Calendar: Authorized Events Only
Posted Thursday, April 24th, 2008 8:48 am by Dave Moyer
You’ve got lots to do, and you want to get it done. So, you put it down on your calendar in a neat little schedule, so you can block out what you’ll get done, when, and you can sleep well knowing that everything will get done. Great! Well, if you’re like me, and many others like me, more often than not you don’t get everything done on the schedule, if you even try! While you work during the day, in the back of your mind you know that the schedule you’ve set for yourself is unnecessary. It doesn’t really have to get done now. We want to get it done on that day, but we don’t. We do these things when they make more sense to do during the day, often letting the things that we need to do slip away as well. Read more >>
Pen and Paper Beats a Digital PDA
Posted Saturday, April 19th, 2008 11:39 am by Dave Moyer
I, too, used to be a big Palm fan. I had a Palm III, a Zire 21, and a Z22 in my time. As one of my previous posts describes, I recently tried out Merlin Mann’s Hipster PDA and absolutely loved it. After thinking about it for a while, I started to realize that old school pen and paper is the best solution to organize your life! Here are my top ten reasons
10. It’s enviro-friendly - Hug a tree, then recycle your planner when you’re done with it. Saves lots of space in electronics dumps.
9. Who needs beaming? - Especially with the Hipster, giving others information is incredibly easy! Instead of hitting all sorts of buttons and waiting for your devices to “beam” a calendar event, just hand them a card. Done!
8. Any size you want - Let’s see you try to fold a Treo into fourths. Yeah. Not so easy, is it?
7. Great Getting Things Done integration - When I get home each afternoon, I just drop the “open loops” (each on a different card) that I’ve collected over the course of the day into my inbox. Simple quick, and easy.
6. Built tough - You’re not going to have any problems if you drop a notepad, now are you?
5. Faster “data” entry - We don’t need no QWERTY keyboard! Why mess around with buttons (or worse, a stylus and that Graffiti stuff) when you can just write a note! On paper, writing is freeform and completely unrestricted.
4. Eternal charge - Wall adapter sold separately. The reason? You don’t need one.
3. MUCH more secure - No need to back up your data! Just file things away where you want them. Lock and key is a lot harder to hack for your secure data. Also, if you’re a hPDA or pocket notepad user, nobody’s going to want to steal that. Look at that! I just saved you $20 on a Kensington lock.
2. It’s fast - One, two, three, DRAW! Watch everyone around you turn on their smartphones and PDAs and start pushing buttons like a madman, while you simply flip to next week and write down the meeting.
1. So much cheaper - Why spend hundreds of dollars on a new PDA when you could spend two bucks for some index cards or paper, and have infinite storage space? Need more space? Head over to your local office store and buy another gigabyte of space for 99 cents.
photo credit: desi.italy
Clean, reusable cable organization: Bind-it Flags!
Posted Saturday, April 19th, 2008 9:10 am by Dave Moyer
Recently, Beth Skinner handed me a bin of these extremely cool clips she bought for me at Staples, knowing I am pretty much obsessed with binder clips. They’re called Bind-it Flags, and I instantly realized all the amazing capabilities they had! Not only did I replace my normal black clip I used for my “wallet” with a wider, slightly more stylish green clip, I decided that these could make excellent labels for those cables you have under your desk, rather than slapping stickers on everything!
I used some generic small stickers I found at an office store years ago, and simply stuck them on the clip, and clipped the flag onto the cables. Instant organization!
The benefits of using these clips go on and on:
- They’re reusable
- You can clip multiple cables together if you’d like to get even more advanced. (For example, if you have a bunch of cables routing to a certain computer, you can clip them all together and label them “Mac Pro”, or whatever you’d want to call it.)
- They have more uses than just cable “flagging”, like a wallet clip, as stated above.
I pondered using one of these clips for My Hipster PDA, but decided that the long flag wouldn’t assist in flipping through cards, and the clips are a bit too wide for that.
Can you think of any other ideas on how to use these? Have any other cool hacks for office supplies I haven’t yet thought of? Why not click that comment button and tell the world!
My Hipster PDA
Posted Monday, April 14th, 2008 5:22 pm by Dave Moyer
For those of you unfamilar with the great Merlin Mann’s Hipster PDA, it is, in essence, a bunch of 3×5 index cards clipped together with one of my favorite tools of all time, the awesomely powerful binder clip.
You can put things together however you want, and many people have put out their suggestons and ideas for hacking the Hipster. I decided to try out this tool a few weeks ago, and have been absolutely astounded by the results. Being a raving fan of David Allen’s phenomenal book, Getting Things Done, and a raving fan of binder clips (see my next post), I organized the Hipster in my own way, tweaking and changing some things along the way. Here’s my current setup, in order from front to back:
- Mini black binder clip - It’s the classic, and the size is hard to beat!
- In the front, around 5-8 blank index cards, for capturing events and other tasks
- A laminated divider card labeled Lists
- My GTD lists, including my Next Actions lists for all my different contexts, my Someday/Maybe list (mostly unused, I love my tickler file- post on that soon), and Waiting for list. I have them all here, this is the only place I use them.
- A laminated divider card labeled Calendar
- Individual cards containing time-sensitive actions, one card per day
- A laminated divider card labeled Inbox
- Any extra tasks or reminders to drop into my central inbox when I get home each afternoon
- A laminated card containing a little “reference diagram” for the GTD workflow.
I laminated the cards with packing tape. Just cover both sides, and cut it out to make a perfectly laminated card! In the beginning of my Hipster days, I had trouble with wrinkles. Not anymore!
Each afternoon when I get home, I do the following:
- Drop anything in my “Inbox” section into my inbox, to sort during my processing time later.
- Synchronize any date-sensitive actions with my trusty Google Calendar. I can’t do without it, but I can’t have it everywhere! This is my solution. I can schedule and keep track of events wherever I am, but I still have sharing capabilities and “black belt” scheduling when I’m at my computer.
- Refill my index cards, and I’m ready for a new day!
How do you all keep your life organized? If you use a Hipster PDA (try it out if you don’t- it’s too cool), what are your techniques? Got any GTD management suggestions? Comment like the wind, my friends.
About
Entries (RSS)
