In Praise Of Efficiency

The Age

Thursday February 16, 2006

CHARLES WRIGHT

Charles Wright finally bites the bullet.

BLEEDING EDGE has managed to have an improbably long career without displaying any traces of efficiency, and would almost certainly have gone on our bumbling way had we not kept bumping into various manoeuvres on the web of an organisation we have come to know as the GTD Army.

This organisation has its own manual, called Getting Things Done - The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, by US management consultant David Allen. At $31.95 for a paperback copy, a lot of people seem to have read it and become enthusiastic recruits. The quartermaster-general of these sites is at tinyurl.com/dszu8.

Allen's theory is that traditional time management and personal organisation - the day timer and to-do lists, priority codes and, for that matter, computer tools such as Outlook or PDAs - have been defeated by the modern workload. He outlines tactics and weapons for conquering the foe, which is, essentially, an excess of stuff, turning the average brain into an anxiety-ridden glob of helplessness.

We read the book, checked out the author's website and user forum at tinyurl.com/dvq3p, and began the task of turning all our stuff into projects and next-action items.

Then we came upon the site of US lawyer Pam Gaines (tinyurl.com/8qpqz), who'd set about the same procedure with a good deal more conviction and ended up crossing paths with Perth software developers Ant Wiese and Daniel Fletcher. They had just written a program, Note Studio, which works on Windows, Mac OS X and Palm PDAs. It's a form of Wiki, which allows people to gather and link information.

That system proved particularly suitable for GTD activities because it requires you to set up projects and action items that have contexts. Using Note Studio, each time you set up a page with a project and an action you can assign it a context. Note Studio allows you to quickly make a list of all the items in each context: a list of phone calls you may need to make, for instance, or emails you might have to send.

Wiese and Fletcher were somewhat surprised when users such as Gaines started sending them emails to say they'd found it useful for Getting Things Done and asking questions about applying the principles to Note Studio. They read the book and quickly they and their company, dogmelon.com.au, adopted GTD too. Then another user developed some templates to make it easier to work with both. You'll find them at tinyurl.com/9ogf7

To get them into Note Studio start the program, which works on the concept of "books" and "collections". If you don't get a default collection, choose Collection/Create New Collection and accept the defaults. That should create a new, empty collection. Download the GTD template, extract it from the Zip file and from the library panel in Note Studio choose Book/Import Book, then choose the GTD.xml book extracted from the download. It includes a manual, available from the book's homepage.

Between the template, Gaines' site and the Dogmelon site, you should quickly find yourself becoming unimaginably efficient.

One benefit of Note Studio is its easy integration with the Palm. When you're out, you can refer to your lists or put additions straight into the real-time system and synch it later with your desktop. Note Studio comes in Windows and Mac OS X versions for $US40 (about $A55) or for Palms ($US50).

Some Mac users have found another solution that involves the Omni Outliner Pro program from omnigroup.com

A Hong Kong GTD recruit, Ethan Schoonover, has developed a free set of Apple scripts that make setting up projects, actions and contexts, synching them and generating tasks simple. The results are elegant and can be printed or synched through iCal to a PDA. You can find them at tinyurl.com/aew96

These tools have increased our ability to get things done without having to endure the humiliation of finding out how.

You can follow Charles' blog atblogs.theage.com.au/razor

© 2006 The Age

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