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Freewheeling on organization...
Jun. 25th, 2005 07:29 amIt occurred to me during what passes as my sleep period that if the organizational system set forth in GTD can truly be reduced to the management of lists that can be easily created and reviewed, then frankly, despite my preference for using paper-based notebooks and journals, using something electronic becomes a very viable alternative, simply because it's much easier to manage/create/review lists in an electronic medium.
With paper, you constantly need new pages for new lists, and although old lists sort of automatically become a record of what you've accomplished, there remains the issue of "straggler" list items that don't get done at the same time as everything else (maybe because they're @WaitingFor items) and have to be tracked somehow and eventually copied to stay abreast of the "leading edge" of what's current.
This is closely related to the issue of maintaining multiple lists. I thought I had come up with a neat scheme to use a Miquelrius journal to maintain two lists, based on the fact that it uses quadrille-ruled paper (just flip the book over and use it "upside down" starting at the back), but as soon as you exceed two lists, things get hairy. Maintaining multiple lists would seem to indicate a solution involving removable pages, or index cards.
Of course, the backup issue (paper = not easy) has been, I think, beaten into the ground.
Having summarized the cons of paper use, it can be stated that the major advantages of paper are that it doesn't need batteries, never suffers from font or i18n problems, and is infinitely configurable.
The main plus of electronic list maintenance is that it is easy to maintain, edit, review, search, modify, etc. data, and that such data can be fairly easily backed up, maintained, manipulated, analyzed, printed, emailed, encrypted, etc.
However, the free-form configurability of paper is sorely absent when using electronic tools, on both the hardware and software level. First of all, you need some kind of hardware to create and store electronic data. Web-based systems are great, unless your server is inaccessible, and computer systems in general are very cool, unless you have to be away from your computer. (Dunno 'bout you, compadre, but there is life away from the keyboard!)
PDAs would seem to address this issue, except that doing Graffiti for any extended length of time will drive you nuts and perhaps inflict some kind of repetitive stress disorder. In addition, there are very few "free-form" software applications out there, meaning that short of using something in the "plain vanilla" category, say, the Palm Memo program, you end up having to wrap your approach around someone else's vision of How Things Ought To Be™.
When I previously tried to stay organized with a PDA, I achieved only a mediocre level of organization, due mostly to the fact that using "official" organization software was not very convenient, and that using Memo-based lists wasn't very powerful. Perhaps it is time to revisit the usefulness of my Zire.
Cheers...
With paper, you constantly need new pages for new lists, and although old lists sort of automatically become a record of what you've accomplished, there remains the issue of "straggler" list items that don't get done at the same time as everything else (maybe because they're @WaitingFor items) and have to be tracked somehow and eventually copied to stay abreast of the "leading edge" of what's current.
This is closely related to the issue of maintaining multiple lists. I thought I had come up with a neat scheme to use a Miquelrius journal to maintain two lists, based on the fact that it uses quadrille-ruled paper (just flip the book over and use it "upside down" starting at the back), but as soon as you exceed two lists, things get hairy. Maintaining multiple lists would seem to indicate a solution involving removable pages, or index cards.
Of course, the backup issue (paper = not easy) has been, I think, beaten into the ground.
Having summarized the cons of paper use, it can be stated that the major advantages of paper are that it doesn't need batteries, never suffers from font or i18n problems, and is infinitely configurable.
The main plus of electronic list maintenance is that it is easy to maintain, edit, review, search, modify, etc. data, and that such data can be fairly easily backed up, maintained, manipulated, analyzed, printed, emailed, encrypted, etc.
However, the free-form configurability of paper is sorely absent when using electronic tools, on both the hardware and software level. First of all, you need some kind of hardware to create and store electronic data. Web-based systems are great, unless your server is inaccessible, and computer systems in general are very cool, unless you have to be away from your computer. (Dunno 'bout you, compadre, but there is life away from the keyboard!)
PDAs would seem to address this issue, except that doing Graffiti for any extended length of time will drive you nuts and perhaps inflict some kind of repetitive stress disorder. In addition, there are very few "free-form" software applications out there, meaning that short of using something in the "plain vanilla" category, say, the Palm Memo program, you end up having to wrap your approach around someone else's vision of How Things Ought To Be™.
When I previously tried to stay organized with a PDA, I achieved only a mediocre level of organization, due mostly to the fact that using "official" organization software was not very convenient, and that using Memo-based lists wasn't very powerful. Perhaps it is time to revisit the usefulness of my Zire.
Cheers...
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