Black Belt Productivity

I was browsing the David Co website and saw that you can pre-order Making it All Work: Winning at the Game of Work and the Business of Life prior to its December 30, 2008 release. From the DavidCo website:

From the author of the bestseller “Getting Things Done,” comes a new book that will change your life. “Getting Things Done” hit a nerve and spawned a movement with businesses, students, and techies all the way from Silicon Valley to Europe and Asia. Now, David Allen leads the world on a new path to achieve focus, control, and perspective. Throw out everything you know about productivity—”Making It All Work” will make life and work a game you can win. 

Photo courtesy of Bitporters

New twitter, friendfeed and BBP friend, Rahsheen Porter, has begun a new series on his blog, SheenOnline, detailing his usage of Remember the Milk (RTM) for his GTD system. It all began when I posted a link in the GTD FriendFeed room to a great post on the RTM blog titled Advanced GTD with Remember the Milk written by Doug Ireton. It is a well thought out system using just RTM.

I have been an Evernote user for a couple of years. Recently, I was fortunate to get an invite to try out the new version. It has refreshed me on one of the best functions of Evernote…tagging.

Of course, being able to tag things can help us find things later. However, one of the best uses I find for the tags, is to mark items for specific use later. Once you process the items, you can remove the tag, and start tagging new items for the next processing period.

A couple of examples that I use…

Greetings all,

I ran across this post this morning about ‘How to Turn Your Desk into a Productivity Zone‘.  There are a lot of good items on this list. They are things that anyone can do to help you increase your productivity.

Also, BBP friend, Brett Kelly, has penned a great article about how GTD problems are not system related. This post has hit me pretty close to home. As those who follow BBP on twitter (michaelramm and jasonechols, respectiviely) have seen, we have both fallen off the wagon here lately. I am going to use my Christmas vacation (11/22 throught 1/2) to revamp my GTD system to a more basic implementation. I am also going to re-read Getting Things Done (time #5) and possibly reedit/rewrite the GTD Primer here on BBP. There also may be a new look to BBP coming in the new year.

For some of you that are more hardcore Jott users than I am, this might be old news. But this morning I discovered that Jott now allows you to set up a reminder over the phone. Really a cool new feature.

This will probably make me a more frequent user of Jott. I am one that is highly dependent on reminders to keep me on track. This feature will certainly enhance the value of the tool for me.

If you are not using Jott, let me recommend it. It is a great tool to help you “toss” items into your inbox…when you are not near your capture tools.

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 was greatly saddened when I learned yesterday that Vitalist has unwisely changed their pricing structure. I had heard about it on another blog (whose name escapes me). So I went to the Vitalist blog, The Net Effect, and read the article detailing the changes.

I was shocked at what I was reading. Basically, the free accounts will let you have 5 contacts/contexts/projects. This is outrageous. You can upgrade to $5/month (Basic) and get 25 + 250MB of storage, and even further to $10/month (Premium) and get unlimited with 1GB of storage.  It seems that they have adapted the Nozbe pricing structure, and that was one of the biggest turn off for me earlier this year.

I was tagged by Stephen about the most influential books in my life. I don’t have quite as many as He does, but they are just as important to my life.

1. The Bible - I have been a Christian for most of my 35 years on this earth. First in the Roman Catholic Church and the last 10 years in the church of Christ. It is the model that I try to live my life by, and the model that I am trying to teach my children.

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.

I had already made a note in my Circa today while sitting in a meeting to draft a post on PowerPoint dependency. Needless to say, I had glazed over while a co-worker was diligently attempting to hold my attention with slides jammed full of info that 1) I did not even understand, and 2) took longer than 2 minutes to read per slide.

Tonight, however, Marc Orchant posted an entry about Tim Sanders…and his PowerPoint epiphany.

He states the case better than I could.

- Jason