Tag: GTD

There’s worse

Started using Everpad [1] on my linux workstation this evening. It’s more responsive than the crapping Thunderbird extension [2] which, in the end, is merely a Mozilla browser window embedded as a tab running against the Evernote [3] site. Using Firefox is fine for that, as far as that goes…which isn’t far at all.

The good:

  • Heavily integrated into the Gnome/Cinnamon desktop
  • Lightweight and highly responsive
  • Supports some of the fancy note formatting available in the Windows/Mac client but not online or in the Thunderbird add-on

The bad:

  • Horrible sorting—no ability to sort notes by tags with a click
  • No ability to select multiple tags
  • No ability to select a tag + notebook combination

The bad things make it almost unusable as a primary GTD tool [4], which is what I use Evernote for. And, yet, I think I it makes a nice addition to the desktop. It’s under active development so here’s to hoping some of these crippling limitations are overcome in the near future.

I also spent a few minutes getting Infinality [5] installed/configured on my linux box. My font rendering is now on par with MacOS. The difference is truly incredible. Font rendering is one of those things that is generally pretty horrendous on *nix and after using MacOS, and I’ll even give Microsoft some love here, going back to a *nix box to plonk around on at home hurts. Infinality addresses this very well with the default settings. I’m not even sure it will be worth my while to wander back into that nest to do any additional tweaking.

All-in-all, a productive night on the laptop. I should do this more often.

[1] https://github.com/nvbn/everpad
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/evernote-tab/
[3] https://evernote.com/
[4] http://lifehacker.com/5952540/get-things-done-with-evernote-using-templates
[5] http://www.infinality.net/blog/

Cleaning up

I’m a habitual non-deleter of mail when it hits my inbox. I mean, sure, I delete the crap and mark the spam pretty regularly but when it is a message that requires action or a response and I don’t have time to do it right now, I’ll let it sit.

And sit it does.

Usually one of three things happen at this point. Most likely I’ll reply / perform the action required to clear this message in the next few days. If it gets beyond this point, though, bad things happen. Most likely it will sit until it becomes so stale it just doesn’t matter any longer and I delete the damned thing and feel tons of guilt. The last thing that happens is that it gets accidentally deleted in one of my bulk clearing operations.

See, for better or worse, my email inbox is my primary collection point. Oh, yeah, we’re talking GTD methodology here. My three or for personal email addresses and the auto-redirect from work all dump in to this bin. Now that I do CM at work I get 20 – 50 automated build status emails per day. My team also has a habit of CC’ing the team list whenever we work through a problem. On the one hand this helps with communication and gets more eyeballs on the problem quickly. On the other it generates tons of email churn when you’re not immediately involved in a particular problem.

But I digress. The point being that I sift several hundred email messages a day which, for most of you, is probably no big deal. Let’s just say I’m not the world’s best multi-tasker. So what happens is the inbox fills up with gibberish and eventually I go on a wholesale delete binge. I don’t want this to take all day so it involves some mental triage whereby I estimate the necessity of keeping a message around by looking at the subject, sender, date and what I can dredge up from memory. Needless to say, it is an entirely fallible system.

Add to this mix the tendency of my ISP to choke in mid-fetch and then do a complete dump of everything in mbox the next time my client goes after mail. Nothing like getting your last week’s worth of mail a couple times every day. Each time this happens the messages that require action have to run the triage gauntlet.

All of this to say that I know the solution to the problem. A basic tenet of GTD is process your collection points and move the stuff requiring action into an appropriate bin/list/what-have-you. Leaving your action items to mingle with your inbox keeps you from being able to trust your system and if you can’t trust it, the principle benefit of not having to remember everything on your plate at all times goes out the window.

So I made a point today of getting my GTD tool in order (yay OmniFocus!) and have managed to keep my inbox empty-ish for most of the day. OmniFocus is no longer stale. iCal is up to day and is an accurate reference tool again. In short, life is much better this way. I know in my heart and head that GTD works. It’s just my lizard brain that gets lazy and causes the system to break down.

So we’re not big on lizards any more…