I am a GTD person, and I’m constantly looking for superior systems for managing projects and tasks. I’m really into simplicity, so up to now I’ve been using the GTD PDA, which is just a set of index cards.

I think I may have found a digital replacement, however–or at least a supplement to it. It’s called Task Paper, and it’s a Google application that runs both locally on OS X as well as online. Soon there’ll be an iPhone version as well.

The service is just now getting started, but I like what I’m seeing so far. The key for me is simplicity; I like the idea of simple text editing (with features) that propagates cleanly wherever I need it.

I look forward to seeing how it develops. ::

(thanks to Steve Rubel for the link)

The fundamental problem when managing feeds is input management. Most of us simply have too many feeds to read in a single sitting. How can we be sure we’re reading the right content at the right time? The goal is to avoid the anti-GTD state of not being sure – a state that consumes valuable brain resources and keeps you from functioning at your best.

That’s what this system helps you do: it lets you instantly choose which feeds to read at any given time – allowing you to feel fully satisfied when you’re done with a session.

The System

Create three types of tags within Google Reader.

1. Priority
2. Subject
3. Location

Mine look like this:

• Priority (general importance): Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
• Subject (classical organization): Security, Programming, Design, Humor
• Location (contextual consideration): Industry News, Important World Events, etc.

This breakdown gives us three choices for how to attack feeds. You can go by:

1. General importance of the feed (priority)
2. Type of content that you want to read at a given moment (subject)
3. Where you are (location)

The key to the whole system is that each individual feed can have multiple tags assigned to it. This feature is there for a reason.

So if you’re at work during regular hours you can read your “work” feeds, which include important information pertaining to your profession, key world events, and perhaps some other tidbits that may be useful during work-related conversation.

During lunch you can read your “lunch” feeds, which include your feeds that are still work appropriate during lunch but perhaps aren’t completely work related, e.g. Dilbert, XKCD, Reddit, etc. Or, you can choose to read based on priority or subject instead.

Assigning the multiple tags makes it possible to cover the same content during various types of reading sessions – whether you browsed based on time available, where you were, or a particular interest such as design or programming.

This system helps me greatly in getting through my feeds with less stress, and allows me to feel confident that I’ve read precisely what I should have during my session. I hope you find it useful as well.:

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p class=”post_update”> [ Original, longer version here ]

I’m constantly optimizing how I do things, and nowhere is this more important to me than with my feed reader. I happen to use (and highly recommend) Google Reader, and what follows is a multi-tiered approach to classifying and reading your feeds using an often ignored feature of the application.

The Problem

The fundamental problem is input management. Most of us simply have too many feeds to read in a single sitting. How can we be sure we’re reading the right content at the right time? Are we reading too much? Too little? The goal is to avoid the anti-GTD state of not being sure – a state that consumes valuable brain resources and keeps you from functioning at your best.

That’s what this system helps you do: it lets you instantly choose which feeds to read at any given time – allowing you to feel fully satisfied when you’re done with a session.

The System

Create three types of tags within Google Reader.

1. Priority
2. Subject
3. Location

Mine look like this:

• Priority (general importance): Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
• Subject (classical organization): Security, Programming, Design, Humor
• Location (contextual consideration): Industry News, Important World Events, etc.

This breakdown gives us three choices for how to attack feeds. You can go by a general ranking of importance of the feed (priority), by the specific type of content that you want to read at a given moment (subject), or based on where you are (location).

The key to the whole system is that each individual feed can have multiple tags assigned to it. This feature is there for a reason.

So if you’re at work during regular hours you can read your “work” feeds, which include important information pertaining to your profession, key world events, and perhaps some other tidbits that may be useful during work-related conversation. And during lunch you can read your “lunch” feeds, which include your feeds that are still work appropriate during lunch but perhaps aren’t completely work related, e.g. Dilbert, XKCD, Reddit, etc.

Assigning the multiple tags makes it possible to cover the same content during various types of reading sessions – whether you browsed based on time available, where you were, or a particular interest such as design or programming.

This system helps me greatly in getting through my feeds with less stress and allows me to feel confident that I’ve read precisely what I should have during my session. I hope you find it useful as well.:

I’m constantly optimizing how I do things, and nowhere is this more important to me than with my feed reader. I happen to use (and highly recommend) Google Reader, and what follows is a multi-tiered approach to classifying and reading your feeds using an often ignored feature of the application.

