Every day it seems we spend more and more of our time in front of a computer screen.  Whether it’s a monitor on a desk or a tiny hand held display on our phones, computers are such an essential part of our day to day lives that for most of us they are almost as indispensable as oxygen.  Given that so much of our time is spent in front of these machines, it behooves us to learn as many ways as we can to do our computer aided tasks as quickly and efficiently as possible.  Or, as David Allen said upon learning  that he’d been awarded the “Golden Slacker Award”, “the laziest people come up with the coolest ideas.”

With this in mind it occurred to me that we could create what could possibly be the ultimate list of online time-savers ever compiled.  Basically what I was thinking was that each of us has probably discovered at least a couple online resources that we now find indispensable to our daily routine and what I am hoping is that with all of your help we can catalog these into a truly exhaustive list that can then become its own page on this site and serve as a truly exceptional reference for GTD’ers and Lifehackers of all stripes.

To keep the list focused I thought I would establish a couple of criteria to narrow recommendations down a little bit.  Thus, for inclusion in this list, the application must result in an actual time-savings of some type- whether by virtue of reducing keystrokes, condensing multiple tasks into one task (or at least fewer tasks) ,  by eliminating the need to do extensive navigation with a mouse, by automating complex actions or by virtue of eliminating the need to navigate to a site to obtain a query result from said site.  Second, the time-saver in question must be free and generally available. (No closed betas allowed although open betas are fine).  Third (and this one should go without saying but I’ll say it anyway) these time-savers must work on a Mac or PC or Linux machine, a PDA, a mobile phone or a tablet computer.

Please provide your time saver in the comments and what I will do is regularly update the list by moving the time savers up to the body of the post.  If/when we get a number of time savers sufficient to justify creating a unique page for the list  I’ll create such a page and provide a list of credits to those individuals that have taken the time to help us expand this list.

I’ll start with a couple of my favorites.  Incidentally, contributing a time-saver is more than just saying “I like xyz”.  We need the application, the URL, what it does and why you like it. If if is a particularly complicated time saver an example would be helpful too.

Here we go:

1.     YubNub <http://yubnub.org>

This is my all time favorite time saver and one that I probably use a hundred times a day.  Primarily because it is incredibly versatile and is actually thousands of unique time savers rolled up into one slick Ruby on Rails application.  In essence YubNub is a command line for the web.  What it does is allow you to harness the power of thousands of different web servers to do specific tasks by using the URL bar of your browser (or a widget or a stand alone application) as a command line.

What can you do with YubNub?  Almost anything you can think of.  The limits are your memory and/or your imagination.  Some examples:  (after opening a new tab (or clearing the contents in the URL bar in an existing tab) I could enter: g David Allen GTD.  The results? This command would yield a Google search for the terms David Allen and GTD.  The savings?  Instead of first going to Google and waiting for the page to load and then typing these terms into Google I did this with one keystroke.  Okay, maybe that’s not that spectacular but what about this?  ebay Green Laser.  This would give you the results of an eBay query for green lasers; again, saving the navigation first to eBay.  Still not impressed?  How about this one?  gimyim Chewbacca. This little query would result in a split screen that contains image search results for Chewy in both Google Images and Yahoo Images (this one usually wows even the most jaded LifeHacking experts cause they’ve never seen split screen queries using two different search engines at the same time).

There are literally thousands of YubNub commands; everything from reverse number lookups to langauge translations to code checking, to site-specific searches.  Need to search TechCrunch for something?  Just type “TC” and your search string (leave out the quotes) and YubNub will find the terms assuming they actually appeared in the popular blog.  Plus if you want a command that you can’t find you can make your own.  The “create” command allows you to build your own YubNub command instantly.

I am constantly amazed by the power and versatility of this online time-saver, it never fails when I try something that simply seems intuitive and it does exactly what I thought it might.  What, for instance, do you suppose the “gmap” command plus a location would yield?  From my own experience at least, YubNub is hands down the most powerful, useful and utterly indispensable application I use.  I don’t think I could live without it.

