Yahoo’s Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) is a great tool to have in your arsenal to supplement how you implement Getting Things Done (GTD).  In particular, I use Delicious to manage many of my Someday / Maybe and reference lists.  Here is a quick overview of how it works.

Someday / Maybe and Reference Lists

If you are not familiar with GTD, Someday / Maybe lists are a technique to formalize the capture of ideas or possible projects that you want to pursue in the future.  They can be personal or work-related in nature.  As an example, you might want to take a trip to Europe, paint a room in your house, or implement some new initiative at work, but if you are not ready to do any of these right at this moment, how do you make sure you don’t lose track of them?

In GTD, you put these into a Someday / Maybe list, i.e. they are projects / things that you may do someday.  In a sense a Someday / Maybe list becomes the “junk drawer” for your brain.

The benefit of doing this is twofold:  1) these Someday / Maybe ideas no longer rattle around in your head because you have a formalized place to put them; and 2) once you start regularly reviewing your Someday / Maybe lists, they should percolate up into current or actionable projects over time — and you actually get a lot of them done!

Very useful lists include easily categorized topics or niches, such as books to read, places to visit, ideas for work, etc.  A related concept that David Allen also talks about is to keep reference lists as well of commonly used items or information as a way again to keep this information from “clogging your brain.”

Using Delicious for GTD

So this is where Delicious comes in.  The Delicious tagging system can be adapted to manage lists of almost any type of information that lives on the web, and it fits in perfectly with Someday / Maybe and reference lists.

Here are a couple ideas that illustrate what I am talking about and can get you started:

1. Books to Read – Anytime I hear about a book I might want to read, I link to the Amazon page and tag it with @books.  In the notes field I will write about how I heard about the book and/or a synopsis of the preview from Amazon.
2. Read / Review – When I come across web content that I do not have the time to read, I tag it with @readreview and move on.  I review the @readreview list as part of my daily or weekly reviews and then remove the tag once it has been read.
3. Ideas – When I read a blog post or article on the web that fires off an idea in my brain I will tag it with @ideas.  In the Delicious notes field, I write down the idea that it inspired or any pertinent thoughts.  You can either create multiple ideas tags or stick with @ideas and also add other tags for specialized ideas lists for different topics.  For example in the book, David Allen gives “Gift Ideas” as an example Someday / Maybe list.  In Delicious you could use a tag of @giftideas or split into two tags: @ideas and gifts.  Either method works and each has its advantages and disadvantages.
4. Restaurants – I tag restaurants I like (or want to eat at) with restaurant and/or menu as appropriate as well as the type of food (chinese, italian, steakhouse, etc.) and the city and state.  In the notes field I put the phone number first so I have a quick reference for take-out, reservations, etc.  This one is really a combo Someday / Maybe and reference list.
5. Recipes – Easy one.  Tag the link with “recipe” and the cuisine, type of food, etc.  This is a reference list.
6. Wishlist – Stuff you want, i.e. CDs / Videos / other items, you want to buy or you want people to buy for you.  Tag a link to the Amazon or online vendor product page with “wishlist.”  (As a side note, there are actually a couple different sites that format your Delicious wishlist links with special formatting to make them more actionable.  One that I recently came across: delishlist.)
7. Places to Go / Travel Ideas – A list of places you want to go for vacation or other reasons.  Tag with @placestogo or @travelideas.
8. Tips – I use this tag all the time.  Put it in simply anytime you come across a good tip.  This should be used in conjunction with other tags, i.e.: flickr, delicious, gardening, etc.  This is more of a reference list.
9. Apps / Software to Review – Same idea as @readreview, but used when there is a software application I want to check out.  I will usually use the tag @software and again remove it once I’ve evaluated it or read through the website.
10. Things to Do – There could be a lot of variations of how you use this, i.e. things to do before you die, things to do with your kids, things to do with your spouse, etc.  As with ideas you could make the tag structure as simple or complex as you want, but to keep it simple just tag the link as @thingstodo and use the notes field to write down anything specific you want to annotate about the idea.

… and the bonus tip:

1. Sort All of the Above with a Tag Bundle – Keep all of your lists together by creating a Tag Bundle called “Someday / Maybe,” “GTD,” “Lists,”, “Me”, or other group name that makes sense to you.

Two other quick comments: I use the @ symbol generally for the lists that are true Someday / Maybe lists, and standard tagging for those that are more reference tags; also some of the lists I have above I do not share, some I do.  How you decide to implement these is really up to your own personal preferences.

Hopefully you got some good ideas out of the above.  Keep in mind that while I am looking at these within the context of
GTD, there is no reason these won’t work equally well for the non-GTD practitioners out there.

