TheScri.be

So the Second round of GTD-inspired stuff happened this morning. There’s not much to explain here really, except that I’ve just gone through all of my reference materials and condensed & sorted them.

On looking at each piece of paper or folder I asked the following questions:

1. Will I need to look at this again?
2. If so, can the information be better stored electronically
3. If not, does it need archiving?
4. Is it in the most appropriate folder?
5. If not, where should it go? What should the folder be called?

What I ended up with was a bloody great pile of stuff to bin, a small pile of stuff to shred or burn, a small pile of stuff to file at cadets and a surprisingly tiny set of nicely labeled file folders in alphabetical order, filling less than half of one file drawer. Cool. here it is:

While sifting, sorting and scrapping I was reminded of one or two things I should be doing and these duly went into OmniFocus via the (pretty cool) quick entry box. There were duly made into projects and, if they had paper stuff, were given file folders too.

Project Front Sheets

The next stage in my journey to sort shit out involved defining outcomes, ideas, constraints and what not for all of the major projects I’ve got going. It’s worth noting here that these only apply to major projects. All the smaller projects that are simply a reaction to life aren’t worth worrying about.

Below is the sheet I use for defining projects. I knocked it up the other day after reading the section on project planning in GTD. Let me know what you think of it.

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

A few days ago, my girlfriend Frankie bought me an iPhone. I thought I’d mention the few things I did to get my new toy up and running.

Applications

After unwrapping it, marveling at the packaging for a few minutes, and activating it I set about installing a few basic applications:

• Facebook - A standard really, we all live by Facebook these days.
• Last.fm - I’ve been using iScrobbler and Last.fm for years now, the iPhone version is a great way to get some new music when I’m walking about.
• NetNewsWire - I use the desktop version to read RSS on my mac and having both applications sync with Newsgator means that my latest news will always be with me. I usually spend about half an hour a day reading news but I’m hoping that now it’s in my pocket, I’ll be able to fit that in while I’m waiting around for a bus or a lecture.
• Remote - Now I can control iTunes from downstairs.
• VNC Lite - I don’t often use VNC but as the application’s so small I thought I’d install it just in case. There are times when I’ve dearly wanted remote access to my mac while out and about. I also updated the VNC Server on my mac (OSXVnc).

Although I’m trying not to buy many applications, I did splash out on two.

• Pennies - A simple but useful money tracking and budgeting app. I’ve often recorded my expenses on an index card and totted them up at the end of the week, it strikes me that doing it on my phone will save me both time and effort, and for the sake of the pound or so that it cost I think it’s well worth it.
• AirShare - This is great. Essentialy, it turns your iPhone into a WifFi hard drive, enabling me to drop files onto it from my mac while it sits in my pocket. I can effortlessly pull files off in the same way when I’m at a friends machine or at cadets. The killer feature for me is the ability to view PDF, source code and iWork files with it. It allows me to read eBooks and lecture notes while on the go. I’ve got an alias to the iPhone in my home directory for easy access.

After configuring the phone’s apps, I set up access to my Gmail account and synchronization with iTunes. I’ve currently got the phone syncing with an iPhone playlist and an iPhone images folder, as well as my latest podcasts.

Contacts

It was a bit of a hassle moving my contacts across from my Sony Erricson K810i - it took me about an hour in total. Here’s what I did:

1. Synced the contacts from my K810i to Address Book using the methods described here. Note that I had to remove the K810i from the iSync list, disable iPhoto from opening automatically and then re-add it to iSync before I could Sync.
2. Synced my Address Book with the iPHone and Gmail (using iTunes) to get my gmail contacts into Address Book.
3. Worked through the address book renaming people, editing email addresses, merging contacts and deleting millions of random numbers. At the end of this I used Address Book’s ‘Find Duplicates’ function to make sure I was done.
4. Added the contacts to various groups and distribution lists.
5. Used the wonderful AddressBookSync to match up my facebook friends to my contacts. This imports their birthday and profile picture if it’s available. The automatic matching is pretty good (it matched Gaz to Gareth) but it’s worth looking through the unmatched list because unless you’re perfect at spelling it will miss some.
6. Synced the iPhone wil Address book using iTunes.

I’ve not got my contacts and email synced across my Mac, Gmail and my iPhone and I’ve got everyone’s birthdays and photos in the phone. The birthdays also show up up in iCal, which makes my life even easier!

