eDragonu.ro on Top 50 Productivity Blogs of the Year

Well, it looks like I will have a wonderful spring: today I was notified about being listed on Top 50 Productivity Blogs of the Year on Evan Carmichael‘s website. The top, divided in several sections, like “Getting Things Done”, or “Life Hacks” puts me near icon bloggers like zen habits or Steve Pavlina. I’am also very happy to find there a fellow Romanian, a famous blog called Ririan Project.

EvanCarmichael.com is the Internet’s #1 resource for small business motivation and strategies. With over 270,000 monthly visitors, 2,500 contributing authors, and 48,000 pages of content no website shares more profiles of famous entrepreneurs and inspires more small business owners than EvanCarmichael.com.

Minimalistic GTD workflow: Getting Things Done with Do It!

Although a little too simple for my taste, Do It (formerly known as “To Do”) is one of the “oldies but goldies” around the Mac software community. Yes, I know, I am being mean, after all, “Do It” is only one or two years old – the author blog haven’t been updated since last year, but hey, we know how this works pretty well – but in today’s rapid moving world, two years may seem like a lot.

Do It is one of the “missed things from the operating system” that somebody thought to write, launch and maintain, filling a gap in the list of necessary applications. Looking at its structure, “Do It” only have categories and tasks (with priorities, deadlines, and linked files or URL’s). Simple enough for the less-than-average user, but flexible enough for an experienced GTD-er.

How can you use this tiny little Mac app in order to implement a slim GTD workflow? Easy, just name your categories like contexts (after you have correctly identified your contexts, of course). So, instead of thinking at your categories as projects containing tasks, think at them as contexts in which you are acting. Here’s the “Office” context, for instance, with only one task in it:

Adding a task is a question of hitting “option + N”, pretty much standard. The task details will be shown in a semi-transparent floating window:

One thing to note is that the task adding / editing window will resize itself, if there are other details to be shown for a specific task information. For instance, here we are editing the task’s deadline, and integration with iCal:

Did I mentioned integration with iCal? I guess not, but this is also one of the strong points of “Do It”. Another one will be the ability to export your tasks into an iCal-readable format (.ics) which you can later import into iCal.

Each task you add can have up to 3 priorities (colored red, orange, or green) and an external object linked to it, being it a file or a web URL.

Keep in mind that you won’t have real projects with this workflow, and you’ll have to correctly split your current projects into multiple actions, and set up your next actions, before adding it to “Do It”. You don’t have any filtering options, so you’d better chose the red color for your next actions, as the default ordering is priority-based, and like this you’ll have your next actions always in front of you.

“Do It” is ‘donation-ware’ so if you feel you want to reward the author, I strongly encourage you to leave a donation for him.

A very minimalistic GTD workflow can be implemented with the tiniest application in the world, if you really want. Which reminds me the fact that GTD is not a software you buy, but a process you implement and follow.

[tags]gtd, do it, minimalistic, software review, productivity, mac os[/tags]

GTD as a downshifting tool

Downshifting is a good thing. As one of the bloggers who haven’t blogged for the last few weeks, I can assure you that downshifting is good for your health. I’m not going to explain what downshifting is, I’m sure that a whole library couldn’t give you an exact idea, but I will tell you how you can efficiently use GTD as a downshifting tool. In other words, how can you use GTD in order to become productively free.

First and foremost: you can achieve a state of relaxation and energy by doing more in less time and with less expenses. The 2 minute rule, the one that states “if a thing could take you less than 2 minutes, than do it!”, it’s a life saver. You will be really amazed after several days of consciously exercising this habit. You’ll realize that the space things are taking into your head is usually far bigger than in the reality of doing it. The process of thinking over and over at something without doing it, makes that thing bigger and bigger. If you will just do it, you’ll be on safe side, the energy of your thoughts could be preserved for something else… Another nice consequence of doing more in less time is that you can actually enjoy the time that you save. You can use it in a more conscious manner, if not an enjoyable one.

Cutting up your expenses in doing things is another advantage. Usually, you have to spend something to achieve something: time, money, energy, creativity. Being efficient suppose you will have more of those. You will have more money, more energy and creativity, and not by increasing the actual quantity of those things, but by saving it. It’s a slightly different perspective. You can have huge amounts of money, energy and creativity if you spend a lot of effort in order to grab these things… But if you spend less effort, and just try to preserve what you already have, you’ll soon realize that you have more than enough. It’s like saving electricity, at a very deep level you’ll prevent a more “global” heating of the planet “you” and you’ll just start to feel better.

