Category Archive for: ‘Productivity’
How to start
Getting stuff done is not always easy. Very often we get burned out and can’t take it any more. Perhaps we want to abandon everything as we’re being pulled from so many directions. After a while things settle down and we can start making progress again.
Since the world hadn’t stopped when your were taking easy there is a considerable amount of stuff you need to deal with. Also you may want to kick off some side projects you always wanted. All of a sudden catching up few things turns into a mountain of stuff.
This can easily put you off from starting getting back into the flow. Fortunately kicking things off is easy and it takes only three steps.
Gather commitments
Take a piece of paper and list all the things that come to your head. Don’t judge those things you will review them later. For now just write them down and see what’s coming up.
Avoid using electronic tools if possible. Computers will distract you and you will lose focus necessary to empty your head. If you really have to use your computer use something very basic like plain text file and Notepad.
Clarify actions and outcomes
Now review your list and decide whether you want to do anything about them. Then clarify which items are projects and which are just simple actions.
Clarify the outcomes of your projects, define what do you want to do. Make them as specific as possible.
For example Fix a car is too vague to give you an idea what it’s about. But if you put it like that: "replace front suspension". Now it becomes clearer and more specific. It’s much easier to list any actions that my form part of such project. At the same time the success or the completion status is also clearly defined. In the first example you never know when you’re done perhaps there are many small things that my need fixing. Second example is very precise so the boundaries are set.
List the priorities
Once you’ve clarified actions and outcomes for projects it’s time to put them in some order and decide what needs your attention first.
No all things are equal and some will have greater urgency and importance.
There are no set criteria for defining priority simply use your own judgement and see what resonates with you.
Once you’re done setting the priorities begin to work on your first item.
Getting clear and current is a straight forwards process. For many the problem lies in the fact that we need to spend some time upfront setting up the environment, clarifying what to do and when to do it.
This may be difficult considering that you may not see it as necessary or even think of it as waste of time. I often thought that I should be working harder, knocking those actions rather than spending time reviewing and clarifying. Unfortunately opposite is true the more time we spend upfront on planning and clarifying the easier it is to make progress on what we want.
Photo by pobre.ch
Evernote for projects
This week I wanted to look at using Evernote for projects. This will be short description of how i use Evernote for my projects. While setting up a project you can go wild and try to use every possible technique to breakdown tasks, time lines, resources etc. Although such approach can be useful and very insightful (see one example) I tend to try keep things as simple as possible and limit the amount of overhead.
When I’m starting a new project I use 5 stages of the GTD planning model as a planning guide. I’ve created a template in PhraseExpress (text expansion tool) so when I’m ready to start I hit right key combination and high level outline of each step appears in the note. Then I start working on a project one stage at a time.
Once I have my stages clarified and different elements sorted I assign relevant tags. At the moment I’m using Evernote as a project support tool. This means I will list relevant actions and steps I need to take to move the project but I will not track individual actions in Evernote. Since I use Remember the Milk for managing actions all project related actions are moved there. But if you are interested in using Evernote only please read excellent Evernote e-book by Daniel Gold.
There are two primary tags which I assign to a project note. First is a !!Project tag second is a @Current or @Closed tags. This way I can track my open or closed project lists with a saved search instead of to navigating through myriad of notes.
If a project is particularly large, especially if it includes a lot of notes and other supporting documentation, I would create a notebook for that purpose. This way it’s easy to keep all related information in a single location. Once the project is done I assign a specific project tag to all notes in that folder, move them to Reference notebook and delete the project notebook. I’m trying to limit the amount of notebooks I maintain and if I ever need to refer to some documentation I can always find it using relevant tag and search box.
Additional two features of Evernote that may come handy for anyone managing project are tables and checkboxes. These two can be quite useful for keeping track of progress of the different stages of a project.
Evernote is not a project management solution so trying to fit a large scale commercial project with hundreds of dependencies may not be the best choice. However for many home and small business user it can be exactly what you need.
My perfect computer
Few weeks ago I posted a link to Michael’s blog post about his perfect setup.
I’ve been thinking about this topic little further and realized that many of us would have two or more computers to consider in their setup. It’s often the case, that the setup is very different between each of the machine. One computer would be in the office, second is a home desktop or a laptop as it is in my case.
