Category Archives: GTD General

General posts about the Getting Things Done methodology.

GTD and Productivity Links – 7th September 2008

Well, Sunday has come again and it is the time to bring together some great links over the past week. I started to write this post last week and I am saving the links to the post as I find them. Saves me from having to duplicate work when Sunday night comes.

Big thing for this week was the two excellent GTD Seminars from the Office 2.0 Conference. Be sure to check them both out as it is great free content.

Right, here are my links for this week.

My first link for this week is a nice list of 99 email security tips that I found useful. I found this post via Ian’s Messy Desk.

My second link is the 10 Best Firefox Plugins to Increase Productivity. Now, I just switched last week from Safari to Firefox and plugins like these are part of the reason behind my switch. More on that later.

My third link is a review of iGTD from Flipping Heck. I like reading Flipping Heck as it is written by a fellow Brit and we do seem to be way outnumbered by our US colleagues and friends!. I used to use iGTD before I started with OmniFocus and this is a great review of the application that is well worth reading.

My fourth link is good review of the Things GTD Application for the Mac by Digmo. Now, I have just installed Things and love the look and feel of it although it will take a lot for me to leave OmniFocus behind. I do have to write a comparison of both so I am going to force myself to play and learn Things to see both sides of the story.

My fifth and last link for this week is another link to the Office 2.0 Keynote with David Allen and the Office 2.0 GTD Panel. Check them both out if you have not already done so!.

Got a few posts coming this week including a review of the 4-Hour Work Week, a book I have just finished and another update to my Email Experiment.

Hope you all have had a great weekend and see you all next week.

Office 2.0 Conference GTD Panel and Keynote

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The content is now uploaded for the Office 2.0 conference that I recently blogged about.

The Keynote by David Allen can be found here

The GTD Panel moderated by Oliver Star from GTD Times and Including David Allen can be found here

Great content so be sure to check it out.

Email Productivity Experiment – Update 1

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Over the past few days I have been using my trusty Moleskine to record the number of times I have checked email. I did not change anything about the way I worked, I just checked mail as normal using the default settings on my laptop. I was out a few days and in the office a few days so I evened out my results in order to get a view from a pretty average day.

What I found was quite shocking! I checked email 84 times in an average day. This was split into 62 times during my working day and 22 times outside of work, whilst at home.

I use a Mac, and Mail.app as my email client. My laptop is hardly ever turned off. It sits on the desk in the office all day, and when I get home it sits on my desk in my study which is a dedicated work room on the ground floor of my house. I have the Mail.app default setting to check for new email every 5 minutes.

With the default setting to check email every five minutes, that means that my machine checks for email 12 times per hour. I start work at 0800 and leave the office at 1730 so that is 9.5 hours in the office. This equates to my Mac checking for new email 114 times during my normal working day. Out of this 114 times, I checked my mail 62 times. The other 52 times I did not get email. I do not manually check email, but I tend to switch straight to Mail.app when a new email arrives to read it.

When my machine is in my study at home, I normally have the sound on so that I can hear the new email notification. I don’t jump when I hear the notification but I do log it mentally and then go to my study to check my mail when I pass the room etc..

Lets treat the during office ours and away from office ours as two separate entities. During office hours you would like to think that I am working on something, normally related to a previously collected task or project so these email notifications are an interruption. At home, I should be relaxing with the family, learning by reading, or as most of the time working, but in a more relaxed environment.

Each time I am interrupted and check email I am going to allocate a 90 second penalty. This penalty is against the break in my focus and the time it takes me to regain the flow on the task that I was performing. So, during the working day I have 62 such interruptions. 62 * 90 Seconds equates to 5580 seconds, or 93 minutes. Just over one and a half hours out of my nine and a half hours of productive working time (not counting lunch). Maybe 90 seconds penalty is a bit high, maybe it is too low. Would love to hear your thoughts about it.

The bottom line, and the basis for my next post on this fascinating subject is that I am losing roughly 15.8% of my productive time due to email interruptions.

ScribeFire – Blogging Plugin for FireFox

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I am writing this post using ScribeFire, a plugin for Firefox that enables you to blog direct from the browser.

I have been using Safari as my browser of choice for the last year or so but Firefox 3 really has got my attention and I feel a switch to Firefox is real close. It is the plugins such as ScribeFire, Delicious, and a host of SEO related tools that really attract me to Firefox.

Check out this great video below for an introduction to ScribeFire and some of the features it brings. It looks like a great tool but one that has to be learned and hopefully it will save me time and improve my writing ability so I blog more.

GTD Panel at the Upcoming Office 2.0 Conference

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The Office 2.0 Conference starts tomorrow from the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco. Really wish I could make this one but living in the UK it makes the journey a bit too far and expensive right now although the content looks great.

I was very happy to read on the MindJet Blog that the sessions are going to get recorded and then turned into webinars by Veodia.

The conference has some great speakers including Robert Scoble and the keynote speaker, a certain Mr David Allen.

The opening keynote will be great as well as the GTD Panel which David Allen is chairing.

I will be on the eager look out for the webinars and let you all know as soon as they are published.

Have a great day.

GTD and Productivity Links – 31st August 2008

Old But True – Set Targets to Achieve Goals

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On the 14th of September I am running the Cancer Research UK 10K Run at Harewood House in Leeds. I am raising money for Cancer Research and also getting fit in the process.

You can sponsor me online by following this link and all the money goes to Cancer Research, so please feel free to give generously.

