Essentially, I requisitioned the file cabinet drawere that holds blank forms. As we print most forms on demand, there are only a few blank forms stored in there these days. I gave each of these a file folder and included them in my alpha file system along with everything else.

During this process I also cleaned up my desk, threw out some useless reference folders and created two new ringbinders for reference:

• Annual Camp Folder - For documents relating to camp inspections, drill competitions & formal parades
• Lesson Plans - For paper copies of all the lesson plans used in the squadron

Here are some pictures.

So the Second round of GTD-inspired stuff happened this morning. There’s not much to explain here really, except that I’ve just gone through all of my reference materials and condensed & sorted them.

On looking at each piece of paper or folder I asked the following questions:

1. Will I need to look at this again?
2. If so, can the information be better stored electronically
3. If not, does it need archiving?
4. Is it in the most appropriate folder?
5. If not, where should it go? What should the folder be called?

What I ended up with was a bloody great pile of stuff to bin, a small pile of stuff to shred or burn, a small pile of stuff to file at cadets and a surprisingly tiny set of nicely labeled file folders in alphabetical order, filling less than half of one file drawer. Cool. here it is:

While sifting, sorting and scrapping I was reminded of one or two things I should be doing and these duly went into OmniFocus via the (pretty cool) quick entry box. There were duly made into projects and, if they had paper stuff, were given file folders too.

Project Front Sheets

The next stage in my journey to sort shit out involved defining outcomes, ideas, constraints and what not for all of the major projects I’ve got going. It’s worth noting here that these only apply to major projects. All the smaller projects that are simply a reaction to life aren’t worth worrying about.

Below is the sheet I use for defining projects. I knocked it up the other day after reading the section on project planning in GTD. Let me know what you think of it.

Sorting my Shit Out

After reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done for the second time (the first was three years ago), I was inspired to get on one sorting things out with me. Perhaps it went the other way around - I re-read GTD because I wanted to sort things out. Either way, I’m feeling inspired.

My intention is to go through the following steps, roughly speaking:

1. Sort my organizational stuff out
2. Do less stuff I dislike and more stuff I like. See less people I dislike and see more people I like
3. Get my Being Healthy thing on.
4. Start building a bit of a brand

So, the other day I started with the first bit, sorting my organizational stuff, all GTD inspired. I bought a nice Brother Labbler from Amazon and set off on a Collection & Organization Binge.

1. Collection

I gathered up all the things that were dotted all over my computer, at home, at work and at cadets and dumped them on my mattress or in a my INBOX folder. After that I wrote down everything I could think of that was bugging me, big and small and piled them on top. That’s about it for collection.

2. Organization

Yesterday Morning I went through all of the items in my Inbox, creating project files for any defined projects with paper-materials and adding those projects to OmniFocus.

Any small Projects which won’t need support material and should have only a few actions went into a n OmniFocus folder called “Small Projects”, and paper for them went in a file folder with a shiny new label “Small Projects Support Stuff”.

For the rest, the projects were split into three Categories: Cadets, University, Others. You can see my Projects list in the screenshot on the left.

One of the issues I had with using OmniFocus in the past was the enormous number of projects I racked up. Anything that required more than one action step was made a project, and this quickly cluttered up both OmniFocus and my brain. This time around I’ve decided to put any small, two-or-three-step ‘things’ into the Miscellaneous Project (shown below).

After this almighty great job I set up a bunch of contexts and a definite next action for each project. Then I had a cup of tea.

It feels pretty good to get all of my stuff out of my head, it’s already allowing me to focus more on what I’m doing and less on what I have to do. What’s the next step? More Organization, with a sprinkle of brainstorming thrown in and of course, more labeling. Cool.

A few days ago, my girlfriend Frankie bought me an iPhone. I thought I’d mention the few things I did to get my new toy up and running.

Applications

After unwrapping it, marveling at the packaging for a few minutes, and activating it I set about installing a few basic applications:

• Facebook - A standard really, we all live by Facebook these days.
• Last.fm - I’ve been using iScrobbler and Last.fm for years now, the iPhone version is a great way to get some new music when I’m walking about.
• NetNewsWire - I use the desktop version to read RSS on my mac and having both applications sync with Newsgator means that my latest news will always be with me. I usually spend about half an hour a day reading news but I’m hoping that now it’s in my pocket, I’ll be able to fit that in while I’m waiting around for a bus or a lecture.
• Remote - Now I can control iTunes from downstairs.
• VNC Lite - I don’t often use VNC but as the application’s so small I thought I’d install it just in case. There are times when I’ve dearly wanted remote access to my mac while out and about. I also updated the VNC Server on my mac (OSXVnc).

