SansPoint

Many moons ago, I read an article by Merlin Mann on his plain text setup for organizing his life. I gave it a try, but was quickly overwhelmed. In response, I tried to force some sort of hierarchy upon the files, rather than use the arcane Metasymbol SphereOfLife Project UniqueIntuitiveFilename VersionNumber.txt file names that Merlin uses. This lead me to a host of programs to house and organize these files: Yojimbo, Mori, Journler, CopyWrite^[1], MacJournal, even DevonThink to a limited extent. All of them, every single last one, had something that didn’t work.

Yojimbo’s two major flaws were a .Mac sync that was utterly broken and it’s lack of an actual hierarchy, though the .Mac thing was the biggest problem. Journler and Mori both had issues with speed once their library filled up with serial numbers, running lists of movies and books to read, project ideas, and other deitrus of life. The more I loaded into them, to offload the required hassles of organization, the less useful they became. DevonThink, which Mr. Mann speaks highly of, proved to be completely confounding to use. If I can’t figure out to put things into it, the program is useless.

What I need is a way to have my life: projects, action lists, class notes, and everything else organized and portable, so I can access them on my desktop machine, my laptop, and nearly any other computer I have to use (preferably), off-line or on-line. Obviously, then, a system that relies exclusively on a single application to hold everything, or even parts of things, is not the best system. In this case, the only thing that provides cross-platform compatibility and portability is good old plain text.

I’ve not set up my system yet, but I’m working on the basic plan. I have a lot of data holed up in Journler’s database, iGTD’s database^[2], and assorted other programs. To do this, I’ll have to rip these things open, export (when the application provides that functionality), and build a system up from scratch. Once I have the data in text, however, it shouldn’t be a huge chore, thanks to OS X’s wonderful little features: tagging, smart folders, and Spotlight—as well as a healthy bit of Quicksilver-fu. Stay tuned.

1. Still the best app to do writing in, though not the best for organizing one’s life in ↩
2. iGTD exclusively holds my action lists, and nothing more ↩

For the past two weeks, I’ve had a small, but nagging problem: one of the various things on my walls, the cut out center of Herb Albert’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”.^[1] I had stuck it on the wall with two dime-size hunks of Tack-N-Stick, a gray, sticky substance with a consistency like Play-Doh. While the goo had been enough to hold the thing to the wall for a while, heat and humidity reduced it’s ability to stick, and it fell down repeatedly. Stupidly, thinking that the small amount had been enough before, I just tried sticking it back up for it to fall again.

This seems like an odd example, and it is, but there is a lesson here. Needs change, and systems have to change to adapt. Increasing the amount of Tack-N-Stick was enough to get the LP center to stay, even with the heat. Likewise, I’m realizing that other systems that provide support have to adapt to changing needs. This sort of heuristic development is the center of all lifehacking. We change the system we use to adapt to our changing needs. Copying someone else’s lifehack whole sale tends to fail. You need something that’s going to work for you, with you, and support you where you need help. Merlin Mann may be a whiz at emptying his inbox every day, but it took a new heuristic for him to clean out his junk.

When I griped about needing a goal tracker widget, I was seeking a new heuristic to compensate for a failure of my support structure to accomplish daily goals. Requiring me to deliberately bring up the Joe’s Goals site to gauge what I’ve done each day was more effort than I tended to exert. Having the site as my browser’s home page is enough, at least for now, to force my mind to think about my daily goals.^[2]

Being a college student on summer vacation, the typical constructs that form a support system for my daily activities have fallen aside. My main requirement each day is to be at work by six PM. History has shown that the natural action for me, then, is to sleep in until 4 PM, eat some fast food before I go in, and stay up all night. Instead, I’ve set up a system where I force myself up at the time I’m going to need to get up when classes resume. This gives me the day to accomplish tasks, as opposed to the night which I would most likely waste goofing around online.^[3]

Even a small, simple change can do wonders. Systems like this are best implemented in small steps, bits and pieces working towards a larger goal. Forcing oneself into a massive, overnight life-change is a recipe for disillusion and failure. Examine your situation, and see if a little change to your heuristic for dealing with life can’t improve things. Evaluate the reasons for your actions, the advantages of changes, and implement something. You can always switch back if it doesn’t work. What do you have to lose, except perhaps a bad habit?

1. I know most people want this record for the album art, but if you like stupid 50s lounge music as much as I do, it’s essential. ↩
2. Of course, if I can’t be bothered to click a bookmark, what makes me think I’d bring up Dashboard? I find that I bring up Dashboard on a regular basis to check on my website stats, see my exercise routine, or just to use the calculator. Having my daily goals visible and trackable there is a logical extension of the idea. ↩
3. This isn’t to say I don’t goof around online during the day, but I do other things as well. Productive things. ↩

The biggest problem with using online tools to handle life tasks is accessibility. Take, for example, Joe’s Goals. I’d originally set up an account with Joe’s Goals to allow me to keep track of personal goals and break a couple bad habits. It worked to an extent. I can credit Joe’s Goals with helping me stop biting my nails, at least. However, in using it further, I ran into a wall—I have to open a web browser, bring up the site through my bookmark, and then check off the accomplished tasks. This is too much for me, it seems.

