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Well,I finally went and did it. I and Tina and our two cats are now officially "on vacation" for two weeks. Loading Mini Cooper with cats and litter box, the SUV stuffed to the gills with every cubic square inch...
In my neverending search for software that makes my life easier -- or at least less frenetic -- I came across an Outlook add-in last week I'm really liking. It's called SpeedFiler from Claritude Software.
What SpeedFiler does is makes it easy and necessary to file your outgoing and incoming e-mail. And that may sound like it adds to your workload, but the reverse is true; I'm finding it much easier to get my inbox empty and that is a good GTD thing.
What SpeedFiler has done is changed how I deal with e-mail. Before, I would get an e-mail, reply, copy myself on the reply and then file each of those in whatever folder I thought it should be. Now, I reply and before my reply gets sent SpeedFiler pops up and lets me pick where to file my reply in and then the message goes on its way. Because I can trust SpeedFiler to do this, I stop CCing myself on every message. And because I can actually find folders, I worry a lot less about where things should be filed.
SpeedFiler - the product of a micro-ISV - has another important benefit -- it gives you the chance after you hit the send button to reverse course. Yesterday, I was replying to an important e-mail, and in my nervousness I hit send before I typed anything. SpeedFiler made and that embarrassing boo-boo go away.
I seldom gush over software but this one's a keeper.
Tuesdays after a three-day weekend are always hard for me to reengage with everything I need to do: What am I doing, why am I here? sometimes it takes me an entire day to get my head back and do what I'm doing. that's wasted time.
So today I decided to try something I heard on my GTD Connect iPod feed: when in doubt clean a drawer. There's a desk drawer right in from my face that's become an unmanaged and unmanageable 14" x 9.25" hole of stuff that got shoved in there at one point or another.
10 minutes later I feel better, the drawer feels better, and this little boost in productivity is enough to get me going for the rest of my four day week.
Don Dodge -- a Microsoft blogger I follow unerringly -- has a post up today about the death of newspapers. He's right, newspapers are dying. He's wrong if he thinks that this means the newsrooms behind those newspapers have to...
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