The former is a device managed by company’s IT team subject to various policies and restrictions. It has custom build applications and a predefined set of programs that can be used. If you want something new that is not on a company approved software list you have to go through a lengthy process. Most likely ending with "no go" response. They have their reasons. Getting this machine to the state of being perfect is difficult. The scope is very limited and you need to learn all the tricks possible to make the most of this setup.
On the opposing end there is a home machine which, with a little tweaking and good and simple software lets you get job done, the way you want. But it’s not only about the job being done. What’s also important is the style, easy of use, friendliness and all encompassing cool factor of the application you’ve selected.
Freedom to hack, experiment is the best way to find this perfect mix of various tool and utilities which make your computer life easier. There is no single list of ideal apps different people, different jobs will require something different. For me, at this moment the perfect computer looks like this.
Web browsing
Firefox/Chrome – Firefox remains my main browser due to a set of extensions I’m accustomed to it. I also use Chrome to check email and for other tasks where I use Google services.
Writing
Evernote – Evernote is my Swiss army knife. It’s a primary tool for writing, storing ideas, managing projects and reference information.
UV Outliner/Freeplane – Non-linear thinking gets done in Freeplane, which is an excellent mind mapping tool. For more structured outlining and thinking I’m using UV Outliner which is often called OmniOutliner for Windows PC.
WriteMonkey – I use it when I need a so called "distraction free" writing environment or simply black screen and white text. The beauty of WriteMonkey is its versatility, you can use the bare bone elements to just write or take advantage of all the different options available like bookmarking, versioning, referencing, multi-markdown.
Time Management
Remember the Milk – I’ve settled on Remember the Milk as primary task management tool almost 3 years ago. It’s been serving me well. Although there are certain limitations, versatility and ubiquity of this app are it’s best features.
Google Calendar – gives me access to appointments everywhere I need. There is hardly a better calendaring solution.
Other essentials
Dropbox – for syncing and keeping backup of current work, for sharing files with family and friends.
PhraseExpress – this a fantastic piece of software that allows me to automate a lot of my typing. I have text snippets for almost anything from email addresses, mail addresses to numbers, tags, keyword combination and even few paragraphs. If you type a lot and prefer keyboard as main tool this program is definitely worth trying out.
Thunderbird – email client from Mozilla, I’m using it to keep a backup of all my email.Run it once a week or so and all emails will be pulled for storing on my laptop. This gives me access to my email on and offline.
Lastpass/Keepass – password management becomes critical, using easy memorable words is no longer an option so best way to solve this is to resort to an application that can store this information securely and generate passwords for you. Keepass is an standalone open source application whereas Lastpass is web app with Firefox and Chrome extensions that lets you sync passwords on all your computers. I’m using two programs solely for backup and security purposes, having two encrypted copies gives me a safety net and ability use my data regardless of the situation.
Notepad++ – This is very powerful text editing application with syntax highlighting, making coding a great experience. Although I don’t use it very often it’s indispensable at times when I need to update WordPress theme files or edit a piece of CSS code.
So this is my current setup and as I’ve been finalising this post I realised that almost all of the above tool have been in my arsenal for a good while. I take it as an indication that majority of my computer needs are now solved. Although it’s more than likely I will be looking at other tools and introduce new tweaks the skeleton of my perfect setup is here.
Projects, Evernote and Remember The Milk
As many of you may know RTM is not the best project management solution it’s great web app for managing tasks and actions but connecting projects and creating nested solutions is not it’s strength. Sure you can try to hack it in many different ways but none would appear to be too intuitive or straight forward.
Evernote is great for taking notes of ideas, plans, sketches. When working on a project you can gather all backup and supporting documentation in it. Evernote is so versitile application
that its possibilities go way beyond that but I wanted to focus on the implication for projects.
In recent weeks team behind Evernote added new feature called note links. This allows you to create a link to your note which you can share in many various ways. Send by email, tweet include in other application.
My project list and many other action lists live in RTM. I prefer to keep it their so I have a single point of reference. RTM is good for tasks but not very good a project support solution. This is where Evernote comes handy.