I hope this was useful to someone!

Hi, I’m not dead.

It’s been an awfully long time since I’ve written anything here (just over a year in fact). Still, a minute ago I felt compelled to write, so here it is.

Shifting Focus

In the past I wrote a lot about productivity. I was an avid reader of lifehacker, zen habits & other leading “life hack” blogs and was keen to pass on some of my knowledge to anyone who’d listen. About 18 months ago I shifted my focus to learning and started reading Cal Newport, Scott Young and other writes on the subject. My desire to pass on what I learned faded. Lately, I’ve had yet another shift of focus - from learning to philosophy, and hopefully for you I’ll want to tell you about it.

In the three of four years that I’ve been learning about productivity I’ve made massive improvements in my organization & workfow: I’ve found software products to help me work efficiently, developed a version of GTD to organize myself more efficiently, learned skills to help me learn more efficienty and made changes to my routine & home so I can live more efficiently. All of this has been great but there’s one problem.

Efficiency is crap

The trouble is, efficiency is only a good thing when applied to the stuff that you don’t really want to do. Some might argue that this is bollocks, that it’s good to be efficient in say, your workouts at the gym. Perhaps technically they’re right.

You see, for me, efficiency means “To minimize the amount of time taken to achieve the goal” and while I attend the gym with the goal of getting fit, I also want to enjoy it.

If I’m constantly trying to be more and more efficient in my workouts, I’ll loose that enjoyment. This is particularly true when thinking about relationships with others - is it really a good thing to be efficient with your partner? Probably not.

With this in mind, I think that I’ve reached a fairly good level of “productivity” - there’s only so much that I can “hack my life”, before I need to look at the bigger picture: Why am I here and how do I make the most of it?

And so to philosophy.

Although I’ve dipped into some philosophy books in the past, and pondered the different philosophies of the people I meet, I’ve not really made an effort to think about things and after all, philosophy is thinking.

I’ve not got much more to say on the subject at the moment but I’ve found that the notes (MP3 and PDF) at philosophersnotes.com are great for setting the gears in my brain whirring.

Time to think

The first step in thinking is finding the time to do so - everyone yearns for some quiet retreat in which to ponder and recently I’ve found that my own head is the best one (thanks Marcus). The thing is, before I can crawl into my head I need to have less stuff in it. No one likes pondering in a junk shop.

In an effort to remove some of the mundane “gumpf” in my head I have, in true Danny style, written two lists:

• Important Ongoing Commitments
• Important Finishable Projects

The first list contains all of the commitments that I’ve made to myself and to others over the past few months. I’v also added some of the people I’m committed to supporting and removed some of the things that I’m not whole-heartedly committed to. The important this is that none of these items are finishable.

All of the finishable commitments I’ve made, like “Remove Vista from my girlfriends laptop so it actually works”, make up my second list. Every item in this list has an obvious and intuitive end condition, some test as to whether I’m done or not.

These lists reside on the whiteboard next to my desk and above them is the promise that I’ve made:

Everything that I do will either further a commitment in list one, lead directly to the completion of a project from list two, or else be fun!

I will not take on any more projects until all of those in list two are complete.

Perhaps I’ll let you know how this goes.

A note on the future of this website

I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking of redeveloping TheScribe and indeed it’s still on my list of things to do. I’ve got a few interesting ideas and It’s looking likely that the blog will eventually be running on a specially designed engine. Don’t hold your breath though - this isn’t on my projects list and isn’t likely to be for some time.

If you want to keep up with me I do occasionally post interesting things over at dannyat.tumblr.com.

Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a great deal about the direction of my business and work, and also of this blog. It’s lain dormant since May thanks to a lack of motivation on my part, and a busy schedule elsewhere.

One of the things I’ve been thinking abut is creating an online portfolio of my illustrations and design work, along with a website to create leads for my business. Initially, I thought of using this blog as both a business front-end, and as a productivity and design blog. After working with this idea for some time and talking to various people about it, I’ve decided against the idea.

This decision is based on three factors:

1. This blog focuses mainly on productivity and lifehacks, my portfolio site should focus on design and creativity.
2. I’d like this site to have a clean, minimalist design whereas I think my portfolio site should showcase some more impressive and off-the-wall stuff.
3. I have two separate audiences: prospective clients and interested readers. My readers don’t want to look at my design, and my clients don’t want to be overwhelmed by articles on productivity.

