Informed by Me

Nothing like having a fortune cookie remind you of what you already know:

The GTD Fortune Cookie

It put it up in Flickr.

I came across this photo essay today that relates to time, aging, and family life (via Daniel Mall).

It’s a powerful visual journey, and it struck me as odd the way old age hits us in a second. Seems like it takes only one year to stop being a child and becoming a young man. And the same with becoming a grown up and then getting old. It’s in a second. One day you look young, and the next you don’t.

Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems were created.

Albert Einstein

An article about David Allen from Business 2.0 Magazine.

I had lots of problems with the way the TinyMCE editor displayed my images on this site. I didn’t respect the div tags that the were in and would transform them into p tags every time I edited an article.

So I turned TinyMCE off. But it was not easy to find in my Wordpress Options. I thought it would be somewhere in my Writing options but wasn’t. It’s located under Users » Your Profile, right at the top of the page.

Check box for disabling TinyMCE

It’s always a pain in the ass for me when a new window opens up while I’m browsing the web using Firefox. I like all pages I’m browsing in a single window with tabs. So even though this is not a really amazing trick, it gets the job done when you need to get that single loose window into your group of tabs.

While viewing that lonely single window you don’t want just hit Command-T (on a Mac) or Control-T (if you’re on Windows) and open up a new blank tab. Now forget about that new tab, grab the tab of the new window you had opened, and just drag it to the group of tabs you’re browsing.

It’s not fancy at all. But it keeps gets the job done.

After reading the post in 43folders about “How I use iGTD” I decided to give it a try. I had been using Kinkless’ kgtd for about 4 months and I’d been loving it, but being a junkie for new stuff, I decided to give iGTD a try. (You can download it here).

The iGTD Icon

Right from the beginning something happened that changed the way I look at my tasks. iGTD prompts you initially to set up Contexts, and I think I had always been very sloppy with how I contextualized my tasks. So first I did my list of incomplete stuff (all the open loops I have in all areas of my life). I wrote the whole thing on paper.

I’m not sure if this is the official Getting Things Done way to think about contexts, but I just thought of contexts as things I do. Here’s a partial list of my contexts:

• Email
• Draw
• Design
• Code
• Read
• Errand
• Phone

This has become absolutely essential for me now. Like I said before, iGTD seems to put a lot of emphasis on contexts. iGTD has a fantastic integration with Quicksilver, and in a very consistent way, setting up a task through Quicksilver starts with setting up a context for it. (Not that it’s mandatory, but it’s a really good practice).

After getting the contexts set up then I just wrote down the complete list of projects that I’m dealing with right now. This was easier than contexts. Seems like I keep a list of projects in my mind all the time, so I just dumped the list into iGTD. I had to remember to put down everything that’s a project in my life (a project being anything that takes more than 1 action to complete). So I wrote down things like these besides the usual web projects I’m involved with:

• Fixing Car
• Cleaning CDs Mess

Then I did a double check with my Kinkless kgtd to make sure I wasn’t leaving any task behind. Once I did that, then it was time to delete all my previous tasks inside iCal. (I’m not saying you should do it. But when I start something new, I usually do things like just deleting tons of things and start from scratch).

After that I was ready. I still haven’t figured out all the features iGTD has (and it has plenty!). But since I started out I’ve loved it. I say try it out and let all the features it has let you learn more of the GTD philosophy.

In case you still haven’t heard, the guys from Plasq have developed the coolest screen snapshot software ever created for Mac. It’s called Skitch (check it out). What Skitch does is let you take snapshots of your entire screen, or portions of it, and then lets you add extra information to the picture.

One of the greatest features is that every picture you take with Skitch is saved in the app’s history. So looking back to the pictures you’ve used is really easy. You can also just use Skitch to keep a handy storage of thing you take snapshots of, and not worry about where the heck you saved them in.

Skitch’s Image History

It’s almost impossible not to integrate Skitch to your ordinary work flow immediately. Give it a try.

This is the default post that came with Wordpress. It’s been about 2 years since I used Wordpress. I had switched to Textpattern (which I love), but I’m starting this blog using Wordpress because I’m hoping that so many people using it can’t all be wrong.

This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

I’m not deleting it. I’ll keep it here to remember that this blog started like this.