Freewheeling on organization...
Jun. 25th, 2005 07:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpIt 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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no subject
Date: 2005-06-25 04:02 pm (UTC)Palm exists outside of my world, I am a very much Windows man (Windows on my servers, on my desktops, on my XDA II - Windows Mobile Phone Edition). So I had to find a way to deal with it.
While there is definitely "life away from the keyboard", there is almost no place where I would appear without my "communicator" - a Russian-coined word for PDA + Mobile phone which I tend to use often. So I assumed that everything should revolve round the PDA/Communicator.
With PDA, you normally have Work PC, Home PC, and PDA.
Having accepted this, I have developed some ideas on my own.
1) Regarding the Calendar stuff, I quickly understood that PDA should contain ALL your calendar stuff ahead, but only a few weeks after. Therefore, proper archiving procedure must be in place. When you archive, they should also disappear from the PDA.
2) With Tasks, I found that most of my tasks were in fact, Projects. Maintaining all the projects in standard Tasks folder quickly led to 20-30 items to do, frustration, and non-working system.
3) Notes are great to do in Windows Mobile 'cause there is a freeform note ability as well as you can switch it to text mode and enter using Transcriber. So you can draw and you can write... Quickly and easily. And here...
4) ... we bump into the Transcriber. In fact the T. is what you always missed in Palm -- ability to just HANDWRITE words, not PRINT your input letter by letter (say good bye to RSI repetitive strain injury...). I took some time to learn Transcriber basics and chuck out the variants of letters I don't use (1 hour on my sofa one evening). Once you get used to it, you start to enter text quicker than ever. Once a young bloke dared me into "who creates a text (SMS) message faster". He used T9, I used Transcriber. I WON. :-P by a significant GAP.
5) I came to the idea that Projects must be stored separately from the TO-DO. Tried to think about MS Project, but it's well suitable for managing REALLY big projects at work (of "Upgrade all EMEA offices to 2003 SP1 and XP SP2 by WSUS" type) and not very much for "Buy a new 32in. Telly for my home" type of project...
So I came to idea of separate folders at home and at work. Which would be reviewed every so often and will maintain project progress and will generate tasks for to-do lists (GTD calls them Next Action, I guess). These TO-DO lists will be stored in Tasks folder and be sync'ed with PDA, so they will always be with you.
6) Re: references I found Microsoft ONENOTE the ultimate reference tool! organise, search, draw. Considering that I'm looking forward to buy a TabletPC notebook ("SOMEDAY" soon :)), it perfectly suits for this. It also can suck notes out of your PDA, unfortunately ONE WAY only - or so I think.
I really watched for an electronic version of the GTD book, so far unsuccessfully. Shit, looks like I will really have to buy a PAPER book... (shit here relates to PAPER, not to BUY :))
Right now I'm considering some inputs.
http://www.gyford.com/phil/notes/2005/01/03/getting_things_don.php to get the main ideas of the book
and http://home.comcast.net/~whkratz/id3.htm as one of the potential way to avoid BUYING the Outlook Add-in which is $70 which is WAAAY overboard, just exploiting people's tendency to be on top of all hypes... There are other resources on this last webpages.
no subject
Date: 2005-06-25 04:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-26 03:53 am (UTC)Cheers...