Atlantis in bits

I adopted the GTD methodology almost one year ago, even before I own a Palm Treo 650. I tried several software to make GTD work more conveniently and effectively. Through some practices, I believe probably I could establish my GTD system “officially”.At first, let’s review the original GTD conceptual diagram from David Allen’s book at first:

From the above diagram, we can conclude four types of utilities which may be necessary if you are applying GTD with a digital device (PDA or PC or UMPC)

1. Inbox
2. ToDo List
3. Calendar
4. Project Planner

And then look at my own system diagram:

The major software I am using to apply GTD are:

• Natara DayNotez: 

I take this as the main inbox. We can type words into it directly, and if your hands are not free for typing, you can just take a photo or record a piece of voice.

DiddleBug, BugMe, Slap are also recommended. No one is the best, just use the one you like.

• Life Balance:

It’s an awesome ToDo List application, but not only a ToDo List. With the context support, we can easily get what we should do at a particular time and spot.

• Iambic Agendus:  Datebook, Contacts
• Natara Project@Hand: A client on Palm for MS Project files.
• Natara Bonsai: A outline utilities, if need to plan a project with few resource and dependency, this is enough.

The detailed process is:

1. When some ideas, tasks and other stuff come out in my brain, I just open DayNotez and type into it or take a voice record. I map DayNotez to “Opt+Hardkey2″, so that it can be accessed quickly. These coarse stuff are put in the “inbox” category. If I am free for a while, I will process those stuff in the “inbox” category. If it is not actionable, change its category to “Reference” or “Maybe”.
2. If it is actionable and can be done in 2 minutes, do it right now and change its category to “Processed”.
3. If it can’t be done in 2 minutes, but also a one step action, I will create a todo entry in Life Balance with a particular context and category.
4. If it can be broken down, use Bonsai or just Life Balance, or MS Project on PCs to break it down, and then create entries in Life Balance.
5. When I am changing my context(spot, time or target contact), I will change the context in Life Balance as well and do the next action according to the order.

The contexts in Life Balance:

I use three flags to make up a context. The first one indicates whether it’s a next action or a “waiting for” action. The second one tells the spot or target contact. And the third one is just a category which is used for import and export. Some example are: !NextAction@Computer$FamilyLife, !NextAction@LvQi$Career.

Dumb Little Man’s 5 Simple Steps to Power Up Your Productivity gave a good approach to help us improve productivity.The essential part of the article is “30 minutes high performance time”. It means you’d better focus on one thing for 30 minutes, and after the 30 minutes, hang about with your notebook, have a rest and try to review all you have done.

The translated version (Chinese) at mifengtd.cn (Chinese) recommend two countdown tools to help us implement this approach. However, I am not so satisfied with those two utilities. I took about 1 hours and made an own application to count down the 30 minutes. Probably, in future, if time permits, I will add some other feature into it, for example the integration with Outlook tasks.

This tiny application is developed with Visual C#, you can just download the application file (LaserConvex.exe) and run it directly, or download the setup file, go through each step and you could run it from your start menu.

Program: LaserConvex.exe
Setup: Setup.rar

I was working for IBM as an intern student From last July to this Octomber (more than 1 year). I planed to stay there, as IBM really provides a flexible and friendly working place, though its salary was a little less than others’.

A good friend of mine who is a PHD also received and accepted the offer from IBM. I asked him to help me to check the salary for Master at the offer briefing event. He asked several Master guys and told me that the range is about X000 – X500 ( I am sorry, but I have to conceal the actual number due to the privacy things) . Two days after the briefing event, I received the official offer letter from IBM, and was vey amazing to find that my salary is 500 less than X000. I asked other intern students in our department, they were given the same number, 500 less than X000. We realized that proabably different department will have different salary. I was kind of depressed and I was not sure if I need to working for this department, Now, I am writting this post and decide to leave IBM not for the 500 bucks but I think we are not much recognized.

I wiil come to office next Monday, and will say goodbye to Christine, Karik and all you guys I was working with for more than 1 years. I love you all, I enjoy the time with you. And I really appreciate all the helps and trusts from you.

I have a playlist with probably 10 songs in it. But these songs are in my external USB hard disk, instead of my laptop’s hard disk. I plugged in my USB hard disk, and enjoyed this playlist repeatedly. After a while, the USB hard disk was incautiously plugged out and iTunes skipped each song one by one and got into a deadly infinite loop. At that time, my computer had no response at all, and I turned the power off directly.

Fortunately, I was doing nothing on my laptop at that time, and haven’t lost anything. Anyway, I believe iTunes should consider this exception and avoid this infinite loop. And actually, leveraging some flag variables  could fix this.

One friend of mine asked me how to clean the typed URLs in IE. We know many toolbars, or Browsers like Maxthon provide such function. But this friend is not allowed to install any software in their machine and has no idea about regedit. So I write a small windows script with just four lines:

   1:  Dim WSHShell

   2:  Set WSHShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

   3:  WSHShell.RegWrite "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs\", ""

   4:  WSHShell.RegDelete "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs\"

You can also download this vbscript file here

I am blogging with u*Blog on my Treo 650. Previously, I used HBloger as the blogging client on Palm. But there was something wrong when posting to a wordpress host and I can’t specifiy the title of each entry, saying nothing of the tag support and category support.

U*blog is quite cool, smaller but more powerful. The most exciting thing is that it supports tags. However, also some limitation exists, as it only supports three types blogs.

Actually, I haven’t tested it on my blog. It will be proved if you can see this post (Oh, you have aleady reached this line).

Okay, more convenient for me to blog.