Aug 7, 2007

Success by obstinance

Let me say this: SUCCESS! I managed to do a weekly review today. It took a long time, and I had to get rid of some stuff left over from bad habits (read laziness) that meant I was really tied up most of this morning. Plus, I didn't block everything out - I still dealt with staff, some phone calls, etc.

I had an epiphany though while I was doing my review. The weekly review itself had become "stuck", to use David Allen's term, stuck by the fact that I was essentially trying to do a RAM dump at the same time as the review. Once I moved off from that, things flew.

I'm still all backwards about how I GTD - my blurring of the collection/Weekly Review/processing stages has probably delayed everything. However, I'm now getting into the full swing of things.

And for anyone interested, my stupidity/laziness from above was putting in tasks without setting a category, trusting that I will do that as I do the Weekly Review. 100 things to categorize in Lookout before I can get the WR done. Simple thing to do, but it takes time.

Aug 2, 2007

Things conspire against me...

You would thing that, booking a time on the Friday afternoon of a (Canadian) long weekend - a time when I *should* be golfing - would be perfect for a relaxed, productive weekly review. Not so much.

An influx of production work - enough that I cannot delegate it all - means that I'm pressed into service on front-end production business. That's ok, I don't mind - but now I am having to look at when to do the WR. I've been out of the office so much lately that I'm currently planning to do it tomorrow morning, so I can clear our my inbox and move things along at the same time.

Wish me luck - I will post again if I've been successful.



KD mobile

David Allen Interview / New David Allen book

I saw a post about this on the Yahoo GTD group (link at right), and subsequently ran across it on a Google search. It's a good interview, showing David Allen's own tools, and is upfront about MSIA, Insight, the lack of scientific evidence for GTD, the abundance of empirical evidence for GTD, and the geek-factor that we all know is there. Worth reading.

It even confirms a new book will be published in 2008.

Link:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/07/01/100117066/index.htm

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Universal Capture Tools - Only one?

I'm getting active on my blog again. That must mean I'm getting active in GTD again. That's a very good thing, as even though I've lamented in many posts that I haven't done a Weekly Review yet (which means, as we all know, that "I'm Not Doing GTD!"), I'm starting to feel like I've gained a little bit of control - perhaps just a little.

That also means that my interest in GTD has peaked, and much of my on-line time wasting is used to read blogs and websites, and search for stuff that is GTD related. I'll give you an example. I'm starting to thing about improving my capture of "stuff", especially when I'm mobile. I've read dozens of people online raving about their Levenger Shirt Pocket Briefcase, and have searched for them everywhere. Being in Canada - no retail, so only over the web. I'm loathe to fork out $40USD for a 3X5 card holder, even though I know the president of my old firm had one and it was quite a neat thing. There must be something similar, right? Can't find anything. Levenger's reputation is huge, so why would I fight it?

Then my father-in-law came to visit, a dyed-in-the-wool geologist, and he had this Rite-In-The-Rain top-spiral 3"X5" notebook, which quite frankly looks like it will suit my needs. I have used those cheap 3"x5" notebooks before, where the covers get torn because they are flimsy cardboard, etc. This has a durable plastic cover, and looks like it could withstand a beating. Hey, check the whole site out - they have military application notebooks, even one that's totally waterproof. Neat stuff.

So, now what do I do? 4 bucks for a tough notebook, or $40 for a sexy note card holder. Who knows. I'll probably just keep up what I'm doing, even though it seems like there are times when I'm not capturing stuff.

However, why do I need one? I use a Blackberry 8703e (87XX in BB speak) as my UCD and my carry-around organizing system. The unit is very slick, does everything very well, and is only lacking a couple of things. For example - I'd love to be able to make a new task from an e-mail. Anyone that can help me with that, please post! That said, I don't use it for capture much, mostly for reviewing, and I'm terrible for using it with my lists. I've got NextAction for Blackberry (or see the link to the right), but am not using it effectively. I've not really sat down with it to give it a good whirl, but I'm going to start doing just that. There are many posts on the David Allen Company website that I'm following, and I'm hoping that will give me a guide. Once I've got it working, I'll post more about the software. It looks to be a great implementation though.

So I have this great thing on my hip, but I still want a notebook or somthing else to write on. Perhaps I'm de-volving and need a feather quill as well? Who knows. More later.

Digital Recorders - another nifty gadget.

David Allen has long talked about carrying a small dictaphone (I believe the first one he was using was a tape unit) with you to record thoughts in a car, while walking - anywhere the universal capture device doesn't quite work. Because of the nature of my business, I've been using a dictaphone for years to prepare reports and letters, usually to tapes of varying sizes.



My company has recently switched to an all-digital system, and look out! These things are great. The unit is the Olympus DS-4000 recorder (and for those that care, the transcription units are the Olympus AS-4000 Transcription Kits, which obviously are all software based). The recordings are crips and clear, way better than anything that was ever achieved on tape, and the folks who do the transcriptions love them. We use them to record dictation, conversations, pretty much anything.


The unit comes with 5 default folders, labelled "A" through "E". Normally, the units are plugged in via USB or their cradle, and everything automatically downloads into the software, then is uploaded into the FTP site where our transcription experts take their work. I've modified mine so that only items dictated in the "A" folder automatically download - things in "B"-"E" don't (I only use A and B anyway). This means that, as I'm driving along, I can record item after item in B, download them to the software, and then play each back as I transcribe it into a task in my Next Action lists.


Each folder can hold 199 seperate recordings (I might get 25 on a trip to work if I have the radio off the whole way and the juices are flowing), which is quite a lot. We get 5 hours of high-resolution recording time (11 hours of low res) out of a 32MB xD picture card, which is plenty - but the cards are swappable, so you could use whatever size you wanted up to 1GB to get tons of recording time, although I'm not sure you will ever need it, unless you are a student recording a full day's worth of lectures.


The unit is very intuitive to use, and does not require a great deal of training if you have used a slide-switch dictaphone before. (For what it is worth, slide-switch units are so intuitive that I'm not sure why anyone would even consider a push button unit except for the slight reduction in cost). Once you are used to the basic features, you can learn about stitching recordings together, selectively deleting sections, etc. - although if most of your recording is to capture NAs, then how much stitching of 3 second recordings are you going to do?


They record in a format called Digital Speech Standard, or DSS (.dss file extensions). These are playable by the desktop software, which can also be used to easily export them as .WAV files to be burned to a CD.


These units are definitely not cheap. As this is a professional grade voice recorder, they go for about $450.00 USD. Mine was provided by my firm, as we standardized on them, but the truth is they are worth every penny. Ours came with a great leather (pleather?) case that gives a nice up-scale feel to them. They are highly recommended.