The two things I like the most:

Focus
Let’s you focus on a special project or folder of projects. Hides everything else you have entered in the app, so you cab concentrate on the task in front of you. Like a zoom lens on a camera. Very cool feature.

Project folders
You’ll be able to make folders of projects, grouping together projects. Put all your “home” projects in one folder, “work” in another, “you” in a third etc. It lets you organize your projects much better than just a long list of projects. It also helps you see the bigger picture. A silly example: Your “work” folder has 800 projects and your “home” and “you” folders 4…

Combine these two features, and you have a very strong tool to help you do what’s mos important right now. I have two major areas of responsibility at work now, and with the project folders and focus, I can hide the other half while I’m working on one of them.

Get me the beta, and I’ll start using this from day 1.

The two things I like the most: Syncing and Quicksilver integration. Syncing worked flawless on my Mac. I had a few tasks in iCal already, synced from another GTD app; Actiontastic, which went open source some days ago. When I synced iGTD, it got these tasks from iCal with no problem.

And this is a good lesson if you are developing a Mac GTD application: Syncing with iCal. One GTD application that doesn’t have this is Midnight Beep Inbox. So there’s no way to get my tasks over to another app. Bah.

I also like that I can use Quicksilver to enter tasks into iGTD. And a nice menubar item with direct access to the app.

The date entry (for entering due dates) is very old fashioned. There’s no pop-up calender to click dates, and you can’t type “today” or “next monday” as some of the other apps can. It doesn’t even recognize 20.3.2007 as 20 March 2007, but as 20 March 2020. Weird.

So the race for the best Mac GTD app is still on. In my heat of possible winners are now five:

Actiontastic
iGTD
OmniFocus (not out yet)
Ghost Action
Midnight Beep Inbox

Which one do you like the best so far? I have big hopes for OmniFocus, based on the quality of the other apps Omni make. Of the other four, I think Inbox looks beautiful, but it’s soooo slow. The other three are great apps, and all have syncing that works. It’s too early to pick a winner for me.

Mentally superimpose the above graph on your desktop (or if you really want, draw it as your background).

Drag the resources (URL locations, documents, graphics, audio files, forms, whatever you’re working with) to the appropriate quadrants on your desktop. URLs are the exact pages on a site with which you need to do whatever task it is. You can chunk a bunch of related items for a discreet task in a folder.

Now rename the filenames to “verb-noun” (ie. “handle tax returns” URL item links to the online filing page on the IRS.gov site)

I find Sean’s tip on using the desktop quite interesting. I drag stuff to the desktop all the time. I will try to organize them according to his tip for some time, and see if that make sense for me. And I think he is spot on when he says that…

Anytime you find yourself uncomfortable contorting your processes to match the latest and greatest productivity religion, I think that’s bad. Ultimately you should learn the fundamentals of various different productivity religions and pick and choose the elements that work for you and make your own.

But – and this is an important but – sometimes it’s better to just use a system someone has spend quite some time thinking about. And not start spending days and hours and months trying to tweak it into your the “perfect-productivity-system-for-you”.

Use Exposé

If you decide to use Sean’s tip, here’s a productivity tip to the productivity tip: Set up Exposé with the upper right corner of your screen to be “Desktop”. When surfing, just grab the link from the browser, move your cursor up in the upper right corner, and wham – all open apps and windows disappear. And you can put the url exactly where you want it on the desktop, on your new urgency/importance grid.

The free (as in “free beer”) part starts tonight. The code (as in “freely available source code”) will follow when the overhead of a new team won’t crush the project under its own weight. Those with experience getting to 1.0 will understand what I mean.

Opening up this project for community participation is the best possible thing that I can think of doing for its future. Great things are on the horizon for that sweet intersection of the web and the desktop. I would rather discuss them openly and collaborate with other like-minded people than hide any of the details just to make another $29 shareware sale. I am not opposed to the idea of shareware in general and have purchased quite a bit of it myself over the past year. It’s just that shareware isn’t the right path for Actiontastic.

