Well,

Short of paying $1400 for a fantastic Unique Theme from Unique Blog Designs, as done by ShoeMoney, John Chow, and Kieron, I have changed my theme to the Illacrimo Theme from Design Disease.

I spent some time looking around the web for Themes for this blog and was quite surprised how many exist, and also how many of these are quite bad. A lot of the themes require quite a bit of work to get them looking something like.

When the finances permit, I will go for a more unique theme and brand for this site. One alternative I have found to Unique Blog Designs is a service from the UK called PSD2HTML. These guys take a PSD design file and create standards compliant CSS and HTML code. One option they offer is to create a WordPress theme based upon your design. So, you can get a PSD design done the way you like it, and then these guys create you a Wordpress template for around $300. Sounds cool and I would love to hear from anybody who has used these.

I would love to hear any comments you have about my new theme and if it works OK with your browsers. I have tested it in most and apart from a problem with the WordPress MORE tag, all seems fine.

I mentioned Things, the new Mac GTD application in a previous post.

I have just read a pretty good review of the Alpha release of Things over at LifeHacker.com

I have briefly toyed with Things, but I am spending a lot of my GTD research time right now still with OmniFocus, which I must admit I am loving and the daily updates are bringing new features to the party all the time.

It is a fantastic time to be a Mac owner, and into Getting Things Done. I cannot wait to fully review all these new GTD applications.

Here’s wishing you all a Happy New Year.

Let’s try to make 2008 a more productive year than 2007.

For myself 2007 was a very challenging year for me. I left a company which I had founded, and worked on for five years. It was a big decision but the best I had ever made. Sometimes in life you get stuck in a rut, and you need a jolt to get you out of the rut. I had the good salary, pretty good work, close to home, but I was not happy. Things were not being run the way I liked and direction was not heading in the way it should. So, it took a pretty big decision, but totally the right one to jump ship and run with an idea that I had for a new company.

The new company, RandomStorm set sail in May of 2007 and has been going great. It is always slow introducing a new company into established markets but we have managed to obtain a foothold and the future for the company is looking really bright. I have a house, wife, four children and a dog to look after so that always motivates me to succeed. My destiny is my own once again, just the way I like it!

So, I wish you every success in 2008 and hope you keep reading my blog of tips and tricks that I use to manage my extremely busy life!

All the Best

Andrew Mason.

Just watched this video on YouTube for Nozbe on the iPhone, iNozbe.

Now, I haven't yet played with Nozbe, as I tend to be a bit of an offline app love for GTD and don't really know how the online version would be for myself.

The app seems pretty cool on the iPhone. The fact you have to log in etc.. and the general slow time to get things entered would see me grabbing for my Moleskine anyday!

Anyway, check out the video, and I promise one day to fully review Nozbe. 

Just a quick post to wish all of my readers a very Merry Christmas. It is the time of year again when the majority of us let go, eat everything in sight and be very merry.

I heard on the radio on my way to work this morning that the average person in the UK gains 8 lbs in weight over the festive period. Wow, maybe that is why so many people feel inclined to join a gym and start a new year with the resolution they never keep. Probably a good reason so many of us are ill in January, excess and stress of Christmas taking a toll.

On that jolly note, I will leave you and I will be back sometime later in the week with another post.

All the Best!

Please bear with me as I am playing with some new themes. Content is all going to be there but the site may look odd now and then..

Work in progress……

Time for a bit of reader participation.

I have nearly 800 subscribed readers to this blog so I know you are out there!I am interested in hearing from you all what system you use to implement GTD?

How many of you use apps like Nozbe, iGTD, NextAction, and OmniFocus? How many of you own and use a Moleskine?

Comment on this post and let me know you are there!Thanks, in anticipation of course.. 

Hey, I’m back, hope you missed me!

Had a break from blogging, but not from Getting Things Done and now it is time to get back to the action. Just upgraded this site to the shiny new Wordpress 2.3.1, broke a few things, tested my PHP knowledge but the site is up and running again. Been away from blogging for a few months and now there are tons more cool SEO and other Wordpress plugins. The upgrade to 2.3.1 also sees the introduction of Widgets, rather than my old K2 sidebar modules.I am also using K2 v 0.9.1 as the theme for this site, but I now see that 0.9.6 is out, so I feel a change is due. Mind you, I feel like getting a shiny new look and feel for this site and going for it! Probably go to 0.9.6 by the time you read this post.

So, what has been going on in the world of Andrew Mason. Well, as I blogged about a while back, I left a company which I founded in 2001 back in Jan of 07. I then set up a company called RandomStorm. RandomStorm is a vulnerability management company, in brief, we check your external and internal networks for any known security and configuration vulnerabilities. Been busy building this up over the past few months, really having to put my GTD skills to the test, but I am glad to say that it is now going really well and the future for RandomStorm is looking very good. I got a few good ideas for some new posts, and I even fancy creating Mind Maps for the whole of the Getting Things Done book. I don’t think anybody else has done this so may be a pretty cool thing to do.

Well, back to the title of this post, which is about the fact that I have just pre-registered for OmniFocus, from the OmniGroup. Those of you who have followed this blog will already know that I am an avid user of Mac OSX, and would not Get Things Done on any other OS. I am going to write more about my first twelve months with GTD in another post so I will keep this quite brief but I have been using a trust pen, moleskine, and iGTD as my GTD system of choice for the past six months, with great success. I have found quite a few limitations with iGTD and the fact that they seem to have stopped in it’s development spurned me into looking at OmniFocus. iGTD used to be updated like all the time, and there have been no updates at all over the past few months. This may be because work is underway with iGTD2. Now, I have always been a huge believer in the fact that it is the system that works for you, and not the software application. A trusty pen and paper used well, is better than the most advanced techno PDA or smartphone with the latest GTP application on it, if it is not used correctly. OmniFocus has been very well supported in the GTD community and Merlin Mann of 43Folders.com has been one of the OmniFocus team for quite a while, adding his own little slant on how it should work. All in all, should make for a cool app.

So, I am busy this week transferring my next actions, projects, and contexts from iGTD to OmniFocus. I will give it a go and see how I get on with it, and obviously, report all findings here on my blog.