Digging the digital

This is just brilliant. I am not christian or religious of any kind, but this is great…

Our lifehacks, which art in contexts,
Inbox zero be thy aim.
Thy Kinkless done.
Thy Mind Sweep fun, in @work as it is in @honeydo.
Give us this day our next action.
And forgive us our open loops, as we forgive those who delete our email.
And lead us not into web surfing.
Deliver us from IM.
For thine is the Moleskine, the Project and the Due Date
For someday/maybe,
Allen.

Update: As mentioned in the comments, I should credit the author. Absolutely right. I was a bit too fast this morning to post this. All credits for the above go to Giles Turnbull over at Gilest.org

[[image:111849236_8d79c14998_m.jpg::left:0]]Hey all. It has been a while already. What happened to good ol’ Frank and his quest to the ultimate GTD-black belt-mind like water-type way of life? Well…let’s say things have been quite hectic lately. To be fair, I totally fell off the GTD wagon. Yeah, it has been that time again.

It’s not that I don’t use any GTD principles anymore, but there have been some projects that have been more intense that others. Let me try to explain this the best way I can. Remember, English is not my native language, so excuse me if some sentences are a bit weird or some explanations totally out of context.  

A couple of moths ago, my life was getting along just nice. Work was very busy but not too hectic and my personal life was flowing along. But then a couple of things happened. First off, I decided to be very active in organizing and arranging a Dutch weblogawardshow. Called the Dutch Bloggies and together with two friends we organised this show. With sponsors, a meeting, judges, elections, the works. We started in late november and the awardshow was last march 11th. All in all. it has been a blast to do. Finding sponsors, making it all happen, the press, everything. Check some photos and videos. But at the same time, around Christmas, my girlfriend found out she was [[lightbox:scan_los.jpg:pregnant::inline:1]]! Yay! Hurray! We were already “trying” but this happened very fast. Because we were planning a makeover for our house in the summer. But now we had to schedule that around our newborn late august. Wow!

So there you have it. Three projects, one way or another, which took almost all my time and energy the last three months in arranging, organisation, calling, emailing. Ofcourse I tried to use my GTD-knowledge the best way possible. But let me tell you this: when you organize an awardshow in three months with others, just make sure you have a Gmail account with good labels, a spare directory on your laptop and an Excelsheet. I tried Backpack, but changes were made so fast that keeping up with lists or notes just didn’t work. Especially not in environment where you work together with people who have never heard of GTD and just go on their own way.

So the whole process of Inbox, process, organize, review and do went something like Inbox, do, file, wait. This happened most of the time because I had to this all besides my regular job. So in the evening and weekends. You don’t want to “waste” time with the whole process, you just want to..ahem…Get Things Done.

So does this mean GTD doesn’t work?

No way. I truly and deeply believe in this system. But the last couple of months it has been hard to maintain. I didn’t completely fell off, because I still had my “Waiting” basket in Gmail, I had some review moments with my Excelsheet. But overall, things could have gone smoother. I am still on some soulsearchingtrip to find out how and why.

But now the next projects arrive. One renovation and one baby. How can you call a baby a project? Ah well, you get the idea. We need to arrange things. We have tons of stuff to do. And we don’t make any time to stop and think about it. Will Backpack work? I don’t know. My girl holds on to her Moleskine. She has her own filing for all things “baby”. I think I will go along with that and see where we end. This time, no mindmaps (yet), no weird synching issues with palms and pda’s (yet) and no new implementation of some sort of system like kGTD or whatever (yet).

And yeah, I will try to post some stuff here now and again. But don’t get mad at me if I don’t.

And what about that spam?

One other thing. The commentspam on this blog has been horrific. I apologize for any inconvenience of not commenting. I just installed a Blacklist app for my weblogsoftware and I hope it helps. But to tell ou the truth, removing commentspam doesn’t enjoy me in having a weblog…anyway, I hope you find some way in commenting on this post. I look forward to your thoughts, impressions, ideas and good advice…

[Photo courtesy from chbeer]

Don’t you hate that? You want to copy something from a webpage or a formatted document into another document. Biggest issue (on a Windows machine) is that all formatting comes with the copying. So you end up using a reroute like notepad where you temporarily paste the text, re-copy it and paste it in the proper document. Fear no more! The answer is here! And we shall call it Pure Text! Just download this 13Kb standalone executable and it will nest in your systemtray. Now, the fun starts. Copy a chunk of heavilly formatted text. But! Instead of using Control-V to paste it, use Windows-V. It’s magic! It’s incredible! All text is pasted but without the formatting! A little timesaver, nice and warm in your systemtray. Wouldn’t it be great if everything was as simple?

I use Gmail more and more as my primary emailapp for everything I do besides my work (like a weblogmagazine , weblogawards, eventblogs). Since I mail a lot of requests that need some kind of answer or followup I made a label called @waiting in Gmail. This is where I put all my emails that I have send and need an answer from the receiver. Every week or so (..cough…Weekly review checkup…cough…) I check the list and see what’s still out in the open. The great thing about Gmail is that any answer that arrives drops in your mailbox with the label attached to it. So I see immediately the emails I have been waiting for and I can easily remove the label if necessary. But one thing that Gmail misses is an easy way to label a message when sending it. Now I need to go to “Sent Mail” and manually label the message. No big deal, but when I’m on a roll with email (sending 20-30 messages at a time) some might slip through the cracks. So it would be great if you could label a message directly when you are in “writing-mode” in Gmail. Not when you’re in “I-just-sent-the-mail-let’s-relax-mode”. So maybe someone from Google is reading this blog and might see this desparate plea for more comfort and ease-of-use in a otherwise excellent mailapp!