Digging the digital

Last week, while walking from the bus stop to work, I noticed a funny sticker with an URL. I wanted to remember the URL. Since my work was just around the corner, I thought to myself: “I can remember that, when I come in, I plug in my laptop and check the site. Takes me less than 2 minutes.” When I walked in, the phone rang and while plugging in the laptop I was already engaged with a client about a support issue. I totally forgot the URL. This morning, I walked past the sticker again. This time, I took out my mini-Moleskine and wrote down the URL. When I walked in, same thing happened. This time, it was a co-worker, asking for some assistance. Right now, the URL is in my notebook, my little Inbox which I check every day. I don’t have that feeling I’m missing something I need to see or check. Lesson learned: Don’t try to remember everything you see, just write it down in your trusted system and you’ll feel a lot better

I have a desktop PC and a laptop. Most of the time I use the laptop, but this weekend I was working on my desktop PC for some coding and arranging stuff for our move to Utrecht. After just one week, I realized I missed my OnFolio-plugin in Firefox (are you reading this, Joe?) so I quickly installed this. While surfing and reading some feeds, I realized I found a lot of stuff I would like to read in more detail, put in a safe place (Reference) or put under the attention of a client or co-worker. Ofcourse, I could email it all to myself at work, but why not use some of the other tools at hand? So here’s what I did: I capture links, keywords, snippets in my Main Collection in OnFolio. This collection gets published every 30 minutes or so to my homepage at my ISP. With the inclusion of a RSS feed. Now, all I need to do is add this feed to my OnFolio on the laptop and I have all the information in one place. There I can use it at work, read offline, put in my reference-file or email directly. Kind of a detour-solution for a simple problem? Maybe for you, but for me, using it this way keeps it out of my sight (read: Inbox) when I’m at work and it gives me chance to process the information in a single timeframe because it’s all in the same feed.

This evening, I was just browsing my Reference file because I was looking for the tagging-extension in Pivot. If you’re not familiar with the concept of tagging, be sure to check out this explanation on Technorati. I would like my posts to be in the Tagging-cosmos too. Even more then they already are … Now, a Dutch guy made an extension for Pivot once. Just one Google search and shazam! there it was. But unfortunately the server where the installation-files can be found, is down right now. So no tagging for me right now. As I was looking through i-Marco’s website (I believe I met the guy somewhere) I noticed the excellent design of his blog. Turns out he made it himself and he turned it into a Pivot-template. Yay! I love the template and the slick look of it. When the server with the template and the tagging-extension is up again, be sure to find some new juice over here :-)

Zoals ik al in mijn SMTN heb geschreven, ben ik gestopt met het technisch bijhouden van de site Frshdjs.com. Niet dat er zoveel aan onderhouden is het laatste jaar, maar de makers zijn van plan er wat meer mee te gaan doen en daar hoorde een update bij. Dat kan en wil ik niet meer extra doen bij mijn toch al drukke agenda. Dus zou ik deze ochtend een nieuw ontwerp omzetten naar HTML en CSS zodat ze met een weblog aan de slag kunnen. Maar helaas, zelfs dat is niet meer aan mij besteed. Niet zozeer het ontwerp, dat is niet zo lastig, maar om het om te zetten naar goede templates voor Pivot, met alle juiste stylesheets en spul. Daarom deze oproep namens ondergetekende en de frshdjs-clan: Wie o wie voelt zich geroepen om het nieuwe ontwerp van frshdjs.com om te zetten naar Pivot templates en de boel helemaal draaiend te maken op de nieuwe server? Reacties in de comments of rechtsreeks naar DJ Mark Green

I was browsing my feeds this evening, basically just chilling on the couch. I read a nice article on the weblog Face-to-Face about the new book of Malcolm Gladwell ‘Blink’. I was already curious about this book, because of his earlier book ‘The tipping point’ and I just got more curious. Because the book deals with decisions we make without thinking. And this got me thinking (no pun intended) about how this relates to Getting Things Done. Since GTD involves a lot of thinking sometimes (processing, reviewing, five phases of planning) I can imagine how you can change your mind while thinking about Next Actions. But is this the right decision then? I haven’t read the book yet, but as I read the editorial review, it seems you make the right decision in the first couple of seconds. So how does longer and more intense thinking about projects (What is the next physical action? How can I move this forward?) change this? Interesting thought. I should read the book first before I talk more about this I guess. Perhaps someone already read the book and has an opinion? I look forward to your comments.