Posts Tagged ‘gtd’
07 Jun
I haven’t got much work-work done this weekend, except for a three-hour burst around midnight last night.
So far today, I’ve been focusing on little things: cleaning the apartment, scanning and shredding documents, doing laundry. Some days, I need this a lot more than I need to get the big stuff done, for my own sanity. I’ve been carrying about 20 items over from one daily todo list to the next, and it often feels like I’m not getting anything accomplished. On days like this, I need to spend a couple hours just doing the little stuff, to make some progress and knock some stuff off the list and get me started.
And for that reason, it’s been a pretty satisfying day already.
14 Nov
I would sum up Getting Things Done in two points:
- Write everything down.
- Everything is work.
The first is the most important for actually getting stuff done. As I’ve said before, if it doesn’t get written down, it doesn’t happen.
The second thing may not have actually been a point in the book, now that I think about it, but I’ve started seeing everything that needs to get done as a piece of work: I have to take out the trash and do laundry and book a hotel for that one weekend and make a shopping list and send an old friend an e-mail and research an API for a project I want to do. To me, things don’t fall into categories like household chores or personal projects – everything is a task that needs to be processed at some point. It’s not “work” in the traditional sense of the term, but they are things that need to be worked on.
I used to get so stressed about all the stuff on my todo list that wasn’t getting done, but now I realize that there will always be more stuff on my todo list. It all needs to get done, sooner or later. As long as I just keep chugging along, as long as I keep being productive, I will be content. I no longer get worried about all the things that need to get done, but I do get anxious if I feel like I’ve been slacking off and haven’t at least accomplished something every day.
28 Sep
I’ve always been the kind of person that has two or three todo lists going at once. If it doesn’t get written down, it doesn’t happen. And if I lose a todo list, a whole bunch of things don’t happen.
This makes me the perfect candidate for any one of the GTD-style task management apps that have been bandied about lately. I’ve used both OmniFocus and Things quite extensively, and hopefully this will help other people figure out which one is right for them. But first, I should warn you: I am heavily biased towards Things. And also, Chris Bowler of The Weekly Review has said a lot of this before, so I hope he doesn’t mind that I’m going to drag him into this a few times.
Overview
I spent a few months using OmniFocus for task management and tried really hard to like it. It’s got a lot of horsepower – if you want a lot of customization and need to track a ton of items, OmniFocus might be good for you.
Usability
No seriously, it’s a workhorse. You can create projects. You can create lists of single-action tasks. You can create folder of projects. You can create contexts. You can create sub-contexts. And yes, you can create tasks, which can have due dates and notes and might repeat. And you can filter on all of that.
The way I see it, OmniFocus is like taking a 747 when, really, all I need is a kite. It’s got a ton of features and options and filters and what have you, and it’s really easy to waste a lot of time fiddling around with settings and just managing the app itself. As Chris Bowler wrote on The Weekly Review:
GTD, or whatever your ‘system’ of choice, are merely tools to accomplish that which you want to achieve. When the tool becomes the focus – the only focus – then we’ve missed the mark of what GTD was intended to improve. Namely, completing work and our ability to do so. Not to give us another distraction.
This was my biggest problem with OmniFocus – it was so easy to just keep tweaking my projects and contexts, and I never actually did anything. Just firing it up to figure out what I needed to work on started to feel like a chore.
Also, Command-N opens a new window, which makes sense in some apps, but not in this one. If you want to create a new task, the key combo is Ctrl-Command-N, and I could never get the hang of that.
Price
Pretty steep: $79.95.
iPhone App
At the high end for an iPhone app: $19.99
The sync is dodgy. The sneakypeek beta version of OmniFocus can sync its database to MobileMe (and other WebDav servers, if you have access to one), and the iPhone app can do the same. As far as I can tell, though, it syncs up it’s whole database at once. There were a lot of times that I would sync and it would find some conflict, so I would be forced to choose to use the server copy or the local copy – either way, some data gets lost. It also means that the sync takes a little while. The biggest issue I had was adding an item to my inbox on my old iPhone while I was out somewhere, then waiting for it to sync the whole database up to MobileMe over Edge. Factor in all the problems MobileMe was having a couple months ago, and it was not a pleasant experience.
They may have improved this process since I stopped using OmniFocus a month or two ago, but I haven’t tried it since.
