moleskine

Back in my day we used to Get Things Done, by garn.

In the last year (or three, sigh) I’ve slowly devolved into a cubicle monkey, one destined ne’er to return to the vaunted halls of academe again [tangent: my god, they have Randy Mac students blogging now? Hypothetical post: “d00ds, tolly skippin class 2 play xbox live!1!one!!eleventy!! Im so high! All PKAs sux!” /tangent]. As such, I spend a lot of time at work, and a lot of time traveling to work and from work. Time does seem to disappear with frightening alacrity.

A work-related example of a time blackhole:
As of the time of this writing I have 688 pieces of email in my work inbox. I have 864 emails in my archived inbox and another 1300+ in my sent boxes. That’s pretty crazy given what I do for a living, which isn’t exactly running a multinational nonprofit with offices in Christchurch, Arkhangelsk, Lausanne, and Kansas City.

So here’s the question: how the heck do I get things done? How do I sort through the noise? [NB: one of the things I still don’t get done? Posting on this blog. Doth.]

Anyway: Behold, my children: Merlin Mann. He’s a guru of GTD, lifehacks, Moleskine hacks, and he loves Apple. He runs a great productivity website called 43 Folders. He also is very, very funny–you should check out his lists of five things at 5ives.com.

The idea of Getting Things Done (or GTD) is to create a framework around all the stuff you’ve got to do, and keeping yourself on track any way you can. If you’ve got about a half hour, listen to Merlin explain it himself [mp3 link via boingboing.net]. When I’ve got too much on my plate, in my Moleskine, or in my inbox, I like to use some of Merlin’s simple hacks to get back on track. For instance, I’ve changed my Outlook account to stop checking for new email once every minute. Instead, it checks for new mail every four minutes. I know. Craziness. What could have happened in those intervening 3 minutes? Aieee!

While I don’t get into using the hipster PDA, his other advice has proved invaluable to me. I just wish I could get around to his latest brainchild, the zero inbox [basically to have an empty inbox, all the time]. Now there’s a truly new idea. Other things that will happen before I get to that level of GTD-ness: cats beating up dogs, sun rising in west/setting in east, Nats getting an owner (and good hitting).