shhLIFE!

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.

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.

Testing Time-Management Strategies – WSJ.com.

As most of you know, I’ve been spending the past year or so working on time management techniques, trying to figure out ways to keep creative, but still get work done quickly and efficiently.

In my new role, I find that I spend quite a bit of time juggling meetings, animating, giving notes, exploring ideas, family, and trying to find time to relax and work out.  It’s not easy, and things can easily get dropped or fall behind.

I’ve explored a few ways of keeping track of things, and what I’m working with now is a somewhat modified GTD technique, or Getting Things Done for those of you who haven’t heard of GTD before.  It’s a pretty cool technique for managing time developed by David Allen.

It’s working relatively well for me, but I still have yet to find a complete email/iphone/os X/linux workflow that I love with it.

I’ve also attempted the Pomodoro technique a few times, which I really like when I have a whole saturday to work straight ahead on 4 or 5 items.

The main thing that’s keeping me on track is trying to keep my email inbox to 0.  My goal is to do it every day, but some days that’s just impossible.  If I can’t hit it every day, I try and make SURE I do it by the end of the week.

Anyway, the Wall Street Journal has put together an article talking about time management.. it’s pretty interesting.  Check it out!

I’m SUPER jazzed and excited to see Bluetoo venture’s Todoist application for the iPhone.  As many of you know I’ve been researching GTD applications and trying to come up with as system that works for my needs.

I’m currently using Toodledo which is a very nice application.. it’s well documented, has tons of support, and the development team is great.  The only problem is that I’m just not a fan of the web UI. It’s difficult to use.. the sub-task support is complicated and feels buggy. I’m not saying it is buggy.. it just feels funky when i use it. Oh, and the UI just doesn’t make me scream with joy.  There are a lot of great things about Toodledo.. it really is a fantastic product.  However, for day to day use I keep coming back to..

Todoist.  It is a much simpler application but I LOVE the UI.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t had an iPhone application to match, therefore making it unusable for me in production.

Well, Bluetoo Ventures is about to release “Doings”.. their todoist iPhone application.  I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m VERY excited.. can’t wait to give it a shot!

After all this time of trying various task managers, it feels like I’m starting to settle on one.  Believe it or not, it’s one of the tools I started  out trying and discarding for various reasons, but after much hunting and pecking and trying and pulling and reading and writing.. I’m about *this* close to settling down.

Yes, I’m going to bite the bullet and commit.

This is a really big deal for me, because this search has gone on for quite a while.  I’ve tried numerous systems, and even used multiple todo lists at the same time.

I’ve tried pure web-based applications and pure iPhone apps.  I’ve tried using Outlook to manage my tasks and a OS X to email combination.

Through everything I’ve tried, only one application has had the best customer support, iPhone application, and web application that makes it easy, cheap, and possible to use a GTD system to manage my tasks, be they management, animation, home, etc.

That application is raman amplifier Toodledo.com.

Yes, I hate the web-based UI.  I can’t stand that I can’t have subtasks unless I pay for support.  The name makes me think of the Denny’s “rooty tooty fresh ‘n fruity” commercial from the 90′s.

But even with all that, every other todo application I’ve tried has been lacking in some area, and Toodledo (shudder) lacks the least.  The only thing I really don’t like about it is the UI on the web page, and there are so many other ways of integrating with it that I can get over that.

Here are the things I dig about it:

• The iPhone application – easy to use, syncs fast, 4 bucks
• The forums – super crazy active with great advice!
• The developers – actively working to improve their product.  This is more than I can say about RTM and Todoist, my two other favorite apps
• Integration with other tools – iPhone, twitter, email, google gadgets, firefox, ical, rss, jott… the list goes on and on!
• Customized saved searches
• Tags and contexts and folders and goals.. and subtasks if you’re a pro subscriber!

So if you haven’t tried Toodledo, give it a try.. but use this link:
http://www.toodledo.com/index.php?ref=td49a592734c5eb
if you do, because if 4 people sign up I get pro access for life!

And so begins day 3 of GTDAgenda testing.

Since I’m an animator at heart (even though I do more managing and meetings now), I decided to try adding tasks to make notes of each fix I wanted to do on a shot I’m currently working on.

I created a project specifically for this shot, and then started listing tasks.

I went stream of consciousness to add as many tasks as I could, just scrubbing back and forth over the animation, adding a task for each.  I was able to add a lot of tasks relatively quickly.  Click Add Task, type, click Save.  Not too bad.  It could be faster if I could enter a bunch of tasks at once, but it’s certainly not a deal-breaker.

The problem came when I went to then order the tasks so I could tackle them most efficiently.  I couldn’t find a way to order them quickly and easily.

