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Change of Direction May 4, 2007

OK, here we go again, but for real this time, honest!

I still have a consultancy business, but it’s “on the side”. I’ve done a couple of things under that banner, and I’ve got a couple more lined up, but while I (really!) liked the freedom and independence, I (really!) didn’t like the marketing aspects of it.

So, it’s secondary.

In light of that, as of next Monday, May 7th, I’m taking on the position of Professional Services Consultant for the iDatix Corporation, based in Clearwater, Florida. iDatix is in business automation, and to quote the website “Our product line consists of over 11 products that have been organically designed and developed with principles of ease of use, seamless integration, and accelerated deployment in mind.” It’s a great opportunity to get back in to an aspect of work that I really enjoy, while working under the auspices of an established company, rather than starting from scratch. I really enjoyed the feeling I got from the folks that I met there so far, and I’m looking forward to a long and enjoyable time there.

In terms of the next ITIL map that I was going to post up here, that’s still in the “to do” pile, partially worked on - it’s not going to be an immediate priority, as I’ll have to come up to speed on iDatix’s product line. It’ll appear in due course, however.

The other thing I see with this opportunity is the ideal time and chance to completely restart my GTD/time-management process; while I’ll still be somewhat welded to my Blackberry and Microsoft Outlook, I’ll be starting out partially paper-based, I think - I remember seeing someone else’s implementation a while back that looks ideal for the type of work I’ll be doing. More on that to follow.

iDatix Logo


Back on Track? July 5, 2006

So, I’m getting back on track with a number of things. Particularly hard to do when my home office has a window through which all I can see is deep blue sky, not a cloud in sight…

Anyway - first thing I’m doing is working my way through the Manager Tools podcasts on Time Management; not “Time Management” in the sense that we normally think about it, and that I still have pretty much under control through GTD, but more the “bigger picture” stuff, and sorting out some of my overall priorities. This entry comes while I wait for coffee to brew, and I take a quick break in between the two parts ;)

I also note on their site that Mark Horstman, who’s management writings I learn a lot from, has posted that he’ll be posting more regularly - specifically, on “Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays”. THE first thought through my mind, I must confess, was “Buffett fan?”. Mark wrote a post yesterday commenting that no-one had guessed the reason he picked that blogging schedule - I’ve just left my “guess” there. I guess we’ll see.

I have the album queued up for playing later - there’s not a hope of my getting any work done if I start playing beach music right now, though!

OK - back to work I go!


Addicted to “@” prefixes? June 26, 2006

Mark Hall wrote a comment to my post Implementing Getting Things Done, while using a Blackberry - Part Five that I think warrants bringing out for further exposure and discussion. Here’s what he wrote:

Mark Hall - June 24, 2006
E-Mail Processing on the BlackBerry:Just about every post I read on using GTD with a BlackBerry talks about the inability to correctly sort “@ symbol as if it is something sacred. To separate “At” context categories from Project categories I simply use an “A-” or a “P-” prefix. This sorts correctly within the BB Task application and also works on Outlook.I also have “R-Read / Review,” “S-Someday / Maybe” and “W-Waiting For” categories.

Here are some category examples (also Outlook Mailbox Folders):
A-Computer
A-Office
A-Calls
A-Home
A-Boss
P-Remodel Kitchen
P-Launch Software
P-San Diego Trade Show
R-Read / Review
S-Someday / Maybe
W-Waiting For
Reference

To facilitate processing “IN to empty” on the BB, I have set up Folders on the Outlook Mailbox that parallel my categories. This way if I read an e-mail on the BB I can process it (Do, Delegate, Defer) and then handle the email correctly (see below). To File an email: 1) click the Scroll Wheel; 2) Scroll to and select “File” 3) Scroll to the desired Folder and click the Scroll Wheel; 4) click File – the mail is moved to that folder and out of “IN.”

DO: If I decide to take the action right away and there is no pending response AND I do not need the mail for future reference I delete it (of course there is still a copy in my “Sent” folder). If I think I will really need it, I File it in my “Reference” folder (for later processing at the desktop).

DELEGATE: If I reply or forward the email and there is a response pending, I File it in the “W-Waiting For” Folder.

DEFER: If there is an action needed that will take longer than 2 minutes, I File it in the appropriate context Folder (which parallel my categories). This moves it out of my IN and into the context folder. If it is something with no action and I simply want to read later (i.e. an e-newsletter), I move it to “R-Read / Review.”

When I’m back at my desktop, I perform my daily/weekly review of all these folders along with my calendar, tasks and notes. I also move things out of “Reference” into my Outlook “Personal Folders/Reference.” There are differing views on if this should be a flat structure or a hierarchical structure. In either case, things can be searched for with the Outlook Tools/Find/Advanced Find.

I am using Outlook 2003 with the 7290 and BB OS v4.1.0.292.

Any questions / feedback: mark.hall@yahoo.com.

I don’t know that I’d consider the “@” prefix to be sacred, but it’s a valid point that it’s the default, and that perhaps situationally it makes sense to change it. People come to it naturally enough - it’s the prefix that David Allen uses in his process, and writes about in his book. It’s also, for instance, the default in the NetCentrics GTD Add-In. I don’t know if that’s a changeable default either, although I seem to recall it is. I don’t have that application installed any more, or I’d head on over and check.