When I launch a new project I create a new entry in RTM project list. Then I move to Evernote where I create a note for that project.
Next step is to create a list of next actions that allow me to complete the project. If I want or need I can supplement that with any thoughts, possible ideas, alternative solutions. All this gets saved into my note.
Last element is connect the information collected in Evernote with RTM project list.
This approach lets me do three things.
- I have quick access to project support material straight from my task application.
- When I decide to work on a project than I can either schedule it in calendar or RTM and simply press the link to focus on those project related tasks.
- Having a list of actions ready I can import them to RTM and by adding a proper syntax for tags, due dates, priorities. This is especially useful for project that may have a large number of moving parts and dependencies . So rather than refer to Evernote I can do what’s needed based on the RTM task list.
You can’t call it a deep integration like the one offered by folks behind Zendoe app yet the existing options allow me for creating quite nice and simple workflow.
Big thanks to Dan Gold for highlighting the usefulness of note links in his post.
Evernote for writing and blogging
Evernote is tremendously useful and versatile platform. Over the last number of months it became my go to place for filing almost anything.
After reading Evenote ebook by Dan it got me thinking about different areas of responsibility. One of those is keeping up this blog. It involves making sure I have a post ready for each week. One post a week sounds easy right and perhaps it’s for many but for me it’s not always. Having a structure in place which lets me focus on different aspects of writing is great aid. As result of some tinkering and reading few different articles I came up with this little writing/blogging workflow.
1.Make a template for a blog post
List key elements/sections which you normally would include in every post:
* text
* links
* photos
* sharing platforms
* mentions of people/blogs that influenced the post
Writing in the spur of the moment is great for capturing that moment of inspiration but more often than not writing is laborious process. Creating consistent and attractive looking posts makes better impression on readers and site visitors. This templates allows me focus on writing and when I’m done with it move to other elements of blogging that otherwise could be forgotten. As result my writing efforts can reach more people (hopefully).
2. Use tags to manage different stages for writing process
* draft current/on hold
* idea
* published
* to be published
When it comes to writing and blogging there are different stages of the process. In short you start with an idea/rough outline, then you work on developing it, then you publish it or leave it in a queue for later. Tags are perfect way to manage this aspect of flow. Rather than look at all your ideas and half written posts you can select a specific tag.
Splitting different stages of the process allows for greater focus and navigation between elements. Rarely or never you have to look at at published post and ideas at the same time. However at different times you will look at very specific stage. If you look for something new to write simply select "idea" tag, when you want to continue working on something that was open for a while you will select "current" tag.
Easy to manage and configure. I find it quite effective. Rather thank keep a bunch of text files (a good option too) I prefer to have it all in Evernote.
3.Bigger writing projects
Novels or serious post with lots of research and support documentation use a separate notebook or even a stack of notebook.
* gather what’s needed in one or more notebooks
* once project is done you can move all the data into single place or assign one tag to find it later.
* keep a small amount of notes (master note) or combination of notes and tags to manage to final result (copy)
Sometimes using tags to separate the content is not best solution, a physical separation may bring better results. When working on something complex which requires a large number of supporting documentation separate notebooks will allow to divide the research from writing and drafts and notes
Additional stuff
Couple additional tips and features that make Evernote great writing tool:
Full screen mode is great for focusing on task at hand. It so easy to get distracted by other things happening on you monitor, twitter feed. Full screen might be overwhelming especially when it’s just white space but once you start filling that space the sense of progress is encouraging
Inspiration and gathering ideas are very important elements of writing process. Evernote offers simple yet useful ability to record and store voice memos and pictures of thing s that caught your attention.
Often times you will want to share your drafts or finished articles with other people to get their feedback and opinion. To do that you can avail of note links which allow your to send a link to a note via email. You can also use shared notebooks if they are Evernote users too.
One feature that I would like to see in Evernote is a black screen editor for distraction free writing. Sounds odd as it should not matter what you use but somewhat it does. Personally I find that writing on black screen with nothing else on it does really help to keep focused and push that writing forward. Perhaps there will be someone looking at API and thinking of designing a simple and nice editor. For now I’m sticking with WriteMonkey and coping to and from Evernote. Slightly awkward but WriteMonkey seems like a better tool for writing.