Although I’m trying not to buy many applications, I did splash out on two.

• Pennies - A simple but useful money tracking and budgeting app. I’ve often recorded my expenses on an index card and totted them up at the end of the week, it strikes me that doing it on my phone will save me both time and effort, and for the sake of the pound or so that it cost I think it’s well worth it.
• AirShare - This is great. Essentialy, it turns your iPhone into a WifFi hard drive, enabling me to drop files onto it from my mac while it sits in my pocket. I can effortlessly pull files off in the same way when I’m at a friends machine or at cadets. The killer feature for me is the ability to view PDF, source code and iWork files with it. It allows me to read eBooks and lecture notes while on the go. I’ve got an alias to the iPhone in my home directory for easy access.

After configuring the phone’s apps, I set up access to my Gmail account and synchronization with iTunes. I’ve currently got the phone syncing with an iPhone playlist and an iPhone images folder, as well as my latest podcasts.

Contacts

It was a bit of a hassle moving my contacts across from my Sony Erricson K810i - it took me about an hour in total. Here’s what I did:

1. Synced the contacts from my K810i to Address Book using the methods described here. Note that I had to remove the K810i from the iSync list, disable iPhoto from opening automatically and then re-add it to iSync before I could Sync.
2. Synced my Address Book with the iPHone and Gmail (using iTunes) to get my gmail contacts into Address Book.
3. Worked through the address book renaming people, editing email addresses, merging contacts and deleting millions of random numbers. At the end of this I used Address Book’s ‘Find Duplicates’ function to make sure I was done.
4. Added the contacts to various groups and distribution lists.
5. Used the wonderful AddressBookSync to match up my facebook friends to my contacts. This imports their birthday and profile picture if it’s available. The automatic matching is pretty good (it matched Gaz to Gareth) but it’s worth looking through the unmatched list because unless you’re perfect at spelling it will miss some.
6. Synced the iPhone wil Address book using iTunes.

I’ve not got my contacts and email synced across my Mac, Gmail and my iPhone and I’ve got everyone’s birthdays and photos in the phone. The birthdays also show up up in iCal, which makes my life even easier!

I hope this was useful to someone!

It’s been an awfully long time since I’ve written anything here (just over a year in fact). Still, a minute ago I felt compelled to write, so here it is.

Shifting Focus

In the past I wrote a lot about productivity. I was an avid reader of lifehacker, zen habits & other leading “life hack” blogs and was keen to pass on some of my knowledge to anyone who’d listen. About 18 months ago I shifted my focus to learning and started reading Cal Newport, Scott Young and other writes on the subject. My desire to pass on what I learned faded. Lately, I’ve had yet another shift of focus - from learning to philosophy, and hopefully for you I’ll want to tell you about it.

In the three of four years that I’ve been learning about productivity I’ve made massive improvements in my organization & workfow: I’ve found software products to help me work efficiently, developed a version of GTD to organize myself more efficiently, learned skills to help me learn more efficienty and made changes to my routine & home so I can live more efficiently. All of this has been great but there’s one problem.

Efficiency is crap

The trouble is, efficiency is only a good thing when applied to the stuff that you don’t really want to do. Some might argue that this is bollocks, that it’s good to be efficient in say, your workouts at the gym. Perhaps technically they’re right.

You see, for me, efficiency means “To minimize the amount of time taken to achieve the goal” and while I attend the gym with the goal of getting fit, I also want to enjoy it.

If I’m constantly trying to be more and more efficient in my workouts, I’ll loose that enjoyment. This is particularly true when thinking about relationships with others - is it really a good thing to be efficient with your partner? Probably not.

With this in mind, I think that I’ve reached a fairly good level of “productivity” - there’s only so much that I can “hack my life”, before I need to look at the bigger picture: Why am I here and how do I make the most of it?

And so to philosophy.

Although I’ve dipped into some philosophy books in the past, and pondered the different philosophies of the people I meet, I’ve not really made an effort to think about things and after all, philosophy is thinking.

I’ve not got much more to say on the subject at the moment but I’ve found that the notes (MP3 and PDF) at philosophersnotes.com are great for setting the gears in my brain whirring.

Time to think

The first step in thinking is finding the time to do so - everyone yearns for some quiet retreat in which to ponder and recently I’ve found that my own head is the best one (thanks Marcus). The thing is, before I can crawl into my head I need to have less stuff in it. No one likes pondering in a junk shop.