For myself, the reason I don’t have that add-in installed anymore is that I’ve moved over to using Beta 2 of Microsoft Outlook 2007, which has its own GTD-like integrated method of handling tasks, deadlines, and so forth. I haven’t fully integrated that into my Blackberry usage routine yet, and in fact changing around some of my “internal systems” is one of the reasons that posting has been light here recently. The revised integration will no doubt make its way here as a separate post one day in the future. In the meantime, I think Mark’s post makes a lot of sense, and should definately be considered alongside the rest of the process that I initially wrote about.

One last tip for the Blackberry that may be of use - Mark refers to the Filing method, and shows the menu approach to it. From either a message list, or after you’ve opened a message, you can also hit the “I” key (that’s “eye” not “one”), and you’ll be taken straight to the filing dialog.


Weekly Review - Checklist MindMap February 20, 2006

My GTD Weekly Review checklist was getting a little disorganized, to the extent that I was tending to ignore it. So, I spent a little time today cleaning it up, and producing it as a MindMap, so that I can have one, clean, sheet of paper that I can pin up over my desks. I usually do the Weekly Review on a Friday afternoon, in the office, but occasionally run through it at home on a Saturday morning, so you’ll see it’s from that point of view. I also tend to do a reasonable amount of processing as part of the weekly review - my expense report, if needed, for instance - which isn’t strictly in the spirit of the review as written by David Allen, but it works for me.

There’s an image below that will expand substantially if you open it up, or you’re welcome to download the MindMap here.

Weekly Review Mindmap

If you’re getting the message that I’m “into” GTD, and that I do a lot of process documentation, often with MindManager, you’d be right!

As always, if you get any benefit out of the above, or have anything else to say about it, please feel free to let me know in the comments section below.


Implementing Getting Things Done, while using a Blackberry - Part Five January 26, 2006

It’s time to conclude (rather belatedly!) this series of posts of mine on GTD with the Blackberry.

First up, some bits and pieces in relation to comments and/or emails that I received:

Category Synchronization

If you do an upgrade of your Blackberry to a version 4.x, as opposed to purchasing one, then you also need to make sure that you also upgrade your desktop manager to version 4.x as well. Then, you’ll need to manually set the Task synchronization up, as follows:

  1. Do a cable-sync of your Blackberry, and then go into the Desktop Manager application.
  2. Go into “Intellisync”
  3. Hit “Configure PIM”
  4. Select “Tasks”
  5. Using the “Configure” button, select “Advanced Settings”
  6. Hit “Field Mapping”
  7. When prompted with a box titled “Intellisync”, advising you of the mapping details, hit “OK”
  8. Drag “Categories” in the Right-Hand column up/down to align with “Categories” in the Left-Hand Column, and click or hit the spacebar to make sure the mapping is in place.
  9. “OK” everything out until you’re back at the Desktop Manager screen.
  10. That’s it. You can do one more cable-sync at this point just to “make sure”, but you should now have the categories mapping correctly.

The above is predicated on you also running a BES 4.0 with wireless sync - but if you’re not, it’s still the correct sequence of events, except you must run that cable-sync at the end to get the changes in place.

Variations on the Method

“Xoff”, in the comments, reminds us of the two-minute rule, and suggests processing email “on the fly” from the Blackberry, filing email directly from the Blackberry (if you’re running a BES, you have access to your entire mailbox folder tree from the Blackberry for the purposes of filing, even if you don’t synchronize the folder that you’re moving the message to).

Well, I agree with this, for the most part – I just find that I personally process too much email at a time on the Blackberry to do this. I’ll certainly delete mail as I go if it’s clearly not needed; but I find that I can bulk-file email far quicker from the desktop as a part of my Morning Review. Diff’rent strokes, again, folks. Depending on your own situation, this is certainly a valid approach.

Xoff goes on to suggest that if he’s delegating, or creating an action for himself, he does so by sending the message on, and BCCing it to himself, changing the subject line if necessary. I’m in two minds about this – on the one hand, it can work, and I know a fair few folks who use the “BCC to self” approach; it doesn’t fit with my personal style, however – possibly because I’m using the Netcentrics addin. His advice about creating rules to add flags to messages from himself is definitely spot on, however. I recommend you read the whole comment (copied below for convenience, and for those reading this in the Complete Document format), and consider it as a part of your system. For my part - I’m going to take the advice about rules/flags and not-synchronizing emails from yourself to stop synchronizing the “in a hurry” messages that I referred to earlier in the series.

3. xoff - January 7, 2006
Gary, Great post! I got my BB three weeks ago and have been tweaking it to work with GTD and the add-in. It is amazing how similar our methods are. I think the key here is that until there is a GTD add-in for BBs (Netcentrics please!!!) we have to focus on the BB as more of a collection tool and less of a processing tool.

