Chris Marsden @ chrismarsden.com

So… BIG NEWS!!!

I am now a professional blogger!

Seriously.

I have been kicking the idea around for quite a while. Debating about whether I should try and set up my own niche site or join a network or what. I want to write and I want to help people. Blogging seems such a natural easy way to do that.

So anyways… I was surfing on problogger’s job board, not expecting to find anything (at least anything that fits me) and sure enough, they were looking for a Mac blogger who could cover GTD apps as well.

Ding!

So as of last night, it is official. I am a b5media.com blogger on TheAfterMac.com. Stop by and check it out. I will see you at TheAfterMac.com soon.

BTW… I do not forsee this in lessening the posts here at ChrisMarsden.com. In fact, the constant research and writing has given me more to write about, so stay tuned here, as well.

If you aren’t using RSS to read your favorite websites, you should be. Everything else is just a waste of time. So save time, be more productive, and check on the updates of your favorite sites via RSS.

On a related note…

RSS Feed publishers…

PLEASE publish your whole feed. I hate having to click through to read something. I know you are only doing it to get the ad revenue traffic. I hope it is working for you. Quite often I do click through to leave comments, bookmark your article, etc… but if I find that your site is too much trouble to read, chances are I won’t be reading it for long.

“We need to say no more often to our busyness so that we can create room for spontaneous adventures with others. We need to look for those who need a hug. We need to turn off our televisions and spend time in coffee shops. Ultimately, we need to reorient our lives so that we begin to invest in the people we already know and start investing in people who need a friend.”

-Eric Bryant from Peppermint-Filled Piñatas

Along the lines of our recentering conversation (1, 2, & 3), I stumbled across this post on How to Simplify Your Life in just 72 easy steps.

Actually, I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but they break it down into two steps for those of us who want to speed up the process.

Step 1… Identify what’s most important.

Step 2… Eliminate everything else.

Simple enough.

Tags: lifehack, gtd, simple, focus

While this is certainly not as smooth as my printing to 3×5 card hack from a while back, I just found a cool mac program that will let you print any PDF to a page in a PocketMod.

Check out PagePacker if you are a paper geek.

I am at that point where I have a TON to do but am also behind on things like reading, organizing, and breathing. I could sit down at my desk, jot out a must do list, and bang away at it or I could take a step back and focus on some things that will make coming in next week less stressful. I could focus on the details of today and go home feeling like it was a "productive" day or I could focus on the big picture health of the long term.

I know that this is a problem for a lot of people. It is especially hard in ministry where people are a priority, but they often feel like an interruption in the productivity of the day. Sometimes I wish I could just do one. Either the people or the productivity. I could be either a people only person or I could hide in my office and get things done. Honestly, I would rather do the people part, but then who is going to get things done for me.

I really have to get my stuff back in line.

Well…I am testing a new Mac program called journaler. One of it’s features…putting your offline journal entries into your blog (with an option to edit them before you publish). The gist of the program is full integration of your whole iLife suite, with Word Processing like text editing. And it is date based in an Apple mail looking format.

No way to tell if it is going to be useful until I use it for a while, but it sure fills a need I was thinking about filling.

Check it out. www.journaler.com

UPDATE: …or…things I forgot to tell you…

One thing I left out earlier is the price. One of those things Bob does when he reviews software that drives me nuts, and yet I find myself doing it here. The price, is free. There is a link to make donations and he offers “commercial” licenses of the software, but I can’t think of any real commercial use for a software that seems very personal.

I have had a couple of conversations today about mental health. Mostly about my own mental health (or lack thereof), but one of the things I realized was how much healthier I was when more strictly subscribing to my GTD system. That whole concept of a complete brain dump and putting things into a trusted system so I didn’t have to think about it anymore.

I’ve been saying I was going to do this again for a while now. It was even tentatively scheduled as a possible task for over Christmas Break, but not only have I not had time, I loaned my GTD book to Ben as he sets up office next week at the new job.

Moral(s) of the story…

1. GTD is good for your mental health (or at least my mental health).
2. Own multiple copies of Getting Things Done (it’s like owning multiple Bibles…it just makes sense).
3. Never loan out your only copy of Getting Things Done unless your own GTD world (and mental health) are in perfect order.

Tags: gtd, mental health

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I am discovering more and more that Getting Things Done is largely about having trusted systems to dump things into. The problem, for me, is they can’t really be called a “trusted system” if there is no way to get the information back out in a readily available way. My whole GTD setup is mostly wasted because I don’t end up getting the information I put into it back out often enough for my brain to trust it. My brain still holds on to way too much.

Needless to say, a little reorganization and re-implementation is in order and I will hopefully be doing that soon, but rather than focusing on the negatives, let me focus on some positives.

Mail

Between Apple’s Mail application and gmail, I have had very little worry about mail. I know it is all still there and it searchable at any given time in multiple ways. Mail comes in, and I don’t have to manually sort every little piece into some designated folder in order to be able to find it again. It has become a trusted system in that I trust it to do what it does well and I don’t have to leave things in my inbox to make sure I don’t forget something.

In order to operate in the InBox Zero mentality, I do sort 2 minute actions, waiting on emails, longer actions, and hold for review emails into particular folders using Mail Act On shortcut keys. This is an area I need to improve on, but it is getting better. Mostly this is a workflow issue and not a do I trust it issue.