The Problem

The fundamental problem is input management. Most of us simply have too many feeds to read in a single sitting. How can we be sure we’re reading the right content at the right time? Are we reading too much? Too little? The goal is to avoid the anti-GTD state of not being sure – a state that consumes valuable brain resources and keeps you from functioning at your best.

That’s what this system helps you do: it lets you instantly choose which feeds to read at any given time – allowing you to feel fully satisfied when you’re done with a session.

The System

The first thing we’re going to do is make three categories of tags/labels within Google Reader (think folders for old-schoolers). These are:

1. Priority
2. Subject
3. Location

Mine look like this:

• Priority (general importance): Primary, Secondary, Tertiary
• Subject (classical organization): Security, Programming, Design, Humor
• Location (contextual consideration): Industry News, Important World Events, etc.

This breakdown gives us three choices for how to attack feeds. You can go by a general ranking of importance of the feed (priority), by the specific type of content that you want to read at a given moment (subject), or based on where you are (location).

So if you’re at work during regular hours you can read your “work” feeds, which include important information pertaining to your profession, key world events, and perhaps some other tidbits that may be useful during work-related conversation. And during lunch you can read your “lunch” feeds, which include your feeds that are still work appropriate during lunch but perhaps aren’t completely work related, e.g. Dilbert, XKCD, Reddit, etc.

The key to the whole system is that each individual feed can have multiple tags assigned to it. This feature is there for a reason.

What this allows us to do is put our feeds in all three categories simultaneously. This gives us the simplicity of knowing what to read at any given moment, but at the same time it links all three categories together. So if you read TechCrunch from one view it gets marked as read in the others as well.

Examples

Let’s take my Information Security News feed. It’s a Yahoo! Pipe I built that combines news from around the industry, removes duplicates, etc. It’s a fast way to get the top stories I’d find in my “security-news” tag that contains multiple individual feeds.

For my infosec pipe feed I have the following tags applied in the three dimensions (PSL):

• Primary (priority)
• Security-News (subject)
• Work (location)

The trick is that I can decide to read from any one of those categories and I’ll still cover this very important aggregation feed. But if you take my Design Observer feed it’s more likely to break down like this:

• Tertiary
• Design
• (no location because it defaults to home)

Assigning the multiple tags makes it possible to cover the same content during various types of reading sessions – whether you browsed based on time available, where you were, or a particular interest such as design or programming.

This system helps me greatly in getting through my feeds with less stress and allows me to feel confident that I’ve read precisely what I should have during my session. I hope you find it useful as well.:

This looks to be the best GTD application I’ve ever seen. The only question I have is whether or not there will be a mobile interface. In my opinion, the only kind of GTD system that will work long-term is one that can be with you wherever you are.

Be sure to check out the screencast.

[ Cultured Code: Things ]

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p style=”text-align: center”> humanproductivitylab.com

Few things are as important to geeks as how they stay informed. Knowledge is so key to us that the ability to pull it in, process it, and ensure that it’s recallable, is absolutely vital to being effective in our work.

One of the main problems we as information fetishists face is the lack of a solid, repeatable methodology for processing new input online. Too often we bounce back and forth between this site and that site, maybe check a blog or two, and then half-heartedly label the task of “reading news” as completed. This approach is not only a really poor way to stay on top of what’s new, but it’s also very anti-GTD.

The GTD Approach

For those not familiar with the GTD system, this essentially means that part of your mind will linger on activities that it doesn’t believe were performed adequately. This is actually a horrible way to go about your day; you want all your brain power focused on your current task, and being “sure” you’ve adequately absorbed today’s new information is crucial to this.

Below I touch on three main steps for accomplishing this goal. Following this simple methodology will ensure that you not only get the best information every time you start a news reading session, but it’ll also help you to actually trust that you’ve had a quality news gathering experience. This trust is what will allow you to move forward in a focused manner, with all your processor and RAM where it should be — on your current task.

Have Quality Sources

At the core of efficient news reading is having quality sources. The phrase, “garbage in – garbage out” comes to mind — meaning the better your sources are, and the tighter they’re tweaked towards the kind of news you are looking for, the more efficient your individual sessions will be.

Think aggregation. One of the coolest recent developments for people who value both time and information has been the emergence of meta-sources, or aggregated sources, of news. Two of these that I deem as absolutely crucial are listed below:

• Reddit
Reddit is an incredible collection of diverse content. The unique thing about this site is its focus on the more intellectual stories, i.e. subjects that branch into philosophy and politics as well as technology. I’ve seen many political sites that are heavier in this area, but none that ride the line between this space and technology so gracefully.
• Digg
Digg is an essential resource. Watching the front page for this site yields perhaps the hottest technology stories of the moment. It’s purely technical, so you’re not going to see it watered down with other types of content. If you’re a technical geek and this isn’t one of your sources you need to attack yourself.