2.      Fluid <http://fluidapp.com/>

Attention:  For Mac Users Only!  Are you a tabbed-browsing junkie?  Do you regularly use web applications like Gmail, Google Docs or WordPress?  Have you ever had your browser crash costing  you hours of work as a result?  Then Fluid is for you.  This application allows you to create site specific browsers.  In other words, Fluid allows you to create a browser that acts like a stand alone application.  Each one runs as a stand alone Cocoa app meaning that if your browser crashes it doesn’t touch what your doing in your SSB’s that you created with Fluid.

Fluid even lets you create a Dock icon to launch each specific SSB . Fluid can also be converted to a MenuExtra SSB (sits in the Title Bar at the top of the screen) and in spite of running in a separate instantiation of Cocoa each SSB still retains the full functionality of the parent browser (bookmarks, spell check, etc.)

I love fluid for using web applications like Gmail.  I don’t lose my work nearly so often and when I’ve got forty tabs open I don’t have to hunt for the ones I use most often.  If you’ve got a Mac I highly recommend you try Fluid  unless you’ve got nothing to lose! (get it?)

Okay, so that’s a start, now it’s your turn.  Please send in your favorite Time saving web applications and together we can compile a page that equals thousands of saved hours for everyone!

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At ‘that’ moment, you understand the power of getting it out of your head.

Some might think that means merely writing it down, but it actually requires one to implement Peter Drucker’s thinking from the Effective Executive treatise (1969) that one must:

1. decide a desired outcome
2. frame a next action and, if possible,
3. execute that next action as quickly as is  possible (in an attempt to achieve the desire of your  outcome).

When you are concerned about:

1. your soon-to-be-newborn’s heart  rate
2. the speed with which they are intending to  induce your wife and
3. the fact that you are still 45 minutes away  from the hospital,

you realize the power of being able to focus past your desired outcome toward next action execution.  At times like these, with as little unproductive stress as possible, you hope to conduct yourself such that you can eliminate all drag associated with achieving the desire of your outcome(s).

And thanks to Providence and the mechanics of GTD, I was able to arrive just in time to see them starting the inducement process and to be the support my wife needed (I still need personal growth in this area) to get through the initial steps in the process.

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Having seen the enormous success that Apple has had with the App Store and the way in which it appears to have single handedly altered the landscape of the mobile phone software market (at least in the US), Google has wasted no time in announcing their answer to Apple’s very successful offering, the Android App Market.

From a cursory view it looks like the guys and gals at the iPhone Dev Team not only did all the hard thinking for Apple when they created Installer.app and the infrastructure of the application environment that allowed users of jailbroken phones to find and load applications on their devices, but from what I can see it appears that they did most of the htinking for Google as well.  I hope they get credit for their hard and innovative work.

At least this partially answers one of the big questions that developers had about Android applications; how they are going to get paid - which was a question I asked in a piece I authored for the Register Developer several months ago.

Of course how successful this will be depends upon the execution of the market.  It will be difficult to top the ease of use that the Apple App Store delivers, if for no other reason than the standardized platform that the App Store services.  How Google will make it as streamlined and user-friendly as the Apple product while still providing a way to differentiate between different handsets is still an open question.  Another is whether the market will be as attractive to developers as Apple has become.  When developing for Apple, developers know up front the potential universe of customers and they only have to write an application once.  With Android the market is still fragmented which means, among other things, that the developer knows up front that either they are going to have to author many iterations of their applcation or be accessible to only a fraction of the possible market.  Neither choice is appealing and both come with obvious costs.

For the end user though this state of affairs isn’t all bad and as competition heats up between the iPhone and other devices it is likely that one way that the manufacturers will try to make each platform that much more appealing is by offering more and cheaper applications.  Clearly, the winner here is going to be the end user so long as the applications that are being developed are actually worth downloading.  At this point I have enough iPhone flashlights and versions of sudoku to last me into the next century.  What I don’t have is a decent graphing calculator, an alarm clock with a loud enough buzzer or a way to actually record a call on the iPhone from the iPhone.  When will the developers actually tackle these tougher problems and when, for god’s sake, will we finally get cut and paste?

