I was on an America West flight to Phoenix in 1999 when David Allen sat next to me. The passenger compartment was bare bones -- no overhead vents, for example -- and I was in a pissy mood. Allen was not. He immediately struck me as the most seasoned, at ease traveller I had ever seen. After he got himself adjusted I asked him if he travelled a lot. He smiled and showed me his United frequent flyer card. It had his name, and "Five Million Miles" embossed on it. I asked him what the hell he was doing on this crappy America West flight. He was flying from Geneva to his home in California, and had missed his connection, so United put him on the next available flight.
He was a "CEO coach" at the time and, while I normally don't badger strangers on planes with questions, we ended up talking for a good part of the flight. When his book came out, I recognised his picture on the jacket, and wrote him an email. He remembered me, and offered to get together for a glass of wine when he was in Boston.
Of course I got his book, and of course it changed my thinking. I wouldn't be writing this if it hadn't. I have ADD, and am also deeply suspicious of self-help literature. I couldn't stomach the moralizing of Stephen Covey and his ilk. But GTD, and Allen as a person, work just great for me, and work with my ADD. I've tried variants, electronic and paper, but everything that works for me is within the GTD ecosystem.
So, what is the current system that you are using for GTD? I need to be more organized and productive but I really don't have the time/patience to read the book. So, if you can give the tldr; of your system or a web app that forces one to use GTD without all the theory would help as well.
My current system is emacs org-mode for my inbox and all computer-based action lists, and Todoist for anything I need to carry with me. Since much of my work is done in emacs, org-mode makes the most sense for me. But honestly, the GTD ecosystem has gotten a bit polluted by really good team-based apps.
At the time GTD first came out, there was more of a hard line between personal task lists and team-based responsibilities, or maybe it at least seemed that way because the technology was so limiting.
That said, technology is not the solution; a decent process is. Google image search "one page GTD summary" or "GTD workflow" and the key features are technology-agnostic: a single inbox for actions, a good decision making process, and context-dependent action lists so you don't wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat about something you forgot when you had the opportunity to do it. In the last 15 years, my favorite GTD systems have been a Moleskine notebook and my old Palm Pilot. I've changed my systems over time, but not because the current systems are particularly better in general; they are better for me in context.
> So, what is the current system that you are using for
> GTD?
Back when I had a job with responsibilities (team of 40), I did the following...
First of all, I used "Things.app", for the iPhone and for the Mac, although really any of the many tools should do - the important thing for me though was that anywhere I could read email - or have a random thought - I needed to be able to access my organization system; I wanted to get it out of my head and out of my Inbox in to a real organization tool as QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE so I could stop thinking about it.
I'll talk about three separate places here: Email Inbox, Things.app Inbox, and Things.app Today.
At the beginning of each day, I would go to my email inbox, and scan through. Normally about 100 items:
* 50% could be deleted because I was CC'd, but there was no action item for me
* Anything that could be done in under two minutes, I'd do; this was generally Yes/No type answers, or quick clarifications
* Anything that would take longer, I would - IF AT ALL POSSIBLE - attempt to delegate. Quick two minute email to someone else, trying to get them to do it, and then I'd add a todo list item: "FOLLOWUP: Did John send Dave the RFP for Acme corp", and then ask Things.app to schedule it to remind me (by placing it in Things.app Today) in x days, where x was task-dependent. Trying to get new managers in my team to delegate ruthlessly was always very difficult - but if they couldn't do it, they'd get swamped quickly, and no-one would win.
* Anything that would take longer that I couldn't delegate, I would add a Todo item for today with a brief summary of what it was to Things.app's Inbox list; incidentally the Inbox list is also where I'd put absolutely anything that cropped up during the day - my boss asked me for something, I remembered I'd promised someone something I hadn't delivered yet, or I had an idea that would take 6 months to do but was worth thinking about.
All email would be archived in this process.
This process would get me to Inbox Zero, but I would still have items in Things.app Inbox - generally about 8 - 14 items - that really needed my personal attention. First pass I'd try and make sure each was actionable; "Sort out team development plan" not in the least bit actionable. However, giving it 10 seconds though led me to realize that our HR Business Partner could probably help, so he got a quick email "Please could you schedule some time with me to sit down and talk about team development?", at which point, it becomes a "FOLLOWUP" item as above. This generally got rid of 4-5 items. Remaining items I would then drag to the Today list. These tasks could be pretty diverse: "Reread James' email about data governance", "Fill out ATR for new DevOps person", "Disabuse Neil of the idea that we should be using Docker".
