I’ve been a loyal Firefox user for almost as long as Firefox has been available to the technology community.  I’ve used it on Macs and PCs and even a Linux box or two and for the most part it has been pretty good to me.  The fact that it is so extensively customizable, that it had tabs before any other browser that I’m aware of and the fact that it was a product made by someone other than the “Evil Empire” all contributed to my choice to use it instead of Explorer.

Certainly it wasn’t perfect with the primary problem from my perspective being a rather persistent issue with memory leaks that ultimately forced you to restart your computer at times that perhaps you would have preferred not to or else locked you up completely if you were a little bit unlucky.  However, aside from that issue I would have to say that up until this most recent release it has been one of the best pieces of software I’ve used.

FF Three on the other hand has been making me pretty miserable ever since I made the mistake of installing it.  I don’t know if it’s just me or if other people are having a similar bad time but after the success I had with the prior two major releases, I’ve been very surprised at how many bugs seem to still exist within this program.  In fact, there are enough problems with it that I find myself uncomfortable using any kind of web-based application as a trusted system and will probably continue to feel that way at least until an update appears to have solved the majority of the problems that I’m having.

So what are these issues you ask?

Well, I had hoped that the memory leak issue would be the major improvement with this release.  In fact, that is the principal reason why I upgraded (?) to Three in the first place.  Sadly, the leak seems to be a regular fixture that has not been “fixed”.  Perhaps I get a bit more runtime before needing to restart but when I look at my activity monitor on my Mac or check out what tasks are demanding the most memory on my PC I invariably see that Firefox is by far the one requiring the most resources.

Beyond these bug, however, are a number of other issues that  vary from annoying to critical.  On the annoying side is an issue I am having with the vertical height of the tabs.  Since a picture is worth at least a couple dozen words check this out:

(You’ll probably have to click the image to see the full sized version to really see what I’m talking about here) This is Firefox the way it is supposed to look.  Check the hight of the individual tabs.

Now the above version is what is happening to my installed version of Firefox Three on both my PC and my Mac after I open up enough tabs that they would occupy more than a single row.  As you can see the tab height has increased.  The more tabs you open the thicker the tabs become taking up more and more screen real estate as they do - which, since I use a laptop is particularly annoying.

What’s especially frustrating about this is that even when you close enough tabs that they would no longer occupy more than one row you don’t get the real estate back, the tabs stay fat.  This problem doesn’t seem to be theme specific either.  I have tried the default theme and four or five other themes besides but the problem seems to persist regardless of which theme I am using.

A variation of this problem also occurs with certain images.  When you click an image to see a larger version of it, sometimes the height of the tabs increases to fill more than half the screen.  They are so large in fact that you can’t even view the image you were looking at because the tab obscures it.  Frustrating and weird.  At least when this happens closing the offending image does restore the tabs to their normal size, at least so far.

Now the last bug that I’m going to mention is the one that is the most problematic.  Here, again, a picture will help explain what’s going on:

This error seems to occur any time that Firefox spawns a new window - when you click “help” while using GoDaddy for example, or any other website for that matter.  You can eventually get rid of the message and continue working by clicking okay about a dozen or more times but if you keep the small window open the error will continue to pop up and interrupt your work until you finally close the window to put a stop to the irritation.

This last problem is more than just inconvenient however because about one in three times the problem seems to completely crash the browser which means that if you are using any kind of browser based application whatever it is you were working on is probably hosed unless you were smart enough to save often or lucky enough that your application saved it for you automatically.

I am wondering if I am the only one having these issues or if other people using Firefox Three are being similarly inconvenienced and paying the price by getting less done as a result.  Please share your experience in the comments.

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One of our challenges in implementing GTD across our organization was to change our people’s habit of keeping stuff in their heads and get them to start actually using an external tool for collection. As you might imagine, if there were leaks in “Collect” process we simply couldn’t go ahead with the other stages of Gaining Control. Of course change always happens slowly. So we continuously stressed the benefits of collecting in an external system at our Weekly GTD Training meetings and I would occasionally send motivational reminder emails, like the one below:

Hi everybody,

A reminder to all to collect 100%. Currently as I’m sitting at my
desk, I see John on the phone, Ram on the phone and & Steve
having a discussion with Omer, but NOBODY’s
collecting. Even if you feel, “oh C’mon, have we got to collect this too,
but this is nothing important”, please do so. Only if we over-collect, for the
sake of collecting only, shall it become a habit. Once it becomes a
habit then we’ll start collecting the really useful stuff.

