I was telephoned by Tesco today, apologising for the anticipated late arrival of my shopping. It’s expected to arrive around about 1.30pm to 1.45pm.
Nice. Except, that’s not late. When you place an order, you select a two hour delivery slot. Mine’s 12pm to 2pm.
Please Tesco, don’t waste your time apologising for something that isn’t a problem. And don’t waste my time either.
One of our clients e-mailed me recently asking “Aren’t you having any time off?”. The answer to this question is, yes, 98% of the time I’m spending in Canada is holiday. The remainder is work. That’s about 30 minutes a day.
The single greatest benefit from applying Getting Things Done (GTD) when your whole organisation uses it is that it makes everyone more productive, and encourages everyone to find ways to become more efficient. Once this philosophy, if not the exact process, is institutionalised, handling business becomes much easier. Without GTD, procrastination is easy, but the secret to GTD is that not procrastinating is even easier. If a task takes less than 2 minutes to deal with when it first appears, do it now.
Correspondingly, it takes me 30 minutes each day to do the following:
I can do this because we have the right tools to support our business. It’s taken us a long time to find these tools and apply them appropriately, but the effort has been worth it.
It shouldn’t even take me this long, but I’m on an internet connection roughly 100 times slower than my connection at work. I reckon I could cut this down to 10 minutes with a broadband connection. Two words: everything online.
Now that I am becoming more tuned into GTD, and the wonders of Apple Mail, I keep discovering other solutions to the problems of managing work.
A few weeks ago, Foldera launched as a private beta. Foldera aims to provide a project-oriented view of a wide range of information. It’s a hosted service that on first glance looks like someone took all the current and upcoming 37signals applications and bundled them into a Entourage-style interface.
This seems like a good idea. If I’m working on Project A, I can go to one place and see everything related to the project – e-mails, tasks, contacts etc. The problem is that it doesn’t help decide what to do Now. That’s the amazing thing about GTD.
I performed yesterday’s weekly review using kGTD and I now have a list of things I need to do next week, in one place. Those things are also in their respective projects. Yup. Two views of the same information. I can also see at a glance everything I need to do in one place. Yup. Three views. kGTD also hides from certain views things I don’t need to see until they are due. This reduces brain clutter. It’s all very well having things organised – each in their place – but problems start arising when you can see everything you need to do now, have done or will need to do. It becomes overwhelming.
There are a lot of programs that provide multiple ad-hoc views of the same information. Apple Mail, however, is the one that beats them all. If I send an e-mail to someone that I also need to action, I e-mail a special address. When Apple Mail receives my e-mail it files it in my Actions folder, because Apple Mail does rules.
Smart Mailboxes are also an incredible feature. I can create ‘folders’ of messages based on pretty much anything I feel like. This allows me to create folders for projects, for people, words, phrases, Actions from a specific project – because Smart Mailboxes can use other Smart Mailboxes as input. You can group Smart Mailboxes into another folder and folders can be organised hierarchically. Of course, folders can also be created and populated manually.
Want a Smart Mailbox containing old mail messages which I haven’t read for three months that contain attachments? I do. Apple Mail can do it. I also have everything I’ve sent to or received from a particular client automatically available in one place. When you have these facilities, you start to rethink what you really want to know and how you want it organised.
Then there are the contextual menus – allowing quick filing of messages in your inbox. Who needs SpeedFiler? Ah, but that Windows application is going to have multiple tags in its new version. Apple Mail knows nothing about tags, but MailTags does:
MailTags is a plug in for Apple Mail. Yes, it does multiple tags for mail messages. It’s seamlessly integrated with Apple Mail, which means it works with Smart Mailboxes. Then there’s Act-On which provides enhanced automated and manual filing triggered by keystrokes.
All of this just helps me get my life done.
I’ve always hated demoing things to clients at my desk. I work on a few projects at the same time, and my Mac desktop is full of icons. I have dozens of applications open often showing commercially sensitive information. Getting everything ‘pretty’ for visits can be time consuming.
I could use one of the virtual desktop switchers, but why should I when I can use something built-in?
Today I set up a ‘clients’ user on my Mac. Then, when someone comes to visit, I just switch to that user. Furthermore, if they are coming to discuss graphics or their website, I can have the appropriate applications open already. No more closing files in Fireworks and opening other ones. No more ‘please wait a minute’. Clients can now turn up late without any consequence to my current activities.
I don’t get the cool 3D cube transition on my elderly Mac, but the transition is snappy, taking a couple of seconds after confirming the password.
