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February 20, 2006
Sync often
This may seem obvious, but I have found that synching my Palm handheld frequently builds trust with my system. Frequent can be different for everyone depending on how often the data is being changed on either the handheld or desktop. But I want to know that wherever I look the information is current and complete. Letting one or the other become stale means my system is only partially useful to me. So usually at least once a day I'm doing a full sync so that my calendar, contacts, to do's and memos are current.
Frequent synching also has the benefit of creating a current backup should one or the other go down. Have you ever known someone who had their Palm crash? The agony of this happening isn't so much that the device crashed--since Palms will often come back to life with a hard reset--but it's that they had not done a sync in a while and just lost the latest version of their life.
There is also a joy that comes forward for me in synching when the items I marked done get updated in both places. What a great sense of completion.
Posted by Kelly at 05:43 PM | Comments (7)
February 14, 2006
Recovery
I was taking a cycling class this morning at a gym in New Jersey and the instructor made a comment that intrigued me. Between intense bursts of climbing hills she said, "recovery builds confidence and strength." Whereas part of me wanted to keep a fast pace and just keep going, I took her advice, slowed my speed down to rest my legs and heart. I was stronger on the next hill I cimbed.
OK--so you knew there'd be something GTD in this: the Weekly Review is recovery. It's my time to relax my mind and body from the frantic pace of the daily grind. It builds confidence in my system letting my mind know it's OK to relax and be creative. It gives me mental strength to make better choices because I'm seeing a clear picture of everything instead of chasing after latest and loudest.
"You need to spend quality time, detached from the daily grind, thinking about, getting control of, and managing the daily grind." - David Allen
Posted by Kelly at 04:50 AM | Comments (1)
February 10, 2006
Organizing digital files
Piggybacking on what David posted on his blog about ways to handle digital filing, I saw a new solution this summer working with a client. This guy was an Outlook user and he saved all of his digital files (Outlook, Word, Excel, pictures etc.) in My Documents, in file folders by topic (of which he had dozens and dozens). He did not use ANY Outlook folders. He only wanted one place to look for all of his digital reference.
Outlook will allow you to drag and drop emails into My Documents folders, or you can be in the email and choose File>Save>change message type to .msg and find the location to save it.
I haven't found it all that cumbersome to have some information in email folders and some My Documents folders, but I can also see the value in having them all in one place or having a great hard drive search tool that works across applications.
I was doing a seminar for a software company last month and one of the participants suggested the X1 search tool, as Eric Mack mentions on David's blog. Now, this guy in my seminar did save all of his emails in Outlook but he only had one email folder called "Archive" which stored everything. He relied on X1 to retrieve what he needed by keyword. The downside I can see with that is if the keyword I'm thinking of doesn't happen to be in that email anywhere then I'm forced to search by other means.
More and more though, I think digital filing will be the next frontier of organization. What once was a paper stack is now just getting stored on a hard drive somewhere. What seems to be working the best for me is to make my system naturally match my thinking so I don't have to "think" when I need something. I want it to be as fast, easy and intuitive as grabbing for something in my paper files.
Posted by Kelly at 07:11 PM | Comments (3)
February 06, 2006
Consequences of messy desks
USA Today printed an interesting article recently about messy desks. Julie Ireland, one of our coaches in the trenches with many people and their offices, passed it along:
The gist of the article is that if you think your messy office isn't affecting your productivity, think again.
Posted by Kelly at 04:21 PM | Comments (3)
February 01, 2006
GTD and Entourage whitepaper
For those of you eagerly anticipating the release of a whitepaper on GTD with Entourage, I want to let you know I've finished the beta testing and I am now in the process of compiling the feedback. At this point, I am no longer looking for new beta testers. I had the most incredible group of guys pouring over the first draft of the doc and got some very valuable feedback.
I anticipate having the final whitepaper available in our online store in a few months. I need to be conservative with my estimate of the release date given my travel schedule and other projects in the queue for our graphics team. But I think those of you waiting for this will be pleased to see the final product.
Thanks. Kelly
Posted by Kelly at 06:40 AM | Comments (2)
