Interesting ideas and tips from the productosphere

Plan your work and work your plan

Organising my home tasks with a week planner | blog to discovery:

"There are 14 boxes each representing a different area of my life e.g. website, writing, health, friends. On Sundays I go through my home task list and add two tasks to each section on the form. This provides a spread of tasks to ensure I am progressing each area of my life, but is also a manageable number to complete in a week (although I haven’t actually completed all of them yet). There is also an area to mark any deadlines and to highlight any tasks that I am resisting."

Maybe that's why I'm always reorganizing

Simply GTD with Kelly: Shifting your position:

"Did you ever move your bedroom around as a kid? Even a simple thing like moving your bed from one wall to another? Remember going to bed that night? It felt new and exciting. Same furniture, new perspective. If that worked for you as a kid, it can work for you as an adult."

I read this paper. It's really good!

[Productivity Workflows] - Blog Archive - Getting Things Done: The Science Behing Stress-Free Productivity:

"A post on the David Allen Company Forum draws attention to an intriguing academic paper, available for download as a preprint, which seems worth a read. It is: Francis Heylighen and Clement Vidal (2007) Getting Things Done: The Science behind Stress-Free Productivity."

Who could resist a good Conan quote?

The Task Tarot at LifeClever ;-) Tips for Design and Life:

"Personally, there are days I’d rather be elbow-deep in cow guts than take another scan through my to-do list. At least a good hieromancer would give you a clear answer, from 'the crops will be good this year' to 'you will crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women!'"

ZuluPad

If you've ever considered using a personal wiki to track your GTD to-dos and notes, but abandoned the idea because the software was too cumbersome, you might give ZuluPad a try. I've been using it recently to hold all my various lists and notes and it's really impressive. Go for the Pro version, available for a $15 donation, which allows you to print, add images, and synchronize your wiki online so that you can use it on multiple computers.

My main ZuluPad document is growing by leaps and bounds. I'm using it for all my GTD lists and notes, and I'm loving it so far. Making links to other pages within the wiki or on the Web is practically effortless, and I easily got my pages to print on Circa Junior paper. There's a handy datestamp feature, and it's easy to navigate between all your pages. The online synch has worked perfectly so far.

The program gets a little slow on larger documents, but not too slow to be particularly annoying. The only things I find myself missing so far are traditional word processing functions like bullet points, customizable headers, and a spell check.

Developer Thomas Gersic seems engaged with an adoring ZuluPad fanbase on his Web site, so hopefully some of those options will appear in a later release. Even without them, ZuluPad is one of the most useful and well-written programs I've found online - simple, elegant, useful.

Ready for Anything: The Verdict

Well, it's a strange book. Basically, it's a collection of insights that Allen came up with writing his email newsletter. They're gathered into sections, but they don't necessarily relate to each other very well. He also veers off into new-agey stuff too much. Finally, I'm still not convinced that this whole idea that "the brain has limited RAM" is even true. Let's ask Stephen Pinker what he thinks, then maybe I'll get on board. This idea permeates the book, and the point is made over and over. Can't GTD just be a good way to organize stuff? Why does it have to be the meaning of life too?