Take care everybody & All the best,
Arif

I admit I was going through quite an over-enthusiastic GTD Phase and was highly motivated to have a team around me that was GTD ready. But I was confident that it was a change for the better that would appreciated by all once we get there.
Well, of all the measures we have taken to fire up everybody to collect, the one that was most appreciated was when we designed a personalized pocket-note-taking pad for ourselves. After all David Allen does say that one of the best way to charge yourself to implement GTD is to get some cool gear. If you really have to collect always, you’ve got to have the tools around you to do so. I had experimented with several note-taking pads, including the David Allen Official Note pad that comes with his Note-taker Wallet, but none of them seemed just right. For some either the size was too small, or it was not too easy to tear off a page once you had completed jotting down what you needed to, none of them had a cool snazzy design.
Our criteria of a good note-taker wallet was:

1. It had to look good. So good that it mad a style statement. The user’s gotta feel like keeping it with him always and whipping it out when it came time to collect something.

2. The size had to be small enough to carry in your pocket, yet large enough to fit a mind map in there if you needed to.

3. One should be able to rip the paper out really easily once he’s captured something. Most of the note-pads I had seen were either spiral bound or micro-perforated. I’ve experienced that the spiral bound notepads, don’t tear off really easily when there are too few pages left in the pad. And the micro-perforated ones need you to hold the upper section of the notepad in one hand so that you can left the bottom portion of the page and tear it off.

4. The pages should not be ruled. So if anybody wants to draw something e.g. a route-map, mind map or an engineering drawing (we are a Construction Company), it would be really simple to do so

So after very intensive R&D we arrived at our first prototype. Ta-da:

The Design is something that everyone appreciated, even Leslie Boyer Harradine (Official David Allen Trainer) complemented us on it when she was down here.

Well there you have it. We first thought we’d put these notepads up for sale to the GTD community, but then since that was not really priority, we said, let’s just have it for in-house use. Anyway, Feel free to copy any of these to make your own personalized Capture Tool. Would love to hear your thoughts on the above. And if you do implement these, please do post what sort of reactions you have from the people using them. I eventually see this being like a trademark, that all Vakil Housing employees carry this particular brand and style of notepad with them.

This is the Second Installment in the series of Posts for Rolling out GTD at Vakil Housing. You can see, the first post in the series here.

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Happy Monday.  Today marks the completion of the first four months since we launched GTDtimes.  To commemorate the occasion, and to help inspire us to do even better over the next four months, I’ve taken the liberty of pulling together a very short survey that will help us see what we’re doing right and what we can do better.

It would help us out if you would take just a couple of minutes out of your day to answer a few - mostly multiple choice - questions about GTDtimes and your GTD related informational preferences.

Click Here to take survey

So you are aware up front we are not asking for any personal information - no demographics or anything like that - the survey is purely content-related.

Thanks!

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Nokia’s Sexiest Phone Ever

I’m still shaking my head in wonder at the new Nokia E71.  Is this really a phone by Nokia? This phone, which is barely thicker than the battery that powers it, is one of the all time sexiest phones I have ever seen.  Hardly the sort of device made by the company that is to phones what Russia is to tanks and assault rifles.

Don’t get my wrong.  I’m a die hard Nokia fan.  I have many, many Nokia phones and I use them every single day.  A least 8 of my lifetime top ten favorite devices have been Nokia phones but that doesn’t mean that I am so blinded by my Nokia gadget lust that I fail to see that Nokia usually makes phones more like tanks than like jewelry.  This is not in and of itself altogether a bad thing.  Nokia phones are by far the most durable, reliable and functional devices of their sort bar none.

But sexy?  That’s hardly  a word you see in conjunction with most Nokia devices.  Until now.

Did I mention that the E71 is thin?  How thin? It’s a bit difficult to measure something this thin but my guess is that it’s between 6 and 7 mm at the thickest point.  What’s amazing is that in spite of the svelte package this is as fully featured a device as Nokia has ever introduced.