I welcome your feedback and please share any other thoughts or ideas on how to integrate Delicious and GTD in the comments below.

Over the last two weeks, I have been pretty excited to see a flurry of activity from the folks at Delicious after what has been a rather quiet second half of the year.  Delicious just launched a beta of the long-requested bulk edit feature, and this follows three other recent updates:  a beta mobile version of the site, an integrated mp3 player, and updates to the Firefox and Internet Explorer add-ons.  Does this indicate that we may be in for more active and frequent updates to the core Delicious functionality over the next year? I hope so.

One of the ways that I informally judge the health of a web application is by the frequency with which its product development team rolls out new features.  Generally speaking, I believe when you see a web application that is regularly updating its feature set, it is a good sign that:

1. The site is “in it to win it” and is focused on maintaining leadership in its category;
2. User adoption is increasing; and
3. The parent company has made it a priority to invest money into engineering and development.

It goes without saying that if all three are true, then it bodes well for the site for the long haul.  Contrast that with one that only trickles out bug fixes here and there.  Unless the platform is very mature, it can get you a little nervous about the site’s future.  Let me illustrate with a couple examples:

In the past several months Google’s Gmail team has totally been on fire.  They have released too many updates to list, but some of the more recent ones include viewing PDFs directly within Gmail, Gmail themes, and integrated video chat.  Without a doubt, Gmail is the innovation leader in the webmail category.  If you are an engineer at Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, do you feel like you can ever catch up?  On the user side, when was the last time you heard of someone switching from Gmail to Yahoo Mail?  Honestly, I have never had someone tell me that.  Yet I know of people jumping ship from other services to Gmail all the time.

What about LinkedIn?  If Linkedin did not make a single update to the functionality of the site from how it operated six months ago, it would still be the best business networking site around, yet the company is not content to rest on its laurels.  Instead, LinkedIn releases new features on what seems like an almost weekly basis.  In the last few months alone some of the major features they have added include better searching, LinkedIn applications, and much enhanced groups among others.

Finally, I have to mention TypePad.  I just started using the service in October, but I probably could not have hit it at a better time.  In the last three months it has been steadily rolling out its new platform and a number of new features which are making the service better and better.  I am at the point where I expect to see a notice on my iGoogle page or TypePad login every week of another new feature that improves the blogging service.

In all three cases, these companies have added functionality that is not feature bloat, but instead will typically evoke one of two reactions from me: either they add a feature that I have been wanting for a long time, or one that I never knew I needed until I saw it.  As a user of these applications, the aggressiveness their product development teams take to enhance the application makes me all the more excited to use the applications on a daily basis.

So getting back to Delicious… I have to admit I have been a little worried about where the site was headed.  I only really started using Delicious toward the end of this year and love it, but after the Delicious 2.0 upgrade in July (which was a major update), the updates have been primarily of the bug-fix variety.  Combine that with Yahoo’s recent struggles, and I have been wondering of late what the plan was for Delicious.  Was Yahoo content to let the site linger as-is or were they going to treat the way it should be – as a flagship Web 2.0 property?

I hope that the activity we are seeing right now means 2009 is going to be a big year for Delicious, and we will see ongoing enhancements to the platform.  The Delicious product development team does a great job managing and responding to a ton of great user suggestions and feedback on their forum, and I, for one, would love to see as many of these as possible translated into reality next year.

P.S. Thanks to the developers from all of these services for all of your hard work in 2008!

On Thursday, Delicious celebrated its 5th birthday.  Delicious is one of my favorite web applications and a major part of how I discover, manage, and organize web-based information both for my work and at home.  My personal experience with Delicious is relatively new given its age –  I only started using it over the last few months, however it has rapidly become a permanent fixture on my desktop.  I love how you can leverage the site to discover and organize all types of information and cannot imagine going back to a typical “browser-based” system to manage my bookmarks.

With that in mind, I wanted to do my part to spread the Delicious gospel, but instead of writing yet another post about how to use Delicious (there are quite a few on the web already…),  I thought a good way to do it would be to pass along a recent post about Delicious that I really enjoyed.

Five Great Delicious Hacks, in Five Minutes, for Delicious’s 5th Birthday,  by Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb, should have appeal to both the Delicious newbie as well as the power user.  It provides a good intro video on the service as well as a second video demonstrating five “power user” techniques to improve the Delicious experience using GreaseMonkey for Firefox.

The intro video was created last year by Common Craft and provides a really nice introduction to social bookmarking and Delicious in particular.  I have embedded it below:

In the upcoming weeks, I plan to write up some tips and other posts about my experiences with Delicious, so look for those soon.  Happy Birthday Delicious!