In an effort to remove some of the mundane “gumpf” in my head I have, in true Danny style, written two lists:

• Important Ongoing Commitments
• Important Finishable Projects

The first list contains all of the commitments that I’ve made to myself and to others over the past few months. I’v also added some of the people I’m committed to supporting and removed some of the things that I’m not whole-heartedly committed to. The important this is that none of these items are finishable.

All of the finishable commitments I’ve made, like “Remove Vista from my girlfriends laptop so it actually works”, make up my second list. Every item in this list has an obvious and intuitive end condition, some test as to whether I’m done or not.

These lists reside on the whiteboard next to my desk and above them is the promise that I’ve made:

Everything that I do will either further a commitment in list one, lead directly to the completion of a project from list two, or else be fun!

I will not take on any more projects until all of those in list two are complete.

Perhaps I’ll let you know how this goes.

A note on the future of this website

I mentioned in my last post that I was thinking of redeveloping TheScribe and indeed it’s still on my list of things to do. I’ve got a few interesting ideas and It’s looking likely that the blog will eventually be running on a specially designed engine. Don’t hold your breath though - this isn’t on my projects list and isn’t likely to be for some time.

If you want to keep up with me I do occasionally post interesting things over at dannyat.tumblr.com.

One of the things I’ve been thinking abut is creating an online portfolio of my illustrations and design work, along with a website to create leads for my business. Initially, I thought of using this blog as both a business front-end, and as a productivity and design blog. After working with this idea for some time and talking to various people about it, I’ve decided against the idea.

This decision is based on three factors:

1. This blog focuses mainly on productivity and lifehacks, my portfolio site should focus on design and creativity.
2. I’d like this site to have a clean, minimalist design whereas I think my portfolio site should showcase some more impressive and off-the-wall stuff.
3. I have two separate audiences: prospective clients and interested readers. My readers don’t want to look at my design, and my clients don’t want to be overwhelmed by articles on productivity.

My next idea was to maintain a portfolio site with an attached blog on design and art, and focus this blog on productivity. A sensible idea? Perhaps not.

Time constraints

Although I’d like to write more, I’ve found in the past that my posting schedules are far to ambitious. I’ve got a number of commitments that draw on my time and I often find it hard to maintain this one blog, let alone two separate blogs.

This thinking led on to the idea that I could maintain two sites, but only one blog - One site hosting my portfolio and business details and this blog, covering articles on productivity and art & design. The simplest way for me to separate the two “streams” on the blog would be to offer three RSS feeds.

• A Productivity feed for my productive audience.
• An Art and Design feed for my artsy audience.
• A combined feed for the nutters who are interested in both.

After putting this to my friends, I’m convinced that this is the best way to go. If anyone thinks differently, please let me know.

The next steps

My work on a new theme for this blog is coming on nicely, as is my article on the process I’ve used to design it. Now that I’ve decided to keep my portfolio and blog separate, I’ve removed a large chunk of the work involved. Hopefully, you should see a relaunch of this site in the near future, with a new design and some flagship articles.

Assuming my other commitments don’t get in the way, and my motivation to write doesn’t decline you should also see an increase in post frequency. I intend to post about three times per week:

• Once on productivity.
• Once on art or design.
• Once with a short story or poem from my girlfriend (or perhaps something else silly).

As far as my portfolio site is concerned, I think I’ll wait until i’ve got this project sorted before I embark on that.

Scott maintains that while it’s entirely possible to learn through memorization, very rarely will a student have a full knowledge of the subject and truly understand it.

While reading through the book I realised that I did, at one time, learn holistically. While I was at school I had no problem learning with very little study. I was able to absorb information without trying, much to the annoyance of many of my peers. It seems that at some point between then and now I’ve lost that ability. What I want to know is why?

This set me off an a little brainstorm and I have, I think, found the answer - or at least part of it.

While I was at school I took in information on a number of subjects (thirteen if I recall correctly), but there was a finite amount of information to absorb. I only learned a fixed amount of stuff in one day. I was happy learning what we were taught. I did, of course, supplement this with reading from books, newspapers and my experiences but the majority of what I learned came from lessons at school. I linked all this information together in massive mind-webs and was thus able to understand and recall it with ease.

When I started my A-Levels in 2003 I reduced the number of subjects I was studying. This gave me less seemingly unrelated concepts to link together in my mind-webs. In the absence of a broad subject range, I looked to the internet for information and discovered “wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.com and the bogosphere. Suddenly I had too much information to actually learn and instead started storing it, both in my head and on my computer. Even now, when I find a good article I save the URL for future reference, on the basis that I haven’t got time to take it all in now.

