Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

New Year’s Resolution: No more mystery chargers

OK, so sometimes I’m slow.  I’ve had an excellent Brother label make(the linked one at home, and an older one at work) for a looong time now.  I started using one in 2002 when I first drank the Getting Things Done elixir, I believe.  And I’ve had a ridiculous number of chargers and power adapters for even longer.

But it just dawned on me that I can actually use my label maker to mark my power adapters so I don’t:

  • throw one away because I don’t know what it’s for (yes, I’ve done that);
  • unplug the wrong one while crawling around under the desk (yes, I’ve done that);
  • accidentally bring the wrong charger with me on a trip (and I’ve done that once, as well).

So from this point forward, one of my resolutions is to label my power adapters when I first acquire them. 

blackberry_charger

Learning the hard way is still learning…

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Taskwriter is a cool tool for GTD

I’ve just started trying out Taskwriter, which is an online tool designed to help you with Getting Things Done (GTD).  As you might expect from a GTD-oriented tool, Taskwriter understands the notion of Next Actions, Contexts, Projects, etc.

taskwriter

I’ve included only a couple of tasks on this screen grab, but Taskwriter’s UI makes it easy to filter, print, and manage lots of items through the selection boxes on the left side of the screen.  This makes it easier to take the distractions of irrelevant contexts out of your view, for example.

Another thing that is pretty cool is the Calendar view they provide – anything that has a due date on it will show up on the calendar.  This helped me recognize, for example, that I had too many things due this Friday so I renegotiated a few to push them out.

Wish list

As you may know from some of my other posts, I often have a hard time with online-only tools because I spend a lot of time without connectivity.  I can work around this by printing lists, etc. with Taskwriter, but wish it had some integration with Outlook, Google, etc.  One workaround might be if they had an email parser that I could send tasks to and have them show up on my Taskwriter dashboard.

With that in mind, I will be making some requests / suggestions for future enhancements to see what happens.  Based on what I’ve seen at the Taskwriter blog, I stand a pretty good chance of seeing my suggestions show up someday.

Give it a try

If you want to give Taskwriter a whirl, you can set up a free account from their homepage, or use it as a guest (obviously, this won’t save what you enter, but you can try all aspects of the product without providing any contact info).

Keep an eye on these folks – I like what they’ve done so far.

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How much are you willing to lose?

One of my colleagues got some kind of malware infection on his site the other day – while distracted by a conference call he was participating in, he accidentally clicked on a bogus “window” that showed up on his screen (you may know the kind – it looks like a legitimate dialog, but is actually a web popup).

Due to the infection, he had to reformat and restore his system.  He made a good backup of his Documents folders (or “My Documents” since this was Windows XP), reimaged to the company’s default configuration, and restored his data.

Bleak Outlook

When he reinitialized Outlook, it re-sychronized with the mail server and put all his messages back.  Unfortunately, when he went to open up his archive folders within Outlook, they were nowhere to be found.  The realization hit him: he’d just lost two years of archived email!

How did this happen?  Well for some reason unbeknownst to me, Outlook doesn’t put your email archive in your Documents folder structure.  Instead, Outlook puts it in a directory you never see: …\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Outlook.  If you only backup your Documents folders you never get this folder.

What can you do about it?

There are a number of things you can do to mitigate the risk of this happening to you:

