Michael Elgan over at Datamation has a very interesting post intended to introduce busy executives to the practice of GTD. While some of what he recommends differs from the strict approach to GTD that die-hard adherents choose, clearly, he has developed a system that works for him and by extension could help out the typical busy executive who hasn’t had the benefit of GTD or even read the book for that matter.

In fact, Michael appeals to readers of his post that they promise to go out and buy themselves a copy of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” if his tips make a difference in their work flow. Having had the benefit of seeing just how much even applying the basics of GTD to how I handle email, I believe that the number of people buying copies of David’s book ought to equal the number of people that read the post and do what Mike suggests; after all who could fail to notice an improvement even partially following David’s principles?<!–more–>

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Nutshell Mail has a great piece on taking control of that burgeoning inbox. If you’ve ever arrived at your office and been faced with over a hundred new messages, this post is a must read… Two GTD Times contributors, Scott Allen and Timothy Ferriss offer some best-practices, techniques and simple processes that will put you back in the drivers seat and keep that email beast under control.

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In the prior installment of this series I wrote about HiRise which is a remarkably complete - if somewhat expensive - task management utility. In this installment we’ll take a look at Things by CulturedCode.

Things is currently my application of choice for task management. It has, at least for my current approach, the right mix of simplicity and comprehensiveness that makes it feel capable without having an overwhelming number of features or functions which either will never be used, or which requires that I take a course in how to use the application in order to actually be able to put it to productive use.

Things looks and feels lightweight - it has a clean, Aqua interface and even though you can see a lot of information at a glance the display still manages to look uncluttered and clean. The application supports tags (and also allows you to enter the same tag again with a minimum of keystrokes) and it has the ability to manage nested tasks by allowing you to create projects and then assign multiple individual tasks to each one.

Because things is so closely patterned around GTD, it has a familiar and useful layout that includes an “Inbox” (for everything you typically collect), a “Someday” box (you know what this is for), a “Scheduled” for calendered items, repeating “to dos” and scheduled projects. Projects can have hierarchical tasks and can also be maintained in another box called “Areas” which is earmarked as the place where you store projects and where you can also show areas of responsiblity and indicate whether they are active or inactive at the present time.

Things has a “quick add” feature that makes it fast and simple to add new items to the application and other common tasks can be easily accessed by clicking an icon at the bottom right of the display or by using the menu/navigation bar on top. You can also add teammates to Things - although this did bring up one thing that is either an oversight or a bug. You can’t add a team member that isn’t already in your address book. Not a show stopper to be sure, but it would be convenient to be able to add someone ad-hoc if necessary and even better if adding someone directly into Things also gave you the option of adding that same person to your address book as well. The application is still in beta so I imagine it is always possible that this feature could be added in down the road.

Also still to be added in is “drag and drop” functionality from the sidebar to the main display area and also within the side bar (to rearrange tasks, for example). It is, however, possible to “drag and drop” within the main display to move tasks from one project to another, etc.

Completed tasks are placed in a section called “Logbook”, while the “Next” section allows you to see what’s coming up on your calendar or due dates of tasks and/or projects that are more than a day or two out in front of you. I especially liked the “Heads Up Display (HUD)” for quickly entering data and the tag menu can be visible or only made visible on demand as you prefer.

Still lacking from Things was a dedicated synching utility, although the data is all formatted as XML so someone with some skill could solve that issue pretty easily. Not so easily fixed is the fact that Things has been developed for Leopard. This makes it tough to use for PC operators, though the company says that a fully formatted version of Things will be available via the web making the application essentially universal.

CulturedCode also is advertising that there will be an iPhone version of things available in June of this year; as they put it:

“And we are not just talking about a simple to-do list. We’ll put the whole application in your pocket.”

About now you’re probably wondering what this whole thing is going to run you. The answer is it depends. That’s because right now, while things is in beta, you can download a preview version free of charge. Once the application goes gold you’ll have to pay and then it still depends. If you are a subscriber to their newsletter you get $10 bucks off which makes the app $39 and IMO a very nice value. Those that don’t subscribe to their newsletter can pay the full price of $49 which is still a deal as far as I’m concerned.

Personally though, I’d hustle over and download the preview version now, if nothing else then to give it a test run and see how you like it. So far it works for me, it might just work for you, too.