It will be very interesting to see what this leads to. I like Actiontastic. It’s fast, clean and solid. Download the latest non-expiring version here.

I’m not sure. I think the other Omni icons are way better. Here they are, presented with the three “main” competitors OmniFocus have:

If I were in charge at Omni, I would have followed the style of the two other apps, a slanted document with something in the lower right corner. A checklist with a magnifying glass was my first thought. The color is ok, so keep that, but change just about everything else. Maybe keep the clip, which looks good.

The other three apps all look great when they are this big. At smaller sizes, Ghost Action look the best. Clear and simple. Actiontastic is a little to complicated for smaller sizes, but the concept is fun: Hit those tasks with a hammer.

OmniFocus out soon

I think OmniFocus is pretty close a release. This is the status message GTD guru Merlin Mann of 43 Folders sported yesterday:

“That thing you want? It’s almost done, I swear.”

Could be he’s knitting some amazing productivity wool socks for his friends… But I think it’s OmniFocus he’s referring to.

(Ghost Action screenshot. The app looks slightly different than this screenshot, as I use Uno).

I still have big hopes for OmniFocus, but Ghost Action looks clean and simple, and very similar to Actiontastic. It looks like it’s made using technology by Omni, the same way Actiontastic does.

Ghost Action syncs with iCal (both ways), something Inbox doesn’t do yet.

I had some problems when entering text into new actions. The text just disappeared after hitting Return. This happened twice on about 20 actions. I’ll try it out for some days. One “fun” thing is to see what happens with tasks already in iCal, synced from Actiontastic. Do the two apps live nicely together?

Update Nope. He didn’t.A bit strange that Merlin just qoutes TUAW, when he is actually working with Omni on the project.

…I think sometimes developers can get caught in a trap of trying to make things too “perfect”.

“Like Chinese Democracy” Kirstin said.

To which I replied- “That’s the perfect analogy. I’m going to blog that.”

In case you haven’t heard of it already, Chinese Democracy is an album that Axl Rose, the singer of Guns N’ Roses, has been working on for a very, very long time. The hold up is because he wants to get everything “perfect”. So it never ships.

First-time sex

Merlin Mann has been talking about something similar in a podcast he called First-time Sex & the Beauty of 1.0. Quoting Merlin:

Everybody is so busy making things perfect the first time around, that you never actually make anything

Yup. That’s now officially declared the “Chinese Democracy Syndrome” (or CDS for short). Trying so hard to get version 1.0 perfect, that it never ships.

This applies to other things than software, like complex projects. I’m working on a presentation on something that’s quite difficult to explain to people. And I found myself planning and planning and researching, and not working on the actual presentation. Gus talking about CDS made me think about what Merlin said about the first draft, and now I’ve put together a really bad version 1.0: Fonts, colors, facts, timing and length – everything is bad. But it’s version 1.0 and it’s so much easier to fix version 1.0 than making it (this does not necessarily apply to building houses, bridges and spaceships, I must add…)

The secret of Google and VG

Loving the beta-version is also one of the key ingredients of Google’s success: They make a 70% good product, get it out to people, tag it beta, and let it improve by getting feedback from users and their own experience with it. In Norway the tabloid VG is the biggest website, far ahead of the others. They do the same thing: Get things out. Sometimes they fail miserably, sometimes they score big successes. They would never have known if they just kept the projects on the harddrives, tweaking and tweaking them.

(Screenshot of Projects pane when adding a new action and assigning it to the @mac context)

I like Vitalist. It’s nice, clean and easy to understand. It needs to get a bit faster and responsive, as I had to wait a bit every time I entered something (even on a fast Mac and a very fast line). It should be as fast as the pages on Flickr when you update them.

