shhLIFE!

Plastic Animation Paper – PAP:Pro 4.0 for free.

Woah!  plastic animation paper for free!

sweeeeeeeeeeet!

Comic Con Panel – Megamind with Will Ferrell.

There was a megamind panel at comicon this morning at 10, and the buzz is coming back that it was a lot of fun!  They showed 5 minutes of the movie, which has shots from all through the film.. Everything should be on Yahoo movies tomorrow, so hopefully people will watch and enjoy!

You know I love Animation Mentor.  Not only is it one of the best places to learn character animation in the world, but the founders and the staff are such awesome human beings that they infuse the entire Animation Mentor experience with pure, unfiltered, pure awesome.  Seriously.. you just mention “Animation Mentor” to someone and immediately you’re surrounded with hugs, and smiles, and great stories.

I spoke with the friggin amazing Bobby Beck, and am now able to offer a discount on the Animator Friendly Rigging products to all Animation Mentor students and alumni!

Bobby will be distributing the information to students and alum on how to get the discounts!

Enjoy!

I’m super jazzed about what the awesome people at Rigging Dojo are doing to help people interested in character rigging learn more about the craft.  They’re all fantastic teachers, excellent riggers, and just darn-right awesome human beings.  I’m really excited to be able to offer a 10% discount on the Animator Friendly Rigging DVD series for rigging dojo students!

If you’re a student there, please contact brad, josh, or chad to find out how to get your discount!

Woot!

I’ve stuck pretty rigidly to my GTD plan these past two weeks and I can really feel a difference in my stress level and my ability to feel like I’m on top of everything on my plate.

I’ve modified my toodledo system a tiny bit.  Previously I mentioned that I had 4 folders set up in toodledo:

1. Inbox
2. Projects
3. Discussions
4. Someday / Maybe

This worked for a little while, but I soon found that my Projects folder was getting a bit overrun, so I decided to change Projects to Areas of Focus.  This lets me separate the areas where I don’t have any overlap to allow me to focus better.

My folder structure now looks like:

1. Inbox
2. Focus – Work
3. Focus – Home
4. Focus – Animator Friendly Rigging
5. Discussions
6. Someday / Maybe
7. Calendar

As you can see I also added a Calendar folder.  This is where I’m keeping things like birthdays and other events that I want to find quickly and easily.

What’s really been helping me keep on track however is being SUPER diligent about not letting my email inbox balloon out of control.  My goal is to get it to zero every night, but that’s not always possible to do before heading home to be with the family.

That means I also don’t skim through and start reading my work emails until I get into work in the morning (or sit down at the computer at night) and have time to process everything.

I absolute refuse to let an email sit in my inbox read.  If it’s sitting there, and I’ve read it, I force myself to make a decision on it.  Is it a task?  Is it an action?  Do I need to read it later and figure out what I’m going to do with it?  Even if that last option is the one I need to do, I make it a project, drag it to my Active folder in outlook, and then make a task in toodledo to read the email and process it.

This works for my physical inbox as well.  I spent a good 4 hours on Saturday going through my entire office and cleaning up all my old files, todo notes, etc.  I got everything current, emptied my inbox, and made sure to have a good clean space that’s enjoyable to sit in.

It’s amazing how just having a clean area and a clean inbox can allow you to focus 100% on a task at hand and really plow through it.

I think I’m totally hooked!

Now.. I still wish I had a cleaner UI for toodledo.. it’s okay, but check this out.. has anyone used smartytask?

Smartytask for GTD (Smartytask.com) from Smarty Task on Vimeo.

It looks super slick.. I’d love to give it a try, but 100 bucks a year is a little steep.

I know I’ve been talking a lot about toodledo as my current task manager of choice, but there are a number of options out there for people that would work pretty well for what I’ve been harping on so far.

In fact, almost any type of “list” system will work just fine.  The only reason I’m currently using toodledo is because it syncs with the iPhone so well and fast, it’s incredibly easy!

However, in terms of UI they could certainly use a retrofit.

Check out a similar task list in nirvana.. I can compress the window a lot more, only the relevant information is shown, and it just looks way cleaner.

I love the list of projects on the left, the fact that I can use Areas of focus to easily separate work from home stuff, and it’s super easy to see what items I’m waiting for, what’s next ,what I plan on doing in the future, etc.

The only real issue as to why I’m not using nirvana is because I can’t sync with my iphone.  They have a beautiful mobile app, but it needs an internet connection to sync. When I want to get my tasks I don’t wait to wait for an internet connection, I want the stuff there.. immediately!