Having said that, I have found a way to process the email in a GTD manner from the BB that I think it is worth sharing. One of the most valuable tools of GTD is processing email the first time you see it, i.e. “what is the next action”. With BBs it is very common to see an email in the BB and then actually process it on the desktop later. In essence, reading the email twice, and thinking of the next action twice.

What I do is to process the email the minute I read it in the BB. If I can apply the two minute rule and it can be processed in that context, process it right there. If not and I have to process the email later I determine the next action:

- If the email requires filing for reference, I do it right there on the BB. I have folders in my server mailbox for all my projects. Because of mailbox size limitations in the server I can’t keep all the emails in the server, but the folders in the mailbox (except inbox) has archive settings of one day, thus Outlook automatically moves these emails to my personal folders, in the corresponding folder using the archive feature.

- If the next action is delegating ie. forwarding the email to someone for action, I forward the email from the BB and BCC myself so that later on my desktop I can assign it the @Waiting For action and integrate the email into my Waiting For list for follow up.

- If it’s an action that requires more than 2 minutes or in another context, I forward the email to myself and change the subject line to the action that needs to be performed and other relevant information like deadline or context. For example, if the email from John requires me to review some documents before responding to John, I would change the email subject to “Review files for project for John @Office”. The other added benefit to using this method, rather than creating a task in the BB is that with this approach you have a copy of the original email thus when reviewing your files you have John’s email. After processing the email in BB I delete the original email from John, or file it (more on that below).

To integrate these emails into my GTD methodology, I have created rules in my Outlook to process emails from me and assign flags to identify them easily in my inbox. If the email is from me with me BCC, it adds a “WF flag”; if it is from me only to me the it adds a “Action Flag”. Thus my inbox in the morning review (similar to yours) I would have the emails that require processing with my GTD Add-in, but the actions are pretty clear. Outlook 2003 simplifies this with a preprogrammed search folder called “For Follow-up”.

Since your emails to yourself, in my mind, create clutter in the BB mailbox, I have created rules in the BB Desktop Manager that prevent the redirection of emails from me to me. Thus these “GTD” emails do not show up in my BB inbox.

Good luck integrating this into your method.

Xoff

MindMaps

I posted previously that I would share the MindMap(s) that I used to write this series with as one of the final pieces; at the end of the process, however, I find that the actual, published version of the work is substantially different enough from the MindMaps that they’re effectively drafts, and not worth uploading.

That said, if more than a couple of people comment on this post asking for the MindMap, I’ll spend the time updating it, and upload it as a “really, really final part of this series”.

Other Sources of Information

I went to Google today, and here’s how many results I got for some search phrases:

GTD 1,860,000
“Getting Things Done” 2,240,000
“Getting Things Done” Blackberry 30,400
GTD Blackberry 35,000

I could go on, but the point I’m making with those figures is that, as we all know, there’s a LOT of information out on the internet.

Presented below, then, are a handful of sites that I personally find useful as a part of my regular reading list in relation to GTD specifically, and Time Management generally. They’re not in any particular order, and if you think I’ve missed something critical out, do please comment and let me know. You may also want to check out the sidebar at www.garyslinger.com which lists each blog and site that I currently subscribe to via RSS; the list is deliberately randomised, for my own use.

http://www.davidco.com/blogs/david/
While it’s true that this list isn’t in any particular order, it does make sense to start with David Allen’s own blog, now, doesn’t it?

http://www.davidco.com/forum/
The discussion forum at the David Allen Company.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Getting_Things_Done/
Discussion forum within the Yahoo! Groups environment. There’s a couple of others, “GTD_Palm”, and “AnalogGTD” that may be of interest as well, depending on how involved in it all you want to get.

http://slackermanager.com/
“Slacker Manager – Paving the path of least resistance, so you don’t have to trip and fall” – don’t let the title fool you, this is a great resource on management, technology and a host of other things.

http://www.ismckenzie.com/
“Ian’s Messy Desk”

http://www.punkey.com/gtd/
“What’s the next action – A weblog about Getting Things Done”

http://safarisoftware.typepad.com/
“ToDoOrElse.com”

Document Download

Finally, as promised, you can download this whole series as a single file (zipped PDF, ~237Kb).

And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, concludes this particular series. Thanks for reading. All comments and suchlike welcome.


Implementing Getting Things Done, while using a Blackberry - Part Four January 12, 2006

Parts One, Two and Three deal with the Collection and Processing stages of GTD. One last piece in relation to Processing, and then we’ll move on.

The Weekly Review – with Added Blackberry Goodness

So, the weekly review in and of itself, shouldn’t need any real explanation here. I have mine scheduled for 2pm, for an hour, every Friday. My theory is that if I’ve missed anything, I’ve still got an hour or two of the working week to deal with it, and in the worst case where I’ve missed something that needs to be ready on Monday – well, I’ll be working through the weekend that week!

The “extra bits” that I’ve found helpful to add into this process, with respect to keeping things running smoothly with the Blackberry:

All being well, that’s the Collection and Processing stages of the Methodology taken care of. In the comments, and in direct mail, I’ve had some suggestions to “tweak” how I’m doing things. I’m going to come back to those in another post, and talk through them.