There’s also a few things I see already (it’s a beta) that needs to be fixed:

I couldn’t find a way to edit contexts. I added contexts as “@online” and “@mac” but Vitalist added a “@” itself too. Easy to fix I guess.

(Screenshot of contexts with @@)

There’s no “Forgot your password” so be sure to write it down. This is something beta sites often forget.

The biggest “problem” with online GTD solutions is – as always – what do you do when you’re NOT online?

I’m online most of my time, but I couldn’t use a system where I’m not able to at least see my tasks even when I’m offline.

Sync to iPod?

One way to solve this is syncing with iPods. Like the excellent Mac OS X software Actiontastic (still in beta) does. Check a button and all your projects and tasks go to your iPod as notes. You can’t edit them but you can see them and – most important of all – DO them!

I think there are three ways to sync online GTD tasks to an offline device: A standalone program, a mobile phone (not a cell phone) or an iPod. Making a standalone app is not something I would expect most online systems would do, as this would be just as much work as the online system itself. And people would compare their offline app with other specialized GTD apps like Actiontastic and Inbox.

Syncing to mobile phones would be perfect for most customers, but there are so many different phones. A total mess to make something that just works.

Syncing with iPod is an easy and consumerfriendly way to go.

My sister is visiting from halfway across the country. I asked her how long she’s staying. She said “Till Sunday.” And I realized… that meant absolutely nothing to me.

This is a good thing. A thing worth celebrating. I had (for that brief time) achieved a state of blissful disconnection from the Real World… to the point where I truly had no idea what day of the week it was. Woo hoo. Here’s to holidays from clocks, calendars, and duties of all kinds.

That is the real beauty of holidays: A “blissful disconnection from the Real World” – what a wonderful expression. And having “…no idea what day of the week it was”.

Thanks, Mary-Anne! You put words on something I have been feeling the last days.

There’s a screencast showing how it will work. And it does exactly what I need it do.

Edit Google Calenders in iCal

So now I can make a shared calender in Google Calender, subscribe to it in iCal, edit it in iCal, and sync the changes right back to Google. Wonderful!

My next question is obviously if several people can edit the same calenders? I would guess this is possible.

But does Spanning Sync keep track of things, so if I edit a calender in iCal, and then try to sync it back to Google Calender, Spanning Sync will warn me if the calender has been changed between this and the last sync.

The screencast is also available at Google Video. And there’s a Google Group for discussion and feedback to and from the developers.

Simple interface, but maybe too simple for my taste? Not sure yet. I think the tasks should have had more importance (in style), and the buttons under them be less visible. But I must admit they have great taste in colors.

It worked flawlessly in Safari on Mac and Firefox on Win XP. Dragging things around works and editing is fast and responsive.

Todos kan be tagged with tags, which can be used like David Allen the way David Allen suggests you set things up with contexts.

You can also set dates for tasks that need to be done before a certain date.

You can sign up for a free test account but I couldn’t figure out if it was always free, or if there was a fee after some time. Data can be exported out of the system. They haven’t got around to write an export feature, but they will send you your data if you cancel the account.

Try it out! I wish there were an offline system to go with it, but if you’re always online and trust Tedium to also be, this could be your next way to get things done.

It has a name. It has a team of engineers working on it, a user interface guru mocking up modes and widgets for it, and a product manager whose Herculean job it is to herd this whole mess towards an elusive ship date.

Great! If it’s only half as good as OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle, it will be better than all other GTD apps out there.

At the same time, Midnight Beep has a new beta of Inbox out (previously on Brilliantdays). Inbox looks amazing, and Omni is known for their clean and good-looking UIs. So if you want to get things done on the Mac, there’s no excuse anymore.

Also see previous posts in the GTD category, and especially “Getting things done with automator and spotlight”.

