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More GTD videos

While I’m in a video mood, here’s my top pick from YouTube of GTD-related videos:

The Carsons – like in Carson Workshops, Think Vitamin and several Web 2.0 projects – have a channel on YouTube with lots of good stuff.

I’m adding it to my ongoing MyGTD project in MasterList Professional to watch all of them, but the one I watched (below) was excellent.

 

David Allen video on Google Video

               
 

While I was posting the previous post, I came across at Kidneynotes.com a nice little Google sidebar thingie that had based on the keywords in the post found this very good David Allen video on Google. Enjoy!

A GTD flowchart

If you want to get the whole GTD thing in one look, have a look at the flowchart that Dr. Joshua Schwimmer, MD has posted at his site. While Joshua calls it a MindMap since he created it with MindManager, it really is a flowchart of how all the parts of GTD connect.

What works when trying to change your life?

Want to know how to load the dice in your favor when you attempt to change your life?  DayTimers had Opinion Research Corporation do a fairly large study in December. The study covered in part what techniques did the people who had kept their previously made New Year's Resolutions use. The results were surprising:

When asked what helped them to be successful in keeping their New Year's resolutions, most respondents used a number of internal motivators, external support, and external aids to help them succeed. These included:

Internal Motivators

• 86% noted determination to make it, even when it got hard
• 76% made a commitment for the long haul
• 76% accepted setbacks and got back on track
• 71% found that visualization was an aid to success
• 59% rewarded themselves for success

External Support

• 57% told other people
• 39% asked for help and didn't do it alone
• 27% were accountable to others, i.e. friend, coach, dietician, therapist, support group

External Aides

• 44% set up reminders
• 40% created a step-by-step plan
• 38% wrote it down

What these numbers tell me is:

• Internal motivational techniques pay off better than external motivational techniques,
• You need to be both stubbornly determined (or if you prefer determinedly stubborn) and prepared to forgive yourself for failure,
• Being accountable to others doesn't work if you are not accountable to yourself.

What's your Value Per Hour?

I'd like to propose a new metric for you to gauge how you are doing: Value Per Hour (VPH). VPH isn't some lame corporate economist term for how much value your employer can squeeze out of you; it's how much value are you getting from each hour of living.

Simply put, you are going to live some X number of hours; how much value you derive from those hours is in very large part going to determine how happy, successful and prosperous you'll be. Being aware of your VPH is a good first step to renegotiating the deal between you and the world.

What is "Value"? It's the sum of everything that you believe, desire, aspire to and want and is uniquely individual. It's how you see what you are doing and it's purpose - regardless of what other people think.

Here's how it works: as you're planning various projects, sub-projects and tasks, add in your gut VPH estimate. Forget about traditional time management categories like A's, B's, C's and 1's, 2's and 3's: traditional time management is about as useful today as proper telegraph etiquette.

Instead, you want to hone your ability to recognize what matters, in the fewest possible seconds, into a reliable, trusted instrument to tell you when you're wasting the lifeblood of your life - your time.

So what are your highest VPH activities? are you getting to them in the course of your day, week or month or do they recede like a mirage, with lower VPH things always getting in the way? Are you getting the VPH from your life you should, or are you running on empty?

A trusted system for small projects

We all have them - those small, nagging projects that linger a slow death in your Inbox or on your desk. The email you printed so you can order a new hinge for a cabinet drawer; the manual for your new cellphone; those evil software rebate forms. Small bits of paper unworthy of their own reference folder, but necessary to perform some small task or small project.

Instead of regurgitating them endless in your GTD system try this:

1. Create a set (I now use 15) Small Project Folders. Regular hanging folders are fine - but I like these heavy-duty plastic interlocking folders that replace traditional paper folder/files.
2. Process your small project paper into these folders, one folder per.
3. Note in whatever trusted GTD system you use the temporary contents of each folder. Naturally enough, I do this in MasterList Professional but the idea is the same in whatever you use for GTD: an easily found pointer to the "materials" needed for each task.
4. Keep in mind your small projects folders are not temporary reference folders; they are the temporary home for tiny bites of dead trees required to perform next actions on tasks.
5. As you complete these small projects in the natural course of your GTD process, reuse them as needed. It's a great feeling to have all of your Small Project folders cleared by the end of the week.

