Getting things done-ish
I am an off-again on-again follower of the principles articulated by David Allen in his notorious book Getting Things Done. I read every post on 43Folders and Lifehacker in an attempt to glean a few more secrets about how I can best use my time for good instead of wasting my hours away with small distractions (like reading productivity blogs, but never mind that).
The hardest bit is finding a system you like. I've tried them all. For a while Star convinced me to use Entourage but it just didn't have the performance I'd come to expect from using Mail and iCal for a number of years. The Project concept in Entourage is handy and the rudimentary sharing between users is nifty in so far as it reminds you that it should be better and Microsoft doesn't know how to make software. What was their business again? Oh right, offering just enough versions of Windows that their customers can't understand what they're getting. But I digress.
Abandoning Entourage I turned back to iCal and Mail with the added bonus of the ever-popular Kinkless GTD. Inspired by David Allen's book, kGTD is a brilliant little tab indented file with powerful scripts that help you manage your tasks by project and by context. But that's not all. It syncs brilliantly with different (color coded, of course) calendars in iCal organizing my life into nice neat little bunches. The problem is that I end up with so many to-do items that it is more efficient to just know what I have to do today and be done with it. My file gets out of date, etc. etc.
So lately I've been tinkering with Google's new calendaring feature because of the added benefit of getting to share a calendar with Julie who is forced, horror of horrors, to use a Windows machine at work. Web based is the way to go and I've found the Google Calendar to be vastly more powerful than the next best thing, 30 Boxes. The big idea powering both of these systems is the all-knowing "one box." Instead of filling out a complicated form you simple type "Have lunch with Julie at noon tomorrow" and it parses the phrase for the necessary details. As you might imagines, this makes adding things to your calendar infinitely easier.
The mystery system that could solve everything is Joyent. They started out as a server appliance but now offer a hosted web-based version of their e-mail, calendaring, file management, contact management, and general collaboration tool suite. It's far far better than Microsoft Exchange in terms of interface, useful feature set, and price. The problem for me is that they don't offer a free, or even an inexpensive service like Basecamp, for example, does. This is because of the obvious fact that freeloaders like me would quickly balloon in number and come to represent around 98/% of their client base.
I've tinkered with Joyent briefly and it looks amazing. The interface is well designed and very responsive. Tagging allows you to easily connect people, events, files, and messages on the fly. In my opinion, if you work for a small team and are dissatisfied with your e-mail, calendaring, contact, and file management systems you should look at Joyent.
But I'm just a guy who wants to get himself organized. Basecamp and Backpack offer interesting promise and I've used and loved them both for specific functions in the past. They just don't feel like life managers to me. Maybe I should just shut up and get working but I know that I lose things and need a system for keeping track of them.
I'm still looking and if you have any pointers please pass them along.
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Who is this guy?
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