Google tasks is another possibility.. you can make individual lists, and you can indent.. but as far as I know I can’t search my tasks, and I can’t tag them.  That makes it a no-win for me.

The other thing I like about both toodledo and nirvana is that I can email tasks directly to the inbox.. super sweet!  And with toodledo I can actually process stuff with my email!  I can send with a subject like:

Call bob about new car ideas ! @@call #today

and it’ll show up in my inbox with the context @call and already marked for #today.  I can also add tags, status, folders, etc..

Crazy powerful!  Also, check out all the connections they have. Lots of ways to work with your data.

They also have a fancy “refer your friend” deal where if you refer a friend to toodledo and they sign up through a special link, you can save money on a pro account.. giving you access to all sorts of cool things like subtasks and more.

I just wish it were prettier.

At any rate, I’d love to hear what other things you guys are using!  In fact, regardless of how useful toodledo is, or how pretty nirvana is.. neither still really give me what I want.

What I WANT is something I can host myself for absolute security that’ll sync with my iphone/ipad.  Anyone know of anything like that?

In a previous post I started going through my new process for handling tasks that allows me to be email inbox zero.

If you can remember, I funnel everything that I have to do (or need to follow up on) to my toodledo inbox, whether it’s from email, snail mail, meetings, etc.

In toodledo I have the following folders set up:

1. Inbox
2. Projects
3. Discussions
4. Someday / Maybe

My default tasks get sent to my inbox folder automatically, so any tasks I add whether it’s within toodledo, by forwarding an email, or by using my own personal python script (I’ll discuss this in another post) all sit first in that inbox folder.

Then, I can go through each item and specify whether the item is a task or project, what it’s due date is, the context (@work, @home, @calls, @wife, etc), what the status is ( next action, deferred, waiting on, etc) and determine if it’s a project, a discussion I need to have, or if I’m going to do it sometime in the future.

Then I move the task to the appropriate folder and I’m done!

Well, done processing anyway. Now it’s time to start doing real work.

Depending on where I am, I will filter my lists by context, so when I’m at work I only see my @work tasks.. Or if I am meeting with my whole animation team I’ll filter to my folder discussions and then check out my @anim items so I know what I want to talk about.

What’s great about this is that I can have a real clear picture of what tasks and projects are relevant to my current state, and I can easily determine what I should be working on at any given moment.

I’ve been focusing on doing this for a few weeks now and my focus has changed considerably. I really feel like I have a handle on most of the things that are taking my attention.

I don’t have everything in this system yet.. For example I know that I have to return my leased car within the next two months but I don’t have a project based on that idea yet.

It’s all a process though.. A journey.

One of the things that I’ve always said is that the techniques I discuss in Animator Friendly Rigging can be used in almost any package. The main idea is that even though the tutorials come with all sorts of mel scripts and files and explicit instructions for Maya, what people should take away are the concepts and theories behind the results.

Why should we rig the way we do?
What are we looking for?
What would help the animator the most?
etc.

That’s why I was totally jazzed to see this post on Vimeo:

AFR Rivalry! from MTracer on Vimeo.

It’s someone doing some of the same animator friendly rigging techniques I talk about in the material, but doing it in Blender!

That’s great! I love seeing stuff like this!

In my previous post I discusses the inbox zero side of my current gtd setup.. Basically processing all my email down to zero.

The trick here is not that I’m completing everything in my email, it’s that I’m cleansing and moving it to a single trusted place. That means that no matter what, I have one single location to go to where all my incoming tasks and projects will be processed.

Of course I was just talking about email previously.. the trick is that I can do this with all types of input.  Email, snail mail, meeting notes, random thoughts, shopping lists, long term goals, etc.

Every thought gets funneled into the same location where I can process, filter, assign, itemize, plan, etc.

The key is to get the stuff to toodledo with a clear action in mind.

It doesn’t help if I just forward an email with a subject like “re: fountains, what a pain!”.

If that ends up in my toodledo inbox I’ll have to re-read the email and figure out what the heck to do about it.  As long as I’ve already made up my mind that I DO need to do something about this (otherwise, why would I be forwarding it to toodledo?), I should phrase the subject as a task that I can physically do, or a clearly defined outcome to a project.

For example, let’s say that what’s hidden in the heart of this email is the fact that there are 15 different kinds of fountains for sale by this company I’m interested in purchasing from, and I need to determine what kind of fountain to get.

Then I’ll forward the email and change the subject to be something like “Choose which fountain I want”.

That way when I look at my toodledo inbox I know that this email is about picking a fountain, and there’s probably information in there for me to look at.

