Category: post

Sorry for the lack of posts as of late. There are many reasons for this that I could list here but they would all sound like a lot of excuses. They would not hold much water anyway. The fact is that I have been posting a fair amount other places. Just not here.
Many who know me are aware of the fact the I have a very broad set of interests. When I started this blog, it was supposed to be just a place for me to post any old thing I wanted. Anything that had my attention at the time. Apple news, productivity stuff, film and media, science, religion – anything. I had a handful of readers. Most of them were friends, or family, or internet acquaintances. They stopped by to see what was on my mind that day or week. They stopped by after Apple news broke to see my take on it. They stopped by to see what I had to say about an article on particle accelerators that I read. They stopped by to see what was up with me and Princess Bethany. It was a lot of fun. It was mine.
It just so happened that, I caught the GTD bug right around the time that über-meme was beginning to catch fire. Therefore, I just happened to be posting a lot about that subject because that is what was up with me. I had this new and very busy life and personal productivity, lifehacks, Moleskine, Backpack, GTD was helping me get through it.
Then, to my amazement, my little musings on these subjects started getting linked by others. Not just any others mind you, but some of the gurus of the GTD field. My traffic from this exposure grew exponentially. More and more people were coming to the site, looking for more and more of that type of information. Therefore, I felt the obligation to deliver, since that is what so many of my visitors were looking for. My little spot on the net became “Patrick Rhone’s Personal Productivity Blog”. I soon felt like I could not post about other things that captured my attention because that is not what people were visiting for. People wanted GTD. They wanted lifehacks. They wanted info on web apps. It was an obligation. It was a task. It stopped being fun. It stopped being mine. It belonged to the readers.
This being said, I am posting a whole bunch some other places. You may even find some of those posts of interest. Here is where you can often see me:

• The Random Post – This is my current favorite baby. It really is as close to what I originally intended for this blog. Just like the name implies, I post anything that captures my interest or that I run across in my internet travels. I post short little reviews about stuff I read, see or buy. My del.icio.us links and Flickr photos get aggregated there as well. I am having a lot of fun with it.
• Jaiku – This is fairly new for me but I am having fun with the whole idea of “microblogging”. If you want to see what I am doing and where I am going on a regular basis, this is a low impact way to see.

• Team Trixie – This is the blog I have started to keep family and friends updated as to the progress of my (yet to be born) daughter. For those not aware, Princess Bethany and I are having a baby.

• Geek Gather – This is a collection of friends of mine that get together on a regular basis at a local venue to talk tech and such.

• In addition, I have several other projects in the cooker but not ready to share those yet.

I am not quite sure where to go next with my feelings stated above on this site, or what to do to change them. I have some ideas but they are not well fleshed out, and may not come while patrickrhone.com is in it’s current configuration. That does not mean that you wont see any more posts here. You will. Just expect them with the frequency that they have been for the past few months (i.e. occasionally).
Thanks to all of you who have followed this far. I hope not to let you down.

There are a ton of GTD based task management applications still on the horizon. One to fit just about any preference it seems.
On one end of the spectrum, there will be Things by Cultured Code. If you like the bells and whistles wrapped in a pretty package than this will be the one for you. It has a ton of features like tagging, hierarchy, a quick entry pane, etc. You can even delegate items by Mail, Bonjour or iChat. (via Daring Fireball)
On the other end, there is TaskPaper. It is basically a very simple GUI and formatting structure wrapped around a text file. Seriously, the document it creates to store your data is nothing more than a text file and can be opened and manipulated with a text editor. It is done in such a disarmingly simple and minimalist way that I immediately fell in love. If you are looking for something with a little more formating and clarity than a plain text file but no more than this is for you. (via 43 Folders)
If neither of those flip your switch, ATPM has a fantastic rundown of the current deluge of GTD applications that are available. Well worth a read if you are still on the search. (via 43 Folders)
Not GTD related, an interesting blog to pop up on the radar screen is TagaMac. They plan to explore the intersections of “tagging” and the Macintosh. Tagging is becoming an increasingly popular way to classify and easily search and sort items. Many of the applications I use rely heavily on tags. If given the choice between tagging and organizing things into folders, give me tagging any day.
Being that I am about to have a newborn (Princess Bethany and I are “with child”), I found this post at The Simple Dollar timely. If you start saving 10 dollars a day on the day your child is born, and you play your cards right, you could have $38,952.16 to give them when they are 25. Great down payment for their first house.

For those who are not in the know, there was a major bridge collapse in Minneapolis today. It is unbelievable, surreal and tragic. Everyone I know, including many who take that bridge every day near that time, are OK so far. Peace be with those affected.

Here is a quick little tip I have been using lately. Lately, in order to hold my place in books and magazines, I have been using a business card for a bookmark. The advantages of this are several, but here are the ones I like. First, I always seem to have one with me so I never have to search for a “proper” bookmark. Second, if I were to leave my book somewhere accidentally, it might have a chance of finding it’s way back to me, due to the information contained on the card.