Update
And now it turns out that Ethan J. A. Schoonover – who makes Kinkless – is developing OmniFocus with Omni. In “Hold breath. Exhale. Focus.”, Ethan explains that …at some point it became clear that the next logical step would be to consider Cocoafying the whole shebang. And continues:

Having the chance to take everything I’d been thinking and working on with kGTD and see it turned into something bigger and better and brighter is like making a doodle on a piece of paper, handing it to da Vinci and seeing it turned into a full color oil painting. Even better: it’s like Da Vinci letting you sit around and gab at them while they do this and ask for “a bit more cobalt-blue in the sky” and “a few more peasants in that bit on the left”.

And what’s more: Productivity guru Merlin Mann is in on the team: Mostly I just stand around like a fat man at a construction site, drinking coffee and shouting pointless suggestions. Ethan and OmniGroup listen patiently, sometimes complying with my random requests, and that’s all the pay I could ever hope for

Two modest guys, eh? I think OmniFocus will be my third most used app in no time… And it will be really interesting to see how Inbox works when it’s finished.

This looks very promising! Khoi Vinh of Subtraction asked for it some days ago:

It surprises me, actually, that no one is working on a proper, Cocoa-authored desktop application that is a fully-fledged, elegant version of kGTD.

“Elegant”. Exactly. I want the apps on my Mac to look fantastic. Nothing less. And Inbox looks fantastic. It looks like something Delicious Monster would have made, and that’s a big compliment in my book. If you have a look at the personal site of Hans Hansen of Midnight Beep, you’ll find an genuine interest for both technology and art. He has several sites, even one for gaming and one for “all the art and all the crack in the heart of San Francisco”.

Which is in a bit what Garr Reynolds in Presentation Zen talks about in his latest post:

However, it’s increasingly clear that logic alone is not a sufficient condition for success for individuals and for organizations. “Right-brain reasoning,” then, is every bit as important now — in some cases more important — than so-called “left-brain thinking.

Spot on. So I’m always excited when I find people that are able to geek and enjoy art, and not just stay on one side of the “fence”. Garr’s post is worth a post of it’s own. But then again, so are all his posts.

For now, I’m going to take Inbox for a test run, put lots of stuff in there, and start reporting back to Midnight Beep and to you what I think.

Previously

You may also want to have a look at “Getting things done with Automator and Spotlight” and the Getting Things Done category in general.

Lots of my friends and contacts use sites sites like Flickr, Del.icio.us or LiveJournal. They have blogs, Amazon wishlists, and Upcoming pages. All this is possible to enter in the Addressbook app in Mac OS X 10.4. As of this version (or was it 10.3?), you can assign as many webpages to a user as you like.

…

Now, checking all my friends and contacts blogs, new pictures, fresh bookmarks etc. takes time. And what better are computers for, than doing the boring stuff that you don’t want to do yourself? What I would like is to add a RSS button to all of these links.

Today HardMac has posted lots of screenshots from the coming 10.5 Leopard. On page 4 you can read this:

Leopard integrates a RSS engine which can be utilised by every application (dedicated API). Thus mail has also become an RSS reader.

This is interesting. What is stopping Apple from adding RSS inside the Address Book too? Have a look at it and tell me what you think. I would love to have this functionality. Since I wrote the original article it seems like everyone has got a blog, a Flickr account, a photocast, podcast or videocast. Having all this info tied to persons makes sense to me. If Apple doesn’t make this, maybe someone else could make it? As a plugin for the Address Book?

So here’s a small mindmap on how to rule the world, a project quite a lot of people seem to be having on their list.

Make the mindmap, and save it. When you make a document in OS X, you get a small icon right in front of the name of the document, in the title bar at the top. Before saving it’s greyed out, and everytime you make changes it also greys out.

But hit Apple-S and the icon gets colors. And – you can drag it.

Exposé is an amazing productivity tool

For dragging to be useful, I have set up Exposé like this:

In English: If you drag the cursor to the lower left corner of your screen, Exposé will show all your open windows, in all apps. That’s the one we’re going to use.

