The BigLig Thinks

I'm very cheerful this evening, so here are reasons why:
I no longer need to be jealous of my neighbour for having a shiny new iPod photo, now the iPod nano is out.
A work project that has been grinding along in a pointless delay for two weeks has finally crashed over the impediment and is shooting along at the speed I like.
I managed a post on Warren Ellis' new message board, The Engine, during the twenty seconds that his server wasn't on fire this morning.
The comment on my previous post, while dull, demonstrates that someone who is not a robot is reading this rubbish.
Chips for dinner.

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My feverish posting over the weekend seems to have unleashed the comment spam. Thanks Intarweb! A particular thank you to the idiot somewhere who clicks the links in these things, making it barely profitable.

I have added word checking in an attempt to disuade some of it.

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It appears that the real geeks use a different method, known as "one great big honking text file". You just put everything into a huge text file, and use things like search, grep, Vi macros, little scripts, and so on to work on it.
For example, you could make a list in your file like so:
[ ] Collect Underpants
[X] ?????
[ ] Profit
and grep it for [ ] to get a todo list.
This idea is intriguing to me, although there does not seem to be a definitive guide on how to make it work. Maybe that is a hint that I should try it, and annotate my results.
Some ideas that immediately occur:
The [ ] and [x] above.

• A vim macro to put the date in at the beginning of the line? Seems possible. Time to learn Vim, perhaps.
• Add contexts at the end - @Andy
• Add project titles at the end - %Exchange
• Write a script to make lists and produce a printable document.
• Write a script to parse tagged mails and add it to the file?

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I tried the HipsterPDA first of all. This is simply a pile of index cards, held together with a binder clip. This worked quite well, and was very portable. I couldn't print easily on the cards to make templates, which was a pain, and I never got the hang of using it as a collection tool as well as a list tool.

I tried with my Palm, syncronised with Outlook, but surprisingly, even though I am a big PDA fan, it didn't gel for me. So much so that I haven't even bothered trying to do it with my P910i.

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My Collection tools are my e-mail inbox (accessed usually via MS Outlook), a cheap grey plastic intray, an envelope in my organizing binder (see below)
My Calendar tool is the calendar in Microsoft Outlook. I keep a printed calendar in my binder but it is only for working out what day a date is or how long I have until a given date and so on.
My List tool is paper sheets in my binder.

More information on the binder. It's a small 4-hole A4 ring binder. I keep some reference material in there, and an A4 pad at the back for meetings or situations when I have to sketch a diagram, but the main work area comprises two sets of A5 loose sheets, punched with two holes at the top, set side by side. Like so:


In use, you hold the A4 binder landscape, and when you open it you have two A5 portrait loose-leaf pads next to each other.
On the left hand pad, plain paper, so I can scribble stuff down and put it into the collection tool. On the right, pre-printed sheets for my lists. Very simple, just wide spaced lines for the items, with a check box to mark them done, and some boxes at the top for the context of the list (in GTD you mark your various ToDo lists with the context in which you can do them. for example, I have one called @Andy that contains all the things I need to do when on the phone with my boss.)
Both pads are made from a variety of different colored papers to make it look nicer.

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So, what are these tools you need?

GTD is about workflow. You collect "stuff" - ideas, instructions, messages, thoughts into collection boxes. Then, every so often, you go through the stuff and process each piece.
First you decide if it is actionable. If not, you junk it, file it for reference, or maybe put it on a "nice to have" list to ponder in quiet moments.
If so, you either do it there and then, or delegate it, or defer it to later.
There are two sorts fo deferment; sometimes you have to defer it to a particular time in the future, otherwise you defer it to when you next have time.
This is a terribly short precis, read the book or visit 43 Folders for a proper description.
Anyhow, from all this you need three tools:
A collection tool that you use to gather stuff together
A list tool that you use to make lists of the action itmes you will do when you next have time.
A calendar tool you use to record things you are defering to a particular time in the future. The Calendar ideally links to the collection tool so that stuff magically gets collected when the time comes due.

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So, productivity. I'm a Getting Things Done fan; google for it and you'll find lots of interesting stuff.
Now one thing about GTD, that makes it so attractive to those of a geeky persusion, is that it is "tool-agnostic". That is to say, you need tools that do certain things, but how those tools work is up to you.
Now, I am not sure I have hit on the perfect toolkit yet. This is important, becuase you must totally trust your tools, otherwise GTD won't achieve its goal of getting worries out of your head and into external systems you trust.

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