After becoming a Book Review Blogger I have had the privilege of reading books I normally wouldn’t read. To my shame I had never read a Max Lucado book. He has written many books and reading Fearless was my first encounter with one of his books.

The book is written in a very easy to read style, fresh approach and every chapter is well crafted. The only drawback for people who don’t speak English natively, he uses quite a lot of new words or at least words I never had heard of. So I had to grab a dictionary every now and then.

I was impressed by his case that fear is an ever growing problem in our current society. It struck me that it is so evident but also very sad to envision the consequences of the rise of fear is so many lives of people around us. There are circumstances where you will experience fear but fear isn’t the end. There is more.

This book doesn’t fit in the self-help category books with quick solutions and fixes to all fears and anxieties. Sorry for that. Instead Max draws from his own life and others to make clear that yes life sucks at moments but fear doesn’t have to imprison you.

I especially liked the honest way in which the author writes about his own fear and his relationship with God, the Ultimate source of relief for fear. With Him you can look fear in the eyes. The book has encouraged me in looking for new ways to deal with fear and hopefully help people around me to do the same.

It has been a while since I started using Evernote as my primary tool for doing GTD. For those of you that just now stumbled upon this blog here is a link to the page where you can find all previous posts on Evernote and GTD.

Since upgrading to the premium version I find myself mailing in more and more documents for projects and it is just great to be able to have all the current files for a project in one place.

With the new iPhone version typing text notes is greatly enhanced because I can now use the landscape keyboard. I still miss a good list view on the iPhone app but the landscape mode makes it already better to navigate and use.

I have had some issues with Evernote. Errors with very large pdf files and errors with mailing documents to my Evernote account. Because these issues were messing with me wanting to have complete trust in the system I contacted Evernote support. They rock. In both cases they understood the problem and provided a good solution.

One of the things that amazes me is that as far as I know the guys at Evernote didn’t know GTD when they originally developed Evernote. It is so funny to see that in my case Evernote turns out to be the perfect GTD app that supports all the importants aspects of GTD. It enables me to keep things under control and have the right perspective on all things in my current reality, both personal and professional.

If you have any question about Evernote and GTD please leave a comment and I’d be happy to answer them. If you have found a great way to use Evernote for your GTD setup, please share them!

Sometimes reading just comes natural to me and sometimes things are very slow. I intend to write about the books I read on this blog because of the fact that it forces me to reflect on books just before I put them back on the shelf.

I tend to have a couple of topics for books that I like to read. I blend them together with autobiography types of books. Generally you can learn a lot of people who take the effort to write down what happened to them.

As part of the Thomas Nelson Book review blogger initiative I got the chance to read the book “Through the Storm” by Lynne Spears, the mother of Britney, Bryan and Jamie Lynn Spears. This book has given me an peek into the hectic life of a family that went into a world not suited for them nor even made for them. As Lynne tells herself in this book they were just a middle-class small-town family.

The book is very well written. It is an easy read but not boring at all. Balanced and with tension are words that come to mind. Two things really stand out after reading this book:

1. Stars are just ordinary people not prepared for the things that come with stardom. In a sense the Spears family didn’t ask for a lot of things that came with the tremendous success of Britney. They just have a place where they grew up just as all of us. They come from the same planet. The people and the media treat stars as if they are from a different planet.

2. Your life is greatly affected by the choices you make. Thinking about big decisions in your life is really, really important. I see a sad combination of wrong choices, wrong people and bad luck as the factors that attributed to the trials this family went through. Lynne sums it up quite nicely somewhere in the book when she writes:

“I wish now I had trusted the professionals a little less and given myself more credit for my own instincts.”

Together with the fact that she puts here hope on GodI makes this book a strong story because not all whent well. In the end a glimpse of hope is evolving and I sure hope and pray that life will bring more joy for the Spears family.

Title: Through the Storm, a real story of fame and family in a tabloid world
Author: Lynne Spears with Lorilee Craker
Publisher: Thomas Nelson

Book review as part of the Book Review Blogger initiative by Thomas Nelson (http://brb.thomasnelson.com)

Just a short post to point you to a great magazine about Productivity. It is a free pdf download. It covers great topics and it looks very professional. In this latest issue you can read about:

• The art of saying No
• How to optimize your life and claim a couple of hours a week back
• Setting SMART goals
• Mind- mapping
• Working in groups

I highly recommend it.

