Ramblings and musings of John Zeitler.
(All right, so maybe for the purposes of this post I identify more with Little Miss Dotty or Little Miss Scatterbrain. Still, I think we should keep the unintentional confusion down to a minimum, shall we?)
I got to thinking a little bit today about the organization scheme I’ve been following off-and-on since February, David Allen’s Getting Things Done. ( Simply put, it’s not working for me very well… » )
This is one of the things I’d said was coming up earlier this week; if you ever wondered just what it is I carry around with me all the time, LifeHacker posted my loadout. I don’t actually have a spiffy name for the whole deal; some folks go with “go bag”, others call it the “urban assault pack”. I just call it “my bag” and be done with it. (Confidentially, I’m surprised they posted mine– I would have thought for sure that my gear was completely uninteresting, though I bet the ’sewing stuff onto the bag’ aspect really sold it.) The ironic part about the “current reading material” is that I took the picture at 6:30p Friday, and I no longer needed the Pokedex with me as of 6a Monday (having completed LGrn). The real test of the bag’s portability, actually, is coming up in a few weeks… but I’ll wait to give you guys that news. Anyway.
I alluded there to the ‘game organization system condensed novel’… maybe one of these days I’ll actually get around to, y’know, writing that. The short short short version is: Read the rest of this entry »
I lied; I still haven’t had any time to get into Luminous Arc, and I likely won’t until tomorrow night, at which point I’ll be either ignoring it further or playing Wild ARMs 5. Yeah. Anyway, today’s another GTD spiel; this time about a software tool I re-discovered just recently.
I first got into the whole “Getting Things Done” and productivity kick after getting linked to ThinkingRock way back in March. At that point, the program had entered a bit of a stalled stretch as a new version was being prepared; of course, after I remembered why I quit using iGTD in the first place (crappy reports and very little capabilities beyond what was there– seriously, about the only thing iGTD has going for it is the Quicksilver bits) I decided to give the pseudo-beta version of TR 2.0 a shot. So far, I am quite impressed.
ThinkingRock is designed with the book-canon GTD workflow in mind; it has you collect your thoughts, then process them, and then you can see your next actions at a glance. The 2.0 version adds “criteria” onto the action descriptors such as “Time”, “Priority”, and “Energy”. (David Allen, author of GTD, uses that last one as a measure of the amount of effort needed to accomplish the action; I repurposed it into tasks which are “foreground”, meaning they require most of my attention, like writing a chapter, or “background”, which means they are mostly automated but still require an occasional check-in, like laundry.) I’d like the option to add more criteria, but for now it’s still good (with sufficient tweaking, which actually is what GTD is about).
While I didn’t ever use it previously, ThinkingRock also has a much nicer printing setup than iGTD. TR generates PDF report files which can then be viewed in Preview or printed. These reports look snazzier and even have support for the new-to-me-yet-extremely-nifty PocketMod page layout. It’s far and away an improvement over iGTD’s crude “print out a snapshot of the ‘actions’ pane without regard for page width or visibility”.
It was with some amount of satisfaction that I was able to get my massive mental to-do list trimmed down from “a lot” to, currently, eight items that are easily manageable. Two of those I can take care of tonight; beyond that, I have a plan. I can’t attribute this sudden burst of foresight to ThinkingRock or to iGTD, or even to GTD itself; it was simply a matter of taking what I already knew and just sitting down and doing it. I knew most of the GTD stuff, I knew that I needed to just sit back and prioritize; but I just let it pile up and pile up until I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. That, of course, changes now.
Anyway, like I said, tonight I’m kind of busy, so we’ll probably have Bailout tomorrow. If I’m smart, I’ll be able to clear the decks tomorrow night so I can sit down and enjoy Luminous Arc from the beginning (I was thinking of just continuing the game I started, what, two weeks ago?, but that would be a Bad Thing). Catch you folks later.
Did some changes to my personal workflow this morning; nothing that would affect the site at all, not yet anyway, but just felt like getting my organization-geek on. Most of this entry is going to be about individual stuff, so if you’re expecting games and anime, this one might be worth skipping.
I freely admit that I often carry way too much stuff in my pockets; this has always been something of a concern for me, as I tend to like having all my stuff with me in the event of a random crisis that would somehow be alleviated by the use of my (devoid of credits) Splash Lagoon arcade card from Erie. In light of this, I found a slimmer wallet/money clip and have put that to use. I still have too much stuff in that, but fewer ‘just in case’ items. Actually, the biggest waster of space in the wallet now is the game and anime list, or rather it would have been if I had not just now decided to store that in the backpack. Now the only thing in my pockets at any given time are my mini-wallet and my voice recorder. I may go back to carrying a cheap pen once in a while, too, but for now that’s all I need at a moment’s notice. I’m kind of getting ahead of myself… I’ll detail the physical organizations soon enough. Maybe in a few days.
