1. Google Reader is by far the most accessed item on my iPhone and, while not an app, it certainly deserves pride of place on the homescreen. The iPhone interface is so easy to use and move around it makes reading feeds simple. Being online, it perfectly compliments the full web version and no other RSS reader I’ve tried has come close to touching it.

2. Stanza is a great app that I use to read ebooks. The online catalogs make downloading new titles a no brainer and the desktop app enables painless sharing of texts you already have. I’m a bit concerned that Amazon have bought the app, but I’m optimistic that they will use it to greatly improve the Kindle app (although I’m expecting that they will hobble future versions with more Kindle-like features)

3. OzWeather. This is basically a better weather app than the default iPhone app. Current conditions, forecasts and the radar images using the Bureau of Meteorology data, which is the critical point for an Australian weather app. While it might seem strange to pay money to replace an app that is included for free, this is a good example of a superior replacement. On my wishlist are push notifications to update the app badge with the current temperature, but I think that’s pretty unlikely. Overall, very nicely done.

4. Balance is a tiny app, but one that does the job it needs to do. I don’t keep a full budget on the iPhone, but I do use it to keep track of the money I spend. Balance lets me do this easily and quickly without any unnecessary bells and whistles.

5. TweetDeck and Tweetie. This is still a tie at the moment. Tweetie has been great, but after using TweetDeck for a while now, I’m starting to like it (even if I still haven’t come around to the desktop version yet). Both have an amazing range of features and stand out among the dozens of Twitter apps in the store at the moment. This is one category that is still exploding on iTunes at the moment, so there’s bound to be more apps that let you tweet on the move. Birdhouse, from Sandwich Dynamics, is one example of an interesting take on using Twitter from an iPhone.

6. Metlink Melbourne. Public transport in Melbourne can be a bit of a hit and miss affair, but at least with this app, you know when things are meant to turn up. Metlink supports saving favourite stations/stops and covers trains/trams/buses/VLine all in the one app. It’s just recently replaced the MetroMelb app and is worth getting if you rely on public transport. There’s versions for other cities under the ‘Metro’ title as well.

7. I like to use Instapaper on the desktop to save long articles I want to come back and read, so when the iPhone app came out, it really made sense. The Instapaper app downloads the saved sites, so once you’ve synced, you can access everything on a plane, in a tunnel or anywhere, regardless of reception. A great app.

8. Remember the Milk and Todo. This is another tie. As a GTD nut, I live and die by the lists I keep in Remember the Milk, but still haven’t found the perfect way to tie this in on the iPhone. The RTM app is nice and now supports push notifications, but has surprisingly poor support for smart lists and tasks with no deadline, which is what I need most of all. Todo offers full syncing with RTM and, while it doesn’t actually support smartlists, you can use the focus list and the filter to achieve a similar list. However, I’ve noticed that the sync hasn’t been working that well lately and I can’t rely on the app as much as I would like. It’s a relatively expensive app (and worth the price), but hopefully this issue will resolve itself soon. I know the crew at RTM are always developing their product, so I’m hoping a new version will arrive soon that will fit the bill – it’s one that I would use constantly if it fit my workflow correctly.

9. Aussie Rules LIVE is my pick of the AFL apps. It offers all the team information and news, as well as past scores and head to head information that you’ll need, but I find their live data to be the best. It’s easy to check the scores around the grounds and the commentary is a great way to get a feel for how the game is going. They’ve recently added DreamTeam scores as well, which is exciting, but unfortunately this doesn’t include the SuperCoach competition I play in – hopefully this is for a future update…

10. The final app on the list is Facebook. At the end of the day, it is just Facebook, but the way the app works just makes it perfect for the job. It’s easy to use and has most of the features you need. I would love support for more applications on the iPhone, similar to what Lexulous offers, but for catching up on news, photos and messages, you can’t beat the app.

I must give honourable mentions to a host of other apps as well, there are heaps that I use on a regular basis and some of the innovations and interfaces the developers have used are pretty amazing. WordPress, AppSniper, Weightbot, TripIt, CommBank, Snatch, Dropbox, AroundMe and eWallet are all apps that I could have added to this list. If you use this as a shopping list on the App Store, you’re sure to find some great applications.

Note that there’s no games on these lists. There’s plenty of those on my iPhone as well, so that is a list for another day.

I’m constantly looking for great new apps, so I’d love to hear any feedback about these lists, or suggestions for anything I may have missed.

Armed with just her cello and a small box of electronics, Zoë Keating is a one-woman orchestra. She records layer upon layer of cello, her feet dancing over an array of pedals to transform her solo performances into multipart works.