When I came across the Book Review Bloggers program from Thomas Nelson I immediately signed up. I love reading and writing about books that have impacted my life. I heard about The Noticer project from @michaelhyatt on Twitter.

The book is a novel about planting seeds of perspective in peoples lives. It is a lovely read, beautiful stories tied together by Jones who appears in the lives of people just at the right moment. The only thing Jones does is offering people a new perspective on their lives. And frankly until you read it this might sound odd to you, but the words are really powerful.

Around the book – available this week -  is a campaign to notice the five most influential people in your life. On a special web site people are encouraged to notice and acknowledge these people for the things they have done. I have added an item to my quarterly review list to think about and name the five most influential people in my life.

Title: The Noticer
Author: Andy Andrews
Publisher: Thomas Nelson

As part of the Thomas Nelson Book review Bloggers (http://brb.thomasnelson.com)

When I get new books I put them on a special shelf. I have dedicated one shelf of my book closet to books I want to read. I got this from readingThe Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life by Steve Leveen. He also has one shelf dedicated to books he wants to read. And here is my catch, I now have more books that I want to read then there is room on that shelf. And that’s when I know there is something wrong, professionaly.

I’m not sure what’s wrong right now, only that I take less time to read than I used to, say 6 months ago. Reading for me is a way to grow, to break barriers, to learn new things and change the way I look at things. Having a to read shelf is not threathening. It doesn’t make me feel guilty but this shelf is a constant reminder of new things to discover. A gentle reminder of the wonder of reading and learning.

In some of my posts I have been describing how I use Evernote as my GTD cockpit. Another part of my trusted daily GTD system is my Dropbox account. Some time ago I made a separation between general reference files and what I call documents at work.

The general reference files on my computer do have their own directory structure. There is a basic three folder approach. Work related files, my own private related files and a knowledgebase directory. I don’t have a lot of subdirectories, I am on a Mac and completely trust Spotlight to find whatever file I need based on a couple of words from the original document. The work and private related files are mostly project related and are from projects that are already finished. Time Machine and Mozy make sure that data is replicated on an external disk and on the Internet.

For work at hand I use a free Dropbox account. The basic idea is that you can store 2 GB of files in your Dropbox and you can access that data through the Web on every computer that has Internet access. But the real power lies in the desktop clients, currently for Mac and Windows. When you install Dropbox on the client you will have a folder set up on your local computer. Any file you drop in that directory gets automatically synced to your online storage. You can attach more that one computer to one Dropbox account so files are replicated on the different computers. You don’t have to be online to be able to access the files.

I have Dropbox installed on my iBook G4 for when I am on the road. At home I have it installed on our Intel iMac. I can work on all project and other related files from both computers and know that I have the most up to date version of the file. Because Dropbox has an excellent iPhone enabled web interface I also can view my files from my iPhone. When working on a client computer or a public computer I have access to all my files through the Dropbox webinterface.

Dropbox also has the ability to roll back revisions of documents. So you can even revert back to files in case something went wrong. Even if you delete files from your Dropbox you can restore them in the Web Interface. I have been using it for months now with no problems so far.

In this screenshot you see the directories I have in my Dropbox account. The @Home and @Work folders hold files for projects I currently work on as well as other context related files.

Read&Review holds files (mostly pdf files) I want to read when time permits. The Reference folder holds reference documents I want to have at hand always. The photos folder is for well photos and the public folder is for sharing files with others.

Dropbox gives you two options when you want to sign up: the free account gives you 2 GB of storage and the $99 dollar a year (or $9,99 a month) paid subscription gives you 50 GB of storage.

But here is a catch for you. They have started a referral program. If you sign up for a free account using this link you will get an extra 256 MB of storage free. I will also get an extra 256 MB of storage. I have found so far that 2 GB of free storage is enough for my use of Dropbox in the GTD workflow I have setup. But having some more space won’t hurt

I regularly purge my Dropbox by archiving project related files from projects already finished.

So if you want to give Dropbox a try, here is a good change!

