Getting Things Done
I’m halfway through Getting Things Done and I’m liking it. I’ve almost got a system worked out with a Hipster PDA and a few plain text files (INBOX, NEXTACTION, PROJECTS, TICKLER) on my Macbook.
Over the past couple days I’ve been moving from the “capture everything” stage to actually getting things moved from my INBOX to the appropriate places. In fact, I just emptied my INBOX.
Note: emptying the INBOX doesn’t mean everything is done, just that it is no longer unorganized. Now I have a bunch of “next actions” to pick from when I want to feel like a productive member of society. It’s amazing how much easier it is to convince myself to do something when I can pick from those 10-15 items. No digging through my brain trying to remember what I should be doing.
So far I’m really happy and I’ve been very productive. I’ll post more about how it goes and whether it still works when the honeymoon period is over.
Oh, and how is it that I had never used rsync until today?
An important feature of GTD is making sure that all thoughts are captured. David Allen argues that when we don’t safely capture ideas, they bounce around in our head and cause us stress. And if our brain is focused on remembering the great idea we just had, it isn’t coming up with a second or third great idea. After a few days of using this system, I believe that he’s right.
A related issue is the security of the capture mechanism. After I started getting my ideas down and organizing them on my Macbook, I noticed I still had a small amount of stress. Suddenly there are all these ideas that would take a lot of work to capture again, and they are on this one hard drive. So I bought a couple USB flash drives and I’ve been dragging and dropping files to them for a couple weeks. But today I got tired of manually deleting all the files and then copying everything over again, and I just happened to read something that Cory Doctorow said about geeks using rsync to backup files. So now I’m using that for syncing to both flash drives and network servers.
Finally, I also moved my old site from Linode to Dreamhost. I grabbed kirkpetersen.com at the same time. Linode is nice for some purposes but all I really need is a web server and maybe Ruby on Rails and a Subversion repository. Dreamhost does that very well.
Ooo, I like this Hipster PDA idea. It’s appealing to my sensibilities having always preferred paper to computers. I noticed yours last night but didn’t realize what is was until now. Thanks for sharing the idea.