This is a blog by Sven Fechner from Stuttgart, Germany - Principal Consultant for a global networking company. I am passionate about simplicity at work, in business and management, on my Mac and when it comes to personal productivity.
I fiddled around quite a bit with my perspectives in OmniFocus and at one point in time I had more than 15 perspectives, which was absolutely useless. Hence I took some time to bring it down to the minimum of perspectives I need. Here they are. I do not use "Flagged" and "Completed", but they are default perspectives of OmniFocus that you can not delete.
Although not for people with hugh tasks list or those following the GTD methodology, but still TeuxDeux is a beautiful designed, web-based and for free task manager for daily tasks. Design by @swissmiss.
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An old, but remarkable scene from "Any Given Sunday". Sometimes we just need to fight for every inch in our (professional) lives.
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I am the first to blame when it comes to automating my personal workflows to the greatest extend possible. And how would you dare to do different, every singe life hacker or personal productivity blog tells you so, the knowledge worker age demands you to be more efficient and seriously who would prefer to do something manual when a machine get do it for you.
And yes, it is convenient to have stupid and repetitive tasks taken care of by an AppleScript that works like a monkey trained to press buttons for food. But the key here is "stupid and repetitive" - while many workflows in your personal organisation and productivity may be repetitive, there are definitely not stupid. I would argue that they are actually so important that they help you differentiating yourself in the business you do. Whatever that is.
You'll find many, many AppleScripts that are designed to make your personal productivity workflow more easy and automated - it all goes by a single keystroke - and yes, even this blog includes many of these 'helpers', but I have changed opinion since I wrote those and that should be okay. Changing your opinion is not an trivial thing, but it is a undeniable signs of progress.
I have decided to drop all my little helper scripts that primarily supported by "Collect" process, meaning getting everything into my inbox, i.e. my task manager of choice. And the reason I dropped them is because they made me pass the "Clarify" step in my process, the step in which I need to determine what things "mean" to me. It became a fire-and-forget process where I collect everything I found (which is good) and because I have collected it, I never looked back at it and clarified where it is actionable, can be delegated, is reference or trash (which is bad).
Although it may take you a little more time, stop automating and look at the things you collected. Decide what they "mean" to you and what you need to do about it. Ever since I stopped automating the collection of mails from Mail.App to my task manager, I became far clearer of what I wish to do and what not, what is important and what not, what action I need to take and what the successful outcome would be.
It helped me massively to feel more in control and gave me a greater perspective of things (what is relevant to my key goals and what is simply 'noise'). For the first time I was able to understand those people that use paper-based productivity systems - with those you don't have any automation at all and that isn't so bad.
Your challenge for the day: Disable all this automation, work it the manual way and find out how this changes your approach.
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Dealing with file clutter remains a challenge for all of us that like to increase their personal productivity and review, filter, sort and file new documents or downloads as effective and efficient as possible, but at the same time make sure we are able to retrieve them in at least the same time.
Personally, I've tried many solution to deal with file clutter. I went from "heavy-weight" file management solution like Yojimbo, Together or DevonThink to more "light-weight" ones such as Shovebox. None of them really did the job for me as I've either seen to slow performance, have been over oder underwhelmed by the the available features, but most of the time I just missed the Mac OS X Finder, which I think is still the best file management available.
Hence I wanted a minimalistic, Finder-based document management approach that complied with the GTD methodology and delivered the greatest possible integration with Mac OS X. Finder was the choice, however, what I missed in Finder, and that was really the only thing I missed, was the ability to tag files. So my solution to deal with file clutter involves Tags from GravityApps to apply tags to all my documents (Tags goes way beyond this, by the way). In addition I was looking to make the entire process as keyboard centric as possible, especially the part where I move the documents in the appropriate folder. LaunchBar, a Quicksilver equivalent, does a great job for me in that respect. Watch my screencast above to get a glimpse of my simple solution in action.
You will also see how I organise my documents and especially dealing with reference material, being the GTDer I am, in the video.
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Mozilla tries to bring all forms of web-based communication (flickr, facebook, twitter, ...) together with email and tries to bring sense and usability to it. The 0.1 doesn't look like a big leap yet, but some of the design principles do make a lot of sense.
However, since they target for a web-based solution, it may again be one of those great tools you'd like to have, but being a corporate citizen, there isn't any way to make it poll your company mail account - which makes it a no-go for many.
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The promises made for the Doxie scanner are great: Integrating with your existing document management rather than introducing new applications (e.g. like by NeatReceipt Mac), low price point and global availability.
Really keen to get my hands on it. But also wondering if Doxie keeps up with the availability date this November.
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These work sticks would actually help quite a bit in many of these meeting without agendas and clear outcomes happening in our corporate world every day.
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Taking it seriously with GTD projects isn't always easy. While you'll be able to grasp the concept of projects in GTD fairly quickly, you'll have a number of challenges to adopt your way of working. By definition, everything that takes more than two steps and has your attention qualifies as a project. The majority of these projects, say those with four to five action steps, are fairly straight-forward and don not require a lot of brainstorming and planning, i.e. getting tires changed on your car. But then again you have these really large projects that first need some cutting (creating smaller sub-projects) and more serious planning and organisation.
For those projects I, for a long time, struggled to get myself sorted. Of course I use a task list manager and of course I store project support materials in a separate folder. But this alone did not help me to see things through and so I came up with the idea of a Project Charter and a simple way to link all things together.
My project charter is nothing more than a simple OmniOutliner Pro template that structures the information and holds some simple check-lists for myself (which I delete once the charter is done).
So here is what the Project Charter contains:
As you can see not an awful lot of information, but that is by design. I wanted to keep the barrier as low as possible so that I actually create a project charter for every major project. Again, you may not want to do this for every single project, specifically not for those that you feel comfortable and in control with, but the bigger once deserve this level of attention, planning and organisation.
Of course you can use other tools such as Word, Pages, Ponies Notebook, ... to do the same thing. OmniOutliner just happens to be my tool of choice and so is The Hit List (THL) from Potion Factory when it comes to task management. What I like about both is the linking capabilities. Again, OmniFocus or Things provide similar functionality, so you should be okay adopting this in your environment.
Most important to me is that I have things available in the right context and without any effort to find or open. So I tend to interlink things where ever possible. The project charter and the project folder get inserted into THL as simple tasks (unfortunately the only way you can currently do this in THL) that always stay on top of the project task list.
As you can see the alias links get inserted as small icons into the notes section of these two tasks. Not assigning any context like "@email" to those tasks makes sure that they do not show up in any of my context task lists where I usually perform my actions. But whenever I need to access this information, I can quickly change to the project list from the context task list by using "Show in List" from THL's context (right-click) task menu.
Download the OmniOutliner 3 template or the OPML version if you use another outlining tool. To use it as an template in OmniOutliner Pro open the file and "File > Save As" OmniOutliner Template in your template directory. You should then be able to create new Project Charters from this template by "File > New from Template > Project Charter".
The simplicity of this approach works perfectly to me and I am curious if anyone of you came up with different solutions for the issue of "keeping it all together".
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Lifehacker features a great article that should help you improving your note taking skills (very handy during important meetings or long conference calls). The article covers the good old Cornell method, Visual Note-Taking (aka Mind Mapping), digital note taking, shorthand and a surprisingly easy additional approach.
Check out: Five Classic Ways to Boost Your Note-Taking - Note-taking - Lifehacker.
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