I’ve found Dropbox to be a huge timesaver, and it’s an essential part of my GTD system. Watch this short screencast to see how I use it to Get Things Done:
Archive for August, 2009
How I use Dropbox to get things done.
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009A real cost saver due to GTD — fewer administrative needs
Sunday, August 23rd, 2009Late last year, I was considering getting an administrative assistant for myself. I simply had too much to do — to many e-mails, too many tasks. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hire a local person to help, or just use a virtual assistant. During that internal debate, I was also trying to get more organized. As you can see in my initial post on this blog, I dove into GTD and started using Nozbe to manage it.
The result? I have no need for an administrative person of any kind. By keeping my email inbox at zero and my task list up to date, I can easily find the information I need and get to work. Having another person in the mix would only serve to complicate things.
I’m sure there are many jobs that require an assistant of some kind. Anyone that deals with a large volume of incoming calls and meetings would do well to have someone sift that information for them and keep their schedule up to date. However, I’m finding that simply dealing with email and tasks is best managed by myself.
It’s hard to calculate the exact savings, but let’s go with this: $10/hour, 20 hours/week = $200/week or about $800/month. That’s some nice savings! Factor in the small costs to get GTD in place (buy the book, get a filing cabinet, perhaps pay a little bit for some software), and you’re still saving a ton of money. Not bad.
Come join our new Facebook Page
Friday, August 21st, 2009
To help you stay better connected to our site, we’ve started a Facebook Page. Come join us and stay connected.
If you prefer, you can also follow us on Twitter, via RSS or get updates through e-mail. We’re trying to make it easy to keep up with the latest ref news, so please let us know if you have any other suggestions.
Thanks!
Mickey
Nozbe 2.0 finally released
Thursday, August 13th, 2009
After months of waiting (and being teased with a partially-finished beta a few months ago), Nozbe 2.0 has finally been released.
I’ve intentionally waited a few days to talk about it, because I wasn’t sure how I felt. My initial reaction was pretty disappointed. While it looked much better than previous versions, it had some substantial problems. Here are the comments I left for their developer:
1 — No filtering on Next Actions. Why?
2 — Next actions don’t show which project they’re from until you click on each one. MUCH harder to scan through them.
3 — The list of projects still take up WAY too much space in the sidebar. Granted, I have a lot of projects (53), but it’s pretty bad. On Nozbe Classic, the bottom of my last project in the list is 1490 pixels down the page. In Nozbe 2.0, the last project is 2053 pixels down the page — a 500+ pixel increase!
I was feeling kind of bad for them at this point. While they were very legit concerns, the blog comments were full of things like that. We were all appreciative to the team for getting it launched, but it appeared it was in big trouble.
In fact, I even started looking around again for an alternative to Nozbe. The two that came the closest were Vitalist and Toodledo, but they couldn’t measure up to Nozbe even with some of the broken features. Nirvana HQ is looking pretty slick, but it’s a closed beta and I haven’t been able to get access to it yet.
However, the very next day Nozbe posted an update that addressed every concern. Point by point, they answered each question and explained how they’d fix it (or why they wouldn’t/couldn’t). They even fixed item #2 from my list above right away! There are still some issues, but they’re getting resolved quickly. On top of that, the new features (like “notes on tasks”) are very useful.
As it stands now, I consider Nozbe 2.0 the best GTD app out there. I’ve long felt that Nozbe has been the best, and with the recent bug fixes to 2.0 they’ve kept the crown. Hopefully Michael and his team can knock out some of the other small bugs and feature requests in the next week or two and they’ll have a pretty awesome product.
Get rid of your email folders
Thursday, August 13th, 2009This tip might not work for everyone, but it has been great for me. I use gmail for most of my e-mail, but I need to use Outlook at work. For years, I had a complex series of nested folders in Outlook, along the lines of this:
- Staff
- Bill
- Jane
- Steve
- Website
- GoDaddy
- Hosting
- Problems
- Programs
- Adults
- Children
- Mission
- …
And on, and on, and on. Probably about 150 folders in all. I was very proud of myself.
The problem was trying to keep myself at inbox zero. Gmail makes it easy with their “archive” feature (and with cool things like “Send & Archive” in the labs section), but Outlook doesn’t do that. Instead of quickly archiving an e-mail and moving on, I had to think about where it goes. Does the one from Steve about the Missions part of the website go in “Steve”, “website” or “missions”? I’d probably spend 10-15 seconds deciding where to file an e-mail, then drilling down to file it. I get maybe 25 emails/day on this account, so that’s 25 emails x 15 seconds/each x 260 workdays in a year = 27 hours/year I spend just filing e-mails. Brutal!
If you handle your inbox properly, you don’t need to fish for past e-mails very often — you just deal with them and move on. I have Xobni installed, which makes the search process much faster when I need it, so that solves the search issue.
My solution? Treat it like gmail. I now have a single folder called “archive” under my inbox. When I’m done with an e-mail, I “archive” it. Much faster and much easier.
How do you handle your folders in Outlook?
