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June 26, 2009

iPhone to Outlook - one less choice

For those of you who have followed by journey with GTD & iPhone, at one time I tried and mentioned KeyTasks by Chapura for synching to Outlook. They just discontinued it. So pull back your horses on that one, it's dead.

As best I can tell, Toodledo seems to be the only option for iPhone>Outlook synching, unless the new iPhone 3.0 OS has brought something new to the table around all that.

Posted by Kelly at 08:24 AM | Comments (10)

June 20, 2009

The Nuances of Inbox Zero

I had an "ah-ha" moment yesterday, I think. The GTD workflow diagram, walks through a few key questions. The very first one is "What is it?" Before you even get to asking if it's actionable (yes or no) and then what you're going to about it (delete/do/delegate/defer), you need to figure out what it even is. Sounds simple and obvious enough, but I think skipping over that one question is what has so many people fusterclupped (my technical term for being confused and stuck) about getting In to zero. They skip that step, leave the email in the Inbox assuming there's some kind of action, but in reality, they haven't even given themselves time to assess the nature of the input, much less decide what to do about it.

That "What is it?" question is the assessment before the decision. That's the time where I'm giving myself the time to actually give some careful thought and consideration to what I'm dealing with, such as:
- What is this email asking me to do?
- Is this even part of my job?
- Am I in the To: field or CC:?

People ask me all of the time how I get my Inboxes to zero every day (or nearly every day.) Here's what works for me:
- I give myself enough processing time
- I've gotten really fast at the "assessment" step
- I have a simple clear model to know what to do with something after I assess what it is
- I'm really clear about my current 20,000 areas of focus to know whether something is my job or not
- I'm really current with my projects & actions to know if I can/should say no or yes

I'm going to do a webinar this summer on GTD Connect showing real examples of this with my email. In the meantime, I hope this helps to bring light to some of the nuances with processing.

Posted by Kelly at 09:44 AM | Comments (3)

June 04, 2009

New iPhone feature for Lotus Notes?

As many of you who have followed my blog know, I switched from my beloved Palm to iPhone about 6 months ago. I am still giddy and overjoyed with my iPhone--EXCEPT--for it's lack of synching to Lotus Notes where all of my lists live now.

So to bring y'all up to speed, here's what went down since I wrote these two posts:

GTD & iPhone
More on GTD & iPhone

November 2008 - I drove off the lot, drunk on entertainment features, with my new 8GB iPhone, even though I knew there was no secure iPhone>Lotus Notes (LN) sync that my IT group would approve. I kept my lists in Palm Desktop, where they happily lived for over 10+ years, for the time being.

January 2009 - Fed up with having email in LN and lists in Palm Desktop that weren't synching to anything anymore, I searched high and low and found KeyTasks for Chapura, which could sync lists on the iPhone to Outlook on my PC. I wasn't necessarily wanting to move to Outlook, but it was better than nothing. That lasted about a month before my setup with Chapura just became too frustrating. I had duplicates, their server was sometimes down (required for synching) and Outlook kept crashing. And, my job shifted such that meeting requests started coming in like a fire hydrant into Lotus Notes. It didn't work to keep Calendar data in 2 places, or even copy and paste like I used to into Palm Desktop.

February 2009 - I moved everything into Lotus Notes--lists, calendar, contacts, memos--all of it. I was never a fan of the ultra-unsexy Lotus Notes To Do's, but the eProductivity boost for Notes made it palatable (and actually fun.) Alas, still no synching option from iPhone>Notes. I recall Tweeting about my dismay with this lack of synching option and an IBM'er (who actually might have something to do with the project?) took pity on me and Tweeted back, "Coming soon." My hopes were raised for a little longer. For the last few months I've resurrected my old Palm and have been synching Palm>Lotus Notes and using my iPhone for everything else. Yes, I now have TWO handhelds. How did this happen? Ahhh...I needed to have an iPhone before the business solutions were there.

So you can imagine my glee when I saw an article today that showed "Notes Synching" as a future feature of the new iPhone.

...but something tells me they mean the Notes pad, not Lotus Notes.

Overall, I am still thrilled with the iPhone as an entertainment device. I think Palm still does an exceptional job as a productivity device. Well, I am productive on my iPhone, if bowling and Twittering count, but not in terms of my GTD workflow management. Yet.

Posted by Kelly at 04:53 PM | Comments (10)