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Post By Michael Sliwinski

Over the years that I’ve been learning and mastering GTD I’ve stumbled across many great individuals who taught me a lot about how to implement GTD in my personal and business life.
Some of them have been exposed to GTD since the day the book was published and have gradually become black belts… and there are others who have never heard of GTD or “Getting Things Done” but if you have a look at the way they work – it’s incredible to see how they follow the book’s advice without ever reading it.

I call them: natural born GTDers.
Who are natural born GTDers? To understand that let’s get back to the question: “what is GTD?” To me, GTD is not just a set of methods, it’s more like a set of habits. Powerful habits. n order to be successful in implementing GTD in your life, you’ll need to develop a series of habits:
• habit of putting all of your thoughts into your inbox and not keeping them forever on your mind
• habit of processing your inbox and deciding what to do with each item
• habit of managing projects and putting all of the project-related stuff where it belongs
• habit of “cranking widgets” – getting things done without thinking too much about your system
• habit of weekly review and re-organizing your actions for the next week
• habit of extracting “next actions” from a pile of to-dos in your projects
• habit of not putting everything into your calendar… just the time-specific meetings and actions
…and you’ll discover more of these as you read the book by David Allen.
Now, much to my surprise, they are people who “get” these habits… they have never read the GTD book, never learned any theory about time-management or project-management – they just intuitively know that this is the way to go and they are just doing that every day. They even don’t have any sophisticated systems for this, they use good-old pen and paper, old-school calendars and whatever applications they have pre-installed on their computers. But these tools don’t matter. The key to their success is the fact that they know the “habits” it takes to get things done and are just following these every single day.

The first natural born GTDer – Luis.
Just after I’ve read the GTD book, I started doing business with a guy named Luis who is to this day one of my business partners and a great friend. I remember I was greatly impressed by the concepts from the book by David Allen but what really struck me is that after a week of working with Luis I found out that he is following his daily habits in the same way David Allen describes it. I set down and talked to him about GTD and he was surprised there is such a thing as GTD. When asked about his daily habits, he just said it was so obvious that he never gave too much thought to it.
He just knew he had to make his actions list in the morning (“Next Actions”), he had to revise his projects and tasks every Monday morning (“Weekly Review”), he had to jot down all the stuff there was to do and later make sure to process it and attach it to a particular project (“Inbox processing”) and he had to spend his day with his list to make sure everything he had planned has been done (“cranking widgets”). No rocket science, he said, just a way to get stuff done and move along.
He just had his regular habits and mastered them. I didn’t. And what he said there wasn’t all that obvious to me at the time. The same thing happened when I met my future wife and discovered she’d been following similar habits and getting tons of stuff done… and neither has she ever heard of GTD before.

They are natural born GTDers – to them GTD is just obvious. I guess David Allen feels the same way.
Habits are not that “obvious” though. I had to “discover” all of these “obvious” techniques and learn my habits. Really study them, learn, fail and try again. And again. And again. And boy it wasn’t all that easy. These natural born GTDers make it look easy. It’s not. Maintaining good habits is a tedious task. Sometimes we feel too lazy to remember them, we try to talk ourselves out of them or simply unconsciously find ways to avoid them.
We tend to get flooded with lots of information and let ourselves be carried away by the pace of work and accumulate stuff to never find the time for the habits of processing, organizing, reviewing…This is why some of us (me!) need tools to help us. We need the tools to help us remember about our habits and guide us how to perform these habits. We sure will be covering some of there on the GTD Times blog. They range from simple pen and paper, calendars, computer based applications, web-based applications, you name it.

I developed my own web application to help me remember about my habits – Nozbe – and boy it helped me a lot – I finally had my projects, to-dos, notes, files… etc. in one system and could easily choose next actions for each day. I’ve initially used it only by myself for more than a year or so… but later decided to show it to the world and now there are thousands of busy professionals from all over the world getting more done thanks to my web application.
Are you a natural-born GTDer?
If you are – congratulations. However, chances are you’re like me so you need a way to develop your habits and a way to keep you on top of them. I’m sure you’ll find the book by David Allen a great read and if you have already read it, find your tools for the job and create a perfect habits-empowering system that will help you get things done and live a happy life. Feel free to post about your system in the comments.

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One thing I’m learning as I get more and more involved in the GTD community is the vast array of activities to which people are applying David’s principles to improve their ability to perform at the highest level possible. Hardly limited to work, we know that household management can be radically improved using GTD tactics, while my own “ah ha!” moment came at the recent Road Map Seminar when I suddenly saw GTD through the eye of my old athlete self and realized that it was much like a periodized training approach to work and life.