Suppose you want to install a MySQL/ODBC Connector for Windows. You go to the MySQL website and download the installer, which is named something useful like mysql-connector-odbc-3.51.12-win32.zip.
Then you unzip it. What’s it then called?
Yes: Setup.exe.
Just like hundreds of other Windows installers. No clue as to what it will install.
And on a Mac? Well, it’s disk image. So it unpacks itself and pops it on your desktop. What’s the package called: mysql-connector-odbc-3.51.12-apple-darwin8.2.0-powerpc.pkg
A bit more obvious, huh?
It’s been many months since I posted Getting Organised, parts 1 and 2. I have since abandoned the paper based system and embraced the GTD philosophy with my own tweaks. This has resulted in a major change to my behaviour and a significant drop in stress. This post outlines what I do now and some thoughts for the future. It is not about GTD.
The simplest things to implement in GTD are the various categorisations of information and lists. I have the following:
Mail folders for Actions, Waiting For and Someday / Maybe. My Inbox remains empty, and I work on the principle that when an e-mail arrives, if I can answer it in 2 minutes I do it, otherwise it gets filed somewhere else. Apple Mail includes the concept of Smart Folders, which allows me to group and find things automatically. This is a great aid to efficient working.
GTD groups things into Projects. A Project is anything which takes more than one Next Action. For business Projects that require us to work together, we use Basecamp, 37Signals cheap but remarkable web based collaboration tool. Todos listed on Basecamp are assigned to one or both of us. It’s then up to us individually to manage them once assigned. Indeed, a Todo in Basecamp might be a Project in GTD terms.
I manage Next Actions in a variety of ways, according to the Project I’m working on. Generally, I use Backpack, which is a 37Signals web tool that provides a way of organising and managing personal tasks and information. Specific Projects get their own page in Backpack and I can put Next Actions there. This means I don’t clutter up Basecamp with stuff that Mark or our clients don’t need to know about.
Maintaining a Tickler Folder is the most tricky part of GTD. I used to have physical folders, but I kept forgetting to review them at the start of each day. Instead I use Backpack. Each day has it’s own page, and I’ve written a PHP script to automatically do the updating, create new day pages, and move stuff between days. There is rudimentary support for recurring events in my PHP script, and I have iCal e-mail other events to Backpack which the script handles. The script also rolls over incomplete Todos. This script is my homepage in Firefox, and it redirects to today.
This all leaves two things: what do I do today, and what happens to new things?
The place I look is on the current day page of my Backpack account. Then there’s the specific Project pages. This gives me a list of all the things I can do today, but not necessarily what I’ve decided to do.
For this I use a 3” x 3” piece of paper – the kind you get on jotter pads. I have these everywhere in my house, together with pens, so I’m never at a loss for writing down an idea or thought. The 3by3 (as I call it) technique involves writing down what I want to do. If I run out of space, then tough.. nothing else gets done. Furthermore, I partition the 3by3 into working hours.
New things can appear in lots of places, but they are mostly handled the same way. They can become Actions or Someday / Maybe in Mail, or entries in a Backpack day page, or a Basecamp or Backpack Project. Sometimes I just need to note it down and deal with it later. In such cases I keep them in a LBB (a Moleskine 3” x 5” Plain Pocket Notebook) – which is also great when visiting clients.
Something that’s been bothering some Basecamp users is that it doesn’t support bars in its Milestone calendar. That is, you cannot see a start and end date of an activity, or discover that on a particular day some activity should be happening.
Since ‘doing my own thing’, I’ve realised that Gantt charts are pretty much useless for this information. Why? Well, it doesn’t matter what should be on-going on a particular day. You’re either dealing with an ongoing project – in which case you have discrete Next Actions (if you’re using GTD), or there is something which must happen Today, so you have a milestone for Today, or there is something which can be done today, which you keep on a list someplace else and you deal with it as your time and situation allows.
I’ve often considered posting the above musings to the Basecamp forums to back up the ‘less is more’ philosophy, but decided against it, because, for me it’s so damn obvious. And in any case what’s really important about a bar?
I’ll tell you: it’s where it starts and it’s where it ends. Not what happens in the middle.
My friend and business partner Mark has just used Basecamp to mark his holiday. He’s got two dates as milestones: the first day of the holiday and the last day. Nothing else. Because it doesn’t matter to me or him to know that someplace in the middle he’s still on holiday.
Throwing Muses:
I hold you in my shins
I won't break your pain
This is much better than me, okay?
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