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Implementing Getting Things Done, while using a Blackberry - Part Three January 6, 2006

Part One and Part Two dealt with the Collection stage of Getting Things Done. It’s time to move on to the Processing stage.

As I said originally, I’m not trying to teach GTD per se – I’ve a reasonable presumption that if you’re reading this, you’re at least broadly familiar with the “normal” GTD processes, and you’re just looking for comments or information on “tweaking” it to work with a Blackberry.

So – Processing. You’ve already got this built into some form of regular routine, at the very least a Weekly Review (seen as a tagline: “If you’re not doing a Weekly Review, you’re not Getting Things Done”. I’d attribute it if I could remember where I saw it originally). I’m going to suggest that if you get into the habit of using a Blackberry for the Collection phase (there are perfectly valid reasons why some folks would only use a Blackberry for the Doing part of their lives), then you need to be slightly more rigid with your Processing, and consider the idea of a Morning Review.

I’m calling it a Morning Review, because that’s primarily when I do it – I commit to myself that at a minimum, I will spend some time at the start of each day processing everything that I’ve collected or pre-processed through the Blackberry. If time permits, and I’ve been “out and about” during the day, I may also do it later in the afternoon. And on the flip side, there’s been more than one occasion when I’ve been out and about, away from my desk and computers, for several days. One “mega”-Morning Review followed each of those to get me back on track.

SIDEBAR: Pre-Processing
Imagine you leave the office at 5:00pm (heh. That’d be nice!) with a GTD-standard empty inbox, and all is well in the world. Then you head out, see some friends, swing by a bar, grab some dinner, end up in various conversations, and through the course of the evening find that you’ve:
- programmed a dinner date directly into the Blackberry;
- emailed yourself a reminder note about checking out a movie review;
- emailed yourself an address change for an acquaintance, to update later;
- answered half-a-dozen “urgent” emails that came in.That first entry doesn’t need anything further doing. It’s where it needs to be. The second and third ones are the subject of the Morning Review that we’re talking about now. The last item, the emails you answered, are also going to be dealt with in the Morning Review, but you need to process them slightly differently, as by answering them on the Blackberry, you have already processed them once, in some form.

So… The Morning Review. Technically, you could do this on the Blackberry. It supports copy and paste, creation of new categories, filing of messages into sub-folders. But honestly, I don’t recommend it. It’s my belief and recommendation that the Blackberry be used the way it was originally intended – as a companion device to a PC, whether that PC be a desktop or a laptop. I’m further going to recommend that a decent, heavyweight mail/contact/calendar application be utilized. I’m not going to debate Microsoft vs. anyone else here – there are good and bad points to be made for each side of the debate. It’s undeniable that Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange are heavyweights in this arena, they happen to be the programs that I’m most familiar with, and will be the basis of my examples and commentary here.

Technically, this part of this series of writings – and part of the reason I’ve broken it up this way – isn’t Blackberry specific. I’d prefer it if you read this part as well, but if you’re only looking for “pure” Blackberry and GTD hints and discussion, go ahead and skip to the next part. I’ll understand.

SIDERBAR: The Blackberry“PC Companion”. There’s a term that’s been around for a while. I think I first heard it about the original Windows CE devices (back when it was PPC and HPC…). I don’t know if it was used about the Palm devices. It’s a very descriptive term – it means you use the device alongside of a PC, not in place of one entirely.

But technology moves ever onwards, and you only have to look at the latest batch of, for instance, Windows Mobile 5.0 devices (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/default.mspx) including the shiny new Palm Treo 700w (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/palm/default.mspx) to think that perhaps these devices now ARE suitable as replacements for PC’s, for some users.

I have to admit to really liking the Windows Mobile 5.0 stuff. And it’s not hard to find folks that prefer them to Blackberries (http://winzenz.blogspot.com/2005/12/my-new-toy-imate-jasjar.html).

But when did one of these devices get five to seven days of battery use, like my Blackberry 7290 does?
Or was allowed into a “no cameras allowed” zone?

I’d make comments about push email as well, but that will be resolved with Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2, so I’ll let that slide.

My point is that different devices suit different people, and that for those folks that are looking for a relatively simple, extremely reliable, proven device, the Blackberry has quite a lot to offer still, despite it’s recent legal wrangling with NTP (hit “Blackberry” in the sidebar Categories listing if you want to see more on that subject).

Back to the Morning Review, and processing it with Microsoft Outlook. As mentioned earlier in the series, I strongly recommend the Netcentrics GTD Outlook Addin (and for the record, I have no financial incentive or affiliation in this recommendation; I’m just a happy, paying customer, and you’ll get my copy of it from my cold, dead hands!). It allows me to process emails extremely quickly into their appropriate buckets. It adds a toolbar to Outlook that offers the following options:

Each of those options above is a simple menu click, and then an appropriate dialog box pops up to deal with your choice.

