The Inbox
Posted on September 17, 2007
Filed Under All, Technology, Context, New Life |
So, we’ve blogged before about our embrace of GTD - Get Things Done - which seems to be the most straightforward (and least expensive) personal organization and time management program. Many in Silicon Valley use it, and I took the course (stored on my iPod Shuffle) as part of my return to Adobe last January.
Now, in my ‘new life’ (I am officially on short-term disability as I write), I’m continuing with GTD as I pursue the myriad details of wrapping up ‘old life’, the whole disability process (which is complex and full of deadlines - a good GTD project), dealing with chemo and lab schedules, physical therapy, getting hobbies and interests sorted out, overseeing our patio refurb et al.
Key to GTD is the concept of the inbox - a place where everything goes - and is reliably dealt with - every day. My physical inbox, seen above, is kind of overflowing onto the desktop, which is not good. Everything isn’t getting done every day. To help order this mini-chaos, I use a program called Ghost Action to manage my physical and virtual inboxes. Ghost Action understands GTD’s concepts of Contexts, Projects and Actions: this morning there are 24 items awaiting my attention, everything from ‘Learn CSS’ to ‘Blood Lab at 9:00 AM.’
Friend Brad Schrick worries Ghost Action isn’t being maintained (he needs a time card feature and hasn’t gotten a response from the developer), but it works fine for me. I think there is another program, Journler, which also has GTD features, should Ghost Action go by the wayside. Week 2 of new life kicks off a major GTD commitment…
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Hey Chris:
Before you get to ensconced with Ghost Action or Journler, you should check out the beta of OmniFocus. It’s a purpose-built GTD system being developed by the Omni Group (OmniOutliner, OmniGraffle, etc), and has an interesting pedigree (Ethan Schoonover, Merlin Mann).
Info at http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnifocus/. There’s a good screencast at that site.
You can sign up for the beta program (if there’s still room) at http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/omnifocus-beta-announce.
Enjoy.
[…] So we put the Leica D2 on our lightweight Quantaray tripod, and caught this image, of moi at the Happy Hacker keyboard working the controls of World HQ. The inbox stack has shrunk, but much remains to be done, including improving our paperless office and better integrating GTD. Our whole backup strategy needs work, too. Slowly getting the cyber side of ‘new life’ in order… […]