I couldn’t not post about this right away. Looks like the fine fellows at 37Signals are finally going to give us the Backpack upgrades they have had cooking for a while now. You can find the first sneak preview here. It features the new ability to place item types anywhere on the page. It was frustratingly static before, so this will be a welcome change.
Not only that, but they have been doing some interesting things with OpenID. Now with several of their apps (Highrise, Basecamp, with Backpack to come), when you sign on to one of them using your OpenID, you get a bar across the top of the page called OpenBar. It has links to all of your other 37 Signals Open ID enabled applications which you are then able to seamlessly switch between. In other words, log into one and it will log you into all and allow you to easily switch between them. No need to keep verifying your credentials because OpenID has already provided them. It knows which Basecamp, Highrise, etc. accounts are yours because OpenID has told them who you are. It is the sort of thing that OpenID was made for. Brilliant.
In any case, I am super excited for all of the things coming down the road from these guys. If past history is any indication, I am sure I won’t be disappointed and it will be worth the wait.

In my day job, I work for a 4-year residential liberal arts college. It is a great job with many benefits – both granted and not. One of the benefits comes along each summer. When a vast majority of the students leave to go home, they tend not to cancel their magazine subscriptions for that 3 month period. Instead, the magazines arrive and get left in some large postal bins by the mailroom. With no recipient there to greet them, they become free for the taking.
Those that know me know that I love magazines, especially when they are free. So, I am known to go down and scrounge through the bins picking out anything that seems remotely interesting without regard to need, time or any other constraint because, well, they are FREE.
Of course, It is not like I have the time to read dozens of magazines. I barely have the time to read the limited amount that I actually subscribe to and DO read, nearly cover-to-cover, every month. After a few weeks of seeing the pile of magazines grow on my desk, with no time to ever get through them, I knew I either had to find some way of reading them or put them back for someone that would.
Then, it occurred to me. In the digital world, using Google Reader, I quickly jump through hundreds of posts in dozens of RSS feeds I subscribe to. When I do this, I star the ones I am interested in or require more time to read fully. Then, when my time and energy allow, I go through my starred items and read them. Here is how I apply that same method with the magazines.
First, I flip through the pages quickly scanning the headlines for things that I want to take the time to read. Using Post-It Flags, I mark the pages with stories that look interesting to me. This way, I can go back through and quickly jump to only those articles that I marked when I have the time to read them, already having put the time in up front of doing the finding. Just like using the starred items in Google Reader.
I know this may seem simple, but it saves me tons of time that I otherwise would have spent doing the wading and reading at the same time. It also made useful a stack of items that seemed to become so daunting, due to the sheer time I perceived to be involved, that I never derived any benefit. There are even several magazines I find myself returning to the bin, not having found anything worth my while during that first quick pass.
It is all about being able to focus in on the signals knowing that I have already aggregated them from the noise.

About a year ago, I wrote a very long whitepaper that outlined my Getting things Done influenced productivity system (some might even call it exhaustive) . A little something I deemed Org-Fu. That being said, like many things, systems change. They naturally grow and evolve with time and with some consistent evaluation of what works and what does not. Here, I will focus more on what has changed with my system and simply refer back to my original Productivity Whitepaper for the items that have not. Without further ado, here is my system as it stands today:
Tools

• Capture Device – Levenger Shirt Pocket Briefcase/Jott
• Physical Inbox- Ikea Dokument
• Next Actions/Projects and Lists – OmniFocus
• Calendar/Reminders – Backpack
• Notes/Misc. Info/Research- Yojimbo
• Vertical Mapping – OmniOutliner Pro
• E-mail – Mail.app
• Physical Notes – Levenger Circa (Letter Sized)/Large Moleskine