Overview
If OmniFocus were a Microsoft product, Things would be the Apple equivalent. It’s simple, it’s easy to use, and it’s pretty to look at.
Things offers enough options to be really useful without being obnoxious. You can create projects, and you can create areas of responsibility. This took me a little while to get used to, because they aren’t exactly contexts, necessarily – they’re intended for things that don’t have an end-point like a project, but will include several tasks over time. For example, I’ve got areas for Home, Work, Blog Ideas, Wedding, and Project Ideas.
Things also allows you to tag items. It seems that most people use tags as they would contexts, but with more flexibility. For example, I might have a task to check with my parents about their plans to come visit. I can tag it ‘phone’, ‘dad’, and ‘mom’. If I have some time to make some calls, I might filter for the ‘phone’ tag and see I should call my parents about that visit. If mom or dad calls me for something and I’m in front of my computer (and let’s be honest, I will be), I can filter on their names to see what I need to talk to them about it (as I said earlier, if I don’t write it down, it doesn’t happen – so, yes, I put reminders to talk to my parents about stuff). I also discovered just a moment ago that you can also tag projects and areas of responsibility in addition to individual tasks.
Things has a couple things that OmniFocus doesn’t. For one, there’s a Today grouping. The idea is that you just mark items you want to finish today. They aren’t removed from the project or area of responsibility that they were in before, they just get a flag. It’s pretty handy to take a few minutes in the morning and flag the items you want to get done that day. The second thing is teammates. You can add people from your Address Book and assign tasks to them. Things doesn’t e-mail them or anything (er, I hope it doesn’t, anyway), but it adds a notation to the task that indicates someone else is working on it. Again, it stays in the project or area it was in, but you can easily see that you’re waiting on someone else to finish it. This feature is not complete yet, though.
Usability
It was like the first time I used a Mac after years on a PC, and discovered that things really didn’t need to be all that difficult. It’s a piece of cake. It’s looks like a Mac app, and Command-N creates a new task, like anyone in their right mind would expect it to. Tasks can be dragged from project to area of responsibility to Inbox to Today and most anywhere in between. There’s keyboard shortcuts for everything I’ve wanted them for, so far.
Tags can be associated with a character to quickly apply them to a task. If you select a task and hit the key that’s associated with a tag, it will be added to the item. For example, Things comes pre-loaded with some tags for priority: High, Medium, and Low are associated with 1, 2, and 3. I have w for ‘work’ and p for ‘phone’. If I select a task and hit w, it gets the ‘work’ tag – or I can hit w and then p and then 1, and it gets ‘work’, ‘phone’, and ‘High’.
The thing I didn’t mention before about tags is how easy it is to filter on them. If you’re looking at a list of tasks and any of them has a tag, those tags will appear at the top of the list, like so:
Clicking on of the tags will filter the list. Piece of cake.
Chris Bowler of The Weekly Review has some more comments about Things usability and design.
Price
Free, for now. It will be $49 when 1.0 is released, but you can get $10 off that by signing up for their newsletter.
iPhone App
$9.99.
The iPhone app is just as simple and pretty as the desktop app. Unfortunately, they’re still working on it, and it doesn’t have all the functionality: areas of responsibility and tags are both missing, but Cultured Code has said that these are both high priorities. It would be nice to have them, but I’m doing OK without.
On the upside, the sync works great. Things doesn’t sync through any third party service. You must connect both your desktop and your iPhone to the same wireless network, make sure Things is running on the desktop, and then start it on the iPhone. It sounds like an ordeal, but it’s really not: if I’m at home or work, both devices are already on the same network, and I have Things running on my laptop all the time anyway. And, if you’re the kind of person doing secrety things, you don’t have to worry about your task list going through a third party like MobileMe.
The sync only takes a second or two, and I’ve never had any conflicts or lost data. Once or twice, there has been an item that was marked complete on one device but got marked incomplete during the sync, but really, that’s about the least harmful issue I can think of.
My Verdict
Obviously, I’m a fan of Things. Like I said, OmniFocus is probably appropriate for a different kind of user. I’m the kind of person that needs a simple, easy system that won’t tempt me to waste time. Things has filled that role quite nicely – I’m getting a lot done these days, and thanks to the easy iPhone app, I never lose track of anything I need to get done.
22 May
At some point in our lives – let’s call it “college” – many of us downloaded illegal copies of software because we didn’t have the money to purchase it, or because we needed the money for something else – let’s call it “beer.” Not that I would do such a thing, of course.
