Blog | tags gtd

Getting Things Done and How It Changed My Life

Getting Things Done (GTD) literally changed my life 3 years ago. Growing up I had always been highly unorganized. After reading about GTD on the internet I ordered the book by David Allen and instantly started to change the way I worked.

GTD offers a pretty simple theory for organization: Collect every task and action you have in one trusted place. Instead of the dozens of lists I had spread throughout my computer for various projects, I funneled them all into several lists in one place. I collected every little nagging task my head and put them in those same lists.

Having all my actions in one place allowed me to easily keep track and review what I had to do. This simple change completely altered the way that I worked. I am now extremely productive and I love it.

A few weeks ago I reread GTD and implemented a number of things I had not done before. I created an orderly physical filing system for all my important papers. When I first started using GTD I tricked myself into thinking that I did everything on my computer. Once my filing system was setup I saw that was hardly the truth.

After creating my filing system I set up what David Allen calls a tickler file. A tickler file is a series of 43 folders, one for each month and 31 for each possible day of the month. When I have a physical item that requires my future attention I put it into either the month folder that it pertains to or the day if it happens to be in within the next 30 days. Every morning I check my tickler file to see if any paperwork is waiting for me.

Getting Things Done has change my life for the better. There is no way I could have accomplished what I have in the last 3 years without it. Thanks to GTD, I can finally say I truly am organized. Being organized is awesome.

Route 66 and Clouds

Route 66 stretches out into the desert near Ludlow in this photo I took after a Desert Explorers Rendezvous in 2007.

Thursday, June 26th, 2008 - Read more...

GTD with OmniFocus

After three years of life changing organizational goodness, I migrated my plain-text-based GTD system to OmniFocus.

My text list system has not been the most efficient implementation. I decided it was time for a standalone application. After reading this GTD application comparison and watching a screencast about OmniFocus I decided to download the trial and give it a shot.

OmniFocus is a slick application. Thanks to its Cocoa goodness, it integrates perfectly with OS X. It has an easy-to-use interface, but its plethora of features takes some getting used to.

The hardest part was manually importing my several hundred tasks and projects. I had to copy and paste these one by one. It would be a nice feature if OmniFocus could parse plain text files and import each line as a task.

Once my tasks were imported I created projects and folders as you can see in the screenshot below. I then created contexts, some of which you can see in the right hand column of the screenshot.

When I was using my text lists I didn't fully utilize contexts properly, but OmniFocus makes them easy to implement. You can switch to Context mode, select a context like "Office" and see all the tasks that can be done in your office.

OmniFocus has a nice feature called Perspectives, where you can save a predetermined view of your tasks. I have one which I use to implement Zen Habits MITs (Most Important Tasks). Every night before I go to bed I review my Next Actions perspective and flag the tasks I want to complete the next day. The MITs perspective shows my flagged items, which I then (in theory) do.

I also have the iPhone app installed. It's not cheap: $20, but it works fairly well apart from the syncing speed. It takes a very long time (5-10 minutes) to sync changes over the EDGE network, which basically make it close to useless for quick entry. If I know I'm going to be using is I can let it sync for a few minutes.

OmniFocus is supposed to sync to a WebDAV server, but it fails on my FreeBSD server running Apache 2.2.3. I am forced to sync using Apple's buggy Mobile Me. I hope they fix the WebDAV sync issues before my Mobile Me free trial runs out!

OmniFocus: The Good

  • Feature rich GTD management.
  • Contexts rock for doing what you can, where you can.
  • Perspectives make reviewing, viewing and doing fun and easy.
  • Simple, system-wide quick-entry is only a keystroke away.
  • Due-dates and start-dates make planning and remember tasks easier.
  • Automated email parsing pulls tasks from Jott and other email based note taking systems.
  • SneakyPeak version with syncing is still in beta and thus is free.

OmniFocus: The Bad

  • WebDAV export and syncing is broken.
  • Syncing to iPhone app over EDGE takes over 5 minutes, making the app nearly worthless for quick entry.
  • iPhone app is expensive: $20
  • Desktop app is even more expensive: $80 ($120 for family pack)

Despite the imperfections and relatively high price, I really like OmniFocus. As soon as they fix the syncing (or they stop extending the free trial) I will be purchasing a license.

GTD with OmniFocus

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008 - Read more...

GTD

I just got in to GTD last week, my book hasn't even arrived yet via Amazon but I have read dozens of web pages about the process and I have my @action lists / projects / goals etc and it works great... put a whole bunch of tasks in to my dead and done file so far in the last few days.

My next step is to create a nice php/mysql interface that will sync with the text lists on my home/work desktops and my blackberry (which is on its way). So far I am using a combination of tar, openssl and scp to keep my lists synced, archived and encrypted. Fun stuff!

Monday, August 29th, 2005 - Read more...

