Busy doing Nothing

So ever since the news came out at work about there being redundancies, the office has been really quiet. Consultants and IFA’s alike are staying clear of the office, only coming in when they really have to. And work wise, its been dead. So much so that I have spend a large portion of the last three days sitting around staring at my empty inbox and todo list seeing that there is nothing I can do right that moment.

So what did I do today? Well besides checking my account to see that I had been paid, I read some of Getting Things Done by David Allen. I also looked on Flickr and on some blogs for Moleskine ideas.

I got my first Moleskine at Christmas and haven’t actually done anything with it yet. But today I started on that. I printed out  a handy year planner, as well as setting up some pages. To keep in line with GTD ideas, I’ve got my Next Actions page, Someday/Maybe lists, as well as a Douglas Furs page where I have made some notes about the band. Have a look at the photos below.

Clean House!

Well tonight I’ve spent a few hours trying to make things a bit neater at home.
We’ve been in this house for about a month now and its getting closer and closer to being straight. We still need a bed frame, and to get rid of some large boxes (waiting to offload them to someone at work actually).
Today I’ve sorted the under stairs cupboard, discovered the shoe rack we have won’t fit, and thrown various things away. Now I’m stuck on CD spindle cases. Do I throw them out or hold into them incase I come up with some ingenious use? Probably throw but not just yet.
Well thats about all for tonight really. Its too late to carry on much more. Sleep is calling me

Tags: life, tidy,

email in (un)organisations

Sometimes I want to scream.
I’ve been interested in the whole GTD methodology and have tried to undertake it in some parts in my own life. The main one is email at work. (I should point out I have to use Outlook being WinXP)
At my old job, my inbox just seemed to be a general dumping ground for anything that didn’t have a large category to be filed into.

Once I read and heard about applying the GTD structure to email I thought I’d try it. So I took an hour or two to set up the folders and get to work. I’ve adopted a few strategies. I have the standard folders, @Action, @Hold, @Archive, @Waiting For and @Respond. These stand as my main working folders, specifically @Action. When emails hit my inbox, I read them, and if they require me to do something, I move them to @Action. Anything that is sent to a a mailing list that I’m on, goes to a @Circulars folder for later reading (this is rarely dire information). My @Archive folder is a general archive folder, and @Hold is vital information to keep on hand. In my Inbox, I also apply some categories to help me sort stuff. Anything that I’m cc’d to gets tagged with FYI (the theory being that people should use cc properly, as for info only, not for action). In the Inbox, I then group by categories, so I can easily hide all those I’ve been cc’d in on for ignoring. That leaves the rest.
As I said @Action is usually a full folder. Its all the emails that require me to do something, or will remind me I have to do something. Once its done, I move it.

I work for a number of sales consultants who have various schemes and IFA’s. Since I don’t like the Outlook search (its too cumbersome and slow) I sort by folders (how un-gmail of me. I shudder) so each consultant has a folder, and each IFA has one, and then the big clients I look after have one too. So when an email is finished, it goes in the client folder.
Thats the bit I hate. If I was using Mail.app I would just bundle all consultant emails in one folder and tag them, then create smart folders to read these tags.

Anyway, the point of this is that most other people don’t work in this sensible way. The way I see a lot of people work is dreadful. The inbox is a (gmail style) dumping ground, only without the tools of Gmail. If an email comes in, its read, and if it needs some action, is often remarked as unread. So your entire system works on remembering those unread emails. So when you have time to do your work, your whole system is to scroll through your mails, read and unread, and pick out those unread ones to work on. So you’ve got lots of emails to work on, and lots around them to deal with mentally. As read somewhere, Outlook is designed to be useful using a hierarchical system. It drives me mad because I see it as so ineffective.
So thats what I hate. When you start working, noone tells you how to deal with email. They tell you how to use the basic functions of an email client, but not good ways to deal with it all. So I would like to educate those people, and others.
There is a better way. And even if you don’t have the tools of Gmail, or Mail.app or MailTags, or Thunderbird, you can find ways to deal with work email better.