Now, in OmniOutliner Pro, make a new project (“Rule the world”) in your Kinkless file, and hit Apple and Esc to make a comment on it. This opens up a field just below the projects name, where you can put notes and stuff that are not sub-tasks. Like this:

In my example I’ve just typed a reference to my mindmap: “My mindmap for ruling the world”. Just leave the cursor where it is after typing that, and switch to OmniOutliner Pro. Click the little icon in the title bar and start dragging. The icon now becomes a little bigger.

Drag the icon down to the lower left corner of your screen, the one we set up in Exposé. Now all your open windows pop up on the screen. Look for the window with your Kinkless projects in OmniOutliner Pro. Move the cursor up again and “park” on top of that window. Wait half a second or so. Finder will now zoom in on that window. Drop the icon right after the text you wrote previously.

Now you have a link to the mindmap directly from your Kinkless projects. Double-click the icon, and NovaMind opens with your mindmap.

Other ways to do this

As always in OS X, there are many ways to do things. You can drag from a window to another, if both are visible. Here I’m dragging a file saved in TextEdit directly into OmniOutliner Pro.

You can also start dragging the icon from the mindmap, use Alt-Tab to switch between apps and then drop the icon.

Forget import or open commands

With this method, you almost never have to import or link to files with a dialog window. You make the document you need, save it to the right place, and drag it into the app you want to use it. I use it for Livetype files in Final Cut Pro, Photoshop files in Final Cut Pro and InDesign, and in general all kinds of graphics, sound, video and text files into apps that use them. No more Apple-I. A huge timesaver. At it looks cool.

This past weekend, I realized that about 20 percent of it comes from email newsletters and companies I’ve done business with in the past. Half of it, I don’t recall opting into—even legitimate companies. Most of it is a complete waste of my time.

So do I, but luckily I started doing something several years ago that saves me hours and hours: I have lots of e-mail adresses.

The first one is my e-mail at work. I use it for work and nothing else. No private e-mails. So when I open Outlook in the morning, almost all mail in there will be things related to work. And only work. NEVER use your work e-mail for mailing lists, even if it’s work related. You will get spam.

Then I have an e-mail for private mail. That’s the one I use when sending to friends and family, when adding my name to e-mail lists for my kids activities etc. Be clever when you make an adress like this: Use a big service like Gmail or Yahoo Mail. They have great spam filters, and tons of storage. Don’t use the e-mail your ISP offers you when you sign up. I have numerous friends that have their e-mail adress at small ISPs in their town. With only 10 MB of storage and strange webmail interfaces. Not recommended. Pick one of the big boys.

Number three is for registration of software, newsletters, mailing lists etc.. This is the one that gets all the crap. And tons of spam. So I check it once a week. I have mine at Yahoo Mail, but Gmail is just as good. The spam filters take the worst ones out, and the rest I just sort by sender, hit “select all” and deselect the two or three I actually NEED to read. Then delete the rest with a click of a button. Today I had 512 e-mails at that adress – in a week. And that’s after the spam filter had removed 288. Imagine having all that crap at your work e-mail… Four of these were things I actually read: An offer to download four songs from the Simple Minds tour, a sale at an online DVD store and two product updates from a tech company.

So that’s your three basic ones: One for work, one for private stuff and one for all registration and mailing lists. And do host the latter two at someone that has great spam filters like Gmail and Yahoo Mail.

Then consider if you need some more: I have a special e-mail adress only used for contact with my host Dreamhost, and sites I’m an affiliate to, like Amazon. I also have e-mails for some special projects and finally some e-mails specially for some people that are really important to me.

All these can be checked from the mail app I use, Apple’s Mail. The exception is Yahoo Mail that charges you if you want to use POP mail, but since I use the Yahoo adress for all the “non-important” mail, it doesn’t make sense to download 500 e-mails to my computer, just to delete 497. Webmail is much better for that purpose: A huge list, sort it, select all, deselect a few, hit delete.

