Gmail is a very useful web app

I know, I haven’t posted any blog entries in a while. Been busy like crazy with projects, and this time of year it’s even harder with the start of our Little League team and also all the yard work that has to be done early spring. At least tax season is behind us.

Anyway, let’s see...what’s the latest tech tip I can share with you? The coolest thing I’ve tried lately is Gmail’s

Here’s how I have mine set up. I’ve got Gmail configured to check my main two accounts via POP3, BUT leave messages on the server. That’s an important option, because that way messages will still download to my “main” tower system at home. If I didn’t tell Gmail to leave messages on the server, Gmail would download and remove them and they’d be unavailable to me on my main computer. That would be bad.

Gmail has lots of useful options for this, too - such as the ability to respond to somebody using the address they sent to originally. This cuts back on the confusion that can happen when somebody who emails you at one particular address and gets a reply from another. If you email me at vin@keystonewebs.com and I reply through Gmail, it should appear to come from keystonewebs.com.

Other Office-ey features include an address book, which you can populate from your Mac’s address book in a variety of ways, integration with Google calendar, and integration with Google Documents.

Oh, and it even has an out of office function which, after the next few hectic months, I’ll be ready to use when I take my vacation!

If you’re an email power user with multiple accounts, which you need to access from various locations while still preserving a “master” account somewhere,
Gmail is the way to go. It’s (naturally) free.

Oh geesh, I almost forgot the best thing about using Gmail this way - the iPhone! Gmail’s web interface on the iPhone is WAAAAY better, IMHO, than the dedicated mail app. multiple account features. This is the closest thing to Exchange functionality with Exchange and the expense it involved. If you’ve got multiple email accounts and struggle to find a way to access those accounts from multiple computers (from a remote office, or friend’s house, or wireless hotspot), this is the way to do it.

GTD tip - voice recorder

Did you check out any of the GTD stuff I linked to in my post about Nozbe and the Getting Things Done system?

No? That’s OK, I’m sure you’ll get to it eventually. You’ve made a mental note to check it out sometime, right? Hardy har.

Well, if you have started looking into it, you’ve probably discovered that one of the first steps of implementing a good GTD system and increasing your productivity is learning how to collect all the informational "stuff" that flies at you all day long.

When you’re at your computer or you have your trusty notebook or stack of index cards handy, it’s easy to capture all the tasks your brain realizes you must finish to move your projects forward.

I don’t know about you, but I find that my brain turns to my work a good bit when I’m driving. Then what?

Simple. Buy an inexpensive micro voice recorder, and keep it in your briefcase or purse on the seat or in your coin tray at all times. If your brain reminds you of something you need to add to that big proposal you’re working on, hit record and speak your notes. When you’re back in a “normal” office environment, just hit play and get your notes into shape. It’s all part of the belief that your brain isn’t always the best place to store bunches of mental sticky notes. Have the thought, record it somehow to a location where you know you’ll see/hear it again, and move on. Make room for more ideas.

This has worked great for me. I have an Olympus tapeless recorder, takes a single AAA battery, and it wasn’t really that expensive. Picked it up at Staples, I believe. It even plugs into my computer via USB and I can download the recordings onto my hard drive, although honestly I haven’t needed to do that.

You can have fun with this, too. When you’re waiting at an especially long traffic light, glance over at the car next to you. Look the vehicle up-and-down like you’re seeing something really interesting. If you catch the driver’s eye, lift the recorder to your face and begin speaking into it, all the while maintaining visual contact. Heck, it doesn’t even have to be on. Shake your head side to side as if to say “tsk tsk,” smile, and put the recorder down right before the light turns green.

OK, don't really do that. Unless it's somebody you know. And maybe not even then. But it was fun to imagine, eh?

Nozbe and the Art of Getting Things Done

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you know that I’m somebody who keeps a lot of irons in the fire. I’m not bragging – I don’t always know if it’s a good thing or not.

But one thing I do know is that if it weren’t for David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) book and productivity system, I’d be struggling to keep up with everything. Allen’s two books, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress Free Productivity and Ready For Anything have really changed how I look at work and life in general.

I started this post as a quick review of Nozbe, an online application that helps you “do” GTD. But it’s kind of hard to talk about GTD services or software without an overview of GTD itself.

This is a long summary, but I really couldn’t decide what could be cut-out. If you’re interested in the GTD concept at all, however, I don’t think you’ll find it a long read.

GTD is a system of productivity and task management that’s based on a few key principles and ideas:

• Your mind is a terrible place to store and organize tasks – it doesn’t have a lot of RAM so to speak. Don’t rely on it; it will eventually let you down. You know this to be true.
• The minute you accept responsibility for a task, your brain – whether actively or on a subconscious level – thinks it should be doing it. All the time. And it’ll remind you about it at the worst possible times.
• A bunch of loose-ends and “stuff” – such as to-do lists to review, mail to go through, phone calls to return, shopping to pick up, emails to pick through, books to read, research to conduct, and other agreements you’ve made with yourself – end up as tasks colliding in your mind. This produces mental stress and inhibits creativity.
  