I was visiting the Making it all Work seminar featuring David Allen in Amsterdam yesterday. The seminar was organized by the David Allen Company and Life Architect. It was my third time that I visited one of David Allen’s seminars. I also listen regularly to the audio version of the seminar. It was as usual a very good seminar, relaxed, focused and entertaining. It looks like it doesn’t cost him any energy. Because I know what it is to have to present in a different timezone, it is amazing how he does it. With humor but with great persuasion he tells his story about productivity. You can read elsewhere on Internet about the content of the seminar.

There are two things I want to write about in this post regarding the seminar. First, David demoed his own system with Lotus Notes with the eProducivity addon from Eric Mack. He also showed his extensive use of MindManager. By doing this he showed first hand how it works in his own personal and professional life. I must say this was quite powerful. It resembled much of how I have set up my own system in Evernote.

The other thing I wanted to mention is the story behind the story. When you have been introduced to GTD and have a good understanding of the practicalities of GTD it is fundamental you get the basic and fundamental theory behind it. Completely in line with his new book, Making it All Work, David pointed to the fundamental behavior changes that are needed to really get GTD and stick to it.

Couple of quotes to illustrate what I really got out of this seminar:

“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” – David Allen

“Psychologists say Distributed Cognition, I say Write it down” - David Allen

“A successful executive solves bigger problems that he or she creates!” - David Allen

And as always during a seminar like this all kind of new ideas, tasks and projects have surfaced and are now in my trusted system waiting for the right timing.

Over the last two months I have seen an incredible increase of visitors to my blog and readers of the feed. I have also seen a lot more subscriptions to the email service of my blog.

So a big welcome to all of you who are new around here!

Most of you have been visiting because of the serie on Evernote and GTD. I am so pleased that a lot of you are using Evernote for your GTD process. It has been a tremendous step forward for my workflow when I started to use Evernote as my main GTD cockpit. I am looking for more stuff to write about in this regard so stay tuned.

Feel free to comment on this post or others with your tips, questions or just to say hello. Interaction is great fun in this online world.

For those of you who haven’t read the about page, please do. It will give you some background on who I am and what this blog is all about.

So again, welcome and stay tuned for more practical posts with new tips, tricks and ways to enjoy life to the fullest.

When I first started out with Evernote in a GTD way I struggled with using the rights features for the right GTD use. I tried using the tags as contexts but this didn’t work out in a way I liked. I have to be honest that early on the tags feature of Evernote was somewhat unpredictable in my case where I mixed the Windows and Mac client together with the iPhone app and the occasional use of the web interface. But even after those glitches were solved by the guys from Evernote I still didn’t completely trust that system. Not that it wasn’t reliable but it just didn’t work in my workflow.

In the meantime I have found a great way for tags in my GTD setup. I use the tags as temporary labels for project support material entries. I use it for web clippings, all kinds of documents (see below about Premium). It is my experience that I have at most about 20 active tags. When the project is done I simply delete the tag.

Saved Searches

This feature of Evernote is used for several lists that I use every now and then. I have a saved search that lists all the notes that contain interesting books, films or music. Also Saved searches provides me with a list of restaurants. I have for each saved search a dedicated word that is used for generating the list from all my notes across all notebooks. For books to read the keyword is simply: booktip.

Premium feature

There was one thing in my GTD workflow that didn’t quite worked. In a lot of my actions and projects I have to deal with documents, spreadsheets and other files. With the premium (aka payed) version of Evernote you can use these kind of files in your notes. What I particulary like is the ability to mail documents to your Evernote account. I explained the feature of mailing to your Evernote account in an earlier post on Evernote and GTD.

When I receive a document that I need to review I mail in to my Evernote account address. Before sending the mail I change the subject line of the forwarded mail with a meaningful action like this:

Read quarterly report for the budget meeting.

All mailed entries are routed to my Evernote Inbox and are processed from within Evernote. The automatic syncing of documents is just amazing. Always the most actual version of the document is available on whatever device or computer I work on.

This is the last entry in this series on Evernote and GTD. Since this is my primary GTD setup, every now and then I will write about new cool things I have figured out. For your convenience I have listed the entries below:

Evernote and GTD (1)

Evernote and GTD (2): Collecting

Evernote and GTD (3): Collecting with the iPhone