follicle²

With the demise of further development of Google Notes, I didn't seriously think for long about implementing my own web notebook. Instead, I've persevered with Evernote and it's gradually infiltrating my daily habits.  

Me, I like lists, so I've captured some thoughts on its strengths and weaknesses.

For

• Web access means ubiquitous access
• Native iPhone app means it suits the limited UI
• Native Windows and Mac apps, mean that clipping and saving both native and web content is easy
• Accepts rich formatted text, pictures, PDF attachments
• The free version is pretty capable (for now)
• Text recognition on images, so the text is searchable.  This is pretty clever

Against

• Lack of decent text editing. I hate making something a heading by selecting bold, and upping the font size. I want styles, or at least HTML-type headings (h1, h2...). 
• Searching on iPhone is a bit painful, although very flexible. Why can't I just go to a home page with a list of all the notebooks?
• Lack of rich text editing on the iPhone, so you can't edit most of the docs you create
• Can't select Google Mail as my email client on any platform

What I am getting used to is having all this information at my fingertips, wherever I am -- work, home, or out and about. It's a GTD inbox for one. I also keep a shopping list on there, so when I have an idea, it's quick to add, and when I'm in the supermarket, there it is.  Same with books to read when I'm in a bookshop, DVDs to watch when I'm in the video store and so on.  I have some favourite recipes on there so I can think about what to cook when I'm at the shop and know what ingredients I need to get.  And so the list of uses goes on.

Some have suggested that Evernote is a killer app for the iPhone. That's overstated, but it's certainly a good example of how a ubiquitous network and multi-platform client can make your information more mobile.

Another example I talk about: I was in a café one Saturday morning reading a magazine, and saw a recipe that was worth noting down. I could have quietly (and selfishly) torn it out of the mag, I could have tried to find it on the Internet, or I could have typed it into my iPhone, but no, I photographed it with the iPhone and uploaded it to Evernote using the app. Some time later it got OCR'ed and the text is now searchable. That's pretty neat.

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I was going to do a long blog post about my approach to personal productivity, but others have already devoted many blog-kilometres to that. I apply the Getting Things Done (GTD) concepts where I can, in terms of the philosophy and some of the processes. It's not always as effective as I'd like, and I continue to search for a personal system (processes + tools) that improves my lot. One has to be careful not to become the armchair expert in productivity, or obsess about your processes or tools, without actually achieving anything, but it's an itch I still like to scratch from time to time.

My biggest problems are volume, multiple inputs, and tools.  My global, geographically-dispersed IT company runs on email, and I'm typically receiving 60-70 a day, and sending maybe two-thirds that number. Being off-line or in a long meeting is stressful in itself because you know how much is backing up in the in-box.  I use an automated email filter to separate those I'm only copied on into a @cc folder, and I have other filters to colour-code the remaining ones.  I work hard to get my inbox down to zero, using the 4 Ds (do, delegate, defer or delete) and forward items to folders called @Action, @ReadReview, and @WaitingOn (à la GTD), or just archive into their appropriate resting place in a local folder. I can access the online folders from my smartphone, a convenience that has its pros and cons, but it generally helps.

Having multiple sources of todo items is a fact of life: from emails, conversations, documents, meetings, thoughts.  Capturing and manipulating them can be a drag. My todo list tool of choice is SimpleGTD, mainly because it lives up to the promise. It's not perfect, a little slow at times, and not very accessible from mobile devices, but I'm rarely away from a laptop at work or at home, when I need to check it. And it's free.  I dump just about every action in there, as my central repository, but the lists can get big and important things can get buried from time to time. 

One of the absolutely essential practices of GTD to combat this is the Weekly Review, and this I find the hardest thing to do, simply because of the uninterrupted time it requires to do properly.  With a large number of simultaneous projects (remember, by GTD definition, this is anything with more than a couple of sequential actions), trawling through these and working out the Next Actions is a major activity, and hard to stay focused on.  I've learned not to try and manage a multitude of micro-projects, but group actions under broader topics like People, Financials, Resources etc. It's not as neat as I'd like, but trades off speed.

My latest pick-up is the Zen To Done (ZTD) tip of deciding at the start of each day on 2-3 Most Important Things (MITs), and making sure that you give them some focus during the day.  Write them somewhere prominently. More strategically, think about the Big Rocks for the week that you want to work on, and plan around.

So, it was a long blog post about my approach to personal productivity after all.

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