Getting Things Done
Jul. 7th, 2005 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsI think I've reached a plateau about Getting Things Done, geek-style. I'm happy with the methodology I've hit, and I hope I'm done fiddling with it. I tried everything: Franklin/Covey paper-based planner, Palm-based planner, even a Hipster PDA.
The one thing that's always appealed to me as someone who tries to keep separate many disparate parts of his life (corporate programming drone, husband and father, kinky polyamorist) is the Covey method of defining your "roles." So when I started, I wrote mine out, with things like "Father" and "Husband" and "Homeowner" and so forth. I'm still not sure that's working for me the way I want it to; I think I like the GTD method of going on a project-by-project basis, but I have so many projects going that the roles thing helps me stay on track.
One of the nice things about the Roles feature is that it lets me have a completely separate system for the one thing that shouldn't intrude on my private life: my job. My corporate drone position seems cursed with a gazillion different ways of getting things done: email updates for both calendar and to-do, plus the normal human interaction of dropping things in my chair (or just dropping by), plus the weird expectation from the marketing department that doesn't understand, after five years, why we Unix geeks don't use Outlook and Exchange.
But where to keep all of this? That remains the principle challenge. As I see it, there are four important categories that my "stuff" needs for organization: Projects, Tasks, Calendered Events, and Notes.
And that's when I read Cory Doctorow's speech at Life Hacks Live where he said, "Real programmers use text files."
Boom. Projects go into a text file, laid out in Emacs Outline-Minor-Mode. Eventually, that text file was renamed "FrontPage" (no relation to the execrable Microsoft product) and put under Emacs Wikimode. That allowed me to use StudlyCapsMode to create notes and subprojects. (One reads "AtWork" and opens to a list of work-related projects, which means I can leave that screen open at work and no-one is the wiser to my private life if they happen to glance at it).
Tasks go under each project, one of which is listed as "NA", or "Next Action." Next to some of them there will be parentheses, into which go calendar-related project notes ("DL: Due 3/4", "PD: Won't be back until 7/12"). Those marked "DL" or "Deadline" are only marked for those items that have consequences.
It all really works, for once. For those things that I need to have immediate, or that I need for reminding, I put into my Palm. I may carry my laptop with me most places, but certainly not everywhere, but I can carry my Palm in my pocket. And as a reminder/alarm clock, it's perfect. I also transfer those "to do" items that I'll be doing out on the road, or when I'm away from the network. Since it also has enough memory for five or six novels, it fills in many of the needs I have when on the road.
For notes, I also carry a small notebook. People seem to think that a notebook is more friendly, analogue, and generally useful than the Palm notepad, and I agree. You can't draw, or be clever, with the Palm notepad, and it's certainly slower than pen and ink.
But the combination of Emacs wiki-mode and outline-minor-mode means that very complicated projects don't necessarily clutter up the main page, and if want to see just the projects themselves and not all of the subprojects or subtasks that go with it, I can just tell outline-minor-mode to show only the first two layers, and hide all of the details. And it provides sufficient real estate, in my case, to get a lot of organization done.
Now all I need to figure out is how to easily make my "Next Actions" list in Emacs port to the Palm directly...
The one thing that's always appealed to me as someone who tries to keep separate many disparate parts of his life (corporate programming drone, husband and father, kinky polyamorist) is the Covey method of defining your "roles." So when I started, I wrote mine out, with things like "Father" and "Husband" and "Homeowner" and so forth. I'm still not sure that's working for me the way I want it to; I think I like the GTD method of going on a project-by-project basis, but I have so many projects going that the roles thing helps me stay on track.
One of the nice things about the Roles feature is that it lets me have a completely separate system for the one thing that shouldn't intrude on my private life: my job. My corporate drone position seems cursed with a gazillion different ways of getting things done: email updates for both calendar and to-do, plus the normal human interaction of dropping things in my chair (or just dropping by), plus the weird expectation from the marketing department that doesn't understand, after five years, why we Unix geeks don't use Outlook and Exchange.
But where to keep all of this? That remains the principle challenge. As I see it, there are four important categories that my "stuff" needs for organization: Projects, Tasks, Calendered Events, and Notes.
And that's when I read Cory Doctorow's speech at Life Hacks Live where he said, "Real programmers use text files."
Boom. Projects go into a text file, laid out in Emacs Outline-Minor-Mode. Eventually, that text file was renamed "FrontPage" (no relation to the execrable Microsoft product) and put under Emacs Wikimode. That allowed me to use StudlyCapsMode to create notes and subprojects. (One reads "AtWork" and opens to a list of work-related projects, which means I can leave that screen open at work and no-one is the wiser to my private life if they happen to glance at it).
Tasks go under each project, one of which is listed as "NA", or "Next Action." Next to some of them there will be parentheses, into which go calendar-related project notes ("DL: Due 3/4", "PD: Won't be back until 7/12"). Those marked "DL" or "Deadline" are only marked for those items that have consequences.
It all really works, for once. For those things that I need to have immediate, or that I need for reminding, I put into my Palm. I may carry my laptop with me most places, but certainly not everywhere, but I can carry my Palm in my pocket. And as a reminder/alarm clock, it's perfect. I also transfer those "to do" items that I'll be doing out on the road, or when I'm away from the network. Since it also has enough memory for five or six novels, it fills in many of the needs I have when on the road.
For notes, I also carry a small notebook. People seem to think that a notebook is more friendly, analogue, and generally useful than the Palm notepad, and I agree. You can't draw, or be clever, with the Palm notepad, and it's certainly slower than pen and ink.
But the combination of Emacs wiki-mode and outline-minor-mode means that very complicated projects don't necessarily clutter up the main page, and if want to see just the projects themselves and not all of the subprojects or subtasks that go with it, I can just tell outline-minor-mode to show only the first two layers, and hide all of the details. And it provides sufficient real estate, in my case, to get a lot of organization done.
Now all I need to figure out is how to easily make my "Next Actions" list in Emacs port to the Palm directly...