Now that I’m not flat broke, I’m more willing to pay for well-designed software that I find useful, and much less likely to spend a lot of time trying to find and figure out flaky free alternatives, or consider “other” means of acquisition. These are some of the Mac apps that have been deemed worthy of my purchase lately.
Uninstalling applications on a Mac usually just means dragging them to the trash. It’s a simple method, though incredibly difficult for PC users to get used to. However, not all applications can be removed so easily. Sometimes, configuration files lurk in your Library or elsewhere. Furthermore, it can be hard to get rid of things like plugins and widgets if you don’t know where to look.
AppZapper fills this hole – it’s the “uninstaller Apple forgot.” It’s true that Apple should have just included this functionality in the OS, but since they didn’t, AppZapper is definitely worth the $12.95.
It seems like there should be at least one free FTP client for the Mac that doesn’t suck, but since I haven’t found it, Transmit was worth $29.95. After the 15 day free trial, you don’t get to use favorites and it limits your session to 10 minutes. For months, I resisted the price tag. I assumed that there simply had to be a good free alternative out there, and any FTP’ing I had to do was done in 10-minute increments in Transmit. I don’t know why I held out for so long, because Transmit is a great product, and the developers deserve to get paid for it.
This isn’t a new purchase (I’ve had it for about a year), but TextMate has become more and more useful to me lately. I wrote a post about it a couple days ago. It was a little cheaper when I bought it, and $64 seems pretty steep for a text editor, but it meets needs I didn’t even know I had.
OmniFocus is the kind of thing that I should really use more than I do. It’s a fantastic GTD-style task management app, but it would be a lot more valuable to me if I could just get in the habit of using it to track things I need to do. I’ve made a few well-intentioned attempts at my own GTD system, but I always seem to put a bunch of “I should do this eventually” type stuff into my system (in this case, OmniFocus), and then I never want to open it because I’ll be faced with all this crap that I need to get done, so I just keep making little post-it notes and ad-hoc lists and things still fall through the cracks. It took me about a dozen tries to quit smoking – maybe it will take me a dozen more to start using OmniFocus.
11 Jan
I finally got around to reading Getting Things Done. I first tried to implement it during that month or two we were incredibly busy at work, so it didn’t really take – at least partly because I never did a full mind-dump to get everything in the system to begin with.
A couple weeks ago, I started playing with OmniFocus, and decided to give GTD another go. Since then, I’ve gotten pretty good about putting stuff in.
The problem is getting stuff out. I still haven’t gotten into the habit of checking OmniFocus when I’ve got free time to see what I should be doing. I feel like everything in OmniFocus is still in my head – I have some free time and think, “I don’t feel like doing any of that stuff,” because I know what stuff is in there. I need to get in the habit of checking it on a regular basis, so I can just put all my to-do’s into it and forget about them.
If anyone has any advice or suggestions on forming that habit, let me know.
28 Jul
College doesn’t really prepare you for the real world. You learn a lot of stuff, which is nice, but a lot of times they don’t teach you how to use it. It’s kind of like learning geometry in fifth grade: I memorized the details and thought I understood the concepts, but it was years later before I knew what to do with any of those concepts.
College was the same way – or at least, it was for me. You spend a lot of time learning about programming languages and syntax, but not a whole lot of real-world project development. For homework, you get clearly defined projects, and the professor never changes the specs halfway through, or adds a bunch of new requirements after seeing the first version. I can’t imagine what would have happened if a professor tried to pull that on a class, but that’s how it goes in the real world. While you’re taking classes, you have to track where you are on a project or two for each of them, but generally, that’s it. Right now, I’m working on two major projects: I’m doing a couple big parts for one, and managing (really, “coding most of”) the other. There are several parts of each that I’m responsible for, parts that other people are responsible for, things I’m waiting to get from the client, and the remainder that isn’t clearly defined yet.
I remember taking Needs Assessment and being told that we would need to know how to gather requirements and things like that, but I didn’t really believe it at the time. At the beginning of this year, I really didn’t need to know how to do it – my manager or a senior developer would come to me with a fairly well-defined project to do, and I’d do it. Sometimes it was changed after the fact or even partway through, but I got the set of requirements and wrote the code as specified. More recently, I’ve been dealing directly with the client a lot more than I used to, and I’m doing a lot more project management than before. I’ve got changes, new requirements, and bug reports coming in from three or four directions and need to manage the schedule for all of it.
