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Keep Your Notes in Order with the Daily Scratchpad
Image courtesy of
London Permaculture
The following is a guest post by Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project
We’re all looking for ways to work both faster and calmer, and I recently hit on a trick that keeps my desk tidier and my thoughts clearer.
One of my most annoying habits is my tendency to scribble down important phone numbers, “Don’t forget!!!” notes, and helpful URLs on any piece of paper that happens to be cluttering up my desk.
An hour later, I throw away what appears to be trash, or I flip over a piece of paper —and the key info vanishes. Or even if the information was still there, I have no idea what it means. Sure, that phone number has a star by it, so it must be important—but I can’t remember whose number it is.
Sandy v. Remember the Milk: The Web-Based Reminder Cage Match
Within this little GTD cult of ours, there are an alarming number of battles fought over the best tool, notebook, web application, etc. In my mind, it’s a little silly - just use what works, right?
Well, sometimes there will be two “competing” services/devices/things that both offer a compelling solution to a common problem. Today, that problem is reminders and the two services I’ll be covering are Remember the Milk (hereafter referred to as ‘RTM’) and Sandy.
Now, before everybody starts frothing at the mouth about how the service they use is better than both of those, let me reiterate - I don’t really care what you use. If a stack of cocktail napkins, a set of soap crayons and a shoebox get the job done for you, then that’s great. My point here is not to decide on the all-time greatest way to remind yourself to take the pizza out of the oven or pick up your kilt from the dry cleaners. I’m simply going to compare the capabilities of these two services and tell you which one I like best. Mmkay? Mmkay.
How to Work Effectively for 24 Consecutive Hours
In my line of work, having to stay at the office through the night in order to meet a deadline is a reality (albeit an occasional one for most of us). Well, my number has come up a couple times in recent weeks. A work project fell behind and required a borderline-unreal amount of work be completed in an extremely short time frame (as is usually the circumstance surrounding the “all-nighter”).
So, after having plowed this road yet again, I’ve had some time to reflect on what I had to do in order to not only stay awake, but crank out code of reasonable quality. While such circumstances aren’t ideal for “knowledge work”, sometimes you simply have no choice but to buckle down and not raise your head until the job is done.
Here are a few tips for making the most of your 24-hour shift:
Superstar Interview: Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani Talks Beer and Productivity
When somebody first start digging around for GTD and productivity-related websites, it won’t take long before they arrive at Lifehacker.com. A fine mixture of links to quality articles and products, as well as full-length features, how-tos and all sorts of other goodies. Like it or not, it’s hard to deny that LH is a force to be reckoned with.
Behind the behemoth sits Gina Trapani. Powered by a staff of stellar writers and a love for all things lifehackery, she keeps the music playing. And being such a fan of their site, I was especially excited to get the opportunity to ask her a few questions. Enjoy!
Your GTD System Isn’t the Problem
Since starting my current job about 7 months ago, I’ve garnered something of a reputation for being “the organized guy”. A couple of the higher-ranking people there had attempted to embrace GTD (with varying degrees of success) and were ecstatic to have somebody on-board who could attempt to convert the rank and file. I got a chance to talk one-on-one to a handful of them to see where they were in terms of “implementation effectiveness”, etc. It was a rather eye-opening experience.
Much of what I saw sort of mirrored what I regularly read about on other GTD-related blogs and websites. People really like the idea of GTD and could definitely see the benefit, but were really having trouble making it work across the board (at work as well as at home). In my experience, these types of situations stem from one of the following two symptoms:
So, You’re Not Using Jott?
I spend a good deal of time in the car every day. Not as much as some, but it’s typically somewhere around 90 minutes round trip on a given work day. And being one of those people whose brain is pretty much always going, I tend to have many thoughts and ideas during that time. It’s easy for my mind to wander around during what amounts to 75% of my “alone time” and I obviously can’t be scrawling notes down whilst operating a motor vehicle. Enter Jott…
If you’ve never heard of it, whoa nelly are you in for a treat. Essentially, it uses your cell phone as a gateway to all manner of applications, websites and services. Some of the more notable mentions are your Wordpress blog, Sandy (my secretary), Twitter and Remember the Milk - all accessible from your cell phone. Oh, and let’s not forget that you can import your entire address book and email/text virtually anybody directly from your phone. Intrigued?
8 Things You Should’ve Memorized a Long Time Ago
Let’s be honest - part of the reason most of us drank this GTD Kool-aid in the first place was that we were tired of forgetting things. Meetings, lunches, dentist appointments - all the crap that we were too busy (and, frankly, ill-equipped) to recall exactly when we needed to do so. So, we got our notebooks, planners and hipster PDAs to solve that problem. But that’s not why I called you here today.
There are certain bits of information that you *should* count on your brain to be able to retrieve quickly. Things that you won’t need very often, but it’ll probably be extremely helpful and efficient if you do.
The vast majority of these things are about you. Things that will be as helpful during conversations with the police or your health insurance company as they would be at your local grocery store.
A Roadmap to Spectacular GTD Failure
It’s rather funny to me that I write all this stuff about productivity, GTD and the like - the truth is, I’m probably one of the poorest practitioners of this stuff that there is. My system is constantly a mess, I’m always trying new little tricks and whatnot to get things working better (which typically blow up in my face). Even though many people think I’m all organized and such (seriously, people tell me this), I’m actually quite a wreck a good portion of the time.
And even though I might know a fair bit more about this stuff than the average person, there’s another area that I’ve gained a hell of a lot of experience with during this last year of “doing” GTD:
How to Make Your Outgoing Voicemail Message Not Suck
I have a handful of friends who, despite numerous pleas and death threats, refuse to carry their cell phone with them. They’re perfectly willing to leave it in the car while out somewhere, or leave it in their bedroom while watching television in the living room. Personally, these are stack-blowing, what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you-types of behavior, but that’s another rant for another blog post.
So, as you can imagine, I generally get sent to voicemail when calling said friends on their cell phones. Now, granted, I’m not usually calling to tell them their house is on fire or that I just scored the Def Lepard tickets they had been frothing over. But I would like to talk to them about something. The phone will ring a few times and then I’ll hear something like this:
Ask the Readers: How do you Handle Time-Based Reminders?
Throughout the many iterations of my personal GTD system (from all-digital to purely analog to a hybrid of the two), the handling reminders has been the one component that’s been the most prone to drastic change and restructuring. There are several ways one might deal with this problem, with each one’s success depending heavily on the habits and lifestyle of the user.
