Tag: GTD

GTD: Inbox Zero email

GTD Inbox Zero email
If you have email (and the fact that you’re reading this means it’s highly likely you do), one of the best ways you could invest 59 minutes this weekend (or any time, for that matter) would be to watch the web video of Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero talk, which he gave at Google late last month.

Merlin is the man(n) behind 43 Folders, a productivity blog that was among the influences that introduced me to David Allen’s Getting Things Done in 2005. After you watch this presentation, you’ll likely want to learn more about GTD, too. Merlin’s Inbox Zero section on his blog is a great resource, or you can go to David Allen’s site, or buy the book…or you can read more about my GTD experience here.

But this video is a great introduction to GTD concepts and their practical application, because it provides immediately useful tips for dealing with what is the single biggest time drain for “knowledge workers.”

Some of Merlin’s key points include:

  • Process your inbox to zero every time you check it. Don’t just check your email and leave messages in the inbox.
  • Think “verbs” with your email. You should do one of five things to every message in your inbox, and these are in order of desirability.
  1. Delete (or Archive for possible future reference in a single general reference folder)
  2. Delegate to someone else
  3. Respond quickly (five sentences or less, following David Allen’s Two-Minute Rule)
  4. Defer for later action
  5. Do it, or capture a placeholder for future action (put it on your calendar.)
  • Do not use your inbox as a to-do list. If you keep your inbox tidy, it won’t accumulate. If it starts to pile up, the pile continues to grow.
  • Develop The Processing Habit. Aristotle said “We are what we frequently do.” Getting at PDA doesn’t make you more organized. You need to actually apply the system on a routine, habitual basis. Make sure the system you implement is simple enough that you can regularly do it.
  • Do Email Less. Shut your email off for a while. Don’t have automatic minute-by-minute notifications. Check email once per hour at most, so you don’t have interruptions. Or, as Tim Ferris suggests, limit email to twice a day, at 11 and 4. I will have a post later about how Facebook can help make Tim’s tip more practical for people who need to be more immediately accessible, and for whom half a day delay in responding to messages is
  • Develop email templates for your responses. If you are answering the same things repeatedly, develop some core responses or boilerplate.

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Free WiFi at Airports

free wifi at airports
In a previous post, I commended the Las Vegas airport for offering free wifi for its patrons, and also alluded to Rochester, Minn. providing the same. Today I’m in the Jacksonville, Fla. airport where the wireless internet also is free. Good deal!

That got me to thinking that there must be a directory on the internet someplace that has a listing of airports where the wifi is free. Sure enough, here is the free wifi at airports directory.

You might want to bookmark that page for when you are traveling, because this makes it a lot more convenient to get to the airport in plenty of time to get through TSA. With free wifi, you can arrive early and then continue working (or updating Facebook…I couldn’t break my string of mentioning Facebook at least once in every post.)

This becomes a GTD tip, too. It extends the range of places where your “@ Online” context is valid.

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GTD Tip: Jott Easy Notes to Self

GTD Tip Jott

In The Four-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss advocates radical outsourcing of your life, going so far as to have a personal assistant in Bangalore handle all those nagging details. Whether you go that far or not, one thing all personal productivity and life enhancement gurus say is you need to start by gathering those details into one place, so you can decide whether to handle them yourself or delegate.

In Getting Things Done, David Allen says you should have as few inboxes as possible, but as many as you need, so you can capture all your ideas and projects in a place where you can be sure to process them later.

I personally rely on email as my main inbox (you have to have a physical inbox, too), so I try to get everything possible into my email, where I can move it to appropriate Context, Project or Tickler folders. So when I get an idea if I’m out and about, and I don’t have my trusty PowerBook with me, I typically have pulled out the Blackberry and sent myself an email for later triage.

Thanks to a tip from Michael Hyatt, I now have a better way of doing this for some circumstances. He recently highlighted Jott.com, a free service that takes dictation on your voice messages and sends the transcription to your email inbox. I tried it, and even with my Minneso-o-o-o-otan accent, it does pretty well. Here are a few examples from this morning:

One of cardinal principles of David Allen’s getting things done system is that you need to get everything out of your head and into an external trusted system.

Perfect. Didn’t capitalize the book title, but what would you expect?

I used to use my BlackBerry and hunt and pack key by key to send myself an e-mail with whatever idea it was that had come into my head. Now, instead I can just call this 800 number and it recognizes my caller ID and sends me an e-mail.

One misspelling, but still not bad at all.

One problem I see with this, although it’s not a terrible problem, is that the limit on the length of the message seems to be a little short. So, what we have coming will sometimes be a series of smaller e-mails instead one longer post.