Organizing

I’m including this section here, as I said I’d map the Blackberry to the full model in the book, but basically, in GTD terms – you’ve already handled the Organizing part of the process if and when you did your Collection with the Blackberry; that is, you decided whether to place an item directly into it’s correct place within the system, or make a note elsewhere, or send yourself an email reminder, as appropriate.

Reviewing

Reviewing and Doing have a habit of blending together when you’re “out and about” and using a tool like the Blackberry, but there are a couple of things that probably need to be thought about and done:

For reference, Reviewing is where David Allen puts the Weekly Review process in his book. It’s my preference when thinking specifically of working with a split system – Outlook and the Blackberry – to put the Morning Review and the Weekly Review into the Processing section. Personal preferences vary, and all that.

Doing

Doing gets its own section… Hmm… Wonder what we’ve been “doing” so far? I agree with separating out Processing and Doing from a “purist” standpoint, and discussing the whole methodology, but as I alluded to above, these stages tend to get blurred – compressed – when you’re working in the mobile context.

It’s worth remembering the “Four-Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment”, from the book; you’ve got:

  1. Context
  2. Time available
  3. Energy available
  4. Priority

And a handy-dandy list of everything in your Blackberry, to readily choose from!

That about does it for this piece. I’ve got another couple of posts on this all lined up:

Thanks to everyone that has left comments, either here on the site, via email, or via their own websites. Questions and suggestions are still welcome, via whatever method you’re most comfortable with.

Part Five is here


Fixated? Me???

CBS News | Catch The Buzz On The Blogs | January 12, 2006 12:33:54

Melissa McNamara seems to think so…

Gary Slinger, a blogger rather fixated on organization, has tried to implement the book’s advice using a Blackberry. He writes, “Collection – getting commitments, obligations and ideas into the trusted system, where they can later be processed – is a key element of the Blackberry’s usefulness to me.”

It’s certainly a major part of my work and life right now.


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


Implementing Getting Things Done, while using a Blackberry - Part Two January 3, 2006

Part One Can Be Found Here

Creating Tasks and Next Actions

OK - the heart of the GTD system. Next Actions, represented within the Blackberry and Outlook world, and then mapped back to contexts through the use of Categories.

Task input on the Blackberry is relatively easy – from the home screen, hit “Tasks”, and then do one of two things:

Remember I said that the Operating System had to be v4.0 or above? This application is the major reason why. If you didn’t check your version earlier, look at the Task screen – no Category line, no GTD compatibility. See you cellular provider for an OS upgrade.

Blackberry Tasks - Setting Categories

Now.. We get into an area where the Blackberry will work. It won’t necessarily work in a pleasant, user-friendly and screen-attractive manner. I said yesterday “…if you work with the tools that you have, and are open to adaptation and interpretation (of the processes and methods), you’ll probably be pretty happy with the results”. This is one of those areas.

Scroll down to the category line. Hit the space-bar, and you’ll be taken into the category selection list. First compromise point – you’re going to see categories from every aspect of Outlook – Calendar, Email, Contacts, Tasks, Notes. Second compromise – the categories turn up whether they’re populated, or not (for instance, I have a context/category @Calls that I use very rarely. It shows up on the list every time – good from a creation perspective, bad from a retrieval one, and the Blackberry doesn’t discriminate).

Third Compromise – the Blackberry doesn’t prioritize the “@” symbol alphabetically. So, on mine I see “@Agendas”, followed by “Bars” (a contacts category), followed by “@Calls”. Caveat: the Blackberry emulator that I am using for screenshots for this work DOES correctly sort the “@” symbol. The version number of the emulator is slightly higher than my actual Blackberry OS as well. Thus, this may have been fixed in a newer release for the actual handhelds. If you have experience confirming or denying this, I’d be interested in your comments.

Final compromise in respect of the Category functionality on the Blackberry – if you have a Filter applied, so that you are only looking at one context (i.e. you were previously in retrieval/processing/doing mode), and you create a new Task, the Blackberry will NOT automatically try to apply that Category. In general use, I don’t find this a nuisance, as I may add an “@Call” item, then a “@Shopping” one, and finally a “@Computer” item. That “@Shopping” one though… Adding five or six grocery items, and having to set the category every time – gets old after a while.

So, that’s it. Task created; reminder and due dates created as you see fit for your own implementation of the system, and a category applied. Save it to the Blackberry, and let it replicate to Outlook.

From a Blackberry perspective, if you were to go into any of the retrieval stages – processing, organizing, reviewing, doing – that task has had all you need doing done to it. If you want to be able to do any of those stages within Outlook – as part of a morning review, or a weekly review – there’s one more step to be done, if you’re using the Netcentrics addin.

The Netcentrics addin adds specific fields to the Outlook forms for “Action” and “Project”. I’m not going to cover the Project field – it’s got it’s pro’s and con’s. Action though is key to being able to use the views that are added to Outlook. If you’re not using the Addin, the chances are that you’re using Outlook views that work around the Category field, so you’ll be OK. Addin users – look at your tasks list, by Active Action, and look at the actions that have filtered to the top with no Action. Those are the ones you need to open up and allocate the appropriate Action code (and Project too, if you’re so inclined). That data won’t synchronize back to the Blackberry, but it’s a necessary extra step to be able to use both parts of the system to their fullest extent.