This works in TextEdit, Pages, Safari text fields, all text fields in iLife apps etc. Very useful!

But I’m not waiting until then. As of now, my fancy-pants, community-generated, emergent-behavior data-sorting heuristic is: a calendar. If I haven’t gotten to something in a week, it dies. Stick that in your attention economy and smoke it. I’m re-booting. Feed list: empty. In-box: empty. TiVo: OK, OK, I still need to watch “24.” But other than that: empty.

Greg Knaus is not the only one. A-list blogger Robert Scoble also deleted all his feeds from his RSS-reader:

By the way, I deleted all my feeds and am starting over.

(Did you add me back, Robert?)

(Throw it out – on Flickr)

Cleaning mail

Merlin Mann deals with his e-mail in a similar fashion: Act or delete.

The only way an email will ever get out of your life (and out of your worrying brain) is to either deal with it or get rid of it. If you’re planning to do anything in-between, you should have an explicit understanding of why you’re doing so. Any idea which one of these is a particularly shitty idea?

• I don’t have time to answer this now (but I will put it in “Respond to” and answer it within X days)
• I just need to save this for future reference (so I’ll just toss it in my Archive)
• I need to convert this into an action by the end of the day (so I’ll put it in my “Daily Pending” folder)
• I’m going to just leave this in my inbox and think about it for a few days. Or months. Or years. Who knows?

Touch everything once whenever possible, but even if you’re busy, take the extra 2 seconds to consider whether this really has any place in your life. If not, just punt it.

I’m not ready to delete my RSS feed collection yet. But with e-mail, I’m with Merlin: Deal with it or get rid of it. I’m not going to use my 2.5 GBs (and rising) on gmail to store bad feelings about NOT gettings done.

So if you’re careful
You won’t get hurt
But if your careful all the time
Then what’s it worth?

Replace “get hurt” with “lose the game” or “get tired” or “get a ‘no’” or “feel stupid”.

vCard

So I got an idea. And if it already exists, feel free to tell me in the comments below! Here’s the idea: My Mac has an Adress book with my contacts, and my own adress data. I can export any person as a vCard and e-mail that to someone. When the person who receives my vCard clicks on it, it will open the default contact manager and put my data in there.

This works on any modern OS, Macs and PCs. Most modern laptops also have 802.11. Or WiFi. Or Airport. Many names.

Broadcast it!

I would like to have a meny item under the Airport icon in OS X. It should read: “Broadcast vCard”.

What it does is to listen for other’s sending me their vCards, and also sending out mine. When it finds them, the OS show me a list of who else did this around me, and let me check off which ones I allow to get my card. The others in the room do the same. This is to prevent anyone else around to get all our vCards without our permission. Like this:

It’s crude, but you get the picture. What do you think? Would this be useful? Would it be hard to put this on OS X or XP/Vista?

Update
Now this is “almost” possible. See Bonsoir, here’s my vCard.

I’m sure people will switch to much bigger displays in the years to come. A 17″ display is just way too small to work effeciently on. Of course, it depends, if you just are going to write and do nothing with the text but write from a to z, 17″ is ok. But as soon as you need to start editing and making structural changes, you need a bigger display.

When editing in Final Cut Pro, I use both a 17″ Powerbook, and G5s with 22″ and “23″ displays. The 17″ Powerbook is much better than the 15″, but if you are working a lot with keyframing of effects and motions, it’s way too small. The 22″ is wide enough, but not tall enough. 23″ is better, but after working on a 30″ at a demo… (I want!)

Bigger = faster

With a bigger display you look at your work more the way you look at your desk. It took me some time to get used to it, but then something happens. You start you use tools faster and better, you can put things you need to have around open next to what you’re doing. You don’t have to scroll as much, and can use your eyes and your amazing brain to find information fast by scanning over text and visual information.