I tried a few ways around it, though none were successful. My favorite was using the Dash Clipping Widget to hold my Joe’s Goals checklist, but the scale of it (9 goal items) was too much. The widget was damned huge. Joe’s Goals displays a week’s worth of goals at once, with the current day on the far right. The week grid alone is a good 530 pixels wide. Then, counting the goal descriptions themselves, and the tallies at the far right, we have a box with the total width of nearly 800 pixels. Running at 1280×1024, having this widget left me without a lot of room for anything else.

Pass.

I’ve decided to set Joe’s Goals as my browser start page now, but I’d prefer to simply have a small Dashboard widget I could use to track goals, something small, maybe showing five days. I don’t need the ability to check off daily goals more than once: just to be able to check “Done” or not. Positive and negative goals, like Joe’s Goals functionality would be a bonus, but I could work around it not being there.

Some nice widget developer, please get on this.

GTD… GTD… GTD… I’ve had it with GTD. I’ve tried many times to implement a GTD system to manage my life: classes, personal projects, bills, and all those damned things. Every time, I’ve failed. I’ve tried web-based systems, text-based systems, specialized GTD applications, and each time it’s failed me. Something about it isn’t clicking, and honestly, I’ve had enough. For the past week or so, I’ve been using something dead, stupid simple: a single TextEdit document open on my main desktop, listing the things I need to do for the next week, and when they’re due, or scheduled for. The scariest thing about keeping track of my life this way? It works^[1].

Because of this, I’ve begun to consider dropping GTD like a bad habit^[2]. There’s some aspects of GTD that I rather like, and have found useful, so I will keep them in one form or another.

• Collection device always on hand: I know my brain is like a sieve^[3], and this at least gives me a bucket to catch things in. I’ve got to work better at emptying it before the top goes all scummy and moldy, and I’m going to quit this metaphor now before things get real bad.

• Inbox: See above. It’s just great to have a place to put things and keep piles from accumulating… not that I don’t have any piles, but it’s saner with than without.

• Tickler File: This one I’m keeping, but in a different way. Having a full 43 folders is nearly unmanageable, especially since 90% of them are going to be empty at any time. Because it’s such a mess to deal with, I find myself not bothering to check it, even just to move one folder to the next month. It’s too much for someone with comparatively so little. I’m probably going to switch to a 9 folder tickler: one for each day of the week, one for the next week, and one for things beyond the next two weeks, and see if that’s easier to manage.

• File Folders: I know if I don’t file stuff, I’ll lose track of it. I’d rather keep my documents in a cabinet than risk them being crushed, lost, torn, or urinated on…^[4].

I’m going to drop, though, things like NAs, Project lists, Someday/Maybe lists, and the GTD lifestyle thing. A simple to-do list, keeping track of due dates and things, is more than sufficient. I’ll probably tweak it some, move appointments, and hard landscape stuff to iCal, for example. I’m also thinking about putting the list-thing into VoodooPad Lite, a wonderful desktop wiki application with a UI slightly less minimalist than TextEdit. That way, I can have an overview list and separate wiki-listed pages for information about assignments and the like.

No matter what, however, I’m going to throw off the formalist shackles of the GTD system. It’s too complex, too overmanaged, too… something, for me. Instead, I’ll just focus on WSD instead.

1. mostly ↩
2. natch ↩
3. This musical reference is likely to fly over the heads of all but three or four of you readers… ↩
4. All of which has happened to various important documents of mine. ↩

I’ve been trying to, slowly, implement the methodology of Getting Things Done, to help me with my academic life. It’s been an uphill climb, and I’m still not used to breaking down projects into granular components that can be simply “done” without multiple steps^[1]. The one big element of GTD that I have put to use is capturing every single thing that grabs my attention.

This is the antidote, I think, to an aspect of my procrastination and laziness that’s plagued me for years. I put an awful lot of trust in my brain to keep track of everything that must be done, whether it’s what I have to read for next class, what I need to buy at the grocery store, or when my appointment with someone is scheduled for. I still remember getting a planner-type thing for keeping track of homework assignments when I started sixth grade at J. R. Masterman school, and letting it get battered and beaten in my bookbag rather than open it.

I don’t use a planner, currently. I have a Moleskine Pocket Lined Reporter notebook that I write down every little thing into^[2]. I keep this notebook on my person at all times so I can write stuff down no matter where or when it comes to me. These scribblings are then processed each day or two, and I put assignments into Remember The Milk, and other hard landscape^[3] items into iCal.

All of this is then synced to my iPod for on-the-go reference, and kept available when I’m online and need to see what remains to be done. I try to keep about a week ahead for academic stuff, though I do fall behind a bit sometimes. Large assignments, such as papers, become GTD projects and are split into Next Actions, which I then perform based on context and order. There’s a bit more to the system than that, but it will have to get its own post. You can see an attempt to figure out actions for an English paper I have due on the 23rd in the picture.

I find that by writing stuff down and keeping it in an easily referenced system, I don’t have to worry about my brain suddenly neglecting to tell me about the ten page term paper due at 10 AM tomorrow, this is just an example.)). The tricky bit is to make sure I keep track of everything. My actions are a bit de-contextualized at the moment, but as I slowly put things into place, I’ll get a better feel as to what I can do, and when.

1. Basically, what canonical GTD says to do is figure out all the little steps of the “project”, make a list of them (separated by context), and do each step, rather than the whole big mess at once. It makes sense, really. ↩
2. I actually don’t like this notebook, as it’s hard to write on the top page, and has no bookmark ribbon. I still use it as it cost too much to simply throw away. ↩
3. Stuff that is either scheduled for, or has to be done by a certain day ↩