• Think about the modern information worker today – we’re constantly “connected,” checking in at the office from vacations, working extra long hours, reading and researching voraciously, and yet our list of things to do never seems to get any shorter. Is it because there’s so much more work to do – or is it because we haven’t adapted the way we look at work to the realities of the information age?
• A key to freeing up your mental energy is a regular review of your “stuff,” whereby you decide first “What is this?” and then, “What do I do with it?” Things that can be done right away, do right away. Things that belong to somebody else to do, delegate. Things that need no action should either be filed away or thrown out. What you end up with are distinct, “do-able” projects, each organized into tasks – and each with a “next action” required to move the project along. If you have 5 projects, each with 10 tasks, you don’t stare at a list of 50 things to do. You review a list of 5 next actions required to move those projects forward.
• A task is the smallest unit of measurement when it comes to getting things done. “Build Web Site for Acme Company” is not a task, it’s a project. What is the very first physical, do-able thing you’d have to do move towards having Acme Company’s Web site done? That’s your next action. What other discrete actions will have to happen? Design the navigation menu; remind the client to email the Word documents containing the content; review those Word documents; call the client’s printer for the most recent logo file; register the domain name; and so forth.
• A key to getting those projects done is looking at the contexts in which their tasks can be completed. There’s no point looking at tasks classified as “At computer” while you’re riding the bus to work.
• The specifics of the “trusted system” for storing your projects, tasks, and context info is less important than sticking with the GTD principles, even though at first it might seem counterproductive. If software helps you to be more organized and let the ball drop much less often, so be it. By the same token, many practitioners of GTD use a stack of index cards and a pencil.
  

When you start to get good at GTD, you really do find that the mental energy you recover can help boost your productivity because you’re doing just the right things at the right times, in the right places, to get projects completed. You’re not worrying about things that aren’t yours to worry about, and there’s no nagging feeling that you’re letting something important slip through the cracks.

Anyway, I could go on about GTD forever, but again the point of this post was to mention Nozbe, the Web-based subscription service for implementing GTD. (Note that I don't have screen shots here because, well, I don't necessarily want to share my live project data with the world. But the Nozbe site has plenty of screen grabs and you can sign up for a demo as well).

Nozbe sticks pretty faithfully to Allen’s principles, offering you three main views of your working life after you sign-in: Next Actions, Projects, and Contexts. It’s simple and straightforward. There are probably a dozen other features that could be added to Nozbe, but the goal for Nozbe is to be your “trusted place” for your project and task info, with no complicated interface elements getting in the way of that. To the uninitiated, it may even seem overly simplistic; to them I respond: “It’s exactly as complicated as it needs to be, and not a bit more.”

I’ve tried several dedicated software programs for implementing my GTD system, including GhostAction, iGTD, and OmniFocus. They’ve all got great features and would probably work well for many people. Personally, though, I need “always-on” access to my GTD info, whether I’m at the office, at home, or on-site with a customer...or even in my vehicle. Being Web-based, Nozbe is great for me because it’s a simple log-in to my account, and all my info is there. With the others, you’ve got to use a .Mac account to sync between computers – and I like keeping my .Mac stuff nice and simple, using it only for calendars and contacts. I’ve found that getting too fancy with it ends up causing sync problems. Yes, .Mac is far, far from perfect.

Even better, Nozbe has an iPhone version of its web page that works GREAT. You can even pick an alternate iPhone-friendly login with a short name and simple PIN number, making it easier to log-in from the iPhone’s touch screen.

Of course, a downside could be that if you can’t get online, you can’t get to your GTD info. Well, most of what I do involves having to be online in one form or another. If my Internet connection at home or work goes down, I can’t do 95% of my stuff anyway. And, because GTD requires periodic review of your projects and tasks, it’s not like I can’t remember anything stored in my trusted system.

Nozbe is subscription-based; I’ve got two – a Nozbe account for my personal endeavors, and one for my full-time job. They offer a free version with a limited number of projects and contexts, a basic plan that costs $5 per month (or less if you prepay for a year), and more advanced accounts offering online storage, enhanced security, etc. I use the basic plan, prepaid for 2 years, which ends up costing under $6 per month for two Nozbe accounts. That’s about four cups of coffee – well worth the boost in productivity and satisfaction I derive from, well, getting things done.

In fact, when you learn the GTD system in both theory and practice, you’ll wonder how you ever managed before. It’s a great thing to do a GTD project review on a Friday afternoon, know exactly what you need to do on Monday morning and the rest of next week. And then, completely forget about it - in a good way: Instead of feeling like I got nowhere all week at work, and wondering if I should come in Saturday to catch-up, and generally spinning my wheels, I’m thinking about how much fun I’m going to have grabbing my camera bag and a few lenses and heading out to the countryside to try out some new photography techniques. My work will be waiting for me on Monday, and I’ll know exactly what to do next.

If you want to give it a try, click the link below and sign up for your free Nozbe account. However, I recommend you read the Allen books first, maybe read them twice, before buying any software or service. They're available at Amazon and other retailers as well as at your local library.



I should let you know in the interest of journalistic integrity, that if you decide that you like Nozbe and convert to a paid account, I get a referral free. However, that wasn't the motive for this post, and I didn't realize they had this program until after I'd invested the time on this entry.

Have you read the David Allen books or tried GTD yet? What are your experiences? Feel free to share by posting a comment here!