there but I wanted to use something simple, cloud based, and familiar to me. So for a calendar I’m sticking with AirSet, Outlook (with Taglocity) and Gmail for mail, I’m making much better use of my notebook, and for lists/projects FogBugz.  I’ve been experimenting with the free of version of FogBugz on Demand and it’s working out quite well.

Educating Creativity

This is from 2006, but it is so insightful and funny. I came across it thanks to Seth’s tribe:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

 

The school or the student

Our little first grader has done incredibly well since we switched schools a few weeks back. This has me thinking. According to Paul Graham it doesn’t matter much where someone went to college, at least when it comes to predicting software startup success. This was a surprise for the Yale graduate. I tend to agree with him at the college level. But when kids are younger does the school matter more?Do they need a better environment when they’re just getting started with formal education?

“Real” Social Environment

Why do so many people consider the main benefit of public schools to be learning how to deal with a “real social environment”? I took that quote from a comment on this article:

Online schooling gives kids, parents new options for education

Every time I see an article or hear a conversation about alternative schools or schooling methods the issue of socialization is raised. Certainly it can’t be the only “real” environment where a kid can learn the proper way to interact with others? It seems rather contrived to me. Instead of dealing with real issues like learning, growing, and enjoying life, too many kids instead become acquainted with popularity contests, bullies, teasing, crude language, and isolation.

Beyond all of that how many of us sit around all day listening to someone else tell us what to do and think and then raise our hands and wait to be called on before we’re allowed to get a drink or even answer a question. I’m all for organization, I just don’t get why we think that is what constitutes a “real” social environment.

Does anyone have any insight to dealing successfully with all of these public school issues?

Middle Class

It’s been clear for quite sometime that our politicians don’t understand the meaning of middle class. Sure today we use it to identify the group between the wealthy and the working class, but the original meaning is much more useful.

Here’s the original meaning from Wikipedia:

“The term “middle class” has a long history and has had many, sometimes contradictory, meanings. It was once defined by exception as an intermediate social class between the nobility and the peasantry of Europe. While the nobility owned the countryside, and the peasantry worked the countryside, a new bourgeoisie (literally “town-dwellers”) arose around mercantile functions in the city. This had the result that the middle class were often the most wealthy stratum of society (whereas today many take the term to refer by definition to the only-moderately wealthy).”

What we’ve been seeing is that incentive to work hard dwindling steadily since ever more of the result is taken to be used by wasteful government programs. The common explanation is that the money is needed to lend a hand or to invest in our future through technology and innovation, or protect us from corrupt corporations. Raise your hand if you believe the government is better at charity, technology, job creation or pretty much any other thing that our taxes support.

What happens when the invisible hand becomes too weak to lift us up again?

Government Motors

In the 1930s Will Rogers humorously suggested: “There’s a simple solution to this traffic problem. We’ll have business build the roads and government build the cars.”

We’re there with the cars:

With Sale of Its Good Assets, G.M. Tries for a Fresh Start

We’ve been privatizing road building for some time now:

Private Roads, Public Costs

Any way you look at it things in transportation are changing.

“Yeah, but his smile is a lot bigger than yours”

We took the young men backpacking around Escalante this month. We had a great time exploring around Death Hallow, Sand Creek, and of course lower and upper Calf Creek falls. At the upper falls we were jumping off a short cliff into the quite cold water when a group of young couples from Provo showed up. They all jumped off too except for one of the guys; he just wouldn’t do it. The youngest scout in our group, who had just barely turned 12, started jawing this guy for not getting in. The spectator responded that he didn’t want to end up shivering like the scouts were. To this his friend replied: “yeah he’s shivering, but his smile is a lot bigger than yours”.

Life can’t really be lived as a spectator can it?

On the same trip we listened to a talk by Scott Simmons titled: “You only live once, but if you live right once is enough”. I highly recommend it. That’s a mantra to live by.

Finding the Temple

Our combined youth activity this month, planned by the beehives, was find your way to the temple. We first had to try and get there by rolling a die at each intersection to determine our course. After trying that for awhile we were given a map to follow. We then visited the temple grounds and had some leaders share thoughts on the temple and then we had some time to reflect and write goals for getting to the temple. It was a really good activity.  It was also a perfect evening, unfortunately I didn’t have a decent camera in tow.

At Stake Conference last week there was a lot of focus on the temple as well; mostly examples of how temple attendance has helped people in various situations. What a great time to live with temples being built like never before.