The Today list was often 3 - 15 items long; generally about half were "FOLLOWUP" items, as per the above, and these could be ticked off very quickly by hitting reply and sending a slightly more urgent or threatening message, and I'd then reschedule the "FOLLOWUP" item to the next day.
Of the remainder, I would attempt to sort them in order of importance. Anything that was a multiple hour task, I would create an appointment in my calendar to do it, as well as a "FOLLOWUP" scheduled to make sure I'd done in - "Prepare salary review spreadsheet" was going to take 5 hours, so I'd block 5 hours off, book a meeting room where no-one could find me, and then forget about it until the appointment came up.
Of what remained - generally 30m - 90m tasks, I'd then take all but the top five, and reschedule them to the next day. This was a struggle to get my managers to done - people are hopelessly optimistic, and think they can get through more administrivia in a day than they can. If you restrict yourself to 3 to 5, it'll force you to delegate more aggressively, and you'll also be surprised how many items that keep getting kicked down the road take care of themselves.
The process up to this point took 20m to an hour depending on how conscientious I'd been in keeping up to date with it.
I'd then try and blast through the top five, generally managing two or three of them. I would attempt to get ALL of these things done in the morning each day, and set aside the afternoons for important meetings and for large blocks of work that needed doing.
The key features of this:
* You need a system where you can TRUST that if something goes in to it, it won't fall back out of it again. The scheduled FOLLOWUP tasks for me were that
* You need to be able to add items to this super easily - whenever you think about it. That way, you're not carrying around items in your head, which is when you get snowed under
* Your email Inbox is a very shitty Todo system, and it'll stress you out. Get items out of your Inbox and in to a real Todo system as quickly as you can. If you're stuck on Outlook, and so don't have an Archive function, create a folder where a copy of every email gets duplicated to so you can aggressively delete from your Inbox and still go back to emails that had important information in.
I too am interested in what particular system you use. I found that it was a useful framework for thinking about tasks, but in college I was never able to use that framework to implement a system and then keep up with it.
As good as that is, see this: http://dlmf.nist.gov/, the online companion to the truly epic NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions, itself the modern successor to Abramowitz and Stegun.
It (and the book on which it is based) are amazing. Virtually every older applied mathematician has a copy of the original Abramowitz and Stegun, which was supported by the National Bureau of Standards, prior to NIST. The successor (http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/mathematics/ab...) is really an incredible achievement. The reviews are hilarious. One notes "The book is quite heavy; for convenience, one might be inclined to place it on a stand, as with an unabridged dictionary". Another review begins "This is like trying to review the bible".
The online version also lets you get LaTeX for everything, and has many other features. But the print version is a thing of beauty.
In full disclosure, the Editor in Chief and Mathematics Editor, who devoted the last 13 years of his professional life to the project, was my stepfather.
I can see one use case for this family of tools: if the same script could generate either crontab files or launchd agents, so it could generate scheduling files for MacOSX, where crontab is discouraged.
From the review, this book seems like a rehash of Taubes' two excellent and well researched books on the same topics. Taubes was the first to make the broad historical connections that also seem central to this book. Even the book title, "The Big Fat Surprise" is a play on Taubes' famous 2002 New York Times article "What If It's All Been a Big Fat Lie?". What, if anything is original to this work? From the Economist review, we have no idea.
I'm an American who has lived in Singapore for almost nine years, in two very different jobs, in two very different parts of the city-state. Singapore has a lot of challenges, but the oversimplifications and generalisations in this glib article don't do Singapore or Singaporeans any favours. (I've been here long enough that my spell-check is set to British English).
Let's take National Service (NS). Dover writes: "after graduating, every citizen is required to do active service in the military." This is wrong on at least three points, which is impressive for a sentence that short: 1) NS is not required of all citizens, only men; 2) NS is also required of male permanent residents who turn 18 in Singapore, and 3) it's an age requirement, not a graduation requirement.
He goes on to write that "pride is the result" of the NS requirement, in that part of the article that seems devoted to unqualified praise of Singapore's success. Really? Pride alone? Yes, male Singaporeans are proud of their service in NS, but plenty — especially younger Singaporeans — also resent it, resent the foreigners and women who don't have to do it and who they believe get an upper leg in society as a result. I've had Singaporean men explain away sexual harassment of women — harassment they witnessed first hand — on the grounds of the hazing they received during NS. If "sense of pride" is the only thing Dover has to say about NS in Singapore, even after months of living here, I'm not surprised he never had deep conversations with any Singaporeans.
