Node Glue

Recently, I’ve been reminded of something David Allen says in Getting Things Done. He is addressing the following question: “so now that I’ve got all my stuff in a trusted system, how do I decide what to do at any given moment?” Allen’s answer: “trust your intuition.”

Sounds so simple, right? But I think I spend too much of my time not trusting my intuition. As a result, I sometimes find myself trying to compensate for that lack of trust by refining the system to make it more trustworthy. The system sets up some rules for me, which helps. These guardrails often keep me out of the ditches. But the rules can also bind me and leave me feeling guilty if I don’t follow them. That guilt itself hinders productivity.

I’ve marveled before at those non-GTD people who just do what seems best at any given moment. Frankly, I’m suspicious that such a method is too susceptible to the tyranny of the urgent, and I think it truly is. But on the other hand, they enjoy a certain kind of freedom in “going with the gut.” So, again, there is the possibility of freedom (going with the gut), and the possibility of bondage (enslaved to the tyranny of the urgent).

So here’s my musing for the day. Perhaps an appropriate tension between these two is: use the trusted system to educate the intuition, making the intuition more trustworthy. Then work from intuition.

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OK, now I’m really excited about MindReader! I’ve been collaborating with ActivityOwner on some minor tweaks that make my life easier, which motivated me to do a few more things with my Outlook Macros. Here’s what we have so far. (link to downloadable Outlook macro code at the end)
ActivityOwner has added:

• Support for “deafaultownerme”: I needed this because I work in a shared map environment. When I capture a task without specifying who owns it, I need my name to be on it by default. I have disabled the option in ResultsManager to take ownership of unowned tasks. So without this tweak, unowned tasks that I meant to be owned by me by default would slip through the cracks. Big win for me personally here.
• Support for “atresource” instead of “resourceat”: by default, when you MindRead something like “talk to Mike about foo”, the partner resource for Mike ends up looking like Mike@ (i.e. resourceat)–@ sign follows the resource name. But my convention is to put the @ sign before the resource name. So now I have the option to tell MindReader to make it @Mike, instead of Mike@.
• Support for a “delegated” resource verb: So now I can say “waiting for Bob to write the draft” and the resulting resources will reflect the delegation, with me as the ActivityManager, like this “Mike;Bob”. This is great!

I have cooked up:

• An Outlook macro like my old one to “convert” an email into a ResultsManager activity. But now, instead of enqueuing the activity with plain ol’ GyroActivator, it is enqueued with MindReader, via GyroQ. And it still carries the link to the email item with it using MindReader’s [link] keyword. After adding this macro to my Edit menu in outlook and assigning a keyboard accelerator, I can now key “Alt-e-v” and almost instantly, the email is marked read, moved to my saved folder, link to it copied to the clipboard, and GyroQ pops up with the ‘fq’ tag selected and the dialogue prepopulated with the [link] keyword, and the cursor focused for additional text input. I can then enter the subject of the activity, hit enter, and done. sweet. And it runs faster than my previous “tfe” ActiveWord that invoked a similar Outlook macro, because I’m skipping ActiveWords altogether here.
• A revised Outlook macro to slurp my Outlook tasks into RM Activities via MindReader. This was my ultimate Holy Grail since I first glimpsed a vision of the power of MindReader. I want to be able to capture a task on the go on my pda, and if I know who owns it, what date, or what context, to be able to enter it in plain text, right on the subject line of the task, and have it all marked up right when it lands in the RM In-Tray. Now, it does. My new Outlook macro builds a temporary GyroActivator file with a collection of tasks selected in Outlook, and feeds them through MindReader. It even slurps up any comments in the Outlook task notes and passes it along to the final RM activity using the windows clipboard and MindReader’s [note] keyword.

So, I have a feeling that I’ll be hitting zero more frequently now that MindReader is helping me to eliminate some of the work of post-processing and refining partially defined actions that I capture with GyroQ, GyroActivator in email processing, and Outlook tasks when I’m mobile.

Here is a link to the Outlook macro code: Outlook Macros for use with GyroQ and MindReader

Whew!  Hit zero again.  This great feeling will probably last about ten more seconds…tick…tick…

This time, I did make better use of MindReader, but it still isn’t humming for me.  I’m having trouble with a couple of the features.  But getting closer, and I’m still convinced that there will be a worthwhile pay off in the end.

Was out of town a while back.  Going out of town on a trip is murder on the inbox.  Recovery time: 1 week.