One of the great things about a pro account at toodledo is that I can make sub-tasks for my todos.  So I can break this down even further!

I can create a few very simple subtasks that allow me to really define what’s involved with picking the fountain:

• create a list of fountain names
• find images of each fountain
• put images and names into a google doc
• send google doc to wife
• set aside 15 minutes to discuss options
• etc..

Then, I’ll make each of those a sub-task and add whatever other information is necessary. .for example, add a link to the actual google doc I’m using, etc.

This is where the GTD stuff comes in real handy.  Each of those things are small physical bite-sized chunks of the big project “choose a fountain” that I can easily manage.  Now this project isn’t so daunting!

To be continued..

I’m such a dork.

This past week I’ve been doing my darndest to try and maintain a zero-sized inbox, both at home and at work.  This is an incredibly daunting task.  As work I receive a TON of email every day.  And by a ton, I mean a metric buttload of email.

One quick example.. on wednesday at 4pm I had my inbox down to 0.  That’s right, not a single email in my inbox.  Not one.  Zero. Kaput.  Nada.  Bupkis. I went off to walkies for one hour and when I returned I had over 150 messages in my email inbox.

Yeah.  One hour.  150 messages.  Expand that over an entire day, and you can see that my email inbox is constantly pinging me.   Expand that to a week.. imagine how much information is coming at me that might require some sort of action from me.  Yep, a bunch.

So this week I thought.. you know what?  I’m going to see if I can practice Inbox Zero, and I’m going to use toodledo to do it.

What is inbox zero you ask?

Only the coolest thing ever.

Yeah, that’s right.. cooler than than anything ever.  That’s right.  I said it.

Oh, you want me to elaborate?  It’s simply a way of maintaing your sanity with the amount of email coming at you.  The main idea is to process your email out of your inbox into a trusted system so you’re only taking in this input ONCE.

How many of you have an email sitting in your inbox that you’ve read once before?  What about twice?  What about knowing that there might be an email in your inbox that you might have read that might have something important in it maybe?

That’s sooooo stressful!

So here’s what I do.. I basically follow david allen’s GTD stuff with some Merlin Mann’s inbox zero stuff, and process it into my toodledo system.

First, I set up toodledo so I had a few folders:

1. Inbox
2. Projects
3. Discussions
4. Someday / Maybe

Next, I went to my toodledo settings and told it to put any new tasks directly into 1. Inbox.

Then I went to the tools and services area and configred my email so that I could email directly into my inbox.

Now that toodledo was set up, I went to my email program and created a few folders in there

1. My Projects
2. Others Projects
3. Reference
4. Archived

Finally, I went to my work email and started processing my email.  For every single piece of email I followed a flowchart similar to this one where I asked myself:

1. Do I need this email?  No?  DELETE it.
2. Is it actionable?  Can I or someone else do something about it? No? Archive it – What I would then do is assign this email a tag (gmail) or category (outlook) and drag it to my References folder.
3. Do I have to do something about it? No? Delegate it – Assign a tag (gmail) or category (outlook) drag it to my Others Projects folder
4. Can I do it in 2 minutes or less?  Yes?  Do it

If an email made it through each of these things and was still around, it most likely was a project of some kind. I would then tag or assign a category to the email, drag it to the My Projects folder, and then forward the email to toodledo with a subject that defined the outcome of the project.

For example, if I got an email that said “My AFR download isn’t working”, I would forward that to toodledo with a subject that said “Fix this person’s AFR download”.  If I knew what the absolute next action was that I needed to do I would add that to the notes.  If I didn’t, then I knew I would think about this later and just sent it to toodledo anyway.

Then, I would continue on to the next email and the next and the next until my entire inbox was ZERO.

Then I hopped over to gmail and did the same thing.

The nice thing about this is that I found that I could head to My Projects in my email and list by tag or by category and get a good sense of all my projects that I’m currently working on.  I could also head to Others Projects and see where they’re at on things.  It is a really great way of seeing quickly where everything is at.

The most important thing about this is that I’m now NEVER going into my email unless I give myself time to process what’s in there.  Even if I don’t have time to do those 2 minute tasks, I will simply forward those to my toodledo account knowing that I’ll get to them.  This allows me to get my email down to zero and maintain it being zero.  If I see that i have 30 messages sitting in there, in the past I would start cherry-picking things to read and not read, and I’d end up leaving stuff sitting there forever.  Now I have the strength to say “nope, no time to process.. I’m not going to even look.”

Talk about a stress relief!

In my next post, I’ll talk about how I dealt with processing all my items that are now sitting in my Inbox at toodledo.