If you would like more info, check out the Inbox Zero section on 43Folders, Merlin Mann’s Google TechTalk (very interesting, especially good for presentation style – learn tips!), and some posts by John Gruber [1]
Also, read these good articles
How to use a single Mail.app Archive (without losing your mind)
Inbox Zero: Processing to zero
Companies Limit Email Use to Boost Productivity

Great Mac Apps – Indepth Part 2

Burn – Burn is an open source CD and DVD burning program that some have compared and said betters commercial software like Roxio’s Toast. Now I have Toast and its pretty good, but its very bulky. Burn, is a nice simple little app that will burn audio CD’s, data CD’s (for Mac, PC, Joilet, UDF, and DVD Video), VCD’s. SVCD’s, DivX DVD’s, normal DVD’s as well as burning disc images to discs (dmg, img, etc). Its pretty handy really. It will also create VIDEO_TS from video files for you if you want to share a DVD with friends over a torrent or something else. And you can’t beat the price. Its equal to about zero Alex’s (can’t find a link for this. 1 Alex = $700)

AppDelete - Think of Windows for a second (I know its a painful memory). Now imagine the Start button, Control Panel and that little thing called Add/Remove Programs. Your one stop shop for removing unwanted programs. Now skip forward to the simple life of Mac OS X. Goodbye windows installers. Hello drag and drop. Well now, what about all those open source apps you downloaded that you don’t want. And what about the plist files and cache’s and settings they created and dumped in your user Library. Well AppDelete takes care of those. Simply drag and drop (so easy isn’t it Microsoft) and AppDelete finds all those nagging files and moves them all to the Trash in one hand folder. Simple. No settings. No cache’s. No application. Lovely

Monolingual - I discovered this off Macbreak Weekly and its lovely. So simple. Question: How many languages do you speak? Now how many do you use on your laptop? If the answer is 2 then lucky you. If its one, this is for you. Why do you need all the program settings and files for Hungarian, or Bavarian, or Sweedish, or any of that? You don’t. Monolingual will ask you to choose some languages to remove, then go out and trash all those files that all the many apps have stored somewhere. The result? Nothing really noticable about from at least 1Gb of brand new free space to fill with episodes of Lost.

Smultron – Finally. I’ve been waiting to talk about this. Mainly cos the icon is a strawberry. lame reason. But it is a good program. At its basic level, its a replacement for TextEdit. At its most complex, its a good program for editing XML files, plist files, or do any coding whatsoever. It does colour coding automatically for each tag, which can help keep track of which ones are open and closed. It also handles multiple open files at once, and gives you a file list so you can quickly switch between them. It also supports Full Screen mode so you can focus without the constant distraction of Mail, Firefox other unproductive apps.

Transmission – Everyone loves BitTorrent. Whether it be for nice legal file sharing with Gran, or whether its for less legal needs. In my opinion Transmission is the best out there. It is up to date, its fast, well designed, fairly well customisable. You can set download speed limits between certain times, you can monitor folders and automatically start downloads (combine with an RSS feed and Democracy for a awesome way of getting those latest TV torrents). You have other options, [see this blog post] but I don’t find any of them as nice as Transmission. Azureus is multiplatform but its slow. BitRocket seems to have trouble reaching some servers. So check it out

Thats it for part 2. Part 3 to come shortly, when we look at Growl, MenuMeters and MAMP.

Great Mac Apps – Indepth Part 1

Quicksilver – Its basically described as a way of creating functional sentences to carry out actions on your mac. You hit the key combo to bring up the window and start typing. At the basic level, its a great quick application loader, much quicker than spotlight. At its most complex, you can quickly select files from all over your mac and create an archive, or upload files to Flickr
Merlin Man is probably the poineer of selling Quicksilver. He’s how I discovered it. Its worth checking out the podcasts he does on Macbreak, 43 Folders, and The Merlin Show

Camino – It really is just another web browser. The Camino team split off from the Firefox team and begun a Mac browser. It doesn’t have some of the functionality of Firefox, like the extension support, but do you really need half of that crap? Probably not. Anyway, its quick, supports all websites Safari seems to slip up with (Google Calendar, WordPress posting, Google Docs), and its free. Check out the latest stable version or get ahead of the rest with the nightly builds.