And with that idea we come to another advantage of using a productivity technique like GTD: feeling better about what you are doing. The result of your activities is a mix of energy, knowledge and feelings. For example, if you write an essay with bad feelings, even if you will have enough energy and knowledge, the result will be somehow bad. But if you write it with a “mind like water” attitude, the emotional field of your being will bring a specific touch, a specific vibration that will improve the results in an almost invisible way. Feeling good about what you do is so important for me, that I often postpone things – even if they are “important” – if I don’t feel right about them. Almost every time I see that the “importance” of that thing was just a mental construct, not a reality constraint…

Because, you know, there is another way of feeling good about things, and that is: feeling good about you don’t do. The bigger obstacle in the way of feeling relaxed is often one of the thoughts: am I missing something? am I supposed to sit here while there are piles of files on my desk that I have to work on? dozens of phone calls I have to make? hundreds of meetings I have to attend to? Well, take them out of your head, put them in a trusted system, and really forget about them until you really have to deal with them. In the GTD terminology, that will be the “processing” stage. Keeping those thoughts in your head will just add to the normal pressure of your goals and influence you in a negative way. Frustration, fear and sadness come from your feeling of guilt. And guilt is about regrets about what you haven’t done. Just let it go. Because you have other things to do…

Like better knowing your goals. Once you started to master the collection – organization – processing habit, you’ll experience a state of clarity and enthusiasm. It’s a refreshing state of mind, when you know what you have to do, and you also know what you have to do in order to make it happen. Being organized gives you a clear perspective of your goals. Changing your goals every week, every month or even every year is an unhealthy way of living your life. Start collecting your aspirations, ideas and intentions, start reviewing them at your own pace (GTD recommends once a week, but I had good results with the processing stage every two or three weeks also) and from the unorganized pile of needs, aspirations and foggy social pressures you will precisely isolate only what you really want to do. And that’s a very relaxing thing in itself for most of us.

Almost as relaxing as letting go of the past. Without even knowing it, or being conscious about it, we are literally our past. All of our beliefs, rules and values are created in the past and perpetuated by our memory. Most of the time, memory is good. It keep us aligned with our system of choice. But it can also be a real pain in the ass if we would just letting it grow beyond its boundaries. Letting the memories invading you is not the best way of using your memory. The past can be suffocating and could give you a sense of blocking roads. If this was possible in the past, why try it again, if we already know the answer? Well, the GTD “emptying the RAM” technique is coming to help in this exact problem. If you constantly take out of your head your thoughts, your disturbing memories and leftovers, you will not only make them less powerful, but you will actually “make room” for the life that you live in this very moment. “Making room” is just a figure of style, of course, your brain have unlimited memorization capacities, what I want to say by that is that you can focus your energy on the actual moment instead of a moment that doesn’t exist anymore.

Of course, not only GTD is a helpful technique, I am not advocating only this way of doing things. But trying it for the last year, I have the results fresh in my experience. You can use simpler and handier things, like keeping a journal, or having a clean agenda at your work. Chose what works best for you.

Either way, being more organized is the best way to start being productively free.

OmniFocus goes live with beta testing

More good news for the GTD followers these days. OmniGroup announced today that OmniFocus enetered its beta testing stage.

They opened the door to the first beta testers today, which means they will make a first copy of the OmniFocus available for the guys that signed up to do so… I also signed up and I’m pretty much intrigued about what OmniFocus may come up with. As they said on their corporate blog, the last traces of vaporware are gently started to leave. It was about time, anyway…

I used extensively in the last few weeks iGTD and yes, I am a convert. The last 1.4 version of iGTD has pretty much everything I need to stay on top of my tasks. It doesn’t make coffee still, and I agree this must be changed in the near future, but until then, I am more than satisfied with this. But Omni guys are full of surprises. Let’s see what it will happen.

OmniFocus video and feature presentations

Yeap, we already have a video folks, and it’s about OmniFocus again. You can find it here, and it is made by the father of Kinkless GTD, Ethan Schoonover, who apparently has been helping the Omni crew in the last couple of months. I must say that this is somehow obvious by looking at the OmniFocus interface, which clearly borrows some concepts from kinkless, but I will leave this up to you to judge.

One other interesting news, this time from Omni blog, is that we can expect a first beta in no more than a couple of weeks, and that most of the efforts has been geared towards a standard file format that will be compatbile with future versions. This is something that I lilke.