Let me give you a quick rundown on the specifications:

Form

• Form: Candy bar with full keyboard
• Dimensions: 4.49 x 2.24 x 0.39 in
• Weight: 4.47 oz
• Full keyboard
• High quality QVGA display

Display and 3D

• Size: 2.36″
• Resolution: 320 x 240 pixels (QVGA)
• Up to 16 million colors
• TFT active matrix (QVGA)
• Two customizable home screen modes

Connectors

• Micro-USB connector, full-speed
• 2.5 mm Nokia AV connector

Power

• Battery: BP-4L 1500 mAh Li-Po standard battery
• Talk time:
  - GSM up to 10 h 30 min
  - WCDMA up to 4 h 30 min
• Standby time:
  - GSM up to 17 days
  - WCDMA up to 20 days
  - WLAN idle up to 6.9 days
• Music playback time (maximum): 18 h

Memory

• microSD memory card slot, hot swappable, max. 8 GB
• ~110 MB internal dynamic memory

A down-loadable PDF with the comprehensive specifications can be found here: nokia_e71_complete_specifications.pdf

As you no doubt noticed the device has GSM, Edge, UMTS, HSDPA, WiFi and a GPS radio.  It also has a huge battery - the same battery, in fact, that comes in the much larger N810 Internet Tablet so you can pretty well anticipate that this phone is going to have about the best battery life of any phone you’ve ever used.

What does it do?

Out of the box it has support for Microsoft exchange mail as well as for Blackberry mail, though for that you’ll have to pay a subscription fee to Rimm. Out of the box it also has the ability to auto-detect your network settings and configure your services automatically so no holding for hours while someone at your carrier tries to look up how to set up MMS on your handset, it just configures itself.

[Read more →]

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Yesterday, CNN posted a special section on parenting with a focus on moms.  Pages of content with tips, advice, answers to common questions and even video round out what appears to be a very nicely done presentation designed to help moms everywhere do a little more with a little less money and a lot less time.

This got me thinking.  How many moms out there use GTD to help them manage all of the things that most moms have to handle?  From keeping the household from running off the rails to getting dads dry cleaning (or is dad picking it up himself these days?) to making sure that everyone is properly inoculated before the new school year begins, it seems to me like GTD would be a lifesaver.

The thing is, I’m not a mom and so there’s a certain lack of knowledge and perspective here of which I am well aware.  I’m sure that at least a couple moms read this site, however and it is to them that I make this appeal; would one (or more than one) of you like to contribute to GTDtimes?  I think that having a section written for moms practicing GTD by moms that practice GTD would be very useful and very interesting - even for those of us who will never be moms.  (Sometimes it is good for us to see how other people deal with things that we can’t even imagine to help us put our own petty troubles into perspective!)

If anyone out there would like to take up the mantle of writing a GTD for Moms column here at GTDtimes, I would love to hear from you.  Please write to me at editor at GTDtimes dot com and put “Mom” in the subject line.  I can’t promise you’ll make money but I can promise both some very nice exposure and some very cool gifts for helping us out.

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Have you ever had the feeling of being lost & left wondering “Why am I doing what I’m doing?”, “Why am I in this Job?”, “What does all this mean?”, “Who am I, and what is my purpose?”.  In spite of all the achievements there is a feeling of emptiness.  This feeling usually comes when our actions are not aligned with our Life’s purpose.

Using the Horizons of Focus model, GTD helped me align my day to day actions to my life’s purpose, and in this post I’d like to talk about how you can do the same.

What is GTD at 50,000 ft?

The Horizons of Focus Model is basically the agreements that one has with his or herself at different Horizons. Each Horizon represents a different time-level & impact.  It’s a tool to know what your work is so that your priorities are clear. Take a look at Michael Dolan’s post for a more detailed description on the Horizons of Focus.

In David’s book 50,000 ft is defined as “This is the ‘big picture’ view. Why does your company exist? Why do you exist? The primary purpose for anything provides the core definition of what its ‘word’ really is. It is the ultimate job description.”

In other words, your agreements at 50,000 ft. are the description of your life’s purpose.

How to Find Your Life’s Purpose?

