If you blog in or around the Los Angeles area, I’ve just launched the Southern California Bloggers Meetup Group. I made the announcement on the Meetup site a few minutes ago, so I have no idea how many people will show up, but I don’t feel like slating the event for later just to feel things out. Come by and meet some of your fellow bloggers in the real world.
The first meeting will take place on Thursday, October 23rd at Swork Coffee in Eagle Rock at 7:00 PM.
Here’s the description of the first meetup, taken from the site:
This first Meetup will be a general introduction to each other and our respective blogs, and an opportunity to voice your preferences for which aspects of blogging should be emphasized for the next Meetup. Candidate topics include:
- Technical issues: hosting services, plugins, audio/video, Wordpress configuration and RSS syndication
- Content issues: niche selection, topic selection, brainstorming, posting frequency and copywriting
- Promotion: traffic, analytics, social networks, SEO and comment marketing
- Monetization: direct advertising, product launches, affiliate programs and ad networks
Feel free to suggest other topics or concerns. This is your Meetup as much as mine.
Jonathan Mead of the personal development blog Illuminated Mind will also be in attendance as the assistant organizer. If you’re interested and local, please follow the link above to RSVP or contact me.
GTD addresses the concept of “work” in the broadest sense. Anything that needs to get done is considered work, whether it’s watering houseplants or editing PowerPoint presentations. If something needs to be done, but hasn’t been done yet, then it needs to be tracked externally to prevent the overhead of having the periodically or constantly think about it.
Assuming that every task needs to be tracked, is it necessary to track everything everywhere? Do we need to keep our domestic activities parked in the same system as our work activities? And what about the reverse? Some people work in high-security situations that make it impossible to bring materials out of the office. And many of those who don’t simply want to leave work behind.
One system to rule them all
A canonical GTD implementation would be one system for everything — home and office, personal and professional. But not all GTD users find this satisfying. I felt the same way once, and experimented with maintaining a dual system.
It didn’t work for me. Whenever I would look at my action lists at work, I would always be aware that they were incomplete. I shouldn’t have mattered, since I couldn’t do anything on my @Home list when I was at work, but not being able to see it during my daily review in the morning became progressively irritating.
I could capture something on my notetaker wallet or throw any personal paperwork in my To Home folder, but I’ve always found it more satisfying to process paperwork right on the spot. As I processed my work in-basket and came across personal items, I would transfer these to the To Home folder, then transfer them to my home in-basket — so I’d handle the same piece of paper three times. Some of this “home” paperwork related to actions I could only take in the daytime, so it was ultimately more efficient to file that paperwork in my work file cabinets.
More importantly, I noticed that I starting thinking about personal issues at work more than usual. It didn’t take long to figure out why. The whole point of GTD is to get things out of my head and into an external system. The more I realized that the system wasn’t accessible, my mind became the system, taking up the slack for those absent written reminders. So I went back to putting everything in the system — my @Home, @Errands and @Anywhere list — and the problem vanished.
Going back to a single, integrated system also made my weekly reviews much easier. I could do one review from one location instead of splitting my efforts, as I had been doing during that trial period. Even though I was processing the same number of tasks in the dual-system approach, it felt like twice the work due to setup time.
A personal preference
That was my experience, but others find it uncomfortable to have their personal items potentially visible to coworkers or supervisors. Still others simply find it more aesthetic to have completely separate systems for personal and professional projects.
If it’s simply an issue of personal security and/or privacy, I’d recommend keeping your entire personal/professional system ubiquitously available, but not necessarily in the same place. For instance, you might keep your work-related list and calendar entries in Outlook, but your personal ones on paper — or on your PDA without synchronizing those items to your work desktop.
If it’s a company security issue, where the office doesn’t allow you to bring things into work or take them out, then the decision is already made for you. You have to maintain dual systems. If a personal project or task occurs to you during work hours, write it down when you’re at your desk; then as soon as you have a break, review what you’ve written down write before leaving the office. Immediately after leaving the office, do a mind sweep and put that list in your car.
How do you integrate or separate your personal and professional systems?
(Photo credit: Andrew*)
Technorati Tags: GTD, Productivity
Video can make learning more efficient than written instruction, but sometimes even video is a but much. Many of the lectures and interviews I come across are recorded on video for no apparent reason — visual aides are minimal or nonexistent. It would be more convenient to have them in a portable audio format to listen to in the living room, kitchen or car.
So go find a streaming video of a talk you’d like to download convert to an MP3, and let’s make the conversion.
Download Live HTTP Headers
Live HTTP Headers is described on the Firefox Add-ons page blandly: “View HTTP headers of a page while browsing.” It’s a little more capable than that. If you launch your video, then open Live HTTP Headers from the Tools menu, you’ll see the stream of recently opened urls under the Headers tab. If the window is blank, it may take up to half a minute or more for the information to appear.
You’ll notice underneath the window that the “Capture” option is checked on by default, which is the setting you want. Scroll through the headers in the window and locate the long url with the appropriate file format, typically .flv or .avi, somewhere inside of it. This can take a bit of scrutiny, since there might be more than one url with the same file format. If that’s the case, look for the url with the relevant keywords (”jacques” and “derrida” embedded in the long url for an interview with Jacques Derrida).
Highlight this url then click the “Replay . . .” button, bringing up the dialog box with the “Save File” option. Save the file to the appropriate directory and let the file download. That’s all there is to it. This technique also works for downloading streaming audios.
