Archive for the 'GTD' Category

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New Hipster PDA Templates

Published on October 8, 2005 in GTD. 1 Comment

Further to the mass adulation I received from my music manuscript template (OK- 6 comments …. but they are funny), I decided to make some more customised templates with Scribus.

For each template I have made available the Scribus source file (.sla), a PDF file, a Postscript file (which you can just squirt straight to your postscript printer instead of trying to find the correct Acrobat settings), and a png image for previewing.

Music Manuscript Template – the one which started me on the track of creating my own templates with Scribus.

Hipster PDA Music Manuscript graphic

Download

  1. Scribus Source
  2. PDF file
  3. Postscript file

Next Actions Grid – I prefer to have my next actions
list as a 2 column list in grid format:

Hipster PDA NextActionGrid graphic

Download

  1. Scribus Source
  2. PDF file
  3. Postscript file

TV/Radio Grid – I don’t watch a great deal of TV, but
I like to know if there is something worth watching in the evening,
and I also want to know if I need to make an effort to record the BBC
Radio 4 18:30 slot in the evening, which is usually very funny
(“Quote Unquote” excepted).

So I created this grid.I use one column for Radio, one for TV, but you
could use one for AM and one for PM :-)

Hipster PDA TV graphic

Download

  1. Scribus Source
  2. PDF file
  3. Postscript file

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Guardian article on David Allen

Published on October 7, 2005 in GTD. 0 Comments

The
Guardian (UK) has an article about David Allen. If you have read the GTD books it’s not new, but good to see him getting this level of publicity.

moving to emacs org-mode

Published on October 5, 2005 in Emacs org-mode. 0 Comments

[This post should be read *before* the previous post. Can't even copy and paste in the right order! :-( ]
I’m in the process of getting to grips with the emacs org-mode for my list management (I’m a fan of David Allens GTD stuff).

I have been using a Zaurus PDA for 2 1/2 years (Psions before that), and found the excellent IQnotes was pretty good for what I wanted. Unfortunately, it was a pain to have to type in things which came through on email etc, and I found myself refraining from moving from the laptop to the PDA to enter something. In fact, sometimes I would write it in a post-it and stick that on the PDA case, with the aim of adding it later that day! It wasn’t seamless enough I suppose.

I also use a laptop running Suse (9.3 at present) and have been a UNIX user since around 1986, using emacs for all my basic text processing and mail reading (with MH and mh-e). Anyway, after finding out about the 43 folders site http://www.43folders.com/ I saw some posts about using emacs and planner mode for GTD. I loaded it up, but it didn’t seem as if it would suit me, so kept searching, and found org-mode (which is basically a souped up outline-mode which most emacs users will be familiar with). Org-mode, at the moment, looks as if it does what I want.

I dumped my Zaurus iqnotes XML file into my laptop at the weekend, converted it to html, loaded the html up into freemind, and then used a utility that comes with freemind to convert from freemind to outline-mode. A bit of editing, and I had all my lists in emacs, which is up all day, every day with me. (I suppose I could have hacked the XSL script to go to outline mode, but I didn’t have the XSL ref book at home).

So, we shall see how things go. I’m using the lists *much* more now that they are in another emacs window to the right of my emacs mail window.

emacs org mode – what have I been missing !

Published on October 4, 2005 in GTD. 3 Comments

[my original post from 25th Aug 2005]

I’m astounded about the difference that emacs org mode has made for me.

I put this down to the following:

1 – it’s always there when I have my laptop open (that tends to be all day in work and most of the time at home);
2 – it is incredibly versatile and powerfull;

I have probably used my lists 10 times more since the weekend than I ever did when they were on my PDA. In work, I find myself constantly checking it after completing something, and adding things that previously I would have written on a post-it and stuck in my PDA case so that I could add it to my PDA that evening.

Some parts of org-mode are a revelation – I love being able to stick something in the Waiting list and do ^C-. to add todays date so I know when I started the clock, and to be able to archive a sub-thread to a separate file.

I am still learning and need to read the manual again, but at the moment I’m glad I bit the bullet and moved to emacs for this.

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