Wed 6 Sep 2006
1) The dining room table has been upgraded to “will ship/arrive week of September 10th”. Yay.
2) I’m really starting to use a Getting Things Done-like system. I will have a question or two for hard core users. Turns out, the book is REALLY BLAND compared to other books like the Covey personal productivity books. It reads very much like a tech manual. I need heartful vignettes, dammit! So I haven’t eaten through the entire book yet, and will soon be hitting some very poignant concerns (about basically using my Writing Pad in conjunction with a Calendar so that I can plan events, without having to buy a palm pilot). I’ll ask for help once I get further through the book, though.
3) I worked out 2 20-minute intense sessions back to back today. Then I drank about 3 glasses of lukewarm water (better than cold). I use to exercise ALL THE TIME (Tae Kwan Do and Kung Fu), but never knew that drinking a lot of water after exercising was a bad thing. Wow. Now I know. Uh, I won’t go into gory bathroom details.
4) Work is work. No reduction in enjoyment, no huge increases in joy. I’m still very happy, though it did get quite busy today (the first day of my four-day week). As I think I mentioned earlier, for the continued stable survival of our elite “We only work support issues for our Top Accounts” team, we should only be getting 5-7 case assignments (from calls or emails) per day (2 of those will be Easy, the rest will be a Monster). Today I got 13. Again. Only three of those were Easy.
5) My Story Games site is pretty successful. It’s my gaming Bat Cave. I was kinda disappointed in the amount of CSS Styles for the forum software (Vanilla), so I went to the Lussumo forums and started a “Vanilla Forum Software Styles Contest“. If you’re familiar with the forums and are good with CSS, give it a shot!
6) I’m currently making Ninjas for Tenra Bansho. This project has been kinda stressful, but lately it’s becoming more and more fun. I think it’s because I feel like it’s coming together more.
7) Gotta go to sleep. Last night I only got about 3 hours (dunno why, some kind of trippy insomnia, plus the shifting x10 work day sleep schedule), I have no idea how I made it through the day. Tonight I have to get at least a solid eight. Ack, too late for that now. make it seven!
8) I saw that on Amazon, after years of hunting, some dealers appeared selling Used copies of the Best Book on Tape in the Universe: ROBOT CITY Part 1 (by “Isaac Asimov”, but actually written by someone else). It’s a book on tape from like 1988 (89?) that’s read like a professional radio drama. The story itself is “ok”, but the voice actors and effects made it something incredibly awesome. Basically as soon as it arrives, with a help of a friend I’m turning it into an MP3. It would be a complete and total coincidence if it happened to then appear on the internet for my friends.
September 7th, 2006 at 4:55
Could you tell me a bit more about your GTD system? I’m thinking about buying the GTD book by David Allen, is that the one you’re talking about? If it is, do you learn anything useful from it other than what’s in the Wikipedia article?
September 7th, 2006 at 7:36
Allen’s other book, “Ready for anything” is a little more inspiration in that it’s 52 short essays on focus and whatnot. That said, it’s pretty much lacking in anecdotes as well, I tend to go to the web for those. It’s dry, but honestly, I equate reading GTD with getting your hands on the source code -i you can use it as is and it rocks, btu the real power is what you can build with it.
September 7th, 2006 at 7:39
Yeah, this is from the Getting Things Done book by David Allen.
Hmmm. The wikipedia article is pretty dry (drier than the book, wow!). Basically in reading GTD I started to notice where it complimented and contrasted with the Franklin-Covey system (which I currently employ).
Basically, it speaks to F-C’s inability to keep up with a complete email/electronic high impact workflow. It’s very hard to stay “rigid” with F-C in this kind of environment. GTD is more flexible.
Currently, I’m aiming at a sort of hybrid, because while GTD is really paying off in the short term, there’s not a decent methodology (read: “I haven’t read to that chapter yet”) for incorporating timed tasks. Ex: Where do I write down my meetings, my appointments, etc? F-C is awesome for this.
So, short of carrying around both my notebook and my Franklin Planner, or using my Franklin planner at night to record timed events, then load up my GTD notebook for the day, I’m going to have to dig around on 43folders and the like for incorporation advice.
The “folders” idea on Wikipedia is, compared to F-C, pretty retarded.
-Andy