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Corporate Travel =  Sound of Piggy Bank Breaking

If you shudder when you pull up to the gas pump these days, or swallow hard before you tear open your utility bill every month image how your company’s controller must feel.  If you’re in a start-up or any small business and especially if you’re not cash-flow positive yet these times of soaring energy costs and economic uncertainty border on the downright terrifying.  Under such circumstances even the most financially stable enterprises are taking a hard look at expenses and trying to determine areas in which costs can be cut without reducing the quality of service or their future business prospects.

One area that is coming under the budget-crunch knife at nearly every company on the planet is travel.  Right now just about every aspect of travel has increased in price.  Airfares are skyrocketing and the new ancillary charges - since when did it become reasonable to charge passengers $50 for bringing along a single checked bag? What’s next?  Charging for inflight air?  Or perhaps pay toilets?  One thing is certain, flying is not only a hassle it’s also expensive.  From your CFO’s perspective anything that can help you avoid the cost and headache of another flight - and especially one overseas with the sinking dollar effectively doubling that cost - is going to be worthy of serious consideration.

Buy the Ticket, Ride the Ride…

The flip side to this is that some meetings really require that both parties see one another.  Sure, conference bridges are good and shared desktops like GoToMeeting are useful for certain things but sometimes you really need to look someone in the eye in order to move things ahead.  Traditionally that meant hopping on a plane and that usually meant at least a thousand bucks drawn down on the company coffers (and  lot more if more than one exec needed to travel or if the trip required crossing a continent or an ocean).  That’s a lot of expense for one short meeting. And until recently there was nothing that could be done about this but bite the bullet and break out the plastic.

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Question: When you identify important projects, do you clearly define the successful outcome?
Do you clearly describe, either in the project title or description what success, even “wild success” will look like?

If you are not doing this, you are missing out on perhaps the most powerful productivity tool available to help you accomplish your goals and dreams: your brain.  In fact, if you don’t regularly do this, you’re leaving your brain in park when it could be driving you to accomplish wild success.

This fantastic image is from Joan M. Mas and

 her collection of amazing GTD Drawings

Visualizing the Successful Outcome
Many years ago, David Allen shared with me that one of the first things he did when planning his first book, the best-selling, Getting Things Done, was to write the Wall Street Journal review of his book, first. He wrote the book review as he would like it to appear in print, even before writing the first chapters of his book. For many years I’ve written my projects in the past tense — as if they were “done” and I found that helped me to “see” done as the objective.  I thought that David’s example of writing a formal review of his book project was very clever and a powerful visualization tool, so I made note of it.
My Personal Application
When I set out to develop my eProductivity software, I followed David’s recommendation and wrote my own review. I determined to summarize the product in two sentences, one from the perspective of the Notes community since eProductivity is built on Lotus Notes; the other from the GTD community because eProductivity embodies many of the principles that I learned from David’s book.

For the Lotus Notes community, the most concise review I could come up with (after many iterations and variations) was this:  “eProductivity: The Ultimate Personal Productivity Tool for Lotus Notes.” This eventually became the marketing tag line and company mission. It is my hope that I have accomplished this and that people in the Notes community who evaluate eProductivity will tell us that we have accomplished this objective.

For the GTD community I came up with a slight variation: “eProductivity: The Ultimate GTD Implementation Tool for Lotus Notes.” For those aspects of the product that were specifically designed with the GTD methodology in mind this was my driving measure. As I worked on eProductivity I would regularly refer back to my “review”.  Not only did this help keep me motivated but it also helped me fix in my mind the final product and how it would work, how people would use, and how it would improve their ability to get things done.  For me, like for David, creating the review helped me to visualize exactly what done looked like.

Do you know what “done” looks like?
If you don’t know how “done’ looks for a particular task, not only will you be incapable of  knowing when you are done, you will also miss out on the ready help available to you from your most valuable and trusted resource — your brain.

