I use an @inbox to drop new content into Evernote, but then process it on a daily basis into other notebooks.

When I first started using Evernote, I didn’t really think too hard about how I was going to use notebooks. Was I going to have a single notebook? Multiple? Work notebooks and personal notebooks?  I didn’t know.  I had no idea and didn’t even give it a second thought.

Then before I knew it, I started looking at my notebook list with some major guilt. There was no system at all and my left-brain hated it.  My default notebook, which at the time was simply called “kenclark’s notebook,”  was a grab bag for everything. That might have been an appropriate strategy if it was the only notebook (because I could then just treat it as an archive and rely on tags and searching to find items), but of course I had a couple of other random notebooks so there was no real strategy there.

Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t even thought of Evernote from the perspective of GTD.  While the beauty and strength of Evernote is that you can clip, capture and send all sorts of items to it from any number of platforms, the content builds up very fast and to use a GTD term is “unprocessed”.

My “a-ha” was that the default notebook was really just another inbox that had to be processed as opposed to a one-size-fits-all archive of my stuff. I know it sounds ridiculous, but once I changed the name of my default notebook to “@inbox”, I began to process it daily and move content into other notebooks using basic GTD concepts.  I tell you it was a minor thing, but it worked great and I have never looked back.

If you’re a GTD’r or are looking for a notebook methodology, give it a try.

I recently read Getting Things Done: The Science behind Stress-Free Productivity, an academic paper by Francis Heylighen and Clément Vidal which attempts to explain GTD from a scientific perspective.  It is not for the casual reader, but it was a take on GTD I had never seen explored previously, and it was a very interesting read.

One of the ideas they discuss as it relates to GTD that really gripped me was that of “flow.”  Flow is a concept developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihayli, and they explain it as follows:

“Flow is the pleasurable state that people experience when they are absorbed in an activity that demands their full attention, but such that they feel in control, i.e. able to effectively move towards their goal, however far away this goal still may be… Flow is characterized by a clear sense of goals, and by continuous feedback indicating in how far the last action brought the situation closer to the goal. To experience flow, challenges should match skills, i.e. the task should be neither too difficult, which would produce stress and anxiety, nor too easy, which would produce boredom. During flow, people tend to forget their worries and even their notion of time, focusing completely on the task at hand. Typical flow producing activities (for those who are good at them) are playing a video game, performing music, painting, playing tennis, or climbing rocks. But flow can also be achieved during everyday work—even during something as prosaic as assembly work on a factory conveyor belt—provided the above conditions are met (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).”

For all the times I’ve felt “in the zone,” until I read this paragraph I had never previously thought about the psychological drivers behind it.  My immediate reaction was to reflect on the experiences that caused me to have flow as well as thoughts of people who have it.  The 2004 Red Sox?  They had it.  Tiger Woods?  He’s got it.  A sales person on a tear?  Flow to the extreme.

When I’ve had flow in a work setting, I have achieved a state of almost uber-productivity.  It’s definitely worth it to take a minute to ask yourself: what type of work gets you to flow?  How can you set up your work environment to more frequently achieve flow?  I guarantee it will be worth the effort.

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.

Google Reader has been my feed reader of choice for awhile now, but it has never achieved the status of a must-have application that I cannot live without.  It was only recently that I recognized the reason I have never wholeheartedly embraced it is because I believe it is designed in a way that creates a drag on my personal Getting Things Done (GTD) system; which for me lessens my desire both consciously and subconsciously to make it part of my daily routine.  I am going to review where I think Google Reader falls short, but also discuss a workaround I have implemented as well as how Google could make a simple feature change that would make the Google Reader experience much better for both GTD’ers and non-GTD’ers alike.

If you are not familiar with GTD, it is a very popular personal productivity methodology developed by David Allen based on his book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.  One of the first steps in GTD is making sure you have a system for collecting all of the things you need to do in your life into “inboxes”.  For example, typical inboxes are physical paper inboxes at work or home, your voicemail, your email, etc.

When I think of Google Reader from a GTD perspective, I look at it as a new inbox.  In and of itself that is not good or bad. David Allen says you should have as few inboxes as you can get by with, but only as many as you need. However, it does rapidly become a problem once you start subscribing to more than a handful of news feeds.  In fact, I would argue that Google Reader becomes the most anti-GTD inbox around.  Why?  Take a look at your subscriptions feed.  If it looks anything like mine, it probably indicates you have 1000+ articles to read (which to the best of my knowledge is the highest number Google has designed Google Reader to display), and is constantly getting filled each day with more items.

One of the main concepts to be successful with GTD is to ensure you regularly empty and process the items in your inboxes using a simple workflow which directs your next actions.  While I could argue that Google Reader has built-in features to support processing each item in a subscribed feed — such as automatically marking items as read once you skim through them, the application is still based on a core concept that each article be treated as an item that has a status of being read (or unread).

As paradoxical as this statement might sound for an application whose purpose is to provide an interface to read news items — I would argue this is the wrong way to look at it.

News feeds are not like email.  Think about how you read a newspaper.  Would you consider a newspaper unread or unfinished if you did not read every article in the entire paper?  Of course not.  You skim through and read what is of interest to you.  Dave Winer, one of the pioneering figures of RSS, said as much in a blog post he wrote several years ago:

He is dead on with this comment, however four years later Google Reader still treats each item in a very “email inbox” way.  Getting back to GTD, it creates a major problem for the processing phase which in a nutshell is about getting “in” to “empty”.  Even though I do not expect to read every article that flows through Google Reader, its interface makes me feel like I have a big lump of unfinished stuff.  If you are of a GTD mindset, this is a tough pill to swallow as you want to process every one of those items.

Given the above, I made a recent change to how I manage my news feeds and moved all of my favorite feeds and feed groups to tabs on my iGoogle page.  Why?  Because iGoogle is designed, at least from a UI perspective, to treat news feeds as queues.  Each iGoogle gadget displays anywhere between the most recent three to nine items for each feed (the exact number is configurable per feed).  There is no build-up of news items if you go away for a couple days and miss a few articles, or fail to read one.  This is exactly how feeds should be treated.  In addition, with the new update to iGoogle you can do this and still get the best of Google Reader’s features – by expanding the feed you see Google Reader’s canvas view which provides the ability to email, star, and share articles.

So far this is working great for me and has eliminated a perceived drag on my GTD system.  That said, given the infrastructure for iGoogle and Google Reader are fairly tight already, I would think it would not be too hard for Google to to adapt a similar queuing system into Google Reader.  The simplest way would be to create a new setting on a per feed and / or global basis, that would treat the feed as either 1) a queue with a given number of items to display, or 2) an “inbox” as it is in the current setup.

David Allen almost never makes a recommendation on the tools to use to implement GTD, and while I talk specifically about my experiences with Google Reader, the same comments could be made for practically every other major RSS or feed reader.  In the end, what I am advocating for “good GTD” is to not think about whatever feed reader you are using as a GTD inbox.  Instead, recognize that feed readers are systems for information to flow through, as opposed to systems for information to collect into and be processed.