GTD Revisited

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Adapting my Getting Things Done-based productivity system from a Palm TX to the new iPod Touch has been something of an adventure in itself.

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a remarkable productivity system when used properly, but I haven’t been using it properly. Three times in the past few years, I’d start using it properly, but then I’d get deeply into a project and skip my reviews for a few weeks, and the next thing I know I’ve fallen back to relying on my Palm’s calendar alarms and to-do lists to keep up with important things like taxes and bills, and my computer’s desktop is covered with disorganized little electronic sticky-notes for things I want to remember. The GTD stuff is left by the wayside.

The Touch’s audible alarms are extremely quiet. Far too quiet to hear them when I’m out and about, in fact. It was obvious after a couple days of using it that my old method of relying on calendar alarms and to-do lists wasn’t going to suffice. It was time to try GTD again, and to keep it up this time.

After reviewing the system, the first thing I did was look at the most recent incarnation of MonkeyGTD (a TiddlyWiki-based GTD system that I’ve mentioned before). It was good when I looked at it a year ago, but it has really improved now! A few hours with it and all of my to-do list items were transferred, properly set up as projects, next actions, future actions, future-dated “tickler” reminders, or reference items. My electronic sticky-notes were reduced to four, all actual notes relating to things I’m working on at present. My calendar items were trimmed down to only appointments and things that have to be done on a particular day or at a particular time.

It’s quite a weight off my shoulders, as it has been the last three times I’ve done this. But since I can’t rely on my Palm’s alarms anymore, I think I’ll be forced to keep the daily and weekly reviews going this time. Things shouldn’t be able to accumulate and hang around for ages (like fixing a piece of exercise equipment — that has been on my to-do list for over a year). And if I can keep the reviews going, I should be able to keep the entire system going.

Wish me luck! 🙂

“What Do You Want To Do With Your Life?”

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I have a confession to make. I’m a self-help book junkie.

I love a good self-help book. Most of them are useless to the vast majority of people, but a well-written one always fascinates me regardless of whether the problem it’s addressing is one that I have or not. But when you find one of the tiny percentage of them that’s useful specifically to you, it’s like finding gold in your back yard.

When I read about a free self-help e-book called “What Do You Want To Do With Your Life?” (via LifeHacker), I checked it out. It’s similar to others that I’ve read, but since it’s free, it gives me something to recommend to people that’s a little easier to get than my three favorites.

I haven’t finished it yet, but from what I’ve read so far, it looks like a good place to begin answering the most important practical question you’ll ever find.

iPod Touch, Part III: Adventures in Data-Moving

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So, having learned that the iPod Touch probably could replace my slowly-dying Palm TX, I’ve picked one up a few days ago. The box said that it required Windows or Mac OS X, which is an irritation but not a problem; I have this system set up to dual-boot between Ubuntu Linux and Windows XP, as well as having a VMware virtual Windows XP box under Linux.

I pulled it out, carefully unwrapped it, and turned it on. It showed a screen that seemed to be saying it had to be plugged into my computer, so I did so. Then, reading the quick-start manual, I saw that I had to load iTunes. Grumbling, I downloaded and installed it.

iTunes says that my brand-spankin’-new iPod Touch has an old version of the OS, and would I like to upgrade to 2.0 for an additional $10? Grumbling further (but not really surprised — I’d read up on it before I bought it), I agreed, paid my ten bucks, and downloaded the update. iTunes wiped the old OS, put the Touch into recovery mode, and then… said that there was an error.

It seems that you can do nearly everything with the Touch via Windows XP running in a VMware virtual machine, but upgrading the OS requires Windows to be running on the bare metal.

After taking care of that little problem (via dual-boot), I settled down to moving my data.

My contact list isn’t all that large — about 100 people — and it had ten years worth of accumulated cruft and outdated information, so I decided to move that manually, updating each one as I did. That took a while, but had no major surprises. I decided to sync it with my GMail account as well, so I’d have an online backup; no problems there either.

The 120+ e-books that I’ve purchased for my Palm over the years were all bought from eReader.com. The eReader program was available in the iTunes Application store (for free, of course), so I loaded it up. I dredged up the password for eReader.com, entered it, and was pleased to discover that my e-books were all there, waiting to be downloaded for the iPod. I downloaded one old favorite and tried to unlock it. Tried being the operative word… somehow, even after entering the proper unlocking information, it wouldn’t work. I had to sign onto the site via a web browser and update my information, then re-download the book, before it would work. It should work for all of them now though.

The To-Do List was… interesting. The iPod Touch doesn’t have one built in, so I checked out their Application Store. There were three free to-do list applications that I downloaded and tested. The first two (I don’t remember their names) were too simple to be useful for me; neither one could handle more than a single list, for instance. The third one was Dobot Todos, and it didn’t take long to realize that I had a winner. Unfortunately the Apple store is two revisions behind, and is dragging its collective feet about updates… I’m sure they’ll correct that eventually, but I wish they’d do it more quickly.