My next idea was to maintain a portfolio site with an attached blog on design and art, and focus this blog on productivity. A sensible idea? Perhaps not.

Time constraints

Although I’d like to write more, I’ve found in the past that my posting schedules are far to ambitious. I’ve got a number of commitments that draw on my time and I often find it hard to maintain this one blog, let alone two separate blogs.

This thinking led on to the idea that I could maintain two sites, but only one blog - One site hosting my portfolio and business details and this blog, covering articles on productivity and art & design. The simplest way for me to separate the two “streams” on the blog would be to offer three RSS feeds.

• A Productivity feed for my productive audience.
• An Art and Design feed for my artsy audience.
• A combined feed for the nutters who are interested in both.

After putting this to my friends, I’m convinced that this is the best way to go. If anyone thinks differently, please let me know.

The next steps

My work on a new theme for this blog is coming on nicely, as is my article on the process I’ve used to design it. Now that I’ve decided to keep my portfolio and blog separate, I’ve removed a large chunk of the work involved. Hopefully, you should see a relaunch of this site in the near future, with a new design and some flagship articles.

Assuming my other commitments don’t get in the way, and my motivation to write doesn’t decline you should also see an increase in post frequency. I intend to post about three times per week:

• Once on productivity.
• Once on art or design.
• Once with a short story or poem from my girlfriend (or perhaps something else silly).

As far as my portfolio site is concerned, I think I’ll wait until i’ve got this project sorted before I embark on that.

Along with a whole bunch of other GTD guys, I use “kinkless GTD”:http://www.kinkless.com/ to keep track of all my next actions. Along with exeryone else I’m exceited about the release of “OmniFocus”:http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnifocus/, which will print to index cards. Until it’s release, however, I need the ability to print my NA’s to my hPDA as “Kinkless”:http://www.kinkless.com/ or OOP doesn’t provide this functionality.

A few weeks ago I started syncing kGTD with iCal and using iCal to work from. I now use kGTD to organize my NAs and iCal to tick them off. This saves having OmniOutliner open the whole time and stops the temptation to re-shuffle my projects every five minutes.

After a bit of research I whipped up a script that formats NA’s from iCal in Textedit and then saves it as an HTML file for printing. Safari will then print the nicely formatted list to 3×5 index cards, providing your printer supports it.

Download: “Print kGTD to Index Cards script”:http://thescri.be/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/kgtd-print.scpt

Make sure that you change the user_name to your login name and change show_help_at_start to false if you don’t want to be reminded about Safari’s printing options when you run the script.

In hindsight It woud have made sense to simply format the file as HTML and write it directly to a text file, I may still rewrite the script.

If you like the script or have any problems with it, leave a comment or linkt o me.

As we’re all aware, I’m quite into productivity. I jumped on the bandwagon about a year ago when I was overrun with work and needed a way to deal with it all. Someone pointed me towards “Dave Seah’s”:http://davidseah.com PCEO and through that I discovered GTD and the massive online productivity community that surrounds it.

Lately I’ve been looking into the more spiritual side of so-called “self-help”, reading about increasing energy, meditating and practicing “Boabom”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boabom. I’ve also developed an interest in psychology.

It seems to a lot of my friends that I spend a disproportionate amount of my time reading about and practicing the various life hacks I come across, especially when they see that my desk is still covered in clutter and I still fall behind with my work. I think that some of them would be quick to label me as one of “Steve Pavlina’s Self Help Junkies”:http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/04/self-help-junkies/. I’m not so sure.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a good piece of advice from the National Health Service and unusually it isn’t about Health.

“NHS The Improvement Network - Five Whys”:http://www.tin.nhs.uk/tools – techniques/links-to-other-tt/hidden/five-whys

They recommend asking why five times in order to drill down to the core of a problem. I does leave me wondering what happens if you need to ask more than five whys to get to the root, but I suppose you have to draw a line somewhere.

I think this ties in well with “my last post”:http://thescri.be/2007/04/07/problems-solutions-worrying/ as far as the way in which you should break down problems is concerned.

Many people see a problem and then produce a solution to it, without giving a thought to the underlying cause of that problem. By asking why a few times the problem, and others like it, can be solved for good.