Yes, most already know about Digg and Reddit, but they’re still worth mentioning. You have to learn to let go and limit your inputs; realize that the odds are good that anything you need to know will likely hit one of these two sites. Trust the system.

In addition to these meta-feeds you of course want to include a number of other specialized sources as well. These could range from personal blogs to industry-specific sites that keep you abreast of current events. For industry-oriented content you want to focus on the sources that bring the best content per unit of time. This seems fairly obvious, but being able to make the distinction between “cool”, “necessary”, and redundant is very important.

Not to pick on any particular site, but if you read a lot of different technical sources you may notice that content rarely shows up on Slashdot without first being hitting at least one other site. The question then becomes — do you need that site as well? Look for these types of sources within your list and see where you can trim them. I haven’t read Slashdot in over a year.

Choose What to Read Based on How Much Time You Have

So that brings us to the most important element of all this — deciding what to read at what time. I suggest that you organize your feeds into two to three groups based on priority. I call mine (creative, I know) primary, secondary, and tertiary.

The key here is to take a look at what you want to accomplish during your reading session, and then pick the feed group that corresponds to it. Here’s how my groups break down:

• Primary: My main aggregations + information security news (which comes from a Yahoo! Pipe I made). This is for getting up to speed quickly on the things that are necessary. Nothing extra goes in here.
• Secondary: This is where I put my main feeds that I care about but aren’t part of primary. If I have a bit more time I may look at these, but they are mostly after-hours reading.
• Tertiary: These are the feeds that I want to have the ability to monitor, but won’t check regularly. I never check these at work.

Here are my others in no particular order:

• blogs (personal and select professional blogs)
• security-blogs (information security blogs)
• security-news (additional infosec news)
• security-vulns (a myriad of vulnerability feeds)
• tracker-links (watches my friends’ linkrolls via del.icious and Google)
• tracker-books (watches my friends’ books)
• tracker-iphone (watches iPhone news via a custom Yahoo! Pipe)
• tracker-semantic (watches semantic web news via a custom Yahoo! Pipe)
• temporary (gathering bin for random feeds from people who contact me)

Basically, the names of my folders within Google Reader tell me exactly when they should be read. I can easily tell — based on what I’m doing and how much time I have — which areas to read and which to ignore. This type of input control is critical for reading news efficiently.

Have a Process

The second piece of the evolved news reading puzzle is being able to quickly rip through the sources that you’ve decided on. Too many people suffer on this step and end up mangled in a car wreck of bookmarks and open browser windows.

My technique is to use one application — Firefox. I use Google Reader for my RSS Reader, and the trick is to operate using the these three steps:

1. Open Google Reader within Firefox (it’s one of my homepage tabs) and select the items you want to read. When you’re done going through your feeds, close your Google Reader tab.
2. Starting on the leftmost tab, read each one until you’re done.
3. Consider your news session finished and return to your current task.

The beauty is in the first one — select your items and close your reader. The reason we get so discombobulated is that we’re constantly going down various tangents. We open a site, read for a bit, maybe follow a link, and before we know it three hours have passed. It’s bad form, and it leads to 1) feelings of never getting enough news, and 2) wasting time. This method solves that by subconsciously saying to yourself:

Once you’ve opened all the stories that interest you and closed Google Reader, everything you need to see today is now waiting for you in separate tabs.

It sounds simple enough, but this is precisely what your mind needs to hear in order to be able to proceed. Without hearing this you’re left with a quiet nagging in the back of the mind. “Did I see everything?” “What did I miss?” These sorts of thoughts keep you from functioning optimally. But now that you can dismiss this sort of tugging at your attention, you are free to fully immerse yourself in the current task.

Archive

The final piece of this whole absorption process is archiving what you find interesting. You do this not only so that you can maybe go back and brush up on it later, but so you can refer others to it easily when it comes up in conversation.

My solution for this is a combination of Del.icio.us – a free service that allows you to keep and share your bookmarks online — and the sharing option within Google Reader. The key thing about del.icio.us is its use of tags. When combined with Firefox Quicksearches, you can do instant URL bar searches of everything you’ve archived in the past (which for me is currently 1400+ sites). For me it’s as simple as this:

d linux firewall

This simple query put into my URL bar will search every bookmark I’ve ever put on the site that have those two tags assigned to them. Very powerful stuff.