There are a couple of aspects to retrieving tasks that need to be converted further – those will come in the next sections – this section is meant to focus on the Collection stage of the process.

When you’re in a Hurry

I mentioned this in yesterday’s post as well, but it bears repeating here – don’t want to create a new task, find the right category (indeed, create the right category if it doesn’t already exist), set the right date details (if you know them), and so forth?

Just send yourself an email.

If you’ve got “Dial From The Home Screen” disabled (from the phone screen, go into Options, General Options, and it’s towards the bottom) then you have hotkey access from the home screen to most applications. “T” for Tasks, “L” for Calendar, “M” for Messages for instance.

There’s also “C” for Create. You can create email, SMS, MMS, PIN Messages, whatever. The system will default to email if you use shortcuts – my surname is Slinger, and I’m in my own address book as that, with my correct email details. I can get to it by hitting “C” from the home screen followed by “SL”. That selects my name. “Enter”, and I’m creating an email. If your own name doesn’t lend itself to such access (I hate to pick on “Smith” and “Jones”, but you get the idea), consider creating a fake entry for yourself – “zz” for instance. “C Z Z Enter” and you’re in. Four keystrokes from the home key.

Fill in as much detail as you feel you’ll need to be able to properly interpret and process the item when you come back to it as part of your Processing stage, Send it to yourself, and you’re done. This step alone is a major reason I put a “Morning Review” into my GTD & Blackberry methodology when I started it – I’ve been known to enter thirty or forty notes to myself in this manner in the course of an evening, and then taken about ten minutes the next day, on a proper computer, to process them into the system. It would have taken me a lot longer than that to directly enter them on the Blackberry. Some of them also came under David Allen’s two-minute rule – 20 seconds to send an email to myself, versus two minutes or more to actually record it properly, and then the next day, on reading the note, less than two minutes to process, and delete the item, keeping it out of the “proper” system entirely.

More on Morning Reviews in the next installment.

Continues…

Coming up in following posts:

Part Three Can Be Found Here


Implementing Getting Things Done, while using a Blackberry January 2, 2006

I’ve had a number of entries in my referrer log regarding “GTD and Blackberry” or “Blackberry and Getting Things Done”. I mentioned in a previous post that I’d be writing about it soon. “Soon” had to be redefined somewhat due to some work and personal issues, but here we go.

Implementing “Getting Things Done”, while using a Blackberry

Assumptions:

I’m going to assume that you’re familiar with GTD – if you’re not, you should first check out the David Allen website, and/or the book itself. From a technology perspective, I should disclose that I use Microsoft Outlook 2003, connected to an Exchange Server 2003. Added to Outlook, I have the Netcentrics GTD Outlook Addin; there’s also a Blackberry Enterprise Server in the mix. Major elements of the process and such that follow will work without having all of these elements, but the results may not be as “smooth” in implementation.

The Blackberry Itself

I personally use a Blackberry 7290:

Blackberry 7290

Provided you’re using a Blackberry with an Operating System of at least 4.0, the Blackberry examples shown here will be consistent, other than the appearance of the keyboard if you’re using a 71xx model, or the aesthetic differences of the case.

The Operating System

A key concept of GTD is “contexts”. These are represented in this methodology through “Categories”, which are replicated between the Blackberry and Outlook. Versions of the Blackberry prior to 4.0 don’t have the Category functionality in the Tasks application, so it won’t work out. Using the Netcentrics addin facilitates pushing next actions into the Tasks section of Outlook, and hence the Blackberry.

To check your Operating System version on your Blackberry, start from the home screen, go into Options, and then into About. You should see something like this:

Checking the Blackberry OS Version

You can see here that I have a Blackberry running version 4.0.2.49. If you have a 3.x, check with your cell provider – they should have an upgrade available for you.

Using The Blackberry For Getting Things Done

David Allen breaks the GTD process into five distinct stages. I’m going to use these as guides, and map how I personally use the Blackberry in each stage. I think that Collection and Processing, the first two sections, are the most involved and important.

Remember that GTD is a process, and concept, that each implementer has to adapt for their own needs. There’s no application to load on to a Blackberry that will magically implement the GTD processes, and there’ll be aspects of the implementation that you don’t like in all likeliness. But if you work with the tools that you have, and are open to adaptation and interpretation (of the processes and methods), you’ll probably be pretty happy with the results.

Collection

While I try and have pen and paper with me all the time, the Blackberry, by virtue of also being my cellphone, is always with me. Thus collection – getting commitments, obligations and ideas into the trusted system, where they can later be processed – is a key element of the Blackberry’s usefulness to me.
Items to Collect with the Blackberry:

Calendar Commitments

Almost goes without saying, doesn’t it? You make a dinner date, or agree the time and date of the next project review meeting, or whatever – just key it into the Blackberry at the appropriate time and date, let it synchronize back to Outlook, and you’re done.

