GTD In A Nutshell (Except I’ve Never Read The Book)

You’ll notice (I’ll understand, blind people) that I’ve got a new theme for kidkonia. This is for one main reason: I hated the old one. There; I said it. The old theme put some weird border around every image I posted (couldn’t get around this!), ended up warping quite a bit of what I wrote into a much uglier format that I’d intended, and was just a general monstrosity of a theme. So I got rid of it, and went for Blix instead.

Now, on to GTD. I’ve never read the much-praised Getting Things Done by David Allen, but have just recently found many little short descriptions. I pieced them all together to get a rough sketch of what Mr Allen intended. So, let’s just walk through what I think GTD is, and how to do it.

GTD stands for Getting Things Done. It’s not that hard, you say? Well, fine for you. But for everybody else who’s having trouble doing things they wanted done yesterday, Mr Allen has more than just a few suggestions.

Start with the most important concept, writing everything down. I mean everything. Your brain can only handle so much, and the more there is in it, the worse it handles whatever’s on your mind. So David’s solution is to write everything down, freeing up your brain’s “RAM” (as he puts it). This does require you to have paper on hand, but we’ll get to that later.

From there, you want to classify things into one of six groups. First, things that take less than two minutes. Anything that does, do it immediatly. Second are Actions. These are, well, actions, that take longer than two minutes, but aren’t too long-term. Just put them on a Next Actions list and do them when you can. Try to clear your list by the end of the day. Third come things you’re waiting for. These go on a Waiting For list (surprised?). Generally, Actions depend on these. Fourth, things that are multi-step: these are called Projects. Just check on them frequently to see if you can do the next Action (step) for the project. Fifth are things that you can archive/save for later. This would include reference material, or Someday things that you want to do… well, someday, but not right now. And last, things that trash/useless/out-of-date/etc, which you can safely just throw away.

Google Video’s Downloads, and How to Hack It

You’ll notice, browsing Google Video’s selection, that some videos have a “download” button, others don’t. For example, a user put together all of RvB Seasons 1-5, but 3-5 aren’t download-able… or are they? Firebug reveals that the download button does this (taken from the “Red vs Blue Season 2″ video):
onDownloadClick("4833169745208123782","","",ele("platform").value)
Interesting… the long number is the exact number in the url:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4833169745208123782
And ele("platform").value? Well, that’s just a JS function for some DOM work to get the value of the “platform” dropbox, who’s only option sets the value to “ipod”. A little JS code hacking, and here’s a work-all function:
onDownloadClick("[insert docid here]","","","ipod")
Using Firebug, select the “thumbsetc” div, and insert this bit of HTML:
<a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick='onDownloadClick("[insert docid here]","","","ipod")'>Download</a>
<!-- Or, if you want the button... -->
<img onclick="onDownloadClick("[docid]","","","ipod")" src="/static/btn_download.gif"/>
(No, I don’t know why the spaces are there… take them out, since I can’t) Substituting the docid for the text. Now just click Edit again, and a Download link should appear somewhere in the right-hand pane. Click it to download an MP4 of whatever video you may be watching!

If anybody can patch together a Greasemonkey script for this, let me know!

Update: Amazingly as this worked the first time, it now finds all sorts of errors. It’s a lot easier just to find a video that can be downloaded, fire up Firebug and edit the download button’s source to change the pointed-to docid…