Humble GTD Wannabe here. I was so happy that I put out another essay, I guess this morning. But I wrote it last night. And I goofed. I misread a page and accidentally attributed not one, but three GTD Tiddly Wiki solutions to a particular person. Turns out he was writing *about* them. I just missed a couple of words. I did think it a bit strange that he was so prolific, but he had mentioned “thesis”, and I know how super-productive that makes me in non-thesis matters, so I said, okay.

Then, tonight I noticed a comment on my blog saying that a small flaw in MonkeyGTD had been fixed. But it wasn’t the same name. So, curious me, I went to double-check. Doh! Amazing Homer Simpson moment - I made a large gaffe, and although nobody called me on it, I feel really bad. So, I’ve just updated the essay on The Adventures of d3 and the Monkey. As well, I’m going to email the people involved, just so they know that I’m not completely inept.

So, if you read my post earlier about GTD Tiddly Wikis, please go back and check out the corrected version of the essay. The amendments are in red, so you can see at a glance what’s new. And again, my apologies to all involved, and all readers. I shall endeavour to do better research in the future.

Sincerely,

GTD Wannabe

I actually have another essay already. Turns out that I had a bad day and didn’t want to do work tonight. What better way to relax than to write something up. (And lest you think I’m too crazy, I had all the screenshots and movies already made.)

Anyway, this essay is a bit about my odyssey to find a perfect wiki for GTDing. I’ve put some effort into looking at two particular GTD wikis in particular, but there’s a bit more general information involved as well. I hope you find it useful.

I was just reading the David Allen Co. Forum and found something that I just have to share with you. In this post, m_s points us to a post at Donation Coder in which he/she gives a great runthrough of his/her quest for the perfect GTD software. m_s is hardcore - trying all sorts of stuff and giving a great review, including screenshots. If you want to learn a bit more about making various programs/web sites (like MyLifeOrganized, RememberTheMilk, Backpack, etc.) work for your GTDness, give it a look-see.

Categories: GTD, mlo, software

I received an email the other day from a fellow grad student, wanting to know about how I used EverNote for my research. Specifically, about how I used it as a bibliographic database, could it be used for keeping article information, notes, research thoughts, etc. organized. And how.

I spent a few hours writing up a reply, including a lovely screenshot of part of my actual database. I think it’s just a bit too big to turn into a blog post, so I turned it into an essay. If you’re interested in EN at all, check it out. For those of you who don’t want to read the whole thing, I’ll just include my summary here:

I think the beauty of EN is that you have so much flexibility with it. If you combine automatic keywords, the keyword intersection panel, and shortcut categories, you can make a very complex interweaving of all of your notes, writing, references, and thought. It’s definitely changed how I keep track of my research now. I’m no longer worried about losing track of information. In my old system, I found that I was never referring to my old notes because I didn’t know what was there. Now, I can write notes in the now, adding keywords as I go, and be comfortable with the fact that the next time I want to think about #analysis#, I can just find all of my notes on #analysis# and have nothing missing. I don’t have to remember that some arcane article that I read a year ago had something useful in it.

Are you a google-maniac? Love GTD? Got so excited about the new Google Calendar functionality that you almost wet your pants? Yeah? Me too! I was excited about another cool Google invention, but I never really thought about melding it into my GTD toolset (which is currently undergoing some changes, but that’s another post…)

Anyway, I was just asked by Isaac of the relatively new Isaac Bowman Thinking Outside the Box blog to check out a post he just did on implementing GTD with Google’s new calendar. Ever happy to oblige, I just checked it out. Very interesting. Especially for people who want to avoid the “man” and Outlook. (I’ll let you in on a little secret - one of the reasons I like Outlook is because I like how the calendar looks. Shhhhh, don’t tell anyone.) But when I saw Google’s version of the calendar, I was tempted. Very very tempted. It’s a nice, clean interface, with the kind of views I like, i.e., monthly, weekly.

I found Isaac’s post very informative - and it’s got great examples/screenshots. I remember when I first looked at the Calendar a few days ago, I was disappointed because all of my calendar entries would be the same colour - and I like to colour code them by their nature, e.g., +ToDo vs. +Hard vs. +Info, etc. Isaac’s post showed me that it is painfully easy to create *multiple calendars*. Duh - it’s so elegant! He’s even got different calendars in order to distinguish between Next Actions and Hard Landscape items. I think that there’s only one tiny flaw in using the Calendar as your sole NA holder though - you would end up dating everything. However, if you were to combine the Calendar for your hard landscape (and those NAs that *have* to get done on a particular day), with the older whitepaper for using Gmail with GTD, you could have a very slick, online system.

Now, I can see how I could actually move from Outlook to the Google Calendar. There are two things that would hold me back:

1. I hate to be solely tied to anything that has to be online. What happens when I’m out camping or whatever, and have no internet access? Yes, one could argue that I shouldn’t be working anyway, but that’s besides the point ;)
2. I’m still attached to my Palm, and although there’s a way to import into Google, there’s no way that I can figure out to export it to Palm. (At least, none that I know of.)

But besides that, it looks like an interesting option. And thanks Isaac, for writing up such a great intro to it!

Categories: GTD, google