Don’t forget that you can do all-day events and foreign time zone events directly into the calendar though – the former for “must do on day X but at any time” type next actions you have (“Call Dad” is a fairly typical one of mine). The latter… If you work in a multi-national company, have friends or contacts abroad, etc., then this trick is handy. For example, let’s say you live in Florida, you’re visiting Texas, and you need to schedule a call to England, but you can’t remember if the time difference is five, six or seven hours. Open up the Blackberry calendar, and create the item, recording the time details at the time you want it to happen at the destination. Then change the time-zone field to the destination time zone.

Time Zone field in Calendar Entry

Save it, and you’re done. Open it back up to check, and you’ll see that it’s been changed to the correct local time for you. THIS DOES REQUIRE that you have your current time zone set correctly in the Blackberry in the first place. From the home screen, hit Options, then Time/Date and make sure that the first entry matches up to your current time zone.

Setting your Time Zone

Contact Details / Phone Numbers

Chances are, if I’m being given an address when I’m out and about, it’s either on a business card or in an email. So I process that normally, back at my desk. Phone numbers go straight into the Blackberry though – don’t forget to assign a category when you add a new contact (although if you forget, you can always deal with that as part of the next “morning review”, of which I’ll go into later).

Very occasionally, though, it may be too long-winded to go into the address book application, and create a record “properly” – in that instance, I just fire up the email application and send a message to myself. I can create a new email to myself from the home screen with the following key presses: “C”, “SL” (first two letters of my surname) and “Enter”. I can use that to quickly enter a note (about anything, this isn’t just relevant to phone numbers and such) in shorthand, that I can then process into my system properly during the next morning review.

If your own name doesn’t come up on the addressing screen with just a couple of key presses, consider adding a “fake” entry to your address book, such as “zz”, with your own email address against it. Same net result.

Continues…

In the interests of keeping this post a manageable length and size, I’m going to break here.

Coming up in following posts:

Part Two Can Be Found Here


What is GTD? November 20, 2005

GTD is the acronym, and common nickname, for Getting Things Done, a time and personal organization management methodology, written by David Allen. The book of the subject can be found at Amazon here, David Allen’s company is here, and his own explanation of what GTD is can be found here.

I personally use the GTD methodology, with a few minor tweaks to my own circumstances and preferences, as is common to many practitioners of it. I use a Blackberry as my primary communications tool; it often becomes my always-available capture device (read the book…), as it is always with me. But, depending on the circumstances, I may also use a HipsterPDA, again, modified to my own purposes (which is the whole point of the hPDA), or Microsoft OneNote, or MindJet MindManager — the important thing, in GTD terms and techniques, is that no matter who I create actions or record information, everything ultimately ends up in one Inbox, for later processing. In my case, I use Microsoft Outlook, and the NetCentrics GTD Add-In.

The book retails for less than ten dollars. There are a multitude of sites, blogs and discussion groups around the web discussion the application of the methodology; you could read those without having read the book first, but the maximum benefit comes with the book. It’s an easy read, although actually implementing the processes for the first time may require you to set aside a weekend, or a series of evenings (everyone’s circumstances are different). If you only read one organizational management guide book, this would be the one I recommend.

The rest of the “GTD” category on this site will have comments about specific situations and scenarios relating to the implementation and use of GTD, and any relevant articles about the topic I see and recommend. The separate “Time Management” category will contain more general observations and links.

Check it out, let me know what you think - comments are always welcome.

(Sidebar: This is a backdated post. I’m actually writing it at 12:20 on November 20th. I want to put this into the early part of the GTD category as an explanatory post, as I intend to refer someone to this, and the whole category block. I’m also interested to see if the post, being backdated like this, turns up correctly in the RSS feed, if at all, as a basis for future knowledge).

Technorati Tags: Time Management, GTD


On GTD and “Conversational” Email November 8, 2005

Written for a friend of mine, who receives a lot of email that isn’t always actionable, but needs to be processed “right now”, and was suffering some overload as a result.

Email Processing and GTD, Some Thoughts

Starting Assumptions/Perceptions/Facts:

It’s important to remember from the get go that GTD is a system that sets out some guiding principles, rather than being an absolute set of procedural rules that have to be followed. Almost everyone that implements GTD, unless they actually work for the David Allen Company, are going to end up “tweaking” it somewhat, either modifying, removing or adding components, thoughts and methods, from other formal methodologies or from their own experiences, for their personal comfort and benefit.

That said, GTD is predicated on a couple of core elements:

Dealing specifically with you, I think one of the first things that I suggest is differentiating your email as soon as you see it into one of two types:

As an aside – I’m completely not considering mailing list email – my (brief) view on that is that if it’s important, and needs participation, process it as part of your regular email processing. If it’s informational only, put it somewhere out of sight, and refer to it as and when you have the spare bandwidth for this.