As novel as those are, they pale in comparison to Mark Crump’s very creative approach to something that may be quite unfamiliar to many readers; the world of Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games or MMORPGs. If you’ve never heard of this before, ask your kids if they have and you’re sure to get that eye roll that can only mean “get a clue, dude, you’re like so totally out of it”. MMORPGs are incredibly popular. So popular in fact that were the economy in one of the most popular games, World of Warcraft a real economy, it would have a GDP greater than all but a handful of the world’s largest and most powerful countries.

There are entire companies devoted to helping build up powerful characters that can then be purchased by well heeled but time-shy participants who are likely to watch that expensive purchase be summarily disemboweled by a precocious 11 year old female who, lacking the bucks, has been building her character organically since she was nine.

Given that time is something that we all agree is at a premium, any strategy that can help an individual be more efficient at anything, from pedaling a bike, to getting the kids off to school to slaying dragons is going to be highly valuable. What’s interesting also is that if you take the time to read the comments on Mark’s post you’ll see two things; the number of people that are using some kind of list to help keep themselves organized for better play and also that a number of people were so intrigued by the GTD approach that they commented as much with more than one even saying that they were planning on using the GTD system in their “meat-space” environment as well.

Do YOU have a unique way in which you are using GTD? Or perhaps you have a unique job or lifestyle in which GTD figures prominently? If so we would love to hear from you. Tell us how GTD is helping you in your every day life. The most interesting and novel uses of Getting Things Done will be written up here and maybe, just maybe I can find some interesting prizes for the really “out of this world” uses of GTD.

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In all of our efforts to be more productive and accomplish more each day, it is sometimes easy to completely forget about why we want to do more or do the same but more efficiently - sometimes it seems, it is all to easy to walk outside on a beautiful, starlit night, and be so lost in thought that we fail to look up at the sky.

This is a shame. After all, if we are so transfixed on doing more that we lose sight of what’s important - including the beauty and majesty of nature, then we’re really missing the whole point of why one would use a system like Getting Things Done in the first place. With this thought in mind, as well as the realization that the night sky may not be all that clear where you happen to live and/or that you may not happen to be all that familiar with the constellations, I wanted to share this amazing new technology that Microsoft is giving to the world. This is the technology that according to one geek source “made Robert Scoble cry”.

(Be patient; this takes a moment to load)

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Most everyone I know that practices GTD likes to use Mindmaps to help put their thoughts about initial structure of a project down in a manageable form. Whether on a whiteboard or using software a good mindmap has a way of helping to clarify thinking, gives you a good visual understanding of how things relate to one another and also, because of their rather less structured nature, they are good at supporting brainstorming and free association, two behaviors that are critical for creativity to be captured and retained to be put into some subsequent action.

Mind mapping software has the ability to be incredibly valuable to GTDers in particular because of the way in which we lay out projects and actions. This is of course why David himself uses mind mapping software to help keep his project list consolidated. One of the main reasons why GTD practitioners don’t have mind mapping tools at their disposal is their reluctance to pay for yet another piece of software. I hear you and feel your pain. While I am in no way grudging developers who make their living writing code - I can’t possibly afford to pay for all the software I would test out if I had unlimited resources. That’s way free and shareware are so great and that’s why you’ll love the price of MindNode Mind Mapping Software .

While you poor windows users are out of luck on this one (if not in general ) those of you with a Mac are going to be very happy to hear about this. MindNode is a full featured mind mapping application:

Here are just a few of the features:

FEATURES

• Export To HTML (New)
• Help Added - Tutorials And Keyboard Shortcuts (New)
• Multiple MindMaps In One Map
• Supports QuickLook, Spotlight And iChat Theater
• Print, Export Or Share As A TIFF Or PDF File
• Full Leopard Support
• Automatic Expanding Canvas
• Much More

This very cool software as well as a slew of others that I won’t just mention but will also be reviewing in the weeks and months ahead can be found at CoolOSXapps.net . You might want to head on over and get your own copy, especially if you don’t have good mind mapping software without it and if you’ve never used this kind of tool you might just be surprised at how intuitive they are and how much more effective your creative time spent would be if you actually were able to capture every idea and keep each of them in the context of the thoughts that triggered those ideas to begin with.

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