Node Glue

I’ve been promising for a while to post the glue that ties together Outlook, ActiveWords, GyroActivator, GyroQ, ResultsManager, and MindManager. (Whew! That sounds like a lot of gadgets when they’re all written out in a list like that!) What follows is my attempt to deliver on that promise.

This is just one of the handful of tools/workflows that I use. I call it “tfe”, which stands for “Task From Email”. This was my original Holy Grail usage scenario, meaning, I figured that if I could use these tools to accomplish this, I figured it would dramatically enhance my productivity. Back when I used the Outlook GTD Add-in, I got really attached to working like this. When I’m in the mode of quickly process my inbox, item by item, two minutes or less per item, I want to be able to quickly make an email actionable in as a few steps as possible. The Add-in was very, very good at enabling such a workflow–turning each email into a task very easily.

My “tfe” mashup doesn’t make for quite as smooth an experience as the GTD Add-in in this particular use case, but it’s Good Enough.

Without further ado…

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Concept #2: Separating the Someday/Maybe activities from “Maybe Never” ones

In the recent past, the Someday/Maybe designation for activities had begun to lose all meaning to me. Part of my journey back to sanity is to reclaim it!

I had been using Someday/Maybe like a black hole, relegating anything marked Someday/Maybe to oblivion. And since so many things lived there, I became rather unmotivated to review it often enough to pull things back onto my dashboard when they should.

Now you might be asking, “Well what difference does that make? Why bother to bring it back once you’ve pushed it out to Someday/Maybe? It must not be that important.”

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A Brief Detour: Priority is Subjective–Commitment is Objective

Several months ago, when I was trying to whittle down my dashboards, I began using the “Priority 1″ feature of ResultsManager. During my weekly review, I’d mark those actions and projects that needed my special attention for the week as Priority 1. Then I could use the “Priority Actions Dashboard” to generate a dashboard showing only those activities marked Priority 1.

This gave me the ability bubble something to the surface for special focus on a given week. The problem was, as usual with assigning priorities, it became the way to cheat my own system to force something to be in front of me. Priority quickly became just another disguise for Urgency. And since everything is urgent, too many things became priorities, which in turn renders prioritizing useless. If everything is a priority, then nothing is.

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So I just looked through the demos of ThinkingRock and I’m impressed. This looks like a really well thought out application, and appears to be very streamlined to help users walk through the GTD process in a disciplined way.

Here’s a screenshot (click to enlarge) of one of the uses of the app called “Process Thoughts”, which is a very similar concept to processing the In-Tray in ResultsManager.

Lindes from the Seattle GTD Meetup told me about ThinkingRock today, a GTD application. Looks like it works on the Mac, for all you Mac users out there! And here’s a visual of the process, a chart that is apparently built into the application to remind you what you’re doing when you’re doing it I thought I’d post it for those of you reading who are still wondering what I’m talking about with all this GTD stuff…  (click to enlarge)

Just stumbled across this great blog where someone who actually knows how to draw sketches images to depict GTD thoughts. Very cool. I wish I could draw. Here’s one of my favorite sketches.

Concept #1: Separating Committed activities from merely Active ones

For my purposes, I’ve defined committed to mean those activities that have been verbally agreed upon with other humans. (That’s probably how it’s already defined in the ResultsManger help docs. But I’m just now getting it.)
Active tasks, then, include the rest of the activities that I’ve planned for myself, self-committed activities, if you will.

As David Allen points out in Getting Things Done, it is important for me to respect the commitments I’ve made to myself, because if I break them, I’m likely feel the same guilt as if I’d broken a commitment with someone else. On the flip side, however, when I’m deciding when to do my work, and what work I can renegotiate, it’s easier to renegotiate commitments I’ve made to myself than those made with others.

Here’s a picture that makes sense to me:

I’m finding that with so many spinning plates, and a propensity to generate too much work for myself, I need to be able to remind myself about what I’ve actually committed to do, versus what I’ve only told myself I plan to do. That’s why I’ve chosen to start drawing a stronger distinction between Committed and Active activities.

By the way, I didn’t come up with the idea of a committed activity, I’m just capitalizing on it. The committed attribute is a standard attribute of a ResultsManager activity, as shown on the following screenshot of the Edit Activity dialog.

Next time, I’ll take a philosophical detour into the difference between using Priority and Committed for organizing my work.

If you been reading this blog over the past couple of months, you know that I’ve been groaning under the weight of too many activities. Not that I’m doing too many activities, of course, just that the proliferation of undone work is getting to me. This is the first in a series of articles about some changes that I’m making to help me cope.

A lot of this is relevant to anyone paying attention to how his/her work is defined and organized. So even if you aren’t familiar with GTD or ResultsManager, you might find some good in reading it.

Some of it is based GTD concepts and terminology. If you aren’t already familiar with GTD, I would invite you to check it out, starting with David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done,” or looking up GTD in wikipedia (or click here).

And since I use ResultsManager as my preferred tool for organizing my work, all of what I’m talking about is ultimately implemented in ResultsManager. But there are many ways to implement a GTD system, including using simple paper index cards.

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