  1. SaveFolderToMyDocumentsChange your settings to get Outlook to put your Archives in your Documents folders.
    • From your Outlook Options dialog, you can reconfigure your default AutoArchive settings to tell it to store your Archives in a folder within your Documents folder structure.  I have a folder within my Documents folder called “Outlook Offline” that has all my archives in it. 
      • Click the thumbnail at right to see what my Outlook configuration looks like (keep in mind that this is for Outlook 2007, running on Vista – if you’re running Windows XP, or another version of Outlook, there should be similar setting.  On XP the folder you’ll look for will be …\My Documents\).
  2. Perform Image (full-disk) backups
    • AcronisBox I also make image backups.  I use an awesome product called Acronis True Image Home 2009 that makes it a snap to do a full-disk image copy of my hard drive. It makes it easy for me to create snapshots in time of all of the setting on my system.  That way, if my drive gets trashed, infected, stolen, etc. I can restore everything on my system as it was when I backed it up.
  3. Perform automated, file-based backups
    • Having lost data myself, I also have another layer in my backup strategy:  automated, file-based backups using Mozy.  I’ve raved about Mozy before, and will continue to do so.  I use this for all of my computers (and my wife’s, and my kids, and my dad’s…etc.)
    • MozyInsuranceYou see, one of the weaknesses of many backup strategies is that they often rely on the user to a) remember, and b) perform backups.  Mozy is an unobtrusive agent that backs up your data in the background and sends it in a secure, encrypted form to remote servers managed by storage giant EMC.
    • Mozy offers integrated restore capabilities so you can initate a file restore right from your desktop.  It’s a piece of cake.
    • The fact that Mozy stores your data off-site means you have backups of your important stuff, even if your computer is stolen, you suffer a catastropic loss at your home, etc. (Mozy also offers a Pro version for your business, and a free version that is limited to 2Gb).

If you lost all your data (or your email archives, or all your digital photos, or all your songs from iTunes, or…) just how freaked out would you be?

The techniques above will help you sleep better at night.  By the way – if you’re doing nothing, remember this:  hope is not a strategy.

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Picture the day...

In the past, I've mentioned just how vital ClearContext is for me in my daily routine.  I just moved to a new computer and reinstalled ClearContext, and was reminded that they provide a very focusing diagram to help guide you through the day:

clip_image001

I'm a visual person, so things like this help me a lot.  The process is sound, no matter what tool you use - ClearContext just makes it easier.

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Productivity, like crime, requires motive and opportunity

Lately, I've had a non-standard routine going - more time in meetings than I'm used to, more attention-demanding things at both work and home, etc. The interesting side effect is that my days have been much more focused on "must do" than "wanna do" items and tasks. As a result, I'm not doing as many of the fun things as I'd like to - like reading and blogging.

Right now, I'm on a long layover en route to Spain and decided to carve out some time to actually write something. Whew - what a relief it is to be sitting at the keyboard blogging instead of doing emails and working on urgent items.

Diamonds form under pressure

In the past, I've commented quite a few times that one part of David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) system I don't use is "Contexts." The idea behind GTD's Contexts is to group next actions according to the context in which they can be performed. I found that so much of my tasks could be performed in so many contexts that this wasn't working very well for me so I quit using Contexts.

Well, the "pressure" of these past few weeks has caused me to re-think Contexts. Now, I really do have a lot of tasks that have clear contextual boundaries and I find I need to really maximize the time I spend in each context - much more deliberately than in the past.

Need begets function

As I started to try to use Contexts again, I quickly remembered one of the other reasons I was so anxious to get away from Contexts: the Blackberry does a lousy job with categories, making it hard for me to look at a context-based list.

Therefore, I've come up with a hybrid (read "bastardized") approach to help me get the right things done.

  1. I still maintain my lists using Outlook (using ClearContext, of course).
  2. Every morning, I do a daily review of my possible tasks, and look at the contexts I expect to be in that day. If there is a "must do" that doesn't have an appropriate context coming up that day, it's time to juggle what's on my calendar to create the opportunity to get the "must do" done.
  3. I use one index card (note card) for each of my major contexts, and add the items I must get done that day to the appropriate card.
  4. I carry those cards in my shirt pocket and refer to them regularly as I decide what to do next. I also carry around a blank note card that I use to capture new commitments I make during the day and to jot down ideas for other things I want to do later.
  5. At the end of the day, I check off (on the card and on Outlook) the things I've gotten done, and add any new items to Outlook.
  6. The process repeats the next day.

This takes little pieces of lots of systems - GTD, Managing Your Now, Hipster PDA, etc. but it is working for me right now. I'll probably change it up again when things calm down, but for now, this is my system.

What's my point?

I realized I had lots of motive in my life, but was lacking in the right opportunity (context) to act on my motive. By changing how I assert control over my day, things are getting better. Yes, I'm still crazy busy, but I don't feel quite as reactive.

What about you - any of this resonate? How do you deal with life when you are in these situations?

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