Firefox – You should know about this one. Latest web browser from Mozilla. It works on all major OS’s, it has tabbed viewing (what doesn’t nowadays), extension support, themes, the works. Worth looking at, even if you’re on windows. Its about 145% better than IE7

VLC – Its a media player. Its fantastic. It will play pretty much any video you throw at it without the need for installing any additonal codecs. Goodbye DivX downloads, XviD, and the rest. Does full screen mode, multiple audio tracks, plays DVD’s, has a nice onscreen display, and tons more I probably don’t know about.

Adium – Quack. The icon is a duck. How cool alone is that? Its a chat client. And it supports multiple accounts all at once. So you can login to AIM, Yahoo, MSN, gTalk, ICQ, Bonjour, .mac, SameTime, Jabber, Novell GroupWise, QQ, Gadu-Gadu and Live Journal Talk. Its really skinnable and customizable. Pick out from tons of icons, like Yoda, or Mario, choose your emoticon sets, chat windows preferences, it supports Growl so you get on-screen notifications when you get messages, it checks your email for you. The only thing I would like is a nice solid “Quack” when it starts, but that could be added. Its worth checking out. Get rid of AIM, gTalk and MSN Messenger, and start taking Adium.

Ok, thats part 1 done. First 5 covered off. Hopefully that gives you some information about the apps. So check them out and if you like them, spread the word.

Great Mac Apps I use

Thought I would do a list of various apps that I really like and later I will come back and talk a bit more about them.

1.Quicksilver -  GTD must have, and all round great app, even as a Spotlight replacement
2. Camino – Open source Web browser, Cocoa app so bit better than Firefox. I’m using it right now
3. Firefox – because WordPress doesn’t play so well with Safari
4. VLC – best video player I found. Plays practically everything ever made. Ever.
5. Adium – Good multi-chat program, gTalk, MSN, AOL, Jabber, others. Cute duck icon
6. Burn – Open source CD burning software
7. AppDelete – Get rid of all those hiding bits of data for applications. Fast
8. Monolingual – Remove unwanted language packs. Free up tons of space (I gained 1.63Gb! Others report up to 4Gb)
9. Smultron – good little coding app. Strawberry logo too!
10. Transmission – Torrent app. Handy, easy to use.
11. Growl – onscreen notifications from many apps (Camino, Transmission, Adium, Skype, iStumbler, Cyberduck
12. Flip4Mac – WMV plugin for Mac. Never touch WMP again!
13. MenuMeters – system resource monitoring for the menu bar
14. Sidetrack – Scrolling for older laptops.
15. MAMP – Test out a local version of your website, with mySQL, PHP, and much more
16. GimmeSomeTune – iTunes plugin. Shows Growl notifications for songs, and gets lyrics
17. Missing Sync for Windows – sync your Windows Mobile device if you have one (I have a PDA for TomTom)
18. Democracy – subscribe to RSS feeds, video feeds, torrent feeds, automatically downloads recent
19. Microsoft Office – because sometimes you need to accommodate Windows users. And Apple has no spreadsheet program. Yet

Wow, that list was longer than I planned. I might have to do a few posts to cover all those off. I’ll update this later with links.

Updated: Thought of another one
20. Onxy - Great app for cleaning cache’s, temp files and folders, and keeping things working smoothly

Where am I?

I’ve entered the world of GPS a.k.a. sat nav. I recently got a HP iPaq 5450 PDA (partly GTD reasons), a 2GB SD memory card and a Holux GPSlim 240 Bluetooth GPS receiver. And with the magic of some navigation software, I now have the ability to get from A to B with little or no stress. Great. All I really need is a reason to use it, apart from to drive back to my parents for christmas (and I already know the way having driven it countless times).

Ever wonder why you bought something? I often find myself getting really into something (like getting a PDA) from a blog post, or website, and then spending loads to occomplish my task, which may not actually have a purpose. Hopefully when I change jobs (sooner rather than later) I will have a decent reason to use one. Until then, guide me home oh sat nav lady!