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 am just writing to share some of my experience of using GMail. It will involve the firefox extensions, the methodology to manage mails and also the clients that I am using.

[Firefox Extension]

My firefox has three extensions working together with GMail:

1. Better GMail:

It enhances GMail with over 25 additional features, some of which are very useful, such as Attachment Reminder, Filter Assistant and Links composed in GMail.

2. GMail Manager:

Just a incoming mail reminder, if you are using GTalk PC Client, probably you don’t need this.

3. GTDInbox:

I adopt some concepts from GTD to manage my task. Previously, before I got my Treo 650, I leverage GMail + GTDInbox + GCalendar to arrange my life and task. Although now Treo 650 becomes my primary tool, GMail is still a very important “inbox”(a concept from GTD, please refer to some material about GTD).