The biggest non-physical reorganization came through my Google Reader setup. I’ve been big on using RSS for a while now, and with GReader things just seem to click. The problem, then, becomes content; I tend to get way too upset by, well, most of the ‘front-page’ stories on Digg. I mentioned back in February that I was reading Digg and Slashdot through RSS only, and for a while that worked pretty well. I dumped Digg from my feed list during the whole HD-DVD key ‘revolt’, but put it back a few weeks after the crapflood had ended. Problem is, though, the front page stories are getting increasingly bad. Not because of the politics involved– I honestly could not give two craps about the election right now, nor do I particularly care about (insert conspiracy theory XYZ here, preferably blaming the current administration). I want tech news. So, I pulled the frontpage feed off and replaced it with the Apple and gaming feeds. Those seem to be quite adequate for my purposes.
I also added a few other prominent tech blogs to the feed conglomerate; specifically Engadget and Macworld. Moreover, though, I’ve decided to actually call attention to the stories that I read and find interesting. It’s not pretty right now, and it’s still in its infancy, but as I mark stories they’ll show up there. I’m tinkering with ways of embedding the feed here in the journal front page. (Also: forgive any weirdness with dating; GReader orders shared items in the sequence in which they were shared, not the order in which they were posted by their component blogs.)
I have most definitely fallen off the GTD wagon in the past few months. This disappoints me, as I had been so gung-ho about it when I first started out. However, that’s a situation I intend to rectify very soon. I need some time and resources to start the cleanup process, but I am going to go back to the basics, back to “desktop zero” and “inbox zero”. Moreover, that also means I need to break my bad habit of checking mail upon waking. It waited for eight hours, it can wait until I get into the office and have had sufficient caffeine to deal with whatever it is I need to deal with. GTD isn’t just about doing things, it’s about knowing when to do them and when not to do them. I really need to learn that lesson.
Finally, in order to save time when I get some of this stuff taken care of (specifically, the GTD stuff via software like iGTD, which now allows manual sorting finally), I’m thinking about getting a printer. I’d resisted getting one for quite some time because I didn’t want to have to deal with crap like paper and toner and all that, but having the printer at home means I can do all that wonderful GTD stuff in an automatic way without having to manually rewrite everything, and I won’t be dependent on an office printer or Kinko’s if I need to print something quickly.
Organization can be fun and easy if done right. And to be honest, I truly do enjoy getting my stuff in order. Anything that cuts down on distractions– like, say, the kind that meant I started this entry an hour and a half ago– is always good. In any event, I’ll catch you tomorrow– hopefully with some more in-depth impressions on Luminous Arc.
Hey. So I’m a little late with the linkage love. As a result, I’m giving you a 110% money back guarantee on the subscription fees to TFO.net*.
I’d been playing around with a few more GTD tools (that stands for Getting Things Done, incidentally) and found that my Dock was starting to get a little crowded. I briefly considered a replacement or extension to it until I decided to take a flyer on Quicksilver. The basic idea behind QS is that it instantly lets you search and automate certain tasks with just a few keystrokes. Let’s say I want to open up my “new blog post” bookmark; ordinarily I’d have to go to FireFox, click “Bookmarks”, then click “New Blog Post”. With QS, all I do is hit control-space and type “new blo”; it finds the FF bookmark and sets up a list of actions. I can hit Enter if all I want to do is open the bookmark (usually) or I can hit Tab to see what other options are available to me. All without leaving the keyboard. The iCal plugin isn’t obvious from an immediate glance but it’s damn nifty for quickly adding new events/logs. I still have to go into iCal to flesh out the details, but it’s faster to type “Friday 8am — DMV trip” than to mouse through the whole thing, especially on a trackpad.
As noted last night, I’m moving quickly through games. To be fair, I was nearly at the end of Castlevania anyway, but I still chose to add one more completion to the moratorium so as to slow myself down even further. I trimmed down my open games list on my whiteboard and will probably fix the list int he blog later today… I don’t want to get into another RPG so quickly just yet, so I’ll likely go through Hotel Dusk. I also want to talk a litte bit about FF12, but in the forums… perhaps this weekend.
I’ve collected about half a dozen agents to work with for publishing Incon. All, actually, without really reading through the copy of Writer’s Market I’d received back in November. That’s about to change, of course; I should be leafing through it and underlining stuff tomorrow in line at the DMV, though just because I should be doing it, it does not necessarily follow that I will.
Oh, yes. There will be a long rant, possibly upset, tomorrow. But it will be late; I want to save my ranting for after I have something to rant about, so as soon as I get done with the car stuff, we’ll talk. Ciao, folks.
* Refund offer expired… yeah, yesterday.
