GTD Implementation Guide
David Allen’s GTD Implementation Guide is a just-released PDF guide to help those who have read Getting Things Done to take it to the next level. There is a lot more detail to all steps of the process and how much time it is expected to take. It can be thought of as a part two of the book.
I am looking forward to reading this as soon as I get the time!
Rethinking Email
I have been a long-time Gmail user and prefer using their web interface for my personal email, which I love for a number of reasons. For instance, when receiving a new reply to an archived email, the entire conversation is always shown, regardless of where the individual emails are located.
On the professional side of things, I use Apple Mail, which I am sorry to say is starting to get fairly outdated. It does not have the above mentioned feature where email replies are automatically shown together regardless of location. It doesn’t even support using SSL client certificates for connecting to the email server. The latter can fortunately be remedied by using stunnel as a proxy.
Thunderbird
I have used Thunderbird ages ago, so I decided to install the new version and add both my personal and professional email account and see what has happened these last major versions. To my surprise, Thunderbird has been cleaned up considerably and has lots of new features like tabs, smart folders and a unified inbox.
The coolest new feature in Thunderbird 3 has to be the new search interface. It is just a beauty to see the data mining ability and the ease of refining the search terms as you go. There is for instance the possibility to visually drill down on the year, month and day to find just the thing you are looking for.
Thunderbird Search
Then I recalled trying out Postbox a while ago when it was in beta. It is a commercial fork of Thunderbird, with its own unique set of features and looks, and although many Thunderbird plugins work with Postbox, not all do. I ended up giving this some thought.
What can a commercial company do with Thunderbird that the Mozilla foundation can not do themselves?
I decided to yet again give it a go. The installation is as easy as it can be on the Mac — just drag the application to the applications folder and you are done. The account set-up was super easy, with most things detected automatically, and that even includes the work account. Being a Thunderbird derivate, I knew that it would support SSL client certificates, so I just added mine and it worked instantly.
Postbox
The interface of Postbox looks a lot like Thunderbird, but there are some not-so-subtle differences too. First of all is the polish — Postbox looks and feels more like a commercial product with its clean interface and modern color palette. The only interface section I liked better in Thunderbird is the main toolbar, which is a lot cleaner. It mostly has to do with Thunderbird having support for showing button labels beside the icons instead of below. That small setting makes all the difference in the world, esthectially speaking.
The first technical thing I noticed was that there is only one folder view — you have your accounts on the top, and the folders (including the inbox), changes below depending on the account you select at the top.
I am not a big fan of unified inboxes, and I had a hard time finding a view I like in Thunderbird (not to mention Apple Mail). Postbox, while only having this single view, get how people work with email. Having personal and professional mail in the same unified inbox just adds to the clutter and distractions we try so hard to get rid of.
Making the accounts completely separate is the perfect recipe for me, and lets me focus on one thing at a time, while not being distracted by Facebook alerts or Twitter messages and other things that may pop up in my personal inbox.
Thunderbird Single message
The conversation view in Postbox is excellent too. It works exactly like in Gmail, with collapsible replies and a beautiful interface. There is also this thread and message summary to the right of the message which collects all links, photos, files and other types of attachments for easy access.
Postbox for some reason, even has integrated support for posting to Twitter and Facebook. While I would use a dedicated application for this like Tweetdeck or Echofon, I will definitely try it out and see what they have done with it.
A last thing to mention about Postbox is the built-in tagging support. If you would like to tag email with certain action tied to them like “Follow Up”, “Waiting For” or other tags, it is possible to do so without having to resort to putting these emails in separate folders.
Postbox Single message
If you are not into sorting incoming email to different project folders, you will definitely enjoy the archive feature, which is available in Thunderbird as well. Pressing “a” will move the selected messages into the archive, which is a regular email folder. The thinking behind this is that since Postbox and Thunderbird index all email, you could just search for what you want.
I am personally fond of having separate folders for different projects and mailing lists. Everything else is put into the generic “archives” folder.
The latest version also features support for Things and Omnifocus, which means that it now is as easy as using Apple Mail to get emails into your GTD in-basket of choice!
If you want to purchase Postbox, please consider using my Postbox referral link. This will save you $10, and you will support this site too!
The Book of Eli
The Book of Eli is a post-apocapolyptic western movie about Eli (Denzel Washington), who has been on a 30 year long journey, heading west. During this tremendous journey though a wasteland full of thugs, robbers and killers, he tries to stay true to his mission to transport a very important artifact to the west-coast.
FogBugz 7.3 Now Available
FogBugz 7.3 Now Available. Highlights include:
- New Plugin: Case Event Edit
- New Feature: Bulk Reply
- Upgraded Feature: Bulk Editing
- Upgraded Plugin: Project Backlog
- IMAP Support
- Resizable Case View
… and lots of smaller features and fixes. See the site for details.
Diaspora — The Open Facebook Alternative
Diaspora is going to be an open Facebook alternative. Things coming in the first sprint:
- Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
- End to end GPG
- External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
- Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
- Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code
It will be very interesting to see what they will make of this.
Going from Things to Omnifocus
I have been a heavy Things users since the beginning, but there have always been certain features that I have found lacking, such as sub-projects and a distinction between areas of focus.
Omnifocus has had all necessary features since I can remember, so I finally decided to give it a go for real. All active projects and areas from Things have been migrated to Omnifocus, leaving the someday/maybe list for if/when I commit to using Omnifocus for a foreseeable future.
The one thing I will have to live without for a couple of days until I can commit, is buying the iPhone app. That means I will be using Evernote on the iPhone to capture actions and projects on the go.
I am really looking forward to be able to use sub-projects and see if that increases my productivity and peace of mind about large projects. Perspectives are also something I look forward too, since that means being able to focus on just work or personal, even though there are deadlines arising in both places. In Things, everything is meshed together and it is practically impossible to completely separate all focus areas. There is an option to disable an area of focus, but that is a too inconvenient workaround.
Facebook Like plugin for WordPress updated
My Facebook Like plugin for WordPress has just been updated to version 1.3.6, and includes the following changes since 1.3.1:
- Added support for entering a custom CSS style.
- Added support for passing custom arguments from the template tag.
- Added an option to use the default Facebook height. Just leave the height option blank in the settings for this to take effect.
- Added support for entering a custom height for the like button, which can be used to trim excess whitespace after the button.
Contact me if you have any suggestions or bug reports.
Going from Failing to Straight A’s with OmniFocus & GTD
Colin Wheeler writes about his journey about Going from Failing to Straight A’s with OmniFocus & GTD. It is very interesting to see GTD being used from a student’s perspective, instead of the working professional normally shown.
Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options
To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. Facebook says it wants to offer precise controls for sharing on the Internet.
Shell script to show a file and optionally delete it
I needed to open a number of files and depending on the content, delete them. Here is a quick bash script to cat the file and ask a question to delete the file afterwards.
#!/bin/bash
VIEWER="cat"
if [ -d $1 ]
then
DIR=$1
else
echo "Enter a directory to clean"
exit 1
fi
for file in `ls $DIR`
do
$VIEWER $DIR/$file
echo -n "Delete file (y/n)? "
read RESP
if [ $RESP == "y" ]
then
echo "Deleting $DIR/$file"
rm -f $DIR/$file
fi
done
You can change the viewer to something else, if you don’t want to use cat, and instead of deleting the file, you might want to move it somewhere else instead.