Simplicity Is Bliss

I recently had an interesting email conversation with Nicolas Thomsen (@apporacle) on how I use Things in my Getting Things Done (GTD) workflow. It became a very detailed description of my way of working and I thought it’s worthwhile sharing with the rest of the world.

My setup is indeed very much centered around the Areas of Responsibility, so let me give you a bit of insight into each one of them.

First of all the all only contain projects, all single tasks (more than 2 minutes to process, but not multiple-step project) just go into the ‘Single Actions’ Area, independent from them being private, customer, company or whatever related. I’ll cover why that is in a second.

• The ‘Customers’ area obviously contains all customer-related projects/commitments, whether active or inactive.
• The ‘Cisco’ area has all my internal projects/commitments ranging from ‘Organise Team Meeting’ to the ‘Improvement Initiative’ I lead.
• ‘Private’ is where all my non-work related projects sit, e.g. ‘Decorate kids room’, ‘Car maintenance’, ‘Wife’s birthday present’, ‘Plan summer holiday’
• ‘House Keeping’ is the Area in which I keep all routines that keep me sane; Most of them are recurring scheduled ‘projects’ (rather checklists), e.g. ‘Weekly Review’, ‘Morning review’, ‘Review Areas of Responsibility’, ‘Review current goals’, ‘Do time card’, ‘Do expenses’
• ‘Someday/Maybe’ keeps those lists (not really projects) I have shown you already. They are more collection buckets than anything else and are all inactive by definition, e.g. Things I like to read/watch/listen, Gift ideas for friends and family, my wish list (read: IPAD! :-), cool ideas and big possible goals (of which I am not yet sure whether I commit to them), ideas for weekend trips/vacations
• Finally ‘Next time in…’ also includes lists, not projects in my definition, I look up when travel to certain places is coming up and I wanted to meet a friend in that city, do some special shopping, visit a specific restaurant

As you can see I use the Things “Areas of Responsibility feature more as a way to categorise projects rather than as a representation of my actual Areas of Responsibility (which are around 15 across work and personal life and that I keep in a MindNode mind map for review).

The reason for all this is to accommodate the way I do and review things. When ‘doing’ I don’t really care whether it is a customer, company or private related task. What matters is the context I am in. As a good GTD’ler I tend to batch process, e.g. if I am doing email, I try to do as much of my email tasks as possible regardless whether they are private, business or what have you. Same if I am in the ‘online’ or ‘offline’ or ‘calls’ context. As I said in our Twitter conversation: Work & life blend very much in my lifestyle. This is also why you find all ‘Single Actions’ in one bucket, regardless where they belong or whether they are active or inactive (i.e. Someday/Maybe).

However, when I do my reviews I need to make sure nothing slips, drops or goes up in flames. And that relates to my projects above everything else. I rarely review single actions (only for the purpose to check those off I have done, but not checked off back then). But what I need every week is an overview of all my projects, where they are, if they all are still valid, have next actions, … and that is when by ‘bucket’ structure really works out. Every 2 months I also review my true Areas of Responsibility and can then easily cross-reference the projects and find out whether all Areas of Responsibility are in cruise control or if I have neglected one, …every 3 months I review my current/annual goals and again can go back and check if I have projects in place that help me achieve this. And that’s where the separation customers, company, private makes a lot of sense as well.

The Someday/Maybe Area in Things gets only reviewed every now and then or basically when I need it, e.g. travel coming up (next time in…) or birthday around the corner (‘gift ideas’). Other inactive or someday/maybe projects or tasks sit in the respective bucket and get reviewed every week. But when reviewing those, I actually use the real ‘Someday/Maybe’ view of Things, which to me is indeed a ‘view’ of all Someday/Maybe’s across all buckets rather than an actual physical bucket by itself.

Pretty long mail, but I hope it helps you understand how I roll. Outside of the actual workflow there are a few things I’ve done that help me integrate Things better into my overall workflow:

• I deactivated the HUD of Things and use an Applescript triggered through Launchbar instead (I use Launchbar a lot I did not want another HUD that pops up on some hot key combination)
• I also trigger Applescripts through Launchbar that (a) open/create the Finder project folder associate with the currently highlighted project and (b) open/create a project notes document (OmniOutliner) for the currently highlighted project. Both are very handy since the note and attachment features of Things are insufficient and one could also argue that the support material also doesn’t belong ‘in’ the task list

Anyone else having some best practices to share with regards to Things & GTD?

I’ve published an Applescript that, with some help of MailTags, automatically adds emails by which you delegated tasks to OmniFocus. Since only minimal adjustments in the code were required to made it work for Things as well. I’ve modified the script accordingly.

Script Functionality

1. Based on a specific MailTag in Mail.app you can invoke a outbox rule which will start the script (I use “@Waiting” in MailTags as well and simply applied it to those emails I write which need to be tracked for response)
2. The script adds a task with the title “<recipient> to come back re <subject>”. The text in the middle can be configured in the script and if you have more than one recipient (CC and BCC recipients are ignores) the script will take the first recipient and add “and x more” automatically.
3. The task includes a link back to the original message in the notes section (and the actual mail body, if desired), is automatically assigned with a “@waiting” tag (configurable) and placed into Things’ inbox
4. If you have Growl installed and running, the script will give visual feedback once the task has been created

Installation of the script

1. You will need MailTags from Indev to later built the proper Mail.app outbox rule
2. Download the script and copy it into your standard script directory, e.g. ~/Users/<your username>/Library/Scripts/
3. Modify the script configuration based on your needs and setup
4. Create a outbox rule in Mail.App that invokes the script if specific conditions, i.e. MailTags Keyword of the message is “@Waiting”, are met

Customising the key parameters

Inside the script you can and very likely should change some configuration properties to match your requirements and setup.

• property mailBody : true - You should change this setting to ‘false’ if you do not want the entire body text of the email to be pasted into the Things task’s note section.
• property MidFix : "to come back re" - Change this text to whatever you like to see in the task title between the email recipient’s name and the email’s subject.
• property myWFTag : "@waiting" - This variable needs to exactly match the name of the tag in Things that you’d like to use for “Waiting For” items, i.e. “@waiting”.

Creating the outbox rule in Mail.app

Next you need to create a outbox rule in Mail.app that looks similar to the one below. Again MailTags will be required to perform this action.

With this last step you should be up and running. Enjoy and please let me know how this script works for you.