Productivity 101

Photo by Cheeseworks

I was visiting the Making it all Work seminar featuring David Allen in Amsterdam yesterday. The seminar was organized by the David Allen Company and Life Architect. It was my third time that I visited one of David Allen’s seminars. I also listen regularly to the audio version of the seminar. It was as usual a very good seminar, relaxed, focused and entertaining. It looks like it doesn’t cost him any energy. Because I know what it is to have to present in a different timezone, it is amazing how he does it. With humor but with great persuasion he tells his story about productivity. You can read elsewhere on Internet about the content of the seminar.

There are two things I want to write about in this post regarding the seminar. First, David demoed his own system with Lotus Notes with the eProducivity addon from Eric Mack. He also showed his extensive use of MindManager. By doing this he showed first hand how it works in his own personal and professional life. I must say this was quite powerful. It resembled much of how I have set up my own system in Evernote.

The other thing I wanted to mention is the story behind the story. When you have been introduced to GTD and have a good understanding of the practicalities of GTD it is fundamental you get the basic and fundamental theory behind it. Completely in line with his new book, Making it All Work, David pointed to the fundamental behavior changes that are needed to really get GTD and stick to it.

Couple of quotes to illustrate what I really got out of this seminar:

“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” – David Allen

“Psychologists say Distributed Cognition, I say Write it down” - David Allen

“A successful executive solves bigger problems that he or she creates!” - David Allen

And as always during a seminar like this all kind of new ideas, tasks and projects have surfaced and are now in my trusted system waiting for the right timing.

written by Fokke \\ tags: David Allen, GTD

Over the last two months I have seen an incredible increase of visitors to my blog and readers of the feed. I have also seen a lot more subscriptions to the email service of my blog.

So a big welcome to all of you who are new around here!

Most of you have been visiting because of the serie on Evernote and GTD. I am so pleased that a lot of you are using Evernote for your GTD process. It has been a tremendous step forward for my workflow when I started to use Evernote as my main GTD cockpit. I am looking for more stuff to write about in this regard so stay tuned.

Feel free to comment on this post or others with your tips, questions or just to say hello. Interaction is great fun in this online world.

For those of you who haven’t read the about page, please do. It will give you some background on who I am and what this blog is all about.

So again, welcome and stay tuned for more practical posts with new tips, tricks and ways to enjoy life to the fullest.

written by Fokke \\ tags: GTD, Personal

Tags

When I first started out with Evernote in a GTD way I struggled with using the rights features for the right GTD use. I tried using the tags as contexts but this didn’t work out in a way I liked. I have to be honest that early on the tags feature of Evernote was somewhat unpredictable in my case where I mixed the Windows and Mac client together with the iPhone app and the occasional use of the web interface. But even after those glitches were solved by the guys from Evernote I still didn’t completely trust that system. Not that it wasn’t reliable but it just didn’t work in my workflow.

In the meantime I have found a great way for tags in my GTD setup. I use the tags as temporary labels for project support material entries. I use it for web clippings, all kinds of documents (see below about Premium). It is my experience that I have at most about 20 active tags. When the project is done I simply delete the tag.

Saved Searches

This feature of Evernote is used for several lists that I use every now and then. I have a saved search that lists all the notes that contain interesting books, films or music. Also Saved searches provides me with a list of restaurants. I have for each saved search a dedicated word that is used for generating the list from all my notes across all notebooks. For books to read the keyword is simply: booktip.

Premium feature

There was one thing in my GTD workflow that didn’t quite worked. In a lot of my actions and projects I have to deal with documents, spreadsheets and other files. With the premium (aka payed) version of Evernote you can use these kind of files in your notes. What I particulary like is the ability to mail documents to your Evernote account. I explained the feature of mailing to your Evernote account in an earlier post on Evernote and GTD.

When I receive a document that I need to review I mail in to my Evernote account address. Before sending the mail I change the subject line of the forwarded mail with a meaningful action like this:

Read quarterly report for the budget meeting.

All mailed entries are routed to my Evernote Inbox and are processed from within Evernote. The automatic syncing of documents is just amazing. Always the most actual version of the document is available on whatever device or computer I work on.

This is the last entry in this series on Evernote and GTD. Since this is my primary GTD setup, every now and then I will write about new cool things I have figured out. For your convenience I have listed the entries below:

Evernote and GTD (1)

Evernote and GTD (2): Collecting

Evernote and GTD (3): Collecting with the iPhone

written by Fokke \\ tags: Evernote, GTD