Gotta like that! Used “it’s” instead of “its.” Smart.

I’ve got this set up as a one-touch speed dial on my cell phone. It won’t work from my office phone because the caller ID is the same for every extension, and its the caller ID that tells Jott.com where to send the transcript. But then again, if I’m at the office I can just pull out the laptop and add the note.

Another bonus: if for some reason the transcript was horribly mangled, jott.com lets you listen to the audio file, too.

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Looking Back: One Year of Blogging

one year of blogging
It was a year ago Monday that I launched this blog with three posts, the first of which alluded to mine being one of 50 million or so. Now Technorati says there are something over 70 million non-spam blogs.


As you look in the archives, you’ll note that my first posts were on July 30, 2006 and then I went dark until September 21. I wasn’t sure it would really be “OK” to have a blog, but then I got the responsibility for New Media as part of my work portfolio, so I decided to really plunge in and learn. Since then I’ve done 212 other posts, or nearly two every three days.

Here are some highlights, themes and lessons learned from my first year of blogging.

I’ve done several book reviews, including The Tipping Point and Blink! by Malcolm Gladwell, Our Iceberg is Melting by John Kotter, I Dare You! by William Danforth, Pyromarketing by Greg Stielstra, Wikinomics and, most recently, Made to Stick. I recommend all of them.

One book I didn’t review, but which has been the concept behind many posts, is David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Click here to read my thoughts on GTD.

I’ve blogged, some of them live, several conferences and seminars, including a Ragan conference in Chicago (where I met Jeremiah), the WHPRMS conference for health-care PR and marketing professionals, an Advanced Learning Institute conference in October, and a similar one in April. More recently, a colleague and I attended and presented at a healthcare marketing conference in Orlando, and last week I was on a panel at the Frost & Sullivan Sales & Marketing East 2007 event. Liveblogging is a great way to take notes on presentations, so I can refer to sites mentioned by the presenters. If it helps others, that’s a nice bonus.

I discovered that my blog was a great place to share personal and family highlights, from our Bible Bowl vacation, to my daughter Rachel’s wedding, to our electronic, multimedia Christmas letter.

On the media front, this has been the year of the buyout and layoff, particularly with newspapers. That has lots of implications for people like me who work with news media.
My biggest surprise, though, was a post on a related topic, when Dr. Max Gomez lost his position as the on-air doctor at WNBC. I began to notice that this post was getting visits every day, even several months after I wrote it. Then I noted that my WordPress.com dashboard was telling me that “Dr. Max Gomez” was a phrase people were using to find my blog. I thought, wow, are people searching for Dr. Max Gomez on Technorati? That must be how people are finding it, right?

I was surprised when I did the search in Google and found what you see below:

picture-4.jpg

Somehow my blog post ranked ahead of Wikipedia’s entry on Dr. Max in Google!

I found something similar with my review of John Kotter’s penguin parable. Which just does go to show that blogs are naturally built for search optimization.

Most recently, I’ve been amazed by Facebook, which has led to several other posts.

It’s been a great year of learning, and while I’ve invested some time, the financial cost has been zero.

Where else but the blogosphere can you learn so much at no cost?

I’m looking forward to continuing my education!

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GTD: Halfway There

For the last couple of weeks I have been strolling my GTD memory lane, reminiscing about what I’ve learned in the last 367 days since I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done on a plane ride home from Jacksonville.

In listening to Merlin Mann’s Productive Talk podcasts with David this week, I heard some heartening news: I’m probably halfway to “getting” GTD. In Productive Talk #7: Implementing GTD, David says for most people it takes about two years “to really re-groove the neural patterns.” This podcast series also is available on the DavidCo site. It’s well worth a listen.

Here’s a list of links to my top ten reflections so far, based on having my brain half-wired through only a year of GTD:

GTD: A Year Later
GTD: Taking the Plunge
GTD and Entourage

My First-Time Experience with Inbox Zero
GTD Success in Two Minutes or Less

Why excuses for not taking time to implement GTD are sick

Why GTD beats other books on personal organization.

Why even mediocrity in GTD pays big dividends.

How the Roadmap seminar is like Neo being introduced to Morpheus

And finally, a conceptual connection I have personally observed between the GTD methodology and a world-famous medical facility’s pioneering work in developing systems for seeing lots of patients while giving each the individual attention they need.

I expect I will continue to have observations over the coming months, such as this one which is not exactly about GTD, but connects blogging to a key GTD concept, the general reference filing system. So, if through the magic of search and the Long Tail you have come across this post sometime well beyond November 2006, you can click here to read my continuing saga.