Finder

Apple’s built in search, smart folders, and Spotlight have given me a similar sort of trust with files I create. No longer do I try and obsessively file every file into a particular nested folder. Files are “tagged” within the filename and I am able to search for them later. I do use broad category folders to keep things from getting too cluttered and I am still trying to improve on getting older files archived and out of the way rather than them maintaining space on my overly full hard drive.

At this point, though, I no longer fear misplacing a file as long as I remembered to give it a full file name and not just a little filename. What do I mean, you may ask?

Well, before I would name a file something like “business card.psd”. I would put it into the folder for ministry and then into the sub-folder for NHCC. Then I would do a search, later for business card and get all the business cards on my system. Now I name the file “nhcc business card.psd”. So when I search, I can either include the tag, since I know which card I want, or at least be able to see visually that this is the card I am looking for. I also time and date stamp in the file name if files have various versions. (btw…I got this idea from Merlin

Browsing History

This is the area I am only now getting a little under control. Before I was using Tab Mix Plus to keep all of my browser windows/tabs from session to session. I would leave 3-10 tabs in 5-10 windows open at all times. What if I forgot to get back to that page/search/project? Essentially, I was leaving my desk cluttered with stuff that I didn’t need right now, because I might need it later.

So what has revolutionized my Browsing “trusted system”. Well, I am playing with 3 programs right now and will probably end up using a combination of all three.

Google Browser Sync replaces Tab Mix Plus’s ability to restore sessions after I close Firefox. But better than Tab Mix Plus, it is not an all or nothing restore. I can choose to restore just a couple of windows that I know I need and let the other ones go. It also does it across multiple computers. As a laptop user, this is not as big of a deal, to me, but I can see this coming in handy down the road.

On top of the tabs and Windows synchronization, it synchronizes my bookmarks, history, saved passwords, and cookies from one computer to another. Again, this is not a big deal for me right now, but a nice feature that I will probably use in the future.

The other Google related plugin I am playing with is gBrain. GBrain takes every site I visit (customizable to block certain domains) and bookmarks them in the [Google Bookmarks][gbooks] service. Now my browsing history is kept in a place I can actually get to when I need to go back to a page I have previously visited. I still use del.icio.us for things I want to share and things I want to tag easily for regular retrieval, but this is helpful.

There is one problem with both of those, and that is that they are text based and not visual in nature. Sure, it is great to be able to go back and see where you have been, but I really need to see it. That is where BrowseBack comes in. BrowseBack lets me keep a visual record of every page I visit. And the great thing is it pulls from all the browsers on my system at the same time. I mostly live in Firefox, but when I use Safari, I want to track those pages too.

I still haven’t perfected this, as a system, but I feel a lot better about knowing my browsing history is accessible if I need it. Fewer pages are left open for later viewing, since I know I can always go back and check it out.

Everything Else

I think the biggest hole in my “trusted systems” is regular review. I don’t manually go back and review my stuff often enough and I haven’t figured out a way to force my stuff to the surface at exactly the instant I need to see it. I am confident that this will all get better as time goes on, but it is a little overwhelming at the moment.

For now, everything gets dumped into a box this week and my desk and in box will be clear and empty, if only artificially so. My wife is organizing my book shelves some and I think she is going to tackle my filing cabinet at some point as well. Ultimately, my filing cabinet needs to be digitized as stuff goes in there, but never comes back out. I am just not a paper person. Oh well, another project for another day.

AN IMPORTANT NOTE

In order for any of these things to work, you have to have them turned on. As I was looking for the links for this post I realized I had toggled gBrain off and had shut down BrowseBack. Doesnt’ work as a “trusted system” if it is not on.

I really like the feel of pen and paper. Even better, a good pencil and paper. I read geeky tech and organizational blogs where people spout about the paper revolution. They talk about the hPDA (I even talk about my hPDA). The review great pencils and great pens. The write about their Moleskin notebook. Shoot…I even like a cheap pen and a legal pad over my high tech gadgets, most of the time.

Here is the problem…at least for me. What do I do with all this paper?!?

I am so not a linear thinker. I like tags and relational thought. I love searching for a document by keyword or by date or who sent it. I tend to file things away into my filing cabinet and never see them again. Ever. I have shelves of books and yet I google just about anything I am looking for. I can outline a project and write in a linear fashion, I just don’t reference in a linear fashion. So what do I do with all that paper once I’ve started using it.

In college, I would get all my research pieces together, sit on them for a few weeks, then bang out a 20-30 page paper in a day or two. Single draft, straight into the computer. I’m good at that kind of thing. But man do I love the feel of paper and pen.

Design and programming classes taught me the value of roughs and I still try and do that for design projects. I collect samples of things to trigger ideas in the future. Sometimes I even file those things away. But I almost never reference them again.

I’m still struggling with the workflow question. How to integrate the physical with the digital, and do it in a way that doesn’t become a bigger hassle than it is worth. The point of all this lifehacking is to simplify and get more satisfaction out of what I am doing. Additional complications are not worth it.

Just so you know, I have a couple of great pens. I have a lead holder that I just love. I carry around my hPDA most of the time and now I have a smart phone too. I am trying to remember to use Kinkless and I am trying to get blogging into my regular workflow. It’s just…so far, those things still seem pretty disconnected from each other. Plus I feel behind since we moved to the new offices. I think that has a lot to do with it. I really need to start my GTD from scratch and start adding things back in a little at a time. Maybe next week.