This is a pretty good start, and this video from Wired gives a bit more information:

To date, Zoë has released an EP titled ‘One Cello x 16′ and an album titled ‘One Cello x 16: Natoma’, in addition to work with other groups. More information on these albums and links to where to buy them, including iTunes, are on her site here.

I’m still kicking myself that I missed seeing her while she was playing here in Melbourne at the Corner in March this year, but will definitely catch her on the next tour!

Make sure you check out her music, you won’t regret it.

You can get the PDF version of the Sydney note from here. I’m not sure if they went through with handing them out at the bus, but it would’ve been a great sight to see if they did. Fantastic work.

Whoa, looks like Twitter is exploding at the moment. The above is a graph from ComScore (via TechCrunch) for unique visitors per month and it looks like March was a very good month for Twitter. As in +131% to just under 10 million good.

Surely a buyout is just days away at this rate. Hopefully it will be to someone who doesn’t suck (I’m looking at you, Yahoo!…)

If you’re not already following me on Twitter, you can find me at @simongoudie.

*edit* However, these numbers may not have captured the true story, as they appear to only have used the US twitterers using the website, not third-party apps. This is a pretty small sample compared to the full range of Twitter users. More at: Computerworld

I realise the target demographic aren’t really the ones that are buying high end ‘phones to swap in, but I still don’t think this was a smart move by Apple. All the same, I’m sure it’s a great player, it’s just the worst one Apple have released in a while.

Best news ever. Such a stupid, backwards plan in the first place.

Inbox processing

My day starts with checking email. I use Outlook at work and GMail personally, but the system is pretty much the same for each. On average, I will have received 30-60 emails overnight, mainly replies from colleagues in the US and UK. These are triaged according to the ever-present 4 Ds: Delete, Do, Delegate and Defer.

Delete: This is fairly straightforward – if I don’t need to keep the email for reference after reading it or if it is spam etc., it gets deleted.

Do: If the email requires an action of less than two minutes, that action gets done straight away. Usually, this is a quick reply or a system update and doesn’t take long at all. Once the action is done, the email is either deleted, or filed away in a reference folder in case it is needed later on. Often, this just involves reading the email, realising there is no associated action and filing it for reference.

Delegate: Not all of my emails require me to do something, often I can pass them along or arrange for someone else to complete the task. Again, this takes less than two minutes and is done on the spot. Once completed, the original email is either deleted, filed for reference or, if I am waiting for a reply or need to follow up on the delegated action, it is moved to my ‘@waiting for’ folder.

Defer: What’s left now are the emails that can’t be deleted, sent elsewhere or will take longer than two minutes to complete. Typically, this will be about 20% of emails, meaning that the 30-60 that arrived have now become 6-12 after just a few minutes – much more manageable. These emails are read and the larger projects and next actions necessitated by the email are identified. These next actions are entered into my action lists on Remember The Milk, which is always available on my second monitor using Netvibes, along with a list of current projects and a lot of other useful information. The email is then moved to the ‘@actions’ folder in Outlook.

Using this system, the 30-60 emails that were in my inbox are usually cleared within about 25 minutes, depending on the day. I am now operating from a zero base again. The psychological effect of this needs to be experienced to be believed – and it’s still only 9.30 in the morning!

A note about my email folders: I only keep my active projects in folders in my main email area, all my old projects and reference materials are stored in PST files. This makes it easy to collapse or close the reference material folders when I need to focus on project work. So, my main email folder view is basically:

Mail
-Inbox
-@actions
-@waiting for
-Project 1
–Subfolder
-Project 2
–Subfolder
-Project 3
–Subfolder

Prioritisation

Now I can start work on my actions for the day. The ‘hard landscape’ is tracked in the Outlook calendar. This only contains the meetings and events that are booked in for specific times or any all-day activities.
I keep a lot of information in Remember The Milk lists, not all of it work-related and not all of it actions. Using the tags function together with smart lists, I can create a list of work actions sorted by date. These may have been entered while processing email, or they could have been quickly entered at any other stage using the Netvibes page. The great thing about Remember The Milk is that it makes it very easy to work with your lists, so I can also enter tasks via SMS, Twitter, email, iPhone or in a number of other ways. In addition to the tasks I’ve manually added, repeating tasks also appear. These may be for things like preparing for weekly meetings and the task can be set to recur after a certain time. Looking at the smart list, I can see at a glance everything that needs to be done today, in the coming few days and also those tasks that don’t have a due date.