Subscribe

Tags (Alpha)

activation-functions  ai  ai-ml  album-names  alexnet  alphago  anomaly-detection  antennas  apple  apple-news  apple-photos  art-center-college-of-design  artificial-intelligence  attention-mechanisms  autoencoders  autonomous-vehicles  autonomous-weapons  backpropagation  bert  big-data  black-hat-2007  blog-series  blogging  books  california  california-academy-of-sciences  canon-r6-mark-ii  canon-rf-2470mm-f-2-8-l-is-usm-lens  caption-generation  caves  celebrity-detection  chatgpt  chemistry  cnn  cnns  communication-with-interplanetary-spacecrafts  computer-vision  convolutional-layers  convolutional-neural-networks  crowdrise  data-denoising  data-extraction  data-privacy  decision-trees  decoder  deep-learning  deep-space-network--dsn-  denoising-autoencoders  dimensionality-reduction  disneyland  drum--n--bass  eecue  embeddings  encoder  engineering-leader  ensemble-learning  ethical-dilemmas  ethics  face-detection  facial-recognition  family  family-trips  feature-extraction  feedforward-neural-networks  fireworks  fnns  food  fully-connected-layers  gans  geeks  general  generative-models  gofundme  golden-gate-park  goldstone-deep-space-communications-complex  gpt  gpt3  gpus  gradient-descent  gru  gtd  ham-radio  hardware-accelerators  health  healthcare  hidden-states  history  image-analysis  image-classification  image-generation  image-keywords  image-processing  image-recognition  imagenet  innovation  interplanetary-spacecrafts  ios  ipad  iphone  japan  koreatown  large-language-models  latent-space  layers  led  lemos-farm  links  llm  locations  los-angeles  loss-functions  lstm  machine-learning  messagepack  military  ml-keyword-detection  ml-photo-scores  mlps  multilayer-perceptrons  music  nasa-jet-propulsion-laboratory--jpl-  natural-language-processing  navwar  neural-networks  neurons  new-mexico  nuclear  object-detection  openai  osxphotos  outdoors  overfitting  parallel-computing  photo-management  photo-sharing  photography  photos  photos-app  pirates  politics  pooling-layers  pyrotechnics  python  radar-imaging  recurrent-neural-networks  reinforcement-learning  rekognition  reverse-engineering  rnn  rnns  robotics  robots  san-bernardino-cave-and-technical-rescue-team  san-francisco  sar  science  security  segmentation  selfsupervised-learning  sequential-data  snarl  space-communication  space-exploration  spawar  speech-recognition  sqlite  support-vector-machines  symbolic-ai  tags-labeling  technical-skills  technology  temporal-dependencies  tensorflow  the-vermont-on-wilshire  time-series-forecasting  tpus  ujet  vaes  variational-autoencoders  vision-transformers  wag  wired  writing  

Tags (Count)

photography  los-angeles  links  general  technology  eecue  politics  security  japan  apple  sar  food  music  science  black-hat-2007  california  outdoors  new-mexico  nuclear  caves  machine-learning  robots  deep-learning  drum--n--bass  geeks  neural-networks  snarl  ai  computer-vision  gpus  gtd  health  natural-language-processing  object-detection  artificial-intelligence  autoencoders  backpropagation  celebrity-detection  chatgpt  cnn  facial-recognition  feature-extraction  fnns  gradient-descent  ham-radio  imagenet  osxphotos  robotics  sequential-data  spawar  sqlite  tpus  writing  activation-functions  ai-ml  album-names  alexnet  alphago  anomaly-detection  antennas  apple-news  apple-photos  art-center-college-of-design  attention-mechanisms  autonomous-vehicles  autonomous-weapons  bert  big-data  blog-series  blogging  books  california-academy-of-sciences  canon-r6-mark-ii  canon-rf-2470mm-f-2-8-l-is-usm-lens  caption-generation  chemistry  cnns  communication-with-interplanetary-spacecrafts  convolutional-layers  convolutional-neural-networks  crowdrise  data-denoising  data-extraction  data-privacy  decision-trees  decoder  deep-space-network--dsn-  denoising-autoencoders  dimensionality-reduction  disneyland  embeddings  encoder  engineering-leader  ensemble-learning  ethical-dilemmas  ethics  face-detection  family  family-trips  feedforward-neural-networks  fireworks  fully-connected-layers  gans  generative-models  gofundme  golden-gate-park  goldstone-deep-space-communications-complex  gpt  gpt3  gru  hardware-accelerators  healthcare  hidden-states  history  image-analysis  image-classification  image-generation  image-keywords  image-processing  image-recognition  innovation  interplanetary-spacecrafts  ios  ipad  iphone  koreatown  large-language-models  latent-space  layers  led  lemos-farm  llm  locations  loss-functions  lstm  messagepack  military  ml-keyword-detection  ml-photo-scores  mlps  multilayer-perceptrons  nasa-jet-propulsion-laboratory--jpl-  navwar  neurons  openai  overfitting  parallel-computing  photo-management  photo-sharing  photos  photos-app  pirates  pooling-layers  pyrotechnics  python  radar-imaging  recurrent-neural-networks  reinforcement-learning  rekognition  reverse-engineering  rnn  rnns  san-bernardino-cave-and-technical-rescue-team  san-francisco  segmentation  selfsupervised-learning  space-communication  space-exploration  speech-recognition  support-vector-machines  symbolic-ai  tags-labeling  technical-skills  temporal-dependencies  tensorflow  the-vermont-on-wilshire  time-series-forecasting  ujet  vaes  variational-autoencoders  vision-transformers  wag  wired