Upon starting my degree last year I reduced the areas which I was studying even further, and filled the space with more information from blogs and the web. Unfortunately, in tune with my reduced scope in school-based learning, I reduced the subjects that I read on the web. I now read about *productivity* and *programming*. That’s it.

It’s my considered opinion that this narrowing of my study areas combined with the vast amount of unlearnable information presented to me every day has led not only to a reduction in my general knowledge, but to a tendency to learn by memorization.

When I realized this it was like receiving a kick in the face from “Bigfoot”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot - no wonder I find it hard to learn and no wonder I lose interest in subjects quickly.

In conclusion I’d like to thanks Scott for helping me to realize this and at the same time resolve to:
* Reduce the amount of information I try to learn.
* Stop hoarding information for “later reading”.
* Expand my learning into other areas.

I’m confident that by eradicating information overload and focusing on *learning what I want to*, I’ll be able to stop worrying so much. Perhaps I’ll find it impossible to reach that long-forgotten state of all-knowing confidence, but I can get a bit closer to it.

A few weeks ago I started syncing kGTD with iCal and using iCal to work from. I now use kGTD to organize my NAs and iCal to tick them off. This saves having OmniOutliner open the whole time and stops the temptation to re-shuffle my projects every five minutes.

After a bit of research I whipped up a script that formats NA’s from iCal in Textedit and then saves it as an HTML file for printing. Safari will then print the nicely formatted list to 3×5 index cards, providing your printer supports it.

Download: “Print kGTD to Index Cards script”:http://thescri.be/wp-content/uploads/2007/06/kgtd-print.scpt

Make sure that you change the user_name to your login name and change show_help_at_start to false if you don’t want to be reminded about Safari’s printing options when you run the script.

In hindsight It woud have made sense to simply format the file as HTML and write it directly to a text file, I may still rewrite the script.

If you like the script or have any problems with it, leave a comment or linkt o me.

“Zen To Done (ZTD): The Ultimate Simple Productivity System”:http://zenhabits.net/2007/04/zen-to-done-ztd-the-ultimate-simple-productivity-system/

Give it a look, it;s well worth the read if you’re having trouble with GTD.

Lately I’ve been looking into the more spiritual side of so-called “self-help”, reading about increasing energy, meditating and practicing “Boabom”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boabom. I’ve also developed an interest in psychology.

It seems to a lot of my friends that I spend a disproportionate amount of my time reading about and practicing the various life hacks I come across, especially when they see that my desk is still covered in clutter and I still fall behind with my work. I think that some of them would be quick to label me as one of “Steve Pavlina’s Self Help Junkies”:http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/04/self-help-junkies/. I’m not so sure.

Steve’s article talks about the all-too-common phenomenon where someone will spend months studying the Art of Productivity, and yet have nothing to show for it except some fancy office supplies and a whole bunch of lists. It _is_ easy to get so wrapped up in the process of being productive that you loose sight of the reason you’re applying all these life hacks - *to get more useful stuff done*.

Steve says that he’d:

bq. ” be wary of anyone who claims his/her self-help results are purely internal and have no outward manifestations. If those inner breakthroughs are genuine, they must eventually manifest changes in the physical world.”

Although I agree with this statement in that the benefits of self help, whether spiritual or organizational will _eventually_ manifest themselves in the real world, I’m not so sure that the benefits will always be those expected.

I spend a lot of my spare time reading about life hacks & productivity and implement (to one degree or another) a number of the ideas I read. However, most of the time I make notes on the ideas I’m reading but *never actually apply them* (I’ve a file full of printouts and notes on “great new productivity tips” and I hardly touch it). Only about 5 per cent of the information I read gets stored or remembered, and probably *less than 10 per cent* of that is ever put into practice for more than a few days. It’s true that sometimes after two hours reading productivity blogs and a half hour trip to buy some stationary (a self-confessed addiction of mine) I’ll sit down and spend an hour doing _”introspective exercises, making journal entries”_, or making yet another list.

In my eyes, this is okay - I’m aware that while I am playing around with ways to make me more productive it is just that: *_playing_*. I don’t consider the hours I spend reading through productivity blogs to be useful work, but instead a form of recreation. When I read a self-help book it’s for enjoyment, much like reading a novel. So if one of my new shiny organizational systems fails, it doesn’t matter - it was a fun little exercise for me. That’s the main benefit - *I had fun*. Of course occasionally I come across something which really does change the way I work: my own implementation of GTD encompasses ideas from hundreds of blogs and books and has increased my output and calmed my brain down.