So, where are we? My understanding is that you’d like to “work from zero” in the Inbox, which is a good principle to work to, but that you’re getting overwhelmed, somewhat, with the conversational email. Turning email off and only processing it once an hour or so isn’t an option, because of your service level agreements. My ideas are outlined below, but they rely on two extra Outlook tools:

So, specific recommendations – this is based on me thinking through “if I was in position, how would I make this work?”. These are ONLY suggestions, and I readily recommend ripping them apart and customising them to yourself, and even ignoring them completely if that’s appropriate to you.

  1. Have Outlook visible on a second monitor if possible, as a reduced size window if not, or check it regularly via Alt-Tab, new message popups, or the display “toast” feature. You may want to do some more tweaking with your auto-preview and preview-pane options here – what has worked previously may need to be tweaked to deal with things in a GTD manner.
  2. If new mail comes in and it’s conversational, deal with it. Engage in the conversation, get information as needed, provide information and solutions as requested – that’s what they’re paying you for J
  3. If you generate Actions as a result of those conversations, and you’re not going to do them right-away, remember you’re only a hot-key away from putting that task into Outlook – CTRL-SHIFT-K.
  4. When you’ve finished your conversation emails, LEAVE THEM. Just leave them in the Inbox. They’re marked read. Don’t worry about them.
  5. While you’re flying through your Inbox dealing with the Conversational stuff, if you come across a Non-Conversational, LEAVE IT ALONE. Leave it marked unread, and move on to the next message. The only exception I’d make to this is if you get something that’s clearly instantly deletable – the announcement about a car with its lights left on (unless it’s yours!), the “donuts in the kitchen!” announcements, etc.
  6. Plan a couple of “Process Email” tasks into your day. I can’t recommend specific times and durations, because that’s going to be unique to you, but play around with it. And then USE those times – process the unread mail in your Inbox – because it’s ALL non-conversational, REAL email to you. One at a time, by the book – read it, and then delete it, defer it, delegate it, or do it. Remember that you can still have your Rules setup to bypass this and alert you, me and the National Command Authority if necessary for messages from your wife, your boss or your bookie… Remember, the idea is to get to a “trusted system” – put whatever safeties in place you need to make that happen.[i]
  7. When you’re processing these non-conversational emails, you should also be moving them out of your Inbox as you process them:
    • Delete – that’s obvious.
    • Delegate – use the Add-In button. Forward the message where it needs to go, and if you need to, have it put a reminder on your calendar or task list. Both options are there. The Add-In will move it out of your Inbox.
    • Defer – put it on your calendar or your task list, whichever is appropriate. The Add-In will move it out of your Inbox.
    • Do it – do whatever’s there, and then file or delete the message, or file the message for later reference. One of the reasons I suggested the desktop/email search is to make filing easier – just put everything in the same archive folder. Retrieve it using the search application. By all means, put a GTD Project tag onto the email if appropriate.
  8. At the end of every day, go back to your Inbox, and move all those messages that are left into the archive folder – because all that’s left there now is those marked-as-read, conversational emails, right?
  9. At the end of the day, consider doing a mini-review. Have a look at your calendar for tomorrow – anything coming up you’d forgotten about, missed the reminder of, etc.? Run through your task lists – anything showing a deadline, or anything that just makes you go “uh oh” when you see it, and make you want to pull it into the calendar, or even your Inbox? (There’s a button in the Add-In that can instantly move anything you’ve processed out of the Inbox back TO the Inbox. You can do this to reprocess it, if you want to. It’s not recommended, but there are exceptions to every rule!).
  10. The biggie. At least once a week, if you’re going to do this, you’re going to have to find time to do a proper Review. Scharff used to say “if you can’t Measure, you can’t Manage” – well, the GTD version of this is “if you don’t Review, you aren’t Getting Things Done”. There are a number of checklists out there that include a LOT of things you can include in your Review, and I can send you one if you want, but at a fundamental level, you just need to know that everything you’ve put into your system is in a place that it’s going to get done – either the Calendar, or appropriate context-based Task items, and that you’re aware of what’s coming up.

After that, possibly the hardest part of the concept, and one that needs some personalisation, is “working in contexts” – you have to be able to sit there and go “OK, I’m in the office. I have no conversational emails to process, and I’ve processed my Inbox to empty. I have three hours before my next time-based activity (the calendar stuff), so I’ll look at my tasks and see what I have in “@Office” and “@Computer” and see what’s appropriate to work on now.

If you find you have stuff on context lists that you’re consistently not doing or not getting to – take them off the context list and put them on the calendar. Commit yourself to doing them in that time.

There’s no doubt that implementing time management methodologies, of any flavor, requires change both in perception and in the mechanics of how things are done on a day to day basis, and sometimes in the usage of tools. Sometimes those changes are easy, and sometimes not so. Experimentation is necessary, although there’s a trap of “too much experimentation” – the goal is for you to find a methods that works for you, is comfortable, and perhaps most importantly is EASY so that you keep doing it.

Everything before this is just my thoughts. I hope they help. Do let me know how you get on.

Gary
2005-10-17

——————–

[i] Remember that one of the fundamentals of the GTD process is splitting out and differentiating between COLLECTION (the 3×5’s, Outlook tasks or emails to yourself, post-its, whatever), PROCESSING (working through your Inbox(es) and getting Actions entered into your system, and DOING (when you pick an appropriate context and get on with it).