If you want some more background and research, first head over to the display pages at Apple.com, and mouse over the the 20″, 23″ and 30″ displays (the numbers) at the page. You get a very clear visual on how much bigger the 30″ is. What I especially liked was that it’s so much higher. The 23″ is wide enough for most things, but not tall enough. When I edit in Final Cut Pro, I need a tall monitor, because I need to see as many tracks as possible. This would be the same all software working with tracks and timelines: Flash, After Effects, DVD Studio Pro, Logic, ProTools etc.

At the same page, Apple has put up a pdf report on how much more productive you become with a 30″ display. They want to sell bigger displays, but I totally agree with the results.

Significantly improve productivity

37signals had an interesting article about bigger screens in October 2005.

One veteran researcher claimed he has “never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user’s productivity.” On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly – and some as much as 44 percent more quickly.

Microsoft has an article on the same subject, also talking about how much better it is to have two displays instead of one:

Give someone a second monitor, let them use it for while, and then try to take it away. It just isn’t going to happen. They’ll never go back to a mono display. Researchers in the Visualization and Interaction for Business and Entertainment group (VIBE), found that increasing a computer user’s display space made it easier for them to complete their tasks.

Women think wider

The Microsoft article also says that woman need bigger displays to be able to work better, because of the way their brains work differently than men:

So we need to support females with big displays, with wider fields of views when they’re doing intense navigation tasks. They’ve been at a disadvantage in any 3D system, but just give them a wider field of vision and smooth graphics, and they’re good to go.”

Bigger TVs -> bigger computer displays

People now are buying 42″ and 52″ LCD and plasma TVs for their living room. And most of these TVs can be used with your computer too. So what does happen when you go back to the 17″ in the office after using your Media Center with a 42″ all weekend? You feel like someone put on blinds. Not a good feeling.

If I were to buy a new display for my computer, I would buy nothing less than 23″. And not a portable with less than 17″ (unless you need to hide it away in a tiny bag, or just need it to dump your pictures when traveling).

Update 1: Eric Mack

Eric Mack points back to this post. Thanks, Eric!

Update 2: Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble has a long post about how to improve Microsoft. One of his points is to buy every employee of Microsoft a new fast computer and dual monitors:

I’ve seen the productivity benefits that dual monitors can bring. Every employee who has them says having two monitors is transformational. Especially coders who can have one screen for typing code and another for designing UIs. Or, even if they are just an algorithm kind of person, the second one keeps their email showing so they don’t need to switch over when a new email shows up.

Heck, I’d go further. If we want to reach the Second Life generation we need three screens. One to run Second Life (and other kinds of social apps), one to run Visual Studio, and one to run Outlook. Or something like this. Go and watch the researchers at Microsoft Research who are working on multiple screen interfaces. They told me that industry researchers are seeing somewhere between a five to 15% productivity gain when someone goes from one monitor to two.

This make sense to me. Even if I totally understand Merlin Mann in his articles about attention, mindfullnes and always on, I often need to pay attention to several things at once. And having a third display just for IM and social apps is a good idea!

Walk outside and take a look around. People on the same city streets are loaded down. They are laden with books, newspapers, Gatorade jugs, personal stereos, knapsacks, briefcases and canvas totes with high-heel shoes inside. They have iPods strapped to upper arms, fanny packs buckled around waists and house keys Velcroed to shoelaces.

Perhaps it’s because we are multitaskers. Or because we’re insecure. Maybe we are becoming more independent. Whatever the reasons, we are more and more burdened by our belongings.

From Washington Post.

Reams of stories have been written about children being injured by heavy backpacks. Now they tow large suitcases on wheels. They look like so many little flight attendants.

LOL.

It scans through all your Safari bookmarks, and uploads them to Del.icio.us. To help you started with the tags for all your bookmarks, it will use the folder the bookmarks are located in, as tags. So if a bookmark is stored in a folder called webdesign, and a folder inside that one called CSS, the bookmark will get the both folder names as bookmarks; webdesign and CSS. Neat.