How does this work?
In my experience, writing my project definitions in terms of their outcome creates a cognitive dissonance between what I have defined as done and the present reality. As a result, whenever I read that project statement (or in my case, look at the product logo and tag line) my brain has to subconsciously decide if it agrees with the statement. If it does, great. I’m done. If not, it usually identifies one or more things that I need to do to make the statement true.

A Built-in Personal Success Coach
It’s quite easy to enlist your brain to define the next actions you must take toward success: all you have to do is craft a clearly defined outcome statement and read it. Immediately, your brain will decide if it is true or not. It may say, “Self, well done.” Or, it may say, “Self, that statement’s not entirely true because this is not done yet.” If so, simply capture what has your attention on to an appropriate list and act on it. Shortly, you will be completing actions that are in alignment with your successful outcome and you will be accomplishing your goals.

This exercise of beginning with the end result in mind has been a powerful tool for me — a productivity tool, even — to help me in the decision making process. Whenever I had a decision to make about this project — whether it was in design, architecture, features, programming, or budget — I would ask myself “what decision can I make that will bring me closer to the two outcome statements I defined? There were times in prior years when I simply wanted to wrap up the current feature set and put the product out there, however, it did not meet my criteria for my successful outcome. So, we waited, and persisted, and continued working, learning, and refining until we are where we are at today.

I encourage you to think about creating one or more successful outcome statements for each of your major projects.

If you decide to try this, post a comment and let me know how your brain worked out as your personal success coach.

I think you will be amazed at the result.

Update: If you would like to see the result of my project, eProductivity, I invite you to watch the overview video

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When you start climbing up the GTD implementation ladder you begin collecting, processing and organizing every cool idea that you come across.   Pretty soon you have a huge list of projects together with an even more colossal list of next actions. It’s tempting to try and accomplish all of them; but what if you are @computer, @office and @call all at the same time?  Do you feel like you should be doing many of the tasks in each of your multiple lists simultaneously?   Suddenly you realize that you’re overwhelmed. Instead of eliminating this feeling from your life which is what GTD is supposed to do, it seems to have multiplied it instead!

So what do you do about it?
In one of the Teleseminars hosted on GTD Connect, a caller asked David this  same question, i.e. “David my lists just keep getting longer and longer, what do I do about it?” David, admitted that, this is a difficult issue to handle.

David Says:  “the trick is to keep getting better at being Okay when Not Doing something.”

Here are some tips that can help you do that:

- Learn the Limiting Criteria, and implement it ruthlessly. Be clear on which context you are in and how much time and energy you have and make decisions accordingly. If you have only 30 minutes and are feeling like burnt toast, you’re not likely to be in the mood to do some highly engaging task and would probably be okay with doing some fun, relaxing item from your Next Action list.

- Identify your goals and passions in life. Revisit the higher horizons frequently and see which of your projects and next actions are more aligned to it.

- We all have the same amount of time in a day, it’s maturing to the fact that there will always be some things that you can handle and some things that you can’t.

Here’s a lovely passage from Page after Page by Heather Sellers, that also beautifully addresses how to feel okay not being so busy.

“Are you swamped?” My colleague Nat likes to ask me.
I always force myself to say no. No, I’m Not Busy, I’m Not Swamped. Why would I get Swamped? That is not my life.

For me, its too passive, too fake, too braggy to be always saying how busy I am. “I wish I had two more weeks before the semester starts, ” my boss says every summer in late August. I feel like we’re feeling really insecure and unimportant when we talk like this. “I’m so important. I have been entrusted with so much work that there aren’t enough hours in the day for me. Look at me! So much work!”

Get real, I want to say to my “busy” friends. Be accurate and tell the truth. You do have two weeks before school starts. You do have time . Get a grip. Time is not all that surprising. If you can’t do a whole lot more stuff, it’s okay to just know that, and to stop orienting yourself in kinky ways to time.

Notice time.
Notice your passion.
Follow where these two intersect.