In one of my early posts I recommended a similar procedure using the application FreeMusicZilla. Despite the open source connotations of that app’s name, I quickly realized that it’s proprietary freeware that limits the number of downloads per session — a limitation designed to compel the user to upgrade to a non-free “Pro” version. The Live HTTP Headers approach is more efficient and less restrictive.
Convert to audio with MediaCoder
Next, you’ll need to transcode your video into an audio-only format. Download MediaCoder Audio Edition. When launching MediaCoder for the first time, you’ll notice that it opens a page on the MediaCoder website prior to displaying the applications. MediaCoder does this by default each time it launches to check for updates, so if you’d rather not go through that, check the “Do not show this page on next startup” option on the bottom of the page prior to clicking the “Start MediaCoder” button.
Once the app is open, click the “Add . . .” button to add the video file, click the file in the window to highlight and select it, then from the menu select Transcode | Transcode Audio Only, then sit back and let MediaCoder work its magic. An hour-long video might take 10 minutes to convert. Depending on the original file’s compression rate, the reduction in file size after converting it to audio will probably be 7-10x.
You can actually skip using HTTP Live Headers by adding the stream’s url and transcoding it directly in MediaCoder instead of transcoding the separately downloaded file, but I find that the two-stage approach takes about half the time. If you don’t mind the extra wait, the MediaCoder-only approach is one less thing to monitor.
(Photo credit: hansdorsch)
Technorati Tags: Technology, Audio, Video
What GTD calls a “mind sweep” gives you permission to capture whatever’s on your mind without having to simultaneously make a decision about it. That’s a lot different than writing a to do list, where some things are clearly defined actions, some are goals and others are basically one-word notes.
Unlike a to do list, the only purpose of a mind sweep is to empty mental RAM. You don’t have to spell out a goal or an action step. A mind sweep might look like this:
- Voter registration
- Groceries
- Email Doug
- Process T&E receipts
- Asset reallocation
We keep going with this list until there’s nothing else consuming our attention. Mind sweeps are typically done after in-basket processing or during a weekly review, but they can be done any time. I’ll do a mind sweep right before working on anything that requires concentration. Some people do one before going to sleep.
Notice that only one of the items in the above list, “Process T&E receipts,” is a sufficiently granular next action. “Email Doug” almost qualifies, but leaves the objective of the email unstated.
Depending on who wrote it, “Voter registration” might get processed into the project, “Register to vote,” with the next action, “Look up voter registration forms.” For someone else, the objective might be confirming her registration if she hasn’t already received her sample ballot. So she would would put down “Look up voter registration confirmation process.” “Asset reallocation” might represent a research project to find out if the cost of shift one’s investments would be greater than the rate of their current decline.
Transforming stuff
In GTD there are two broad placeholders for anything that we record:
Since most people equate task management systems with “getting organized,” the organization component gets the lion’s share of attention. That’s not surprising, since it’s also the part with the most operational detail: lists, calendars, filing systems and software. You process what you collect into your organization.
Collection can involve several buckets: a notepad, an in-basket, an email inbox, voice mail and a physical mailbox. But for the moment I only want to address the notepad (which for some people might mean a text editor). The inability to capture thoughts rapidly can be a primary bottleneck to the entire GTD process. Excessively deliberating on how or where to write some things down breeds an unconscious resistance to writing anything down.
When I started GTD, I captured everything on my Treo 600. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was actually trying to capture and process at the same time. This became dramatically clear when I purchased a notetaker wallet — a regular-size wallet containing a small retractable pen and notepad. The first thing I noticed was how much more I collected — and how much I wasn’t collecting before –two reasons.
- Physically, it was faster and more fluid to write notes on paper than enter them directly into the Treo’s QWERTY keyboard. Jotting down notes with pen and paper was also a less self-conscious process around others than whipping out a gadget.
- Since the Treo’s PDA function is inherently a list manager, I felt compelled to locate the appropriate list for capturing each thought, so that before I could type something in, I would have to think about whether it was a project, next action or appointment. Sometimes the category was self-evident, but for captures that involved even slightly more thinking downstream, I tended to leave them in my head — something I didn’t notice before switching to the notetaker wallet.
Collecting allows you to write stuff down without the overhead of thinking about what to do with it. You see a book discussed on Oprah. You haven’t decided whether or not you want to read it. You just know that the book is still on your mind since Oprah mentioned it. It doesn’t seem important enough to commit to reading, but it was still interesting enough to keep thinking about.
Instead of spending further cycles of attention on it, just write down the title. Once you have a physical representation of the thought in front of you, it suddenly becomes easier to think about, for the same reason that doing arithmetic on paper is easier than dead reckoning — mental effort is no longer divided between thinking and working memory. Naturally, if you did know you were going to read the book, it’s easier to skip the collection process and just make a next action out of purchasing the book. Sometimes, just finally seeing the item in front of you is enough to know that it’s not worth acting on or thinking about anymore.
As long as what you’ve written down on your mind sweep isn’t crossed out, you know that there’s still processing that needs to be done on it. Looking at someone’s to do list on Flickr, I see a task that only says “Tape deck,” which doesn’t indicate what to do about it. If “tape deck” were an open item on a mind sweep list, it would be clear that it needed more processing to make it actionable. Once we put “Donate tape deck to Goodwill” on our @Errands list, there’s nothing more to think about; we just have to do the action. But now that it’s processed, we can cross “tape deck” off the mind sweep list.
Whenever you find yourself unusually preoccupied, taking a minute or two to do a mind sweep can be a much more effective way to reflect on what has your attention then purely mental introspection.