So, the Morning Review sequence of events goes a little something like this:

  1. Check calendar for any timed events for the day. That sets the awareness of how much time I have for doing things, and when.
  2. Check calendar for any all-day events. Those need a place in my consciousness as things to resolve at some point that day.
  3. Hit the Inbox. Any unread, urgent items? If so, eyeball those first to see if they’re going to have to take precedence (I work in an interrupt-driven environment. “Your mileage may vary”, as they say).
  4. Sort inbox by subject. By definition, everything that’s in here now is (a) new since I left “yesterday” (yesterday being the last time I was able to do a review in the office), and (b) has been processed in some way on the Blackberry.
  5. Process each item in turn. It should be less than one minute per item, as we’re doing a combination of collection & processing here, and we just need to get those items into the correct place in the rest of the trusted system. My “record” is processing something like 150 emails in about 30 minutes (remember that there may be more than one email relating to the same issue. So, I might see ten messages all saying “RE: Availability Question” that I know has been dealt with and resolved. They’re sorted by subject, so click on the first, shift-click on the last, and I can delete them or file them as appropriate).
  6. That’s it. You should be looking at an empty mailbox again now, so go on with the rest of your day the way you normally would, with your own personal interpretation of the system.

SIDEBAR: Delete or File?
I file everything, except the truly transient (“Donuts in the downstairs Kitchen!”, etc.). It keeps my inner-lawyer happy… Your choice in this matter may be personal, it may be corporately dictated. There’s a time and a place for both. If you do go with File everything, I’d suggest you also go with either the MSN Desktop Search Toolbar which I use, or the Google Toolbar (the Firefox version, or the “figure out what browser I have” version). Use either of those, and you should be able to find anything (including documents outside of your mail client) without issue. It also makes the actual filing concept easier – I only have one filing folder under my Inbox, for instance, called “Old Inbox”. Everything gets filed in there, if I’m going to keep it. I find it with the search toolbar. I used to use hierarchical folders – until one day I realized I was seven layers into the tree, and still couldn’t find what I was looking for. If you’re using an Inbox folder structure that exactly matches a physical file structure, you may have different experiences. And this is very much one of those “diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks” issues.

The Morning Review is a critical component to me for dealing with those “In A Hurry” emailed-to-self quick notes that I mentioned in Parts 1 & 2 of this. Imagine I get a phone call at 7pm asking me to email document X to person Y first thing in the morning. Here’s how it gets done:

  1. Create email to self.
  2. Subject: “Email document X to ”
  3. Send it.
  4. It obviously comes into my Blackberry as an unread email almost straight away, so next time I happen to look at that screen, I mark it as read, and then forget about it.
  5. Total time for the above 4 steps = less than fifteen seconds. I can forget about this action now until I’m in the office in the morning. Obviously – if you’re on an extended trip, you need to modify this approach slightly!
  6. Next morning, processing through the emails in turn, I come across this one. Following the two-minute rule, I try to immediately send the document via email. I realize that I don’t have a soft-copy of this particular one, just a physical one.
  7. I hit the “Task” button on the Outlook Addin toolbar. The appropriate details come up, and I assign this to “@Office”, as those are the first things I’m going to look at on my task list. The subject line “Email document X to ” defaults into the new task, but it now isn’t really the next action.
  8. My personal method for dealing with this is to change the subject line to say “Scan document X -> Email document X to ”.
  9. Save that into my task list, and done.

Call that one two minutes, end to end, to get it to the top of my list of next actions, once I’ve finished the Morning Review.

The Morning Review, incidentally, is in my calendar as “hard landscape”, same time, every day. It’s also scheduled for 90 minutes, to allow me to deal with any contingencies, deal with issues in different time zones ahead of where I am, and, on a perfect day, give me some clear thinking time, before I start scheduled events.

If you’re not automatically synchronizing your Blackberry over the air for some reason, the Morning Review is one of those times when you should cable-sync. Process the Inbox, deal with anything immediately outstanding, get yourself synchronized, and you should be set for the day.

Conclusion

The above really was more of a “ramble” about my own particular approach to time management, but I honestly believe that it’s a necessary part to the bigger picture of using a Blackberry for this stuff – if you have a very small number of items to process, you may well get away with doing them directly on the handheld. But there’s a reason they call them Crackberries, and the volume of information you process through them does tend to expand to fill the time you spend with them, thus necessitating the extra, “real PC” processing.

I’ll continue on with “proper, Blackberry specific” suggestions and comments in the next couple of days.

If you’re still reading – thanks! I appreciate the comments, feedbacks and links I’ve received over the last couple of days. Any comments or questions in relation to this welcome – just leave them below.

Continues…

Coming up in following posts:

Part Four Can Be Found Here

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