 

Technorati Tags: Time Management, GTD


GTD, Contexts, and “Break/Fix” November 2, 2005

In a discussion, the comment was made:

“I’m getting there. […] Break/Fix messes with it some, but it’s a help.”

To which I offered my reply/opinion/advice:

It shouldn’t - other than possibly leading to an occasional long day… Break/Fix, at least the way I look at it, is just another context.

Scenario:
  • You’re busy working away at something from your “@Office” context, because there’s nothing on your calendar right now.
  • Something occurs that needs you to stop, and go do Break/Fix.
  • You return to your desk (or, you stop doing whatever remote-control you were doing, etc. This is one of the reasons Context is a good thing to think about - it isn’t necessarily a location thing, it’s a what am I working on thing).
  • If you generated any new Next Actions as a result of your break/fix work - they go into the system.
  • Right - anything on the calendar? No - OK, time to go home yet? No - OK, back to context thinking.

The risk is that whatever you were working on in that @Office context is something that’s actually due today, and it’s now 16:30. One argument would be that last week’s Weekly Review (because you did do a Weekly Review, didn’t you? ;) would have identified the upcoming deadline, and you’d have booked hard-time into your calendar to work on it. Cool. But then the counter-argument is that break/fix comes along and you don’t get to use that hard calendar time. That’s where my “occasional long day” comment comes in - that’s just an unfortunate aspect of Operations. The underlying reality is that most ducks are smart enough to build slack time into any deadlines they give you, and if you genuinely couldn’t do something, because of break/fix, you can probably use that slack time.

Or stay in the office until Midnight


GTD, Contexts, and Break/Fix

-

In a discussion, the comment was made:

“I’m getting there. […] Break/Fix messes with it some, but it’s a help.”

To which I offered my reply/opinion/advice:

It shouldn’t - other than possibly leading to an occasional long day… Break/Fix, at least the way I look at it, is just another context.

Scenario:
  • You’re busy working away at something from your “@Office” context, because there’s nothing on your calendar right now.
  • Something occurs that needs you to stop, and go do Break/Fix.
  • You return to your desk (or, you stop doing whatever remote-control you were doing, etc. This is one of the reasons Context is a good thing to think about - it isn’t necessarily a location thing, it’s a what am I working on thing).
  • If you generated any new Next Actions as a result of your break/fix work - they go into the system.
  • Right - anything on the calendar? No - OK, time to go home yet? No - OK, back to context thinking.

The risk is that whatever you were working on in that @Office context is something that’s actually due today, and it’s now 16:30. One argument would be that last week’s Weekly Review (because you did do a Weekly Review, didn’t you? ;) would have identified the upcoming deadline, and you’d have booked hard-time into your calendar to work on it. Cool. But then the counter-argument is that break/fix comes along and you don’t get to use that hard calendar time. That’s where my “occasional long day” comment comes in - that’s just an unfortunate aspect of Operations. The underlying reality is that most ducks are smart enough to build slack time into any deadlines they give you, and if you genuinely couldn’t do something, because of break/fix, you can probably use that slack time.

Or stay in the office until Midnight


What is GTD? November 1, 2005

(This is a replacement post. I’m having some issues with the category selection aspect of the wordpress.com client. This is part of my efforts to work around that).

GTD is the acronym, and common nickname, for Getting Things Done, a time and personal organization management methodology, written by David Allen. The book of the subject can be found at Amazon here, David Allen’s company is here, and his own explanation of what GTD is can be found here.

I personally use the GTD methodology, with a few minor tweaks to my own circumstances and preferences, as is common to many practitioners of it. I use a Blackberry as my primary communications tool; it often becomes my always-available capture device (read the book…), as it is always with me. But, depending on the circumstances, I may also use a HipsterPDA, again, modified to my own purposes (which is the whole point of the hPDA), or Microsoft OneNote, or MindJet MindManager — the important thing, in GTD terms and techniques, is that no matter who I create actions or record information, everything ultimately ends up in one Inbox, for later processing. In my case, I use Microsoft Outlook, and the NetCentrics GTD Add-In.

The book retails for less than ten dollars. There are a multitude of sites, blogs and discussion groups around the web discussion the application of the methodology; you could read those without having read the book first, but the maximum benefit comes with the book. It’s an easy read, although actually implementing the processes for the first time may require you to set aside a weekend, or a series of evenings (everyone’s circumstances are different). If you only read one organizational management guide book, this would be the one I recommend.

The rest of the “GTD” category on this site will have comments about specific situations and scenarios relating to the implementation and use of GTD, and any relevant articles about the topic I see and recommend. The separate “Time Management” category will contain more general observations and links.

Check it out, let me know what you think - comments are always welcome.

(Sidebar: This is a backdated post. I’m actually writing it at 12:20 on November 20th. I want to put this into the early part of the GTD category as an explanatory post, as I intend to refer someone to this, and the whole category block. I’m also interested to see if the post, being backdated like this, turns up correctly in the RSS feed, if at all, as a basis for future knowledge).

Technorati Tags: Time Management, GTD