Kevin's Weblog

The little one wanted to make her own cards for her class this year. Here’s the results:

(There’s 31 kids and 3 teachers and we started at 9 the night before, so, yes, mom and dad did help out as well.)

I started implementing GTD a bit over a month ago. It’s definitely been worthwhile. If I’m diligent about following the practices, I’m more relaxed and I feel happier, and I think I’m more productive overall.

One challenge has been balancing the satisfaction of having a total catalog of projects against the sense of being overwhelmed that can come from viewing a hundred or so “next actions” and nearly two hundred projects. But I feel like I’m starting to adjust, and it definitely feels good to do regular brain dumps of ideas.

The past week and a half has been a big stress on the new system. I’ve been in crisis mode at work pretty much the whole time. My entire workday has been non-stop racing against a deadline, and after work I’ve been so fried I can’t even look at my home to-dos. Plus, the gnawing feeling that I was neglecting things was a real downer. Finally today I got breathing room to do a proper weekly review, and to knock off a number of small tasks. I guess this is part of the discipline I need to learn; to make time every day, no matter what, to keep an eye on other things I could be doing.

Tools-wise, I’ve been using a couple different things. My primary tracking system is Thinking Rock. It’s okay. I like having heirarchical projects. Particularly for my 101 in 1001 project, this is essential. Other than that, the feature set seems adequate, but not exceptional, and the UI is a little clunky. It also doesn’t seem to have a very good tickler file implementation. But, it was free, and the data file is XML so I’m not trapped forever.

I’ve also got the “Hipster PDA” going. I used to think this was a bit odd, but once I gave it a try I was totally hooked. Part of my resistence was that I really don’t like having lots of stuff in my pockets. But, it turns out that pen and paper is so useful (who knew?) that I was forced to make adjustments. I’ve actually stopped using a wallet entirely now. I just carry the 5 or so cards I consider essential and some folded bills, with a fat rubber band around the whole thing. It’s much less bulk than even my relatively slim wallet was. And now I don’t notice my index cards.

For a while I was independently tracking some to-dos with just physical reminders in one of the trays on my desk, but I’ve decided that’s generally a bad idea. I just wasn’t scanning through there with any regularity. Now I’ve got it all in Thinking Rock. The only exception is my file folder of receipts and the like that I need to enter into Quicken and then file.

It’s still a little early to say if this is really life-changing, but it seems like an improvement so far.