Sometimes I wish we were born with an instruction manual outlining our purpose, life would be so much easier, but then again life wouldn’t be so interesting if we had all the answers!  I like to define Life’s purpose in a two-fold manner. The first is one’s Inner Purpose, and the second is one’s Outer-Purpose.

[Read more →]

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Editor’s Note:  This is the first post by new GTDtimes contributor Dan Schawbel.  His expertise is in personal branding.  You can visit his site here.

People need drive in order to accomplish goals.  Salespeople need incentives in order to act.  We all need a reason for being to feel compelled to get things done.  Passion is an amazing vocabulary word.  It means to have a strong feeling or emotion tied to something.  Passion is the energy or rocket fuel we need in order to give us a reason for being or the ability to get from 0 to 60 in 3.2 seconds like a Ferrari.  The one thing in common with most successful people is passion.  Take Oprah, Trump or Tiger Woods for example.  They all love what they do, which means that no matter what obstacles surface, they will push through because they believe in themselves and their cause.
As a brand, you need to discover what you are passionate about.  In the blogosphere, 60-80% of blogs are abandoned due to lack of passion.  Without that mental drive, you lose focus and become lethargic; therefore you stop your current activity and jump to the next.  When you make that leap, you are confused and unsure of yourself, which is detrimental to your personal and professional life.  People switch jobs all the times and sometimes they shift careers altogether.  When this happen, the skills that don’t carry over become lost and not exercised.
Where does passion come from?  The secret is that passion comes from within.  It makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.  It’s like a drug for the soul that reactivates it every time it’s asleep.  I always tell people that when you discover your passion, everything else comes together.  It’s like you’re having an awakening and are going through enlightenment.   Many people neglect their passion for financial reasons or because they feel they have to work a regular 9-5 job to survive.  They may have multiple responsibilities that they have to juggle on a reoccurring basis or a family they need to provide for.  The key with passion is to take time out of your day to reflect and to have a clear goal in life.
What you do for work might not even define who you are.  Sometimes it’s your work or hobbies outside of your current profession that become what you do full-time.

Tips on how to find your passion:

•    Take time out of your day and think about your situation, your skill set and goals.
•    Ask others for feedback, as to what they think you would excel at.
•    Take self-assessments from institutions such as Myers-Briggs.
•    Read a book or two to get some new ideas and refresh your mind.

Before you start a blog, a business or proceed in your career, please take time to find out more about yourself.  You will waste a considerable amount of time second guessing yourself later if you don’t invest now.  The more you pay attention to who you are in the inside, the more you can become that person on the outside.  Passionate people are confident, energetic and above all, happy.  Do you want all of that?  If yes, then start working at it.

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Okay, if that headline leaves you scratching your head you are probably not alone.  After all, doing nothing hardly seems like a way to get anything done, however, it is my aim to convince you that at times, doing nothing is the most appropriate next action.

As you know if you’ve been reading GTDtimes with any regularity, I’m fairly new to practicing GTD and I make no claims of being an authority on the subject.  In fact, it’s a great privilege to be able to learn from so many knowlegeable and experienced GTD’ers as a direct benefit of editing this site.  Nevertheless, I believe that I can make a strong case for my statement above because my experience in another arena has proven to me that sometimes it is the choice to do nothing that leads to better results in everything down the road.

Back when I used to race bicycles for a living I had a problem finding people who wanted to train with me.  It wasn’t that I had no friends.  The problem, it seemed was that I rode too hard on my hard days and too easy on my easy days.  Most less experienced riders do exactly the opposite.  Their hard days are not intense enough and their easy days are too intense to deliver optimum recovery.  After more than two decades in the saddle, I had learned that having the discipline to take a day completely off and just do as little as possible was a key component in my training program.

Without taking the occasional day off your body never gets that chance to fully recover and recharge.  Your energy level never reaches maximum, you never get totally re-hydrated and in the long run, the twenty, thirty, forty or fifty miles that you put in while I was hanging out watching TV weren’t the miles that won you the race, they were the nails in your coffin as I rode away on fresher legs over the final climb.

Similarly, I believe that we all need a mental break from time to time so that we have the ability to focus completely, to make good decisions about what our most appropriate next action needs to be and so that we are capable of putting forth our best effort when and where it can do the most good.