Putting It All Together

Ok, so now that we’ve got all those steps, let’s see how it plays out:

1. Open Firefox and a Google Reader tab.
2. Go through your feeds and either read each item right in the reader or open it separately (in a browser tab).
3. When you’ve gone through all your feeds, close your Google Reader tab; you’re done with it.
4. Start from the left-most tab. Read each item, focusing on the core content and not the fluff. Remember, most items are 80% fluff.
5. If the item is a good reference or you may want to read it again or show it to others, archive it using a service like Del.icio.us.
6. When you’re done processing all the open tabs, you’re done reading news.

That’s it. It’s a process with a beginning and an end, which is a critical part of being able to break the cycle of inefficient news reading. You don’t want to drift around hoping that you read your news for the day — you want to know that you did.

The cool thing about this system is that you not only cover all your news in a repeatable, dependable way, but you also do so very quickly. This gives more time to do what’s important, namely putting all that newfound information to use.:

My friend Ken just put up a post about what tools he uses for being productive on his MBP. If you aren’t using the tools he talks about you should consider trying them out.

[ Link: Being More Productive on my Mac ]

Those of us who use RSS tend to struggle constantly with two impulses: 1) the drive to reduce your information inputs in order to focus more on output, and 2) the urge to seek out additional stuff that you’ll likely end up pruning later in step 1.

But even after people settle on a good set of feeds, people usually spend far too long reading them every day, and just looking at an unruly mass of unread items is enough to stress you out. Most don’t feel their feeds are organized, don’t know which ones they should be reading at any given time. But there’s a solution.

<

p align=”center”>Organize your feeds into groups based on the time you have available to read them. Separate current-events and work-related content from specialized and personal content. This way you can take in your feeds in more manageable chunks based on where you are.

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p align=”center”>[ My feeds configured using Google Reader. ]

Examples

Blogs

What: Personal blogs, any sites where the personality of the site’s author(s) come through. When: Every 1-3 days, after hours and during breaks.

Bookmarks

What: Here I subscribe to all my friends’ and associates’ bookmarks through del.icio.us. When: As they come in, after hours. This is a discovery activity, meaning I’m using them to find new stuff to learn.

Books

What: Here I subscribe to popular book lists, such as the New York Times bestseller list, friends/associates books on LibraryThing, etc. When: As they come in, after hours. Again, this is about expanding, which isn’t done during time crunches.

News

What: This is where you put your primary news feeds, i.e. the ones you use to stay up to date on current events, industry news, etc. Don’t put any specialized feeds here that aren’t necessary for current events or work. This folder is for acquiring knowledge about current events that may help you during the day. Think about putting pre-aggregated feeds in here, like Techmeme, Techcrunch, etc. in order to save time. When: This I usually read every day upon arriving to work, and possibly again during breaks and lunch.

Main

What: This is where you put most of your feeds. This is your general folder. The catch-all. Science feeds, comic feeds, specialized news-sites, non-personal blogs that you follow — whatever. When: Usually at least once a day — after hours.

SecBlogs

What: This is where I put my security blogs. This is a good folder for specialized industry sites that you follow. As with blogs vs. main, I differentiate between a security blog and a security site by how much of a personal feel the site has to it. If it’s a lot, it’s a blog; if it’s more like a list of stories, I put it under Secnews. When: Once every 1-3 days usually at the beginning of the work day while I’m reading news. Security is a philosophical discipline, so it’s important to follow what people are discussing within the field. It helps you to cultivate your own ideas.

SecNews

What: Security content that doesn’t fall under News or SecurityBlogs. I put a lot of the big security aggregation feeds in here. SecGuru, Altavista, etc. When: Every day along with my news. In fact, sometimes I’ll read this folder and skip the regular news. It just depends on how I feel and whether or not I’m going to possibly need to discuss some current events in the space.

SecVulns

What: All your vulnerability feeds. Enough said. When: This depends on what kind of work I’m doing. If I’m doing heavy security testing at the time I’ll be in this often. If not, I’ll pick up the major ones from the SecNews folder.

Trackers

What: I use these folders to track certain things I’m interested in. Currently one such topic is the iPhone. So what you put in the folder is various ways of following what’s being said about your given subject. For example, for the iPhone tracker I’m currently following an iPhone blog called My iPhone, and the Google Blog Search results for the term. Other ideas include ego searches for your own name and/or searches for your friends’ names. When: As they come up, after hours.