I am used to people saying to me they want to “write” (edit-insert your passion here) if only they had time. I always look up to the sky, and check in with the gods when I hear this. “We all get the same amount of time, right? “Yup,” say the gods. “You mortals all get the same allotment. It’s the single fair thing in life.” “Thanks, “ I say. “Just checking.”

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Editor’s Note:  Here’s a short inspirational post by GTD Facilitator Maurice Gavin.  He challenges himself as well as all of us to ask ourselves a tough question; Why Not?  He doesn’t stop there, either.  He goes on to ask “What if?”  In your life you may only get a few moments where the answer to these questions can change your own future or possibly even everyone’s future.  Back when I was still racing my bike, a great Italian Champion, Francesco Moser said something to me that changed my career forever.  He said to me “to win the big races you must first risk losing them.”  I think that Maurice is making the same point only on a bigger and more important canvas than simply winning a bike race.  Take Maurice up on his challenge and ask yourself these two big questions.  For the courageous among you, how about sharing your answers in the comments below?  The best answers - according to Maurice, myself and some of the other GTDtimes contributors will get something nice from DavidCo for being so brave…

“What if you really could achieve the dreams  you conceive for yourself and your corner of this world?”

“What if you could overcome any obstacle set  before you in your life and in the lives of others at will and on  demand?”

 ”What if you saw every problem as an  opportunity to face yourself, overcome yourself and expand yourself without  fear or uncertainty during the process?”

 ”What if you could inspire others by your  example to change themselves for the better and to want to model your success  and your personal standards of integrity and excellence?”

As I write this I am doing so to challenge myself as much as to reach out to you the reader.

I have moved past

“What if”

and am now asking

“Why not?”

In fact, to be honest I am now saying to myself, if even in a whisper,

“Why not now? Right now?”

Regardless of what you do or think about this or anything else…

“What are the questions that are secretly  plaguing you from within?”

 ”What would you try anew if you were guaranteed  you couldn’t fail?”

“What is the highest level you could achieve across the  various spectrum of your life’s experiences if you were to intensify your  focus and apply yourself without regard for time required or the fear of  failure?”

What If and Why Not Right Now…!

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Mike St. Pierre over at the DailySaint seems to think so.  What do YOU think?

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OmniFocus is a GTD inspired productivity application for Mac. When I visit the OmniFocus discussion boards, at fairly regular intervals someone will ask, “But why can’t you Omni guys incorporate a way to assign priority to action items?” and an argument promptly ensues. GTD folks try to explain why that just doesn’t make sense. Others work to advance the idea that rating the priority of action items is essential.

From the Getting Things Done perspective you don’t want to assign “priority” to action items on the front end for a couple of reasons. The first is that priority always depends on the constellation of situations at hand. From a GTD view you just can’t decide priority in a vacuum. To the question, “What is the priority?” the question that needs to be asked to answer it is “…the  priority in what context?” When you know more about the the given situation in the moment, the priority becomes clear.

When you do try to assign priority to action items on the front end, you’re apt to run into the following problem. As soon as a couple of variables shift, as they are guaranteed to do, it will alter the array of possibilities. So lots of the action items you have rated at given priority levels are going to change. And when they do, then you’re busy re-prioritizing all those items. You finish and brush the dust off your hands, breathing a sigh of relief. Then another change pops up and your priority labels are inaccurate all over again. I lived through doing this re-prioritizing hamster wheel in the early 90’s and ended up dropping the practice. Looking at the on the ground practice, GTD suggests that priority makes a lot more sense to assess when you know the complete context of the given moment.

What You Need to Know

So what details do you need to know? First, what is the context? Where are you, and what tools you have at your disposal? Examples are at the computer, @computer; at the computer and hooked up to internet service, @computer: online; talking with my spouse, @Erin in my case; at the hardware store, @cavernous box store, etc. Unlike priority, context is something that makes sense to decide on the front end. If you know you want an avocado, you likely know where you’re going to want to buy it. If you have an email to send, you know where you’re likely to send it from. So deciding the context of each item on the front end and writing them down makes sense. Here’s another reason.