In the geek culture in particular, there’s a sort of masochistic pride we seem to take in logging the most absurd hours, taking the fewest days off and forgoing meals and coffee breaks to prove we’re working harder than the next guy.  Frankly, if we were bike racers we’d be peeing off the bike on training rides instead of stopping like civilized people. (Yes, I know it sounds impossible, but it is actually something that a professional cyclist can do without wearing it - seriously) .

Peeing aside, the truth is that this sort of behavior leads to all sorts of problems.  As a double-divorcee myself I can attest to this being counter productive to relationships, but there are other costs that are equally steep.  Stupid mistakes like accidentally hitting the “send” button or misaddressing a scathing email, falling asleep in a crucial meeting or simply doing less than stellar work are all quite possible when you don’t factor some mental recovery into your productivity strategy.

Like an athlete who doesn’t realize that the body improves while recovering from the stress of training, not the training itself, an executive who works non-stop is cheating herself out of the mental recovery that can enable creative thinking, problem solving, or even simply relaxing enough to get a good night’s sleep.

People used to laugh at my training schedule when they’d see a day that said: Mileage Zero, Couch 9 hours - they figured it must be a joke until they saw me with the remote control a stack of videos and a big bowl of microwave popcorn - yet it made perfect sense to me to schedule my recovery with the same discipline with which I scheduled my other training.

The thing is I bet that not a single reader of this site has doing nothing as a next action anywhere on any list or scheduled on any calendar.  Of course doing nothing is a little bit hard to categorize as a next action.  Perhaps we should also add occasional inaction to our lists.  Who knows, you might just discover the same thing that I did during my  racing years: that sometimes a little bit of time spent doing nothing leads to accomplishing something much bigger down the road…

HOPE YOU ALL HAD A GREAT FOURTH OF JULY AND THAT EVERYONE TOOK THE DAY OFF!!!

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We all feel shy at times.  Some of us find groups intimidating, others feel self conscious one on one, still others can’t stand to be the focus of attention for fear that people will see something wrong with them.  The truth is that everyone has insecurities and everyone has faults.  While we’re busy worrying that everyone else is secretly noticing how badly we suck at something, chances are they are really worrying about everyone noticing how badly they suck at exactly the same thing.  For all but the truly exceptionally self-assurred among us a few tips on how to feel less shy would probably come in very handy.

If you agree, check out  ThinkSImpleNow.com .  They got as a great article on how to overcome shyness as well as a ton of other content that will lift your spirits, improve your self esteem and help you remember that everyone is unique and special and also that we’re all just human. I’ll be that our two resident cognitive scientists, Jennifer George and Lynn O’Connor have even more helpful tools and enlightened commentary on shyness and how to fight it.  Perhaps one of them will weigh in on this post?

As a bonus you might want to check out another article from  ThinkSImpleNow.com that covers all the stuff we collect and some helpful methods for getting it under control.  Do you have any tips on decluttering your life that you’d like to share?  Please do in the comments.

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I’m one of those unfortunate people who loves trying out new software for my GTD system. So far, I’ve always gone back to the online, tried and true, Vitalist (www.vitalist.com  ) for contexts/next action lists (projects too if needed).  But that hasn’t stopped me from doing that experimenting or “tweaking” as some optimists call the time I waste fooling around with new organization/GTD programs. I’ve made this lame excuse: “Every time I enter my next action data into a new program it allows me to review everything in greater detail than I do in a weekly review.” That was as far as I got in explaining my sneaky kind of procrastination behavior. It began to feel even shameful to wile away a whole afternoon exploring some new program.

I felt a lot better about my “try new software”  habit when I read a report from the latest issue of Neuron, as described in New Scientist. In an experiment, researchers demonstrated that our love of adventure and novel objects, is based upon our hard wiring, we could say on our basic nature.  It seems that every time we explore, investigate, try out or learn something new, the reward center of our brain starts firing, much as it would if we were expecting to win a lottery, a card game, a horse race  or any kind of competition. My guess is trying out new GTD software is yet another way I flood my restless brain with dopamine.

This fact about how we’re naturally wired is long known in business and advertising. It’s why companies may put out a product with absolutely no changes, except for the packaging. People buy the new, even if it is more expensive and less convenient. We all fall for something novel. So now, maybe I can get off my case about trying out every new GTD program.

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