You still would have to add quite a few tags to your bookmarks, and a nice way to do that is to load them back to your Mac again with the software Cocoalicious. It helps you manage your Del.icio.us bookmarks and makes it a whole lot easier to add tags to bookmarks.

Benedikt Terhechte is the one who also make Tagbag, the way cool OS X widget that scans all your files, looking for Spotlight keywords. With Tagbag and a the instructions I wrote about how to use your Mac to get things done, you would have a very flexible and fast GTD system working in 5 minutes.

The Noguchi Filing System is fascinating. You put papers you want to file in envelopes, write a title and a date on them and stack them in a shelf. No classification, tagging or anything.

On the left side you put new envelopes, on the right the older ones that you still need.

Over time, some documents will “survive” and stay in the shelf – on the right side. Other envelopes are emptied and taken out of the shelf. You assign time once in a while to go through your documents, which will be quite fast as all the envelopes are marked and easy to open.

Unless you have several hundred envelopes, I think this would work! Anyone who have tried this exact system? Comment below or contact me.

This superhero does SO need to meet David…

This is the same thing that made Bjørn Dæhlie the worlds greatest winter athlete. He used to go the fastest he could as a junior. As fast as possible: 110%. For 3 out of 15 kms. Then fall over. Exhausted. And become number 39 or something.

Next race: As fast as possible for 4 kms. Fall over. Exhausted.

See the pattern?

When he finally managed to finish a race without falling over, he started winning. And winning. And became the most winning winter-athlete in the Olympics ever.

The moral: Don’t play it safe and save for later. Just give it everything you have from the start. This won’t give you golds in the beginning, but sooner or later it will.

Update

Leon at Lifehack.org has posted about this, and invited you to discuss it. One reader already strongly disagrees.

Bert Webb’s Open Loops

First, read my previous entry about “Add spotlight tags”. Make the Automator action described and save it as a Finder plugin for ctrl-clicking.

Smart folders

Then, in Finder, make a smart folder called “@home”, one called “@work” etc. One for every category you use with David Allen’s brilliant book “Getting things done”.

Set up the folders like this: In Finder, choose File > Add smart folder. Or use the shortcut Alt-Apple-N. This brings up this window (mine is in Norwegian but you get the message).

Be sure to choose “Computer” (“Datamaskin” in my screenshot) in the header, to make the smart folder search your whole Mac, not just parts of it.

Remove the bottom search term by clicking the minus sign. And click the first menu for the first one, and choose “Other” (“Annen” in my screenshot).

This brings up a long list of things you can use in smart folders. To find the one we’re looking for, type “Spotlight” in the upper right corner. You don’t need to type the whole word, as the list will be shorter for every letter, leaving you with just “Spotlight comments” (“Spotlight kommentarer” in my screenshot).

Choose that one, and “OK”.

Now type “@home” or “@work” or whatever context you’re making a smart folder for, save it and put it somewhere visible. I put mine on the desktop.

Start tagging

Now, everytime you get a new file, just tag it by ctrl-clicking on it, and put in “@home”, “@work” etc. and the file will magically be listed immediately in your smart folder with that context. And it doesn’t matter where you put it on your drives. Put it anywhere!! It will still show up in your smart folder. This is just great!

Also tag files with other keywords while you’re at it. Example: If working with the “Redesign” project at work with your friend Mark, tag the Illustrator file both “Project:Redesign” and “@work” and “Projects” and “Mark”.

If you want to remove a tag from a file, just click it once in Finder, hit Apple-I and edit the Spotlight comments directly.

What do you think?

Do you have any experiences with this? Post them in the comments below! Also read my other posts about GTD and “Getting things done”.

The 43 Folders wiki is up and running at http://wiki.43folders.com/. Great! Merlin has an excellent site at 43 Folders, and I’m sure going to contribute.