Next up: my calendar information. This is the single most-used function of my Palm TX, and I really really didn’t want to have to re-enter all of the data for it by hand. But from everything I could see, the only direct way to get my information moved over (without a Mac computer to go through) was to go through Microsoft Outlook.

Yuck.

But I did have a long-since-retired copy of Office XP (with Outlook 2002) around here somewhere, so I started excavating my CD-ROM collection and finally found it. It installed with no problem, and with a little setup, it synced to the iPod easily — the only trouble was that two of my contacts somehow got duplicates. I carefully deleted the duplicate entries, re-synced, and made sure the originals were still in both places (they were) and wouldn’t re-duplicate themselves on later syncs (they didn’t), then I was ready for my Palm data.

Unfortunately, my Palm doesn’t seem to want to retire, and it and the rest of my electronics fought me all the way.

First I had to dig out the CD that it originally came with (which meant another excavation), then RE-install the Palm Desktop software (for some reason, the installation I already had on that machine wasn’t good enough for it), then tell that to sync to Outlook instead (carefully telling it to overwrite the Palm’s contact information with the desktop’s). Then the virtual machine wouldn’t make a wired connection with the Palm, no matter what I tried — I never did figure that one out. Then the network connection couldn’t find my XP virtual machine (VMware’s bridged network connection was hooked to a different network card than the one that I’m currently using). I finally got everything set up properly though, and the Palm reluctantly turned over its information to Outlook, which then sent it on to the iPod. A few manual tweaks (because the iPod doesn’t seem to like the “zero minutes ahead” alarm setting), and all seems well now.

My next project is getting a few audio-books (that I purchased from Audible.com) onto it. That shouldn’t be a problem… I hope. 🙂 Then, once WinPwn comes out with an update for the 2.0.1 firmware, I’ll jailbreak the iPod so I can load my music onto it from Linux. Then the configuration stage should be complete.

The iPod Touch: Good, But Not Good Enough

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GoddessJ and I were with some friends at a mall yesterday, and we decided to stop by the Apple store. I wanted to see the iPod Touch in action; I was considering replacing my aging Palm TX with one, and at all the other stores that carry them around here, they’re never charged and running.

I was very favorably impressed. The touch screen on it is ridiculously good, and the software seems very well thought out. But I also discovered a fatal flaw: there’s no external speaker on it at all, so it can’t duplicate the most often-used function of my Palm, which is sounding an alarm to notify me of upcoming appointments.

It also tops out at 32GB (at least 10GB too small for my entire music collection), still doesn’t have cut-and-paste capability, and Apple is keeping a stranglehold on the applications the company allows to run on it. So I’m sorry to say that I won’t be buying one. Maybe the next generation will remedy these lacks. If so, I’ll buy it in a heartbeat.

UPDATE: As described in the comments, it seems that the Touch does have a working external speaker, at least for notifications of events and such. Rumor has it that there’s a hardware refresh on the way, but I’ll probably be picking one up today anyway. One of the less expensive models, so I won’t feel so bad about replacing it with an updated version in a year or two. 🙂

“Dr. Strangevote saves mankind with Luddite voting recipe”

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I’m usually an all-out pro-technology guy, but I agree with this completely: no e-voting until it’s provably (and checkably!) secure against fraud. There are too many people who would see the ends (the election of their chosen candidates) as justifying the means (tampering with the voting system) — you’ve got to make it as hard to do as possible, and I have yet to hear of an e-voting system that’s secure against even a determined amateur.

“Delete Flash Cookies”

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I’m very security- and privacy-conscious, so it came as something of a shock to read (on LifeHacker) about a kind of cookie file that I didn’t know existed. I picked up the Objection extension and took a look… there were files from all sorts of places, going back years. 🙁

I am not happy about this, and I’ll be checking whenever I let a site use Flash from now on.

“Cybercrooks get faster, further and sneakier”

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Although interesting (to me) in and of itself, I’m mentioning this article because of this bit from the last paragraph:

In other developments, spammers have abandoned the use of image-based spam, file attachment spam and other such frippery by going back to basics. Nine in ten spam messages now contain little more beyond a few simple words and a URL.

I’d call that a major win for the anti-spam effort. 🙂

I’d wondered at the lack of spam recently, but I figured that SpamBayes/ThunderBayes was just doing an exceptionally good job. Which it is (when I saw the above, I checked… out of 308 spam messages in the past couple weeks, I’d only had to look at forty of them, and SpamBayes was unsure of only seventeen of those), but getting only about 22 spams a day is pretty freakin’ amazing too, considering that I’ve had these e-mail addresses for five and seven years now. (I’m not counting the GMail account or the account at the company that bought our Project Badger, since both of them have their own very effective spam-filtering stuff.) After only three years with my previous e-mail account, I was being inundated with a couple hundred spam messages a day.