First OmniFocus screenshot

Well, it seems that finally we can see what’s behind the guys at Omni Group. It’s about the hiper-hyped OmniFocus GTD-enabled software announced several months ago, we finally have a face. They posted a first screen-shot, and from what I saw it looks pretty interesting. I am a public fan of their products – OmniPlan proved to be an incredibly valuable resource for my company project plannning so far – and I constantly use their OmniOutliner for quick sketches or fast annotating documents.

This is the original screenshot of what they offer – of course, all the credits and copyrights goes to them – so far…

What we may expect in the first – still unknown release date – version of OmniFocus:

• Quick entry panel, accessible via keyboard shortcut from any application
• Import for kGTD documents
• Focus feature for opening a specific folder or project in its own window
• Project or context work views, both with extensive filtering and sorting options
• iCal synchronization (enabling you to get to Palm and other devices)
• Printing support that will include printing to index cards
• Project outlines include hierarchical tasks and task groups
• Pop-up calendars for assigning start, due and completion dates
• Project and task filtering by project state, dates, next actions, available actions and more
• Rich text support for project and task notes
• Ability to attach files to any task or project

A part of the more orthodox GTD-centric approach, iGTD does already all of this. And the latest version, (1.3.5 at the date of this article) offers .Mac integration and MailTags integration. Wow, we do live interesting times. I am already impatient to see more of the OmniFocus, signed on they beta tester list, and hope to get my hands on fresh, beta realease ASAP .

iGTD! Do you?

Well, it’s been some time since I’ve got used to my ThinkingRock gtd helper. For those of you not so into GTD stuff, ThinkingRock is a java-based organizer application that closely follows the David Allen’s Getting Things Done Methodology. I think I’m at or around six months of daily usage. My list of future items and information items – the ThinkingRock way of calling “Someday/Maybe” items – has reached a point where it is almost usable. It’s a part of my recent history, of my intentions, goals, ideas and sketches that crossed my mind in the last half of year.

It’s so interesting to go through this in my daily or weekly reviews. I get a lot of fresh insights from myself. One of those insights was related to a blog post I saw several days ago at the TUAW guys. Didn’t had the time to read and marked it as a “future item”. And in one of my reviews, I decided to go over it. It was about “yet another GTD application”, called iGTD. I remembered I saw the name sometime at the end of last year in some forums, and I think it was a post about “how would you like to use an application called iGTD?”. Out of curiosity, I visited the page, and ops!

Yes, that’s the word, ups! It was so interesting that I haven’t even tried to make the connection with what I remembered, so at this point I really don’t know if this iGTD is the same application with the one that got shaped last year in those forums, but I don’t really care either.

iGTD is a full Cocoa application and is one of the best pieces of organizing – and GTD compliant – software I saw so far. It’s not bloated, nor shiny, nor simple or mean and lean. It just do the trick of boosting yourself and it’s also discrete enough to not get in your way of actually doing stuff.

I will write a full review next week, but until then, here’s a little sneak peak of what iGTD knows:

• syncing with iCal (and in the last version recursivity for tasks)
• Quicksilver and iBackup powerful integration (with it’s own plugin)
• Mac OS menubar integration
• AddressBook integration: search contacts from within iGTD with autocompletion
• configurable autosaving of data
• url’s integration into projects
• context, projects, “someday/maybe” and “waiting for” functionality
• task searching by keyword
• a plethora of keyboards strokes that makes your processing activity much easier
• tagging of projects (you know, like technorati tags) and, based on this, “smart folders” of tagged tasks
• a really cleand and light good look
• a donationware strategy

As of April 5th, the latest version is 1.3.2 and I already have more than a week of using both ThinkingRock and iGTD. I must say I’m impressed by iGTD. Have you had your iGTD experiences with this? I would be interested in some feedback…

Midnight Inbox teaser

The guys from Midnight Inbox, the most polished Mac GTD I’ve ever seen (and this is about how it actually looks, not about how it actually performs) announced today a little teaser about what to expect from Midnight Inbox 1.1 version. Things are shaping pretty well, and I already saw some goodness, like “the dock icon of Inbox show its fulness”, or some serious sql speed improvments.

Always considered Midnight Inbox a sort of Maserati of GTD applications, not from the cost standpoint, but from a visual luxury perspective. On the other corner are applications like Actiontastic, with a minimalist interface. In the beginning of my GTD ramblings, I was quite excited about Inbox, but since I started to use ThinkingRock, no other applications has paralleled its efficiency, despite its, let’s call it, ugleness.

But the latest announcement from Midnight Inbox seems interesting, I will surely give it a try as soon as it is released.