the lake - kicking old habits

after almost 1 year with the diy hipster pda, i've gone back to silicon land, thanks to kgtd, merlin mann and his 43 folders site and the fabulous people at the omnigroup, from which i now use omnigraffle and, most importantly, omnioutliner (which is worth buying just for running kgtd). my next step is to take my quicksilver-foo to the next level (be sure to check the related articles at the end of this). for documentation that i have to circle through the company i use tiddlywiki, which is a breeze to use and has a very high wow-factor with the cow-orkers. i just trim down the main menu for the contexts we have in the company, add the tiddlywiki help tiddlers and list of tags to the hello there tiddler (which is the only default tiddler) and then tiddlers for each bit that needs documenting, cross-referencing where necessary. an extremely important step: if you make sure there are no orphan tiddlers, your documentation will be much more consistent. also, check for missing tiddlers.

i still carry some paper trail, though, for meetings and for when i'm away from my mac:

• a moleskine weekly planner


• some coloured 3x5 cards for tasks (red for urgent; yellow for until the end of the week; green for when i have spare time). these get into kgtd as soon as i return to the computer


• some 3x5 white cards for notes and diagrams. these may or may not result in actions.


• a couple of moleskine notebooks, one for writing little stories and another for comments on pubs and beer in london

in order to maximise real work done, certain things had to go:

• i didn't configure my personal email account on entourage


• apple mail is gone from the dock, and in fact not running at all until i get home at night. boy, this one is hard!


• newtnewswire is also gone from the dock, and is also only ran at night. i just couldn't resist the urge to click the dock icon with the 438 number hanging over it, so it had to go


• i am still running im, but i'm seriously considering killing it, or at least parts of it. chat-wise, i now don't moo during the day, and only hang around in a tech irc channel
  <@pfig> karma beer
  <+dipsy> beer has karma of 73.
  <@pfig> karma perl
  <+dipsy> perl has karma of 20.
  

so does this sound utterly contrived and a mess to mantain, taking more time to manage the system than the work itself? it might look that way, but thanks to merlin's tips and all the magic kgtd does behind the scenes (and throwing e2sync to the mix) i get everything synced in perfection (kgtd, ical and entourage).

the result after the first day was pretty good, my output more than doubled and there were no blanks during the day. the downside is getting at home and have 100 unread mails and 700 unread items in netnewswire when you're dead tired; so my delete-foo is improving quite fast.

next action: stop blogging during work hours :)

update: rui just pointed me to kgtd on gtdtiddlywiki plus. i used gtd tiddlywiki in the past, but with the two-way syncing kgtd gives me (ical & entourage) it just doesn't cut it for me.

update: i live inside a mac, but for those who can't, there's tracks (via rui, once more.