Pro tip, Dover: there are better ways to investigate peoples' heritage than walking around asking people about their heritage. And if you do ask, and the answer you get is "what heritage?" and a laugh? Well, that may not mean what you think it means.
There's a lot happening in Singapore. It's an evolving place, with a growing civil society, increasing activism, growing nationalism and anti-foreigner sentiment, brutal competitiveness (the Singlish word is "kiasu", which is a Hokkien term that translates as "afraid to lose"), a terrible Gini coefficient, complex underlying racial tensions, and some absurd historical hard-edged nanny-state reflexes. There are a lot of things Singapore needs, but the dynamics are complex, not ripe for banal oversimplification.
gtuckerkellogg, thanks for your posting. I'm curious -- have you learned Mandarin or Malay language during your stay, enough to communicate extensively?
It was my experience living in Taiwan for two years that language is a significant requirement for understanding the culture, even when English is commonly spoken among the educated classes.
In my opinion, a month really isn't long enough to evaluate a country, even a small one such as Singapore.
I've learned to speak Mandarin, but not Malay. I can read and write enough to read the Chinese newspaper and sing karaoke. It's helpful: it breaks down a lot of cultural barriers, and makes chatting with cab drivers more fun. It also makes the Singlish more understandable. There's a lot of Singaporean English that borrows from Chinese word order, which in western English sounds harsh even though the Chinese word order (in Chinese) uses it as an expression of politeness. E.g., "Go to lunch, can or not?"
We used to talk that way in Taiwan, as a joke. I would amuse my Chinese friends by taking famous pop songs (Beatles, etc.) and singing them in my clumsy Chinese. They would roar with laughter. I think and believe they were laughing with me.
Obviously, Dover can live where he chooses, and like the places he chooses. I don't begrudge him his preferences. But the shallow armchair-quarterbacking from someone who has clearly made no serious effort to have a substantive experience of a place? That I could do without.
After I posted my comment, I read his Life List, his About page, and other parts of his site, and realised that Dover's entire schtick is to promote an utterly self-absorbed worldview, so the lack of perspective is not really about Singapore.
The thing is, after two years as a Westerner in an Asian country, I felt as though I was completely unqualified to judge the people and the country who had so impressed me with their courtesy, grace, and humility.
The longer you stay in a country, the more you realize that it's difficult to generalize. A one week or one month visit confers a certain shallow impression which is easy enough to express. A year or two can dramatically change one's outlook.
Everything I've read from folks at Mendeley misses the point of the disgust. Most people are not concerned about Mendeley going away, or about development stopping, or about new features not being added. Of course you're continuing to build the tool, at least the for the foreseeable future. Of course Mendeley will continue to be have a free version, etc. Of course Mendeley will continue to add features.
But none of that is because Elsevier has suddenly decided to support open access. It's because buying and developing Mendeley is an affordable way for Elsevier to launder its godawful reputation. All the smiling emoticons in the world don't change that.
Those <$200 USD suits made in Thailand are unlikely to be top shelf. There is a huge business in southeast asia on rapid turnaround custom suits. It's not targeting the same market as real bespoke tailoring.
I have a weakness for bespoke suits. I live in Singapore, and have gone to the same tailor for seven years. He's superb, but you can tell from working with a great tailor why even "made to measure" suits can be disappointing. When I started with this guy, I would go back for two fittings after my initial measurements, and before the suit was done. The fittings would be done with the partially constructed suit. Many details were checked and little adjustments made: asymmetry in my body, the sway in the back, where I pocket my phone, how to adjust the jacket for my wallet, and making sure the right sleeve accomodates my watch (I'm left handed). I thought it was overkill. But worn, his suits are flawless and so comfortable the idea that a suit would be uncomfortable is a distant concept.
After the first few years we reduced it by one fitting.
He was a "CEO coach" at the time and, while I normally don't badger strangers on planes with questions, we ended up talking for a good part of the flight. When his book came out, I recognised his picture on the jacket, and wrote him an email. He remembered me, and offered to get together for a glass of wine when he was in Boston.
Of course I got his book, and of course it changed my thinking. I wouldn't be writing this if it hadn't. I have ADD, and am also deeply suspicious of self-help literature. I couldn't stomach the moralizing of Stephen Covey and his ilk. But GTD, and Allen as a person, work just great for me, and work with my ADD. I've tried variants, electronic and paper, but everything that works for me is within the GTD ecosystem.