In fact, I don’t think there’s any way other than editing the task and changing priority. It literally takes 4 clicks to change the priority from 1-5 of a task.  The other tough thing is that you need to be aware of all other task priorities to make sure you set this task’s priority correctly.  Is the eye tweak a higher priority than the nose tweak?  They’re both facial priorities, so maybe they both go under a priority 3.  But then there’s another eyeline change I want to tackle.  So that’s priority 3 as well.  The big problem there is that I can’t re-order within that level 3 priority to plan my attack.  Very frustrating. * See the update below for a faster workflow!

This is quite the problem for me, it means I really have to think about the tasks as I log them and make sure I do it in the right order.  I don’t want to work that way.. I want to tackle the order of tasks as when I’m in the mode of processing them and figuring out what I have time and energy for.  I could just sort of skip around through the task list itself, but that means that I have to keep re-evaluating each item to see what I have energy for.  I’d rather make the plan once, and then just go through tick tick tick.

I’m hoping that I am missing a feature somewhere, or that the Developer is working on this.  It could certainly make it tough for me to use GTDAgenda to handle shot tasks.

Anyway, here are a few other thoughts that came up throughout the day.

??????
• Notes per task – need more room than just 1 line.
• Really missing the ability to create a whole bunch of tasks at once.
• Too much mouse traffic with the clicking on Add Task, filling out all the data, and then having to click Add Task.  Would much rather a system where I do quick-add & add @contexts and .Projects at the same time.
• The ability to submit tasks via Twitter is really cool.  It allows me to enter tasks much faster, and then head to GTDAgenda to edit them.
• You can also apply tasks via email.  The subject is the name of the task, and the body is the note.  I don’t know if you can automatically assign the email tasks to projects or not.. it would be great if you could.

Hope people are finding these posts useful!

Update -

Dan contacted me with an update to some of the notes I have above.  I thought I’d include his reply here because there’s some really great news for you gtdAgenda lovin people!   I don’t know when these issues will be released, but the fact that Dan is working on them is great!

One of the next features that will be released is the possibility to insert multiple tasks at once.

Regarding changing priorities, it can be done faster if you select the task(s) and then use the drop-down menu (More Actions) for this action. No need to edit.

When you send tasks by email, it’s not possible to assign a project to it, or context. However, each project and context has its unique email address too, and if you send tasks to its email the task will be added to that project/context.

After 2 days of using the online task management/productivity application GTDAgenda, I’m starting to get into a groove with the software and find my flow. I’ve still got a few issues that pop up here and there, but I’m getting a better hang of managing my todo lists, and displaying them in a way that I personally find useful.

Again, I’ll just say that all of these thoughts are for how *I* like to work. You may agree or disagree, and that’s totally fine. If this helps you make a decision on what kind of task software you’d like to use, great! If not, then that’s fine too. My main goal is to help me decide what workflow I like and determine whether or not to keep using a particular piece of code.

I also hope that these notes help the developers of GTDAgenda. If it’s helpful for you.. great, glad to be of service! I really appreciate the opportunity to use the software!

Anyway, on to the thoughts for Day 2..

First of all, I realized that in order to really get a handle on my next actions, I had to figure out how to order them better on the Next Actions page. By default I had everything listed as a #1 priority, so everything just sort of showed up in whatever order they appeared in. Since I had some @waiting tasks, and some specific actions I figured I could use the Priority feature to at least do some ordering. So I went with the following scheme:

Priority 1 – tasks that I need to do

Priority 2 – Tasks that I need to talk to people about

Priority 3 – Tasks that I’m waiting anxiously on information about

Priority 4 – Tasks that I want to see on this page, but I’ll be periodically checking in on.

This allowed me to have a much cleaner Next Actions list. There are actually 5 priorities, but 4 suited me nicely.

Some other thoughts that have come up throughout the day:

• Pre-defined Someday/Maybe and Archived areas is very handy!
• When using the mobile version of GTDAgenda, i noticed that the Next Actions page doesn’t display the task’s context. It does this in the online version. Personally, I like to see it and I wish it were there.
• If adding a task in project view (gtdagenda mobile), it should know what project you’re already adding to. Currently you have to add that yourself. (Note: I just received a note from the developer, this is a bug that’s been fixed! sweet!)
• When marking a task as done, you currently have to select it first, and then mark it done. I’d much rather just have it automatically marked done when I click it & then allow me to go back and unmark it.
• Can’t edit/modify global goals in the mobile version.
• Would really like a “quick entry” mode so I can just power through all my tasks and add them as quick as possible. Then, once the tasks are in my inbox I could process them into projects and contexts. Currently you have to enter and process all at once. I find I’m using paper to write down my tasks, then I enter them into GTDagenda all at once.
• I like the fact that you can have Repeating tasks, that’s very handy.

Like I said, I’m starting to get into the swing of it. I’m finding areas of GTDAgenda I like, and also areas that I’d like to work with differently. I appreciate all the links to other todo and gtd management tools, I’m putting them on my to do list and checking them out!

Hopefully later this week I’ll get to start using some of this methodology for my shots & we’ll see how it holds up.