I’m sure that (weird as it may seem) there are many people who spend their time studying “self-help” not for the “emotional high” but simply because it’s *fun*.

Steve suggests that _”This enormous time investment in self-help is nothing but mental masturbation”_.

Too true - but *what’s wrong with that?*

*Despite* all this I feel I should acknowledge that steve makes a good point in his article - if you’re spending your life “reading books and going to seminars” to no avail, and you don’t see it as a form of recreation then perhaps you should stop with the quick-fixes and create some measurable outcomes.

“NHS The Improvement Network - Five Whys”:http://www.tin.nhs.uk/tools – techniques/links-to-other-tt/hidden/five-whys

They recommend asking why five times in order to drill down to the core of a problem. I does leave me wondering what happens if you need to ask more than five whys to get to the root, but I suppose you have to draw a line somewhere.

I think this ties in well with “my last post”:http://thescri.be/2007/04/07/problems-solutions-worrying/ as far as the way in which you should break down problems is concerned.

Many people see a problem and then produce a solution to it, without giving a thought to the underlying cause of that problem. By asking why a few times the problem, and others like it, can be solved for good.

*The Too-Much-Stuff Reduction Method*

*Step 1: Problem dump*
The first step is to get all of those problems out of your head. Scribble them on a piece of paper or record them, or paint them on your wall, it doesn’t matter how - *just write them down*. I record them on my phone as I’m driving and then translate that into a text file.

*Step 2: Problem Identification*
Once you have your big senseless and unorganized brain dump you ned to *organize the nonsense* into problem areas. From these you can identify sub-problems and master-problems and sister-problems and connect everything together. I use a big sheet of paper and a pencil to make a giant mind map. You’ll find that while you may start with your dump from _step 1_, you’ll quickly discover other things you’re worrying about.

You should try to break down each problem into as many sub problems as you can, thus “No Money” becomes “No Job” and “Spending too much on shiny gadgets”. “No Job” can be broken down further still, perhaps to “No Time”. You’ll discover a whole bunch of links between your various problems (”No Time” because I’m playing with my shiny gadgets) and these links can help to clarify what’s worrying you the most and how other things on your mind influence those worries. I usually end up with a _big web of connected worries_.

*Step 3: Problem solutions*
Once each big problem has been broken down into smaller ones, and the connections between them are apparent, you can start to look for solutions. I add these to my mind map in a different colour, branching them off the various problems they solve.

*Step 4: List solutions*
List all the Scribbled solutions from your mind-map.

*Step 5: Categorize solutions*
The next step is to look at your solutions and categorize them. Play with them and try to identify any changes in your lifestyle which would solve a number of problems. Look for non-specific solutions (”Buy less Stuff”) and specific ones (”Stop buying Tobacco”) & write down the changes you intend to make somewhere.

*Step 6: Identify Specific Actions*
From your categorized solutions create a list of small, actionable things which you can actually _do_ right now. For instance, while an overall solution might be “Send out CV’s to get some Work”, you cold “Find your old employment records” right now.

While this system looks a little over-complicated for what it is (that’s writing down your troubles and then writing how you can solve them), It allows your already chaotic mind to remain so, even when defining the solutions. Try it next time everything gets too much.

I seem to be asked for business cards by three groups of people: those who want my contact details relating to my work in the Air Training Corps, those interested in my web design and those who want to get in touch with me regarding my music. (I’m forever being asked what my myspace address is by the latter.)

In the end I decided to just stick with my name, email address, website and phone number so that the card could be as multi-purpose as possible - I suppose it’s more typical of the old fashioned “calling cards”, albeit with a little more information.

Along with my name, the circles at the bottom are meant to suggest an acoustic guitar, at least that’s the intention! I’ve also made the email address (and specifically the [at] symbol) quite prominent to suggest a technology connection. The blank space on the left allows me to write any details which aren’t on the card - my address or ATC Squadron number, for instance.

So, without further ado, here’s the initial design:

Let us know what you think.

bq. “Power is in the Present”

In other words, while you can look to the past for advice on how to deal with a situation and you can look to the future to prepare for new situations, the ability to influence your life and _actually do something_ is governed by what you do *now*.

Use your past and your imagination to inform your choices, but *actually focus on what you must do _now_*.

This is a great way to motivate yourself to get on with stuff when you’re in a lethargic mood. Just think “Power is in the Present - Right Now”, and get on with it.