Motivating ones self to go out running is one of the hardest things to do. How many people do you know, maybe yourself included, who have started a personal fitness regime with great vigor, only to give up after only a few sessions? Go to any gymnasium and ask about the number of members, and then look at how many members are in the gym at any one time.

However, sign yourself up for an event and you find this is a great call to action. I used to train in Kickboxing around 10 years ago. I always remember my teacher telling me that when you have an upcoming fight, it really motivates you to pound the street and the heavy bag, to avoid your head getting pounded in. Well, a similar thing has happened with me and the 10k run. I am not a good runner and the 10k will be the furthest I have ever run. With this end goal in mind, I have been very focussed to allocate what is in fact very little time to go out running against a training schedule, hitting the trails three times a week.

So, do you want to reach some personal goal? If so, make a commitment and book something that means you cannot back out of it. Get support from friends and family and get them to sponsor you. The pressure really now is on and this will lead to you taking action to reach the goal, simple!

I will leave you with a great quote from Zig Ziglar, “You cannot hit a target that you do not have”.

Sponsor Me for the Cancer Research 10k by Clicking Here

Email Productivity Experiment

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Email Productivity
Email is one of my main communication methods and in a quest to try and improve my productivity, I am going to start a little experiment into getting the most out of email. Hopefully, this is going to lead to an ebook that I have been planning for a while. This ebook will outline my methodology for dealing with Email in the most productive way based upon my experience and knowledge gained from the books and methods I have studied.

So, to start this experiment, I am recording the number of times I check email per day, over a few days. I am out on a client site today so probably will not check it as much as if I was in the office.

I get the feeling that this will be the start of a great series of blog posts regarding email productivity.

GTD and Productivity Links – 24th August 2008

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In a bid to ramp up the content and readership of this site, I plan to start a new section of this blog with a collection of weekly links.

I am very active in the GTD, Productivity and Motivation arenas and I think it is great how many blogs are appearing right now.

I find some great things to read so it only makes sense to have a weekly summation of the weeks best links that I have found whilst surfing the web for relevant information.

So, for this week, my links are as follows.

My fist link is a great review of my current GTD app of choice, OmniFocus. The review is brought to you from Productivity501, a blog that I subscribe to.

My second link is another good review of OmniFocus. This time the review is from a neat site called MacApper. MacApper reviews all the latest Mac Apps and it has become a great site that I visit to find out about the little apps that are not mainstream and you don’t always here about.

My third link is a comparison of Things and OmniFocus from MirthLab. Now, I use OmniFocus at present but I am going to review Things. I like the visual look of Things, but the functionality of OmniFocus is what wins it for me. Again, a better look at Things is what I need to see if I am missing anything.

The fourth link is a collection of GTD tips for Microsoft Outlook. I used to implement quite a few of these tips before embarking on a journey with GTD and before I made the switch to the Mac. Worth a read.

The last link for this week is The 4 Ideas That Will Revolutionize Your Productivity from Organize IT. I love these tips and I will be dedicating considerable time to writing about all of them in the coming months.

That is it for this weeks links, hope you are having a great day.

Woopra – Track Your Web Site Visitors in Real Time Better than Google Analytics

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Woopra Web Analytics
At the Bloggers Meet-up I attended on Friday I had the chance to get a beta invite code for Woopra.

Woopra is a Web Site Analytics program similar in operation to Google Analytics. These type of Analytics differ from the log based Analytics Apps such as AWStats that is provided with most hosting accounts. The reason these differ is that these rely upon Javascript code on each page in order for the Analytics program to work.

In order to start using Woopra, you have to register for an account at the Woopra website. You can then add your websites to your account. If you have a beta invite code, your sites are enabled immediately. If not, you have to wait until they release some more codes and approve your site. I am unaware how long this takes at present.

Once your site is approved, you need to start using the tracking Javascript. There is a WordPress plugin that you enable and then enter the Website ID into the Plugin Configuration Screen, that is found on your WordPress Dashboard. If your site is not WordPress, you need to manually enter the Javascript shown on your Woopra Account just before the tag. I use a PHP Include for the footer for one of my non WordPress sites so this was very easy for me.

To view the Woopra Analytics, you either use the Woopra website, which shows limited information but the best way to view the stats is with the downloadable client. This client is available now for Windows and Mac. The Mac version has just been updated and works now without needing the latest 64bit only Java Runtime.

You enter your Woopra details into the client and it stars receiving stats for your account in real time.

Now, the killer use of Woopra is the real time alerting. You can see visitors as they come to your site in real time, along with information such as the referrer and also what page they are currently on. I have to date not used any tool that comes even close to what is offered by Woopra. You can also interact with the users by opening up a MSN Messenger type window in their browser. This seems like a really powerful tool for sales based companies to track web site usage and attempt to interact with the potential customer in real time as you can see how the visitor came to the site.

I have enabled Woopra on three sites. One is WordPress, one is hand cranked PHP and the other used RapidWeaver. I have got it working fine on all three with no fuss whatsoever.

Below is a screenshot showing a map of the world that shows which nation your visitors are coming from.

Woopra Web Analytics

The screenshot below shows one of the many representations of data. This case for referrers.

Woopra Web Analytics

I know a lot of fellow bloggers and webmasters read this blog. If you have not yet tried Woopra, what are you waiting for. I think this is the best analytics tool I have used and cannot wait to see how it develops in the future.