Black Belt Productivity

After reading Leo of Zen Habit’s article last Friday at Web Worker Daily, I decided to post about how I am keeping my Gmail clean and slim.

Since I got my Macbook Pro in March ‘07, I have been POPing [1] my Gmail off of the server and using Gmail itself as my online mail archive. I have setup a LOT of filters and tweaked settings so that I can keep a clean inbox and an archive structure that makes it relatively easy to purge unwanted mails.

I just bought a couple of pounds of coffee from my favorite coffee place downtown yesterday. I have been quite dissatisfied with the canisters I have been using to store my whole beans. They did not do a good job of keeping moisture in the air…away from the beans.

Tonight my family made a Target run. I had added “coffee canisters” on my Target shopping list in the BlackBerry (yes…that is a GTD thing). I made a pretty neat find. I was able to find a canister from simplehuman (yes…the company’s name IS one word) that was stainless. It had a clear plastic top. A latch seals the coffee air tight.

Today, I followed a link to a video interview with Robert Scoble (aka the Scobleizer) that show how he digests the content from his 600+ RSS Feeds every day. The video was shot by Tim Ferriss (of The 4-Hour Work Week fame). It is located on Tim’s blog here [How Scoble Reads 622 RSS Feed Each Morning].

I found a number of great tips from watching this video.

Lately, I have become torn with my selection of contexts. I am in IT so I have quite a number of computer related contexts and lately, I have found that it is easier to put everything on my mGTD that I keep with Moleskine Planner/Notebook. There are columns for next action, context, project, waiting for and S/M on the mGTD. I have found myself writing down NA for all of my tasks. Sometimes I will drop a context in the list, sometimes, when applicable, I will put the project down. I do us the waiting for column a lot.

As our regular readers know, I recently purchased a BlackBerry Pearl and have been using it, in large part, as my GTD tool of choice.  Upon a recommendation, I picked up a copy of BlackBerry Hacks by Dave Mabe.  I have found several great nuggets in this book to enhance my BlackBerry experience.

Little known fact…

Our friend, Emory Lundberg, wrote several of the hacks posted in the book.  Way to go!!!

This book covers everything from using your BlackBerry as a fax machine, to displaying your signal strength in numbers rather than bars.

As many of you know, I just returned from New York. I learned a hard lesson when I arrived at LaGuardia last Saturday. Typically, I have carried my computer bag on the plane as a lone carry on.

It rained that Saturday in New York. This put several flights from O’Hare in Chicago back to back to back in arriving to New York. So when I arrived, our luggage did not come on the plane with us (I thought there was some law in place about this because of terrorism, but maybe I am wrong). We waited around for an hour until the next plane arrived. Fortunately, our luggage came on the next flight. So we were ok.

As I write this post, I am taking a break from packing for a week long trip. My wife and I are leaving tomorrow morning to fly to New York for a fun week with friends. A week or so ago, I started thinking about GTD^® and the trip. Amazingly, GTD even can help up me prepare for such a journey.

Few things are as frustrating as that nagging feeling that you forgot to pack something you will need. The good news is…we do not have to feel this way.

You have a deadline staring you in the face. You must focus. You settle into your cockpit. You get all of your support materials laid out and get going on the next action that has been nagging at you for days.

You begin to feel like you are accomplishing something…and then it happens.

Like a tap on the shoulder startling you from a trance, a little window pops up from the lower right hand corner of your screen to tell you, “YooHoo, You have mail”.