Unlike a lot of GTD setups, I have very few ‘contexts’. The vast majority of my work is done sitting at my desk with access to email, the internet and the phone. However, when I need to create context specific lists and tasks, this is easily done by adding another tag to the task in Remember The Milk and creating a matching smart list to display these tasks. In my situation, most tasks are covered by the @home and @work contexts.

I also don’t use any kind of prioritisation when listing tasks. I find that without the stress of a huge list of emails in my inbox or piles of papers on my desk and with the ability to see all my outstanding tasks at once, I have a much clearer view of my next actions and can decide priorities quite easily, based on time at hand and energy available.

Doing the work

Then the task is worked on. I keep my supplies (all work in progress) in a set of labeled folders in a drawer that is swivel distance from my computer. This gets my desk clear and everything in one place. As my desk is kept clear, I can easily tell what I’m working on at any given time and can give it full attention. Once a task is done, the task is marked complete and the work goes back into the folder. The next action for the project is identified and is added to my list of actions. If the project is still in progress, it goes back into the supplies drawer; however, if the project has been finished, I move the folder to my reference material – a set of shelves close to my desk. These shelves are close enough to quickly access my reference material, but far enough away to keep things out of the way. Again, once I have finished working on a task, my desk is clear and ready to start something new.

Using this technique, I can move through each of the tasks on my list and dedicate my time and attention to each one fully. Should I be interrupted, I am able to quickly return to the task at hand as it is the only thing on my desk. I find David Allen’s ‘mind like water’ saying to be quite accurate, and I also like to apply it to my workspace – everything is calm and empty to start, then the workspace reacts to the task at hand with as much paperwork, mess or clutter as is needed. Then everything is restore to the original calm again, ready for new stimulus.

This is how most workdays are run. I use one notebook, a lined Moleskine with a handmade Gfeller leather cover (that I previously covered here), to take all my meeting notes in and any actions that come up are flagged during the meeting. When I return to my desk, these are moved on to my Remember The Milk lists and crossed out of the notebook. This limits the number of ‘collection buckets’ I have to manage.

The Review

Ask any GTD practitioner and they will soon tell you that the cornerstone of any good GTD implementation is the weekly review. My weekly review is scheduled into my calendar at 4.00 on Friday afternoon. During the review, I’ll go through each inbox I have: email, voicemail, notebook, desk, etc and will process everything. Then I’ll look over my calendar to make sure I have all my actions captured for events in the coming week. I then review the list of current projects and add or remove items as appropriate, followed by a full review of every action that I have on my lists, making sure that nothing has fallen through the gaps in my system and renegotiating any tasks that have changed. I’ll also review all my supporting information and move anything completed to my reference files. The reference files are also reviewed briefly, with anything outdated thrown out.

This usually takes about 30-40 minutes and covers the complete system. Once I’ve finished the review, I know that all of my projects and tasks are up to date and safely captured. This means I finish the week with nothing on my mind and can enjoy the weekend without any niggling thoughts about work.

So there you have it, my complete GTD system in five parts. As I’ve said, the change this has brought about in my professional life has been amazing and I still can’t work out how I managed to cope before implementing all of this.

If you have any questions or comments about my setup, or if you would like to share yours, I’d love to here from you in the comments below.

(link to part 1)
(link to part 2)
(link to part 3)
(link to part 4)

Living on our own in Essendon has been fun, we’re pretty settled and have survived the first eight months. The number of weddings, engagements and pregnancies among friends has been amazing and fending off suggestions of when I will be following suit has become a fulltime occupation, although I am beginning to mellow a bit on these fronts…. Having a school reunion recently put a few things in perspective, which I found to be rather surprising.

Work has been frustrating in most cases, but I think it’s time to start thinking a little bit outside the box in the coming year. It’s getting to the point where I will need to make things happen rather than wait for them to happen. This year has seen me turn things around in terms of being organized at work, thanks to the GTD methodologies. I still need to finish off my GTD series of posts, but hope to get to that soon. I’m still amazed at the changes and personal gains I’ve been able to make, and have already bought my fourth copy of GTD after giving away my previous ones!

The coming year is still a mystery at this stage, there are still many directions we could end up taking. I’m looking forward to taking the year head on though, and I’m sure that this time next year will present a very different set of circumstances. It’s going to be fun finding out just exactly what they will be.

The downside, of course, is that the Singapore to London leg was a bit of a let down. The flight was with British Airways, rather than Qantas, and wasn’t that great. Smaller screen and seat, plus none of the comforts of business class. No on-demand movies was also quite disappointing, as were the meals.

Still, I’ve made it here in one piece and am looking forward to a busy week before flying back next weekend.