Conclusion

When you organize your feeds in this way you help remove the stress of not knowing if you read “enough”. This is something of a GTD approach to things — allowing you to read the appropriate folders according to what frame of mind you’re in at the time, and how much time you have to spend. In short, read the folders that you have time for, and close your reader. Done.

This is GTD-like because it allows you to develop trust in your method, which eliminates stress and allows you to focus on what you’re doing. Without this approach many constantly fret about whether or not they’ve missed something important.

I find this system helps me greatly, and I hope it will help you as well. If you have any comments, questions, or recommendations on how to improve this system I’d really love to hear them.:

I just spent the weekend cleaning my computer room, which is now my new home office. It’s been very refreshing. I threw out hundreds of pounds of crap I’ve been hoarding for my entire eight (8) years in the computer field. Old hardware, peripherals, manuals, software, games, etc. — all gone. I saved a few things, but probably only 5% of what I had.

The point is that it felt really good to do this. It’s part of the whole GTD thing — starting fresh and then following up with a good strategy for managing new inputs. If yo haven’t done this yet I really encourage you to give it a try. To me, simplification has a raw, natural beauty to it.

Collect

Capture everything that you need to track or remember or act on in what Allen calls a ‘bucket’: either a physical inbox, email inbox, tape recorder, notebook, or any combination of these. Get everything out of your head and into your collection device, ready for processing. All buckets should be processed to empty at least once per day.

Process

When you process your inbox, follow a strict workflow:

• Start at the top.
• Deal with one item at a time.
• Never put anything back into ‘in’.
• If an item requires action:

• do it (if it takes less than two minutes),
• delegate it, or
• defer it.

• If not,

• file it for reference,
• throw it away, or
• incubate it for possible action later.

The 2-minute Rule: If it would take less than 2 minutes to do something, just do it right away. Two minutes is a guideline, roughly the time it would take to formally defer the action.

Organize

Allen describes a suggested set of lists which you can use to keep track of items awaiting attention:

• Next actions – For every item requiring your attention, decide what is the next action that you can physically take on it. For example, if the item is ‘Write project report’, the next action might be ‘Email Fred for meeting minutes’, or ‘Call Jim to ask about report requirements’, or something similar. Though there may be many steps and actions required to complete the item, there will always be something that you need to do first, and this should be recorded in the next actions list. Preferably, these are organized by the context in which they can be done, such as ‘in the office’, ‘by the phone’, or ‘at the store’.
• Projects – every ‘open loop’ in your life or work which requires more than one physical action to achieve becomes a ‘project’. These are tracked and periodically reviewed to make sure that every project has a next action associated with it and can thus be moved forward.
• Waiting for – when you have delegated an action to someone else or are waiting for some external event before you can move a project forward, this must be tracked in your system and periodically checked to see if action is due or a reminder needs to be sent.
• Someday/Maybe – things that you want to do at some point, but not right now. Examples might be ‘learn Chinese’, or ‘take diving holiday’.

A calendar is also important for keeping track of your appointments and commitments; however, Allen specifically recommends that the calendar be reserved for what he terms the ‘hard landscape’: things which absolutely have to be done by a particular deadline, or meetings and appointments which are fixed in time and place. ‘To-do’ items should be reserved for the next action lists.

A final key organizing component of GTD is the filing system. Getting Things Done says that a filing system, if it is to be used, must be easy, simple and fun. Even a single piece of paper, if you need it for reference, should get its own file if it doesn’t belong in a folder you already have. Allen’s suggestion is that you keep a single, alphabetically organized filing system, in order to make it as quick and easy as possible to store and retrieve the information you need.

Review

The lists of actions and reminders will be of little use if you don’t review them at least daily, or whenever you have time available. Given the time, energy and resources that you have at that particular moment, decide what is the most important thing for you to be doing right now, and do it.

At least weekly, the discipline of GTD requires that you review all your outstanding actions, projects and ‘waiting for’ items, making sure that any new tasks or forthcoming events are entered into your system, and that everything is up to date. Allen suggests the creation of a tickler file in order to help refresh your memory each week with your outstanding tasks and projects.

Do

Any organizational system is no good if you spend all your time organizing your tasks instead of actually doing them! David Allen’s contention is that if you can make it simple, easy and fun to take the actions that you need to take, you will be less inclined to procrastinate or become overwhelmed with too many ‘open loops’.

(All Content From Wikipedia’s Article on GTD)