Back to Jim Matthews; we had a brief email conversation about TiddlyWiki. He said that since it was HTML, it should run quite quickly as an Outlook Today page. Missing the boat, I responded that I had looked at it once, but didn’t want to get into anything that I needed to be online for.

I had forgotten that you can keep TiddlyWiki on your local machine (even a USB key). So, after Jim pointed out the error of my ways, I repented my downloading a (relatively empty) TiddlyWiki and seeing what would happen if I pointed my Outlook Today (Personal Folders) home page to the tiddlywiki html file.

Ooooooh.

Here’s a screen shot:

This is what you would see in your Outlook Today page. I didn’t show the whole screen, but the left would hold the Outlook folder list, and above, you would see the standard menu bars. Now this one is the standard TiddlyWiki, and I’m sure that I could modify the CSS to produce different colours/fonts, etc.

Anyway, what a fascinating idea. Here, you could have access to a tiddlywiki without having to leave your Outlook. Why is this exciting? Well, for one, I tend to think of my Outlook as a working program, i.e., serious stuff gets done there. On the other hand, having a browser open is not always serious, so I would be less inclined to actually keep a tiddlywiki open and input things into it if I had to keep opening a browser (or even leaving a firefox tab open).

Secondly, there’s much talk on the web about using tiddlywiki for GTD things - just do a search and you should be able to find how people are using it.

I particularly like the concept of using CamelCase to create links to new “tiddlers” while I’m in the middle of writing something in a tiddler.

Anyway, the whole thing is kind of cool, and I’m going to leave this as my dashboard and see if I can make some use of it. Unfortunately, I’m very much tied to using EverNote (as well as Onfolio and OneNote, depending on what I’m working on), so I’m not sure that I need *another* ubiquitous capture tool ;)

Categories: GTD, outlook, tiddlywiki

I received another email from Jim Matthews the other day. He has created an interesting macro that can be used, when you’re in a contact or task form, to create a note object and then link to it in the body of the task or contact that you’re in. Sound confusing? Here’s a screen shot of the before and after:

And here’s Jim’s discussion of it, with the macro code.

This macro works with CONTACTS and TASKs. It ask for a Subject, creates a NOTE with the subject name, then creates a link at the top of the CONTACT/TASK body area. After you fill in the NOTE and close it, you can click the link and recall it. You might dress it up to do something useful.

Lets say you have a TASK form open and run this macro. An InputBox opens and you enter “@Action - Send to customer”.

A NOTE opens with the subject “@Action - Send to customer”. The body of the TASK now contains a link:

11/18/2005 > NOTE

Click on it and you have your note.

Public Sub LinkNote()

Dim objOutlook As Outlook.ApplicationDim ins As Outlook.InspectorDim TKitm As Outlook.TaskItemDim CNitm As Outlook.ContactItemDim NTitm As Outlook.NoteItemDim strText As StringDim lnkText As StringDim subText As String

subText = InputBox("Enter Subject", "SUBJECT")

Set objOutlook = CreateObject("Outlook.application")Set ins = objOutlook.ActiveInspectorSet NTitm = objOutlook.CreateItem(olNoteItem)Set itm = ins.CurrentItemNTitm.Display

strText = subText & vbCrLf & NTitm.Body'Write the text back to the Body fieldNTitm.Body = strTextNTitm.Color = olGreenNTitm.Save

lnkText = ""'lnkText = ""lnkText = lnkText & Date & " > NOTE" & vbCrLf & itm.Body'Write the text back to the Body fielditm.Body = lnkText

End Sub

I think it’s an interesting concept, especially if you want to create a separate note to hold some information, instead of keeping it in the body of the task. I can definitely see doing that when you want to keep referring to some information, and don’t want it to basically disappear when you’ve completed your task.

The only issue I have with the macro is that it somehow scares my Outlook, which keeps asking me if I want to let something access my contacts. I’ve seen that message box before, when I was syncing my Palm on a domain. No idea how to get rid of it though.

Anyway, thanks for the macro Jim!

Matt over at Matt’s Idea Blog has a very interesting post about GTD project naming conventions. Should they start with verbs, like actions do? Should they reflect the desired outcome? Should they just be short enough for a good label?

It’s a fascinating topic, especially since it’s not one that’s discussed often in the GTD blogosphere. I was curious as to how I actually named my projects. It turns out that in my project list, about half use a present participle verb (ing verb) and half are nouns.

For example:

Getting Papers
Reading
Editing the xxx
Helping xxx with xxx
Tweaking
Blogging

and

Cue Cards
Defence
xxx Paper
xxx Symposium
Next Meeting
Furnace

I think the difference between the two might be some implicit assumptions I have about the purpose or duration of the project. For instance, in some of my projects, there is a clear outcome but it is far away, then the project is more of a “doing” project. Other projects are less continuous, or have sharper edges, e.g., getting the furnace fixed is Furnace. On the other hand, I do have a couple of projects that start with a verb, and it turns out that these are definitely one-shot, fixed timeframe projects, such as “Review xxx Paper”.

Many of my projects don’t even get their own file folder (I use EverNote as my project support material repository), so the applicability of a project name as a file folder label is not such a big deal to me. If it turns out that I have to turn a “doing” project into a folder label, I would just remove the verb.

Anyway, it’s an interesting topic. Matt also asked his readers to let him know how they named their projects. Check out the comments in order to see what other GTDers are naming their projects.

Categories: GTD

2007-05-09 09:13 Updating link for dashboard. I’ve moved hosts, so it must be moved as well :)

I received a comment the other day in response to my post about customizing the Outlook dashboard. Basile69 requested that I upload my dashboard. No problem. Here is it. Don’t bother clicking on the link, it doesn’t look like much. Instead, save the link as an html file on your computer. Then, in Outlook, point your Personal Folders to this html file (look under its properties for Home Page). I’m still not quite happy with this dashboard, but I haven’t been working on it either ;) If anyone comes up with a really cool dashboard, let me know!

A little while ago, I posted about how the newest version of EverNote had been released, and how it allowed for a couple of interesting global shortcut keys: CTRL+ALT+V and CTRL+ALT+N. The first would allow you to paste the contents of the Windows clipboard into a brand new note. The second would open EverNote and start a brand new note for you.

I was very excited about the first one especially. So much so that I immediately started using it. And then broke it ;) Actually, I just found a couple of flaws. It turns out that one is a bug, and one is by design (so far).

First, I noticed abnormal behaviour with the global pasting. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. I decided to do some testing and see if I could recreate the environment that caused the global paste to not work. I posted about it on the EverNote support forum. It turns out that if EN is minimized, as opposed to being maximized in the background, or closed (and sitting in the tray), then the global paste does not work. This is a bug, and hopefully will be fixed soon.

The other problem I found when I wanted to make a whole whack (scientific term, that) of new notes, based on the contents of a particular text file. I wanted each one to be a To Do Single note, so I was planning on copying a line from the text file, and using CTRL+ALT+V to create a new To Do Single note for each one. I set the default note type appropriately (that’s handy) and then started. Only to find out that the global shortcut for pasting does not work for the templates! I posted about this as well. Turns out that they haven’t got the global shortcut keys working for actual templates yet. Oh well.

Now that I know these two things though, I can make use of the shortcuts very well. I just have to keep remembering to not minimize my EN!