In retrospect, this is what Needs Assessment and Tech Transfer (two classes in the IT department) were meant to handle, but I don’t think that any of us took it seriously at the time. In my defense, I took both of them my last quarter at RIT, so my priorities were elsewhere. Would I be better prepared for my current job if I had paid more attention? Well, it’s hard to say – since I wasn’t too interested, I really can’t even remember what we did in those two classes.
Then again, sometimes the sink-or-swim method is the best way to learn. I’m doing a much different job than I was six or eight months ago, and I’ve learned a lot in the process. As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been reading Getting Things Done. I haven’t gotten very far, but I already feel like I’ve got a better idea how to handle all this stuff. Plus, you know, the Internet needs another GTD fanboy.
25 Jul
For the second time this week, I’m wreaking havoc on my subscriptions in Google Reader, because ya know what? I don’t need this much news, nor the guilt I feel for never reading it. Even so, I feel just a little guilty every time I removed a blog, even though I don’t know any of the authors and rarely even read their posts.
I’m down to around 130 feeds now. I know that sounds ridiculous, until I tell you that I cut about 60 earlier this week, and 20 more since I started writing this post. A lot of the remaining 130 don’t update regularly – probably 20 are friends that don’t blog much, and another 30 are other low-post feeds. I can’t believe that six months ago, I managed to keep up on so many of them. No wonder I didn’t go out much.
And as long as we’re talking productivity, I FINALLY started reading Getting Things Done this week. I’ve been reading it on the Metro, so I’m only about 50 pages in, but already I’m feeling a lot more relaxed – knowing that I’m at least taking some initiative to sort out this mess has reduced my stress level a fair bit. Cleaning out my feed reader is step one – I know very little about the GTD system at this point, but I think that getting rid of all that unnecessary distraction will help.
And as long as we’re talking books, I also started The God Delusion last week, and I’m liking it a lot more than I thought I would. Richard Dawkins has always seems kind of dry, and…well, BRITISH, so I was worried it would be boring, but he keeps a pretty good pace. It’s another book I’ve been meaning to read for a long time and finally got around to starting.
And as long as we’re talking about God, I feel I should mention that we decided on Friday that “God” shall henceforth be known as “göd” (pronounced sort of like “gurd,” for those of you that don’t speak German). Just so you all know.
04 Sep
It seems that over the past two years, I’ve heard from a consistent stream of friends and acquaintances who have converted to the Getting Things Done system. Most recently, it came up when Lewk and Schmitty were here last week. Lewk whipped out his well-worn copy and explained how he’s been keeping track of things on to-do lists and the like.
And then I realized, it’s been ages since I had a real to-do list.
Obviously, I keep one at work, because I always seem to forget the minor details in my pursuit of the bigger picture. And I’ve still got a list of project ideas that I’ve had running for a few years now. But really, I haven’t kept a running, daily-consulted to-do list since I finished classes. In a way, it’s been kind of nice: I’ve felt relatively free from responsibility. I’ve done a lot of reading. I’ve put a significant dent in the list of movies I hadn’t seen (that list doesnt count, since I never really made it). I can’t really say I’ve accomplished much, though.
I think it’s time for that to change. I’ve been feeling listless lately, like I’m not sure what to do with myself, and having some personal projects on deck would certainly help. But then, what to do? I’m losing interest in programming; it’s not the kind of thing I can do all day at work, and then do at home for fun. I keep saying that I want to write more. I’ve got the time, and I’ve got the means, but I don’t have the inspiration. I have some ideas, but when I actually go to write them down, I don’t know what to say.
Lewk mentioned that writing things down has helped him be more creative. It’s true that I tend to be more stressed when I lay in bed each night, mentally re-hashing everything that needs to be done in the coming days. I still carry my <a href=http://www.brockli.com/archives/2005/02/thehipsterpda.php”>Hipster PDA, but haven’t used it much lately. I also got in on the Moleskine craze a little late, but I’ve been jotting notes and making lists in there a bit more lately. It’s tough to get in the habit of making a quick note when ideas occurr to me.
I’m hoping that Lewk is right, though: maybe taking a couple minutes to get things out of my head and onto paper will allow other things some breathing room.
