getting things done
7 habits is back on the backburner (i swear i’ll finish it), as my attention shifted to getting things done, by david allen. it’s much more tangible, outlining a system for, well, getting things done. all things. things at work and in your personal life. it’s a system for capturing everything that you want/need to do in life, and ensuring that it’s acted on. so at any given moment, you can feel confident that you’re working on the right thing, and that everything else is in the system and will be acted on at the appropriate time & place. here’s this guy’s summary of the book, which he was nice enough to post online.
so while the book defines how the system works, there are many different ways it can be implemented. 43folders is a great blog about tricks & tips to implementing. you can use your PDA, or tons of different software apps, day planners, or just pen & paper. one of the most popular methods is the hipster pda, which uses index cards to implement the system.
i’m not an analog guy, so my tools are my Treo/Palm (which syncs to Outlook on my laptop) and a new tool i just discovered, TiddlyWiki’s. through some amazing coding, they are self-contained web pages that organically grow & change based on the content you put into it. i’m using TiddlyWiki’s to manage all my projects at work now.
a ‘wiki’ is “A community developed documentation project.” it’s analagous to open-source software, except for content. the most famous is wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that is constantly evolving based on user contributions.