As I’ll discuss further in an upcoming post, our brains just aren’t good at carrying around that kind information, or more accurately, they aren’t good at retrieving it when we want it. It either will clog up our psychic RAM and take up valuable processing space, or it will be relegated to long term memory. Unfortunately the way our cranial long term storage works depends on cues that may or may not come to mind at the moment we need them. So writing down next actions and the contexts we know we’ll do them in, or digitally recording them, will make the best use of how our brains work. This in turn will ensure that when we leave the grocery store, for instance, we’ll have all the things we need, not just the ones that happened to be triggered by internal and external (grocery store visual input) cues that happen onto our mental scene.

The other two variables you’ll want to take into account before deciding on priority are the time available, and energy available. One of the strengths of Getting Things Done is the way that it seizes all sorts of strange little windows of time, and distills those into moments of productivity. They’re usually moments that we wouldn’t get much out of in any case. Sitting waiting for Super Lube to finish up their signature service on my wagon doesn’t usually leave me with any rewarding sense of satisfaction. On the other hand if I have the gut sense that just sitting and being present in the moment as I wait for them to pronounce me ready for checkout is a priority, then I could go for that option. If I do go with getting something done, that is work that won’t need to be done later, leaving you that much closer to the GTD goal of “having nothing on your mind”.

Sift Out Context

So let’s put it all together. Rather than making our decisions about what to do based on predetermined priorities that are likely to change like specks in a kaleidoscope anyway, GTD suggests that we use four criteria to decide:

1. Context
2. Time available
3. Energy Available
4. Priority
Using all four requires looking at context in the moment—where we are and what tools we have—and assessing time and energy available on the fly. Only then are we able to use our brain’s strength, intuition, or gut if you prefer, to assess what the priority might be given the circumstances consisting of the prior three criteria in our list. I use context, time available, and energy available as a sieve to sift out what can be done in this weird little window of a few minutes. Only after I’ve looked at these three can I determine what is the priority for right now, the present moment.

Say I’m sitting in the shoe store waiting for the shoe salesman at 6:17. I’ve got my phone and my notepad with me with some notes from this afternoon’s meeting. I’m not going to listen voicemails because the salesman might come striding up and interrupt me in the middle of a message, and I’d just have to listen to it again later—time wasted. I open my email program on my phone and take a gander, and there’s that email I still need to respond to. I’m too fried to think about the details clearly now. The meeting this afternoon didn’t have anything urgent in it. Plus it will be more efficient to pull next actions out of my notes when I have a legal pad in front of me. Not very convenient to do here. I also could look over my calendar to review upcoming meetings and deadlines. I could do some minor deck clearing by deleting any emails that don’t contain any info I need to access or file. Based on intuition and the relatively similar priority. I decide to go with reviewing my calendar.

Going with Your Gut

Now these little windows are often easier to decide what to do with than larger swaths of time. But the small window of time serves as a nice example, keeping the process front and center. For some this post was review, which is often good in any case. For others this will clarify the nature of how GTD triangulates priority by using your brain’s crowning skill, on the ground intuition. So letting your gut lead you doesn’t have to mean that it’s been too long since you’ve been to the gym. Instead it can mean using your brain in a manner that enhances its strengths and shores up those areas it just does better with support, keeping you moving on the path toward effortless productivity.

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If you’re one of the people that wouldn’t miss the GTD Global Summit for anything than you probably aren’t too concerned with hearing about the recent updates to the GTD Global Summit website.  However, if this is something that you haven’t yet reached a conclusion on one way or another you might want to click on over to the site once more to take a look at the schedule and the different educational tracks that are going  to be included.   I have to say it looks like it is going to be an amazing event and I can’t wait to participate as well as blog it for those of you that can’t be there.

In addition to information about the schedule, there is also material that has been posted regarding exhibiting, sponsorship opportunities and more.  If you want to go but haven’t yet made up your mind be careful about waiting too long.  The number of spaces is a fairly limited and you don’t want to wait too long only to discover that you’ve missed your chance and are now on a waiting list instead of happily registered.

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