Dealing with spam undelivered emails in Outlook

The battle to put email on a leash continues, with today's installment focusing on dealing with spam undelivered and spam out of office emails. If you aren't familiar with those terms, consider yourself lucky.

If by necessity or mistake your email is on the net and spammers have scrapped it, they start using it as the fake sender's address of their digital garbage and you start getting both automated messages from legitimate people telling you they've blocked "your" spam and the occasional Out of Office Autoreply. Often, the spammers will invent a name and email at your domain and if you get by default any email to your domain, you'll get that crap too. Oh Joy.

On one hand, these emails are from other innocent spam victims and who knows? - they just might have a legitimate reason to email you one day. So blacklisting them out of hand is not a great option. Further, once in a while you may send an email and get one or the other back, and you'll want that information. What to do?

The solution is to automatically route this auto spam to hell using Outlook Rules. Here's how to banish this slime from your Inbox:

1. Right click an "Undelivered Mail Return" message and pick Create Rule... from the popup menu.
2. Check the checkbox "Subject contains: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" and then click the Advanced Options... button.
3. Click Next once.
4. Now set what should be done with the message. Since stick it in the eye of the original spammer is not an option, choose "Delete it" and click Next.
5. Important step! On the next screen, check "Except where my name is in the To box" so you will still see legit messages of this kind. Click Next.
6. The rule is ready to go; so check the box to run the rule now, click Finished, and have the satisfaction of seeing the spam undelivered and it's ilk vaporize.
7. Repeat the above for Out of Office; just be sure to check for just the phrase "Out of Office Autoreply" and not the rest of the specific subject line.

That's it! Back to Work.

The beginner's GTD Guide

If you've decided to make 2007 better than 2006 by learning the Getting Things Done methodology, good for you! And if you head over to Lisa Peake's 10 Beginner Behaviors, you'll be doing even better!

GTD can take some getting used to, but Lisa, who manages GTD Connect at David Allen's company, has distilled 10 really good starter points in her post. Definitely worth reading.

Leashing Email, part 3

This morning at when I checked email for the first time today at 9am, I was eagerly looking forward to seeing less. Less spam, because I using Cloudmark, Less vendor-spam because I fired a dozen or so yesterday, less news-spam because I fired the lot yesterday.

Poor fool me!

Instead, of 84 emails, 4 were actual communications from people I know. Eighty emails were:

• 26 please confirm you emailed us responses from all over the world to spam emails that are spoofing my email address as the sender. (See email is broken.)
• 29 spam Cloudmark filtered - and 4 I got to be the first guinea pig for. That's not bad and I can live with the idea that by "paying" with my judgment Cloudmark should block those 4 spam (the nasty image + contemporary text spam) I get 29 sent to spam automatically.
• 13 self inflicted productivity wounds. These are "email newsletters" (an oxymoron) and ads from people I've done business with online. Fired the lot of them.
• 8 news spam. Wait a minute! Didn't I fire all those yesterday? Should I call the FTC and get them to enforce the CAN-SPAMM federal statutes? Nope - it's just mainstream media trickery - While I fired the daily emails yesterday, I have to go back in and fire all of the "email alerts" (Congress is now in session with the Dems in charge - wow, hot news!).

Amazing how easy it was to subscribe to this email pap and how hard it is to unsubscribe! So, a half hour later after un-inflicting my email wounds and unsubscribing to email new alerts about things I don't care about, and adding a few more items to my News folder in my RSS Reader, I can only hope that tomorrow will be a better email day.

Putting Email on a leash, part 2

After being out sick yesterday, I took about fifteen minutes to fire The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS News and CNET this morning. That's right, I kicked the lot out of my Inbox, cruelly unsubscribing to each and every one of them. The bottom line is they've overstayed their welcome - it would be one thing they delivered actual news, but no, they are all about selling their media brand.

Since I still feel a twinge of civic responsibility to keep at least a toe in the river of current events, I've added several New York Times and CBS News feeds to my RSS Reader of choice, FeedDemon. We'll see if they behave themselves and not waste my time or if they get voted off that island as well.