Getting Things Done GTD with Personal Development and Motivation for Success

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.

Just read a great article over at the Cranking Widgets Blog that provides a Roadmap for GTD Failure.

The post is not too long and a great read for anybody involved in Getting Things Done.

Read the post, and then see how many of these items on the list you are guilty of!

Be sure to check out and sign up for WebWithout.com.

WebWithout is a new free service that has just gone beta that provides safe Internet browsing. I have kids and I have configured this on their computers so that I can assured that what they are searching for in Google, is verified and filtered to take the nasties out. There is nothing to set up apart from making a change to your DNS servers which can be done manually or their is a Windows application that does it for you.

I am also using this on my desktop right now and find it a great way to reduce the distractions so I can focus on getting things done.

WebWithout offers

• 100% FREE
• Easy to set up and use
• Protect your family from inappropriate content
• Protect yourself against Phishing attacks
• Filters over 2 million web sites!
• 100% Spyware/Adware Free
• Improve your online experience
• Fantastic, easy to use service
• And if you are not happy, it is easy to remove!

Since this is free, seems a no brainer really so go ahead and give it a go.

I have just enabled iPhone support on the Did I Get Things Done? blog.

So, for those of you fortunate to own an iPhone, you can now browse this blog in Safari on the phone and it is perfectly formed for your iPhone.

To do this, I enabled the iPhone Plugin from Content Robot.

Works a treat and even though the browser support in iPhone is awesome, this little plugin works a treat and really improves the user experience.

Found this rather good video on YouTube that is an interview with David Allen and a great intro to GTD. Ever been asked what GTD is? Show them this video and all will be explained!

Well, Summer is over, even though the weather here in the UK is actually much better than the shocking Summer we had. The UK summer was the wettest Summer on record. With floods and an endless supply of rain. At least we avoided the usual Summer hosepipe ban!

I have been rather lacking in my posts. This is due to me being away on holiday twice, and also busy launching and settling into my new business and new premises for the business.

I am back now and the regular updating of this site will resume.

A little bit about my summer first. Spent two weeks in an absolutely fantastic place called Union Lido, in Northern Italy.

This is one of the best camping villages in the whole of Europe. Spend two great weeks enjoying the sunshine and the local food and drink. Next is was off to Chapel Stile in the English Lake District for a week. Enjoyed lot’s of walking and the weather was fantastic for the English Lakes.

So, over three weeks of the six spent away from my usual GTD system! How did I cope!

Summer Holidays are a great time for me to take time out of my usual busy schedule, and to relax. I always find that I have some great inspirational thoughts whilst I am on holiday. I think the absence of technology puts me in a position where my thoughts flow freely. Often, I will have ideas, and thoughts of actions that I need to do. Now, being GTD’ers, we know the importance of collecting these ideas in our trusted system so that we do not suffer the “now what was that I thought of?” syndrome. As this is the longest I have been away from my GTD system since I started with GTD, I was curious to see how I would fair. I must admit that I was tempted to take my laptop. I have a 17″ MacBook Pro and although it is a powerhouse, it is not the most portable of devices and the thought of taking it to the campsite, full of sand did not really appeal. So, I decided upon a more manual method.

Well, the trusty Moleskine came to the rescue. I decided that I would utilize my pocket ruled Moleskine to collect the tasks which I thought of and ideas I had whilst away. I know this is just a notebook, but I have found the constant carrying of this little notebook a revelation since I begrudgingly started carrying it around 4 months ago. I am never far from a Moleskine. The pocket book goes with me when I can and the Moleskine Cahier when I cannot fit the pocket notebook into what I am wearing.

I kept the Moleskine and assortment of pens handy. Whenever a thought popped into my head, it went straight into the Moleskine, in my newly created “Ideas and Thoughts” section. The art of taking notes is not new, however, when lying in the sun, relaxing, it does take willpower to prise yourself off the sunbed and into your room to record the note in the notebook. At the end of the day, GTD is about Getting Things Done, and we all have our own systems. I have found in this instance that it is more the implementation of the system that matters, rather than the system itself. I could have had any method of collecting my thoughts, but unless I stuck to them, they are pointless. This is pretty much true of life. You have to, as Nike would say, “Just Do It”. Too many times we don’t, and we forget or procrastinate.

Anyway, work is calling, till next time…..

Just read a great little post over at Lifehacker. I am a real fan of Quicksilver on my Mac and use it every day. Since the iGTD integration with Quicksilver it has become one of my most frequently used tools on my Mac.

The mouse is just so slow in comparison to using Quicksilver for application launching as well as adding next actions to my iGTD set up.

Anyway, the original post is over at LifeClever so be sure to check it out but I will provide a snapshot of what it is about.

The post is about de-cluttering your desktop to just use 5 folders that all your desktop “stuff” is placed into. You prefix these folder names with a number. You can then use Quicksilver to quickly access your five folders by simply pressing the number of the folder and it automatically opens, no matter where you are on your Mac.

Read the full post and I am sure you will agree it is pretty neat.