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 And last, things that trash/useless/out-of-date/etc, which you can safely just throw away.

3 Sheet Day

I’ve been planning my day out for a while now, using several methods. First off, just by planning events and using the special “Agenda” feature of Google Calendar. Then I’ve hunted for off-line version, and came up on Sunbird, which worked, but the printing needed a lot of work. There have been other hard-copy attempts too, from D*I*Y Planner and other lesser-known sites. But none of them were quite what I was looking for. So now I present to you… the 3 Sheet Day.

It’s a simple but effective time-management/semi-GTD technique. I’m pretty sure it’s original, but you never know, with however many billion people there are. It’s broken down into just 3 steps, and uses exactly 3 sheets of paper.

Sheet One: Just list everything that you are going to, or are considering doing. Include something like a title (“Radioshack Mic,” or “The Chosen Paper”) that should describe what it is, but not in too much detail. Then, near the middle of the page or so, include the priority. This can be (as I do it) High/Medium/Low, or a scale (1-5, 1-10, etc.)… whatever you want. Just make sure there are at least a couple different groupings. And finally, your estimated time. Don’t be too exact and say something like “47 minutes,” even if you know that’s exactly how long it will take. Try to round it to the nearest ten minutes/one hour. This gives you padding if anything comes up, or another event/task runs over.

Sheet Two: Copy everything from Sheet One. This time, organize the events first by priority (highest to lowest), then by time (longest to shortest). So “Watch Superbad — Medium — 2 hrs” should be higher up than “Call Liz — Medium — 30 min.” If you have two or more events that are the same amount of time and the same priority, just organize those in whatever order you want.

Once you’ve done that, take some time and cross out any events you know you won’t be doing. If you total hours add up to more than seven or eight, go ahead and chop some more events off. You should be left with no more than 20 or so tasks. What you also want to do is connect/group events that are similar or take place in the same area or something. Shopping at Target should probably be grouped with Grocery Shopping, since you’re out anyway at a store. Or if you’re biking down to Radioshack, group the “Fees at Library?” event with it, since the library falls along the way (it might not, but it does for me).

Sheet Three: This is your day. Don’t list priorities in this one; just the titles and times. Start off the day with one or two hours of a Medium task. Now add in some groups that you’ve already added one event of, or just move on; whatever works. Now add a High event or two. If they’re long, split them up into a couple parts (like my “Autobiography Paper,” which has 2 parts, each 1 hour long). Now take a break with a Low event, and then ease in to your remaining Highs with one hour (or less) of Mediums. And finally, just add on whatever’s left, in order of priority. You should have something like this (Note: the priorities aren’t on the sheet, just for reference now):

Clean/Pack Room (Med) -- 1 hour
Mow Rin's Lawn (Med, grouped with below) -- 1 hour
Figure Out Lawns (Low, grouped with above) -- 30 min
Chosen Paper (Med) -- 30 min
Autobiography, Pt 1 (High) -- 1 hour
Radioshack Microphone (Med, grouped with below) -- 30 min
Fees @ Library? (Low, grouped with above) -- 10 min
History Notes (Med) -- 30 min
Autobiography, Pt 2 (High) -- 1 hour
Figure out Defcon (Med) -- 1 hour

You don’t have to assosciate times with them. Just get them done in the order given, and you’ll have a lot more done than you’d think. It works for me, at any rate. Just wanted to pass this concept on, in hopes that maybe somebody will at least try it.

Tiddly Winks

I’ve been using Google Notebook for a good while now. But what I don’t like is that Google doesn’t provide an offline version. It’s a great tool, and I would love to have it on my desktop. So I set out to make an offline version from the original (Firefox’s Save As… Web Page (Complete)). But after going through over 1000 lines of Javascript, it occured to me: where’s the notebooks? I did some research and found it it was AJAX based. So that was a no-go.

But I continued Google-ing and reading for a while, until I stumbled on a post about some new technology or other that could make it possible. For Windows. But as I read the comments, somebody brought up something they used and liked better, TiddlyWiki. A bit more searching brought up the link. It was actually rather amazing, to me.

It was an alternate Wiki system. It describes itself as a “non-linear reusable web notebook,” but its much more. Built with pure CSS, HTML, and Javascript, it is all in one HTML file. You can have plugins, stylesheets, random CSS, macros, themes, the works, while still just contained inside of that one file.

There are a lot of different uses for it. Some people use the “flavors” (modified versions distributed with plugins or themes pre-installed) MonkeyGTD and d³ as GTD systems. Others use it as a blog (you can deny non-admin editing), or as a way to present stuff at work (aided by the Presentation distro), and some as a simple notebook.

It’s got all kinds of stuff written for it. All macros and plugins are just combinations of CSS and Javascript and HTML, so anybody can write one. There are some that change it to a more Wikipedia style (combining SingePageModePlugin with BreadcrumbsPlugin, and the right style), some that add calendars, splashscreens, GTD systems, little toys… the system is your playground. It’s very cool, and I highly recommend checking it out.

You can run it anywhere, as long as you use IE or Firefox ( > 1.5). I’ve even got it running on my DSL installation. As for hosting, I know for a fact that GooglePages can run at least 1 copy of it, with plugins and themes. There’s also TiddlySpot, which is just for TiddlyWikis, and offers a bunch of pre-installed flavors to start of with (though Standard is still an option).

The Fox is on Fire!

Originally started 3/23/07, didn’t just type this in like 5 minutes ;)

Digg used to be my homepage. Then I learned about the coolest feature of Firefox: tabbed bookmarks. Say you want to save Digg and giantitp.com (home of Order of the Stick) as bookmarks. But, you’re lazy and don’t want to click two separate bookmark buttons. How to do this? Easy; open them in two tabs by setting the bookmark to:
www.digg.com|www.giantitp.com
Each | (that’s a pipe, SHIFT+\, or SHIFT+BACKSLASH) means “in a new tab.” So, 1.com|2.com|3.com|4.com would open 4 tabs, one with each of the four websites listed.

What’s so cool, though? This applies to home pages, too. Mine, for example, is
http://www.netvibes.com/|http://www.digg.com
Netvibes, you ask? That brings me to my next topic….

There was a Digg article a while back, covering Netvibes. I had no idea, at the time, that it was so awesome. Basically, you can have tabs (inside of browser tabs, that is ;) ) with just about any kind of content in them. Very useful, you might want to check it out.