Capture Device
For a couple of years I was an avid fan of a Ruled Pocket Moleskine for capture. While it served me well for that time I often found it a bit too bulky to carry around in my jeans pockets. There was not enough room in the front pockets with other stuff in there like my keys, phone or wallet. Putting it in my back pocket caused it to bend and the pages to come loose from the spine as I would sit and move.
I considered other alternatives but wound up expanding the use of my Levenger Shirt Pocket Briefcase for the majority of my capture. It is slim and slips into my back pocket easily. I always have it at the ready and use the same dash/plus system on index cards as I did with the Moleskine. I then process those items into OmniFocus (see below) when I am at my computer.
In those cases when I am unable to capture by writing, while driving for instance, I use Jott. Jott allows me to call and leave a message for myself which then gets translated into text and e-mailed to me. I then can process those into OmniFocus with a simple copy and paste.
The combo of these two tools is a killer capture system for me as I always have one or both with me at all times. It is what capture in GTD should be – easy, fast and ubiquitous.
Physical Inbox
Nothing changed here. For more information, please refer to my Productivity Whitepaper.
Next Actions/Projects and Lists
OmniFocus is a soon to be released GTD based organization tool from the fine folks at The Omni Group. They have long made many of my favorite and most used applications on the Mac and they certaily don’t disappoint with this one. OmniFocus is still in a limited alpha release so I am not sure I am at liberty to say to much about it. I have posted about it before.
OmniFocus is heavily rooted in the GTD methodology and, as one would expect, allows one to organize by next actions and projects and execute by contexts. It allows for working on project tasks in order or in parallel. It also allows for sub projects. It is, hands down, the most user friendly and perfectly crafted GTD application I have ever used.
Calendar/Reminders
After many years with my old friend, Now Up-to-Date and Contact, I had to leave. It was a bittersweet goodbye filled with a few tears and some restless nights. The only solace I found was in a simpler life filled with SMS and e-mail, ease of entry and browser based ubiquitousness. That’s right, I now use the Backpack Calandar and Reminders features for my hard and soft landscape needs.
Regular reader know that I am a huge fan of Backpack and, until OmniFocus came along, I used if for all of my GTD needs. Now, I mainly use if for the Calandar and Reminders. the Calendar is very basic and no frills but it does the job of telling me where I need to be and when I need to be there. The one feature I have come to not be able to live without is that reminders are sent 30 minutes before an event via SMS to your mobile phone or via e-mail or both. Killer. I use the reminder for those “soft landscape” items that are not quite events but I still need a tickler anyway. I have written about hard versus soft landscape items here before.
Notes/Misc. Info/Research
Yojimbo basically took the place of two applications I wrote about in my previous whitepaper – NoteTaker and Notational Velocity. I pretty much use it as I did those other two applications. It is my digital commonplace. I store all sorts of things there. Meeting notes, research, project support materials, bookmarks, web clippings, PDF’s of product manuals, passwords for websites, even the chore lists I leave for my sons. If I need to write something that is not a blog post or and e-mail, it usually begins it’s life in Yojimbo. If I need to store information that I might need to find later, it usually ends up in Yojimbo.
The main reason for this is that I find it easy to search for things quickly and in a iety of ways when I need them. I keep things sorted by date modified so that the most current stuff I have saved or edited is always at the top. In addition, I let it sort things for me using the smart folder like “tag collections” feature so it is easy to search a subset of items grouped by a tag I have assigned them.
In a perfect world, the Finder in Mac OS X would work this way and there would not be a need for an application like this. It is getting there and it looks like with improvements to spotlight and the quick look features in Leopard it will get even closer. That being said, at this point I would be hard pressed to give up the ease and elegance that Yojimbo offers.
Vertical Mapping
Nothing changed here. For more information, please refer to my Productivity Whitepaper.
E-mail
Nothing changed here. For more information, please refer to my Productivity Whitepaper.
Physical Notes
I wrote about my paper based notetaking and love of using Levenger paper and Moleskine in the original whitepaper. Not much has changed here either.
There is one small change however. At the time I wrote:

“I am considering replacing the Levenger notepads with a Levenger Circa Notebook in order to keep things a bit more organized and complete but am not quite ready to cross that expensive bridge yet.”

Well, I did not have to cross it because my wife crossed it for me and got me a beautiful Bomber Jacket Leather Letter Sized Circa for our first anniversary. Granted, there was lots of heavy hinting from me to her on this purchase but, hey, it was paper and therefore was an appropriate first anniversary gift.
The short review is that is it beautiful. It is one of the few things I own that I look forward to having reasons to use it. I have some tabbed dividers in place to create a few sections. I have a section called Actions. One for Notes. One called Project Support where I can punch project materials using a Circa/Rollabind punch I borrowed from a friend. Then one final section called Archive that everything goes to when I am done with it. My plan is to eventually get some more Circa rings and gather these items and file them when it begins to pile up.
I have not been using it too long but it is a great system that is helping me stay on top of my game.

Just a reminder to my regular readers. When you do not see much activity here, feel free to check out my tumblelog – The Random Post.
There you will find cool links, photos, quotes, funny words and odd angles. Basically, it is all the little snippets that catch my attention while cruising the interwebs and is far less structured than the posts here.
If you do check it out, and you enjoy it, I would love to hear your feedback. Heck, I would love to hear your feedback even if you don’t.

Merlin Mann once again drops the mad science on how to get prepared from the upcoming release of OmniFocus which I have mentioned here before. That being said, the tips he gives not only apply to OmniFocus, but can apply whenever you are in the process of switching to a new application for your productivity system. Here is Merlin’s take…

“Moving your world of action into a new application is like moving into a new house (and can be almost as stressful). This is your chance to throw away crap, rethink how you’ve been doing things, and just give yourself a fresh start. So before you ever fire up OmniFocus for that first time, do yourself a favor and get sorted out with your current system first. Believe me, you’re much more likely to handle this well before the temptation of having the app in your hands sends you diving into using it full-time.”

I have been preaching this sermon for a long time. An application can help to support a robust productivity system but, at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is finding a system that works for you. When your system stops working, gets a little stale or no longer inspires – treat it as an opportunity to refresh and recharge. While I don’t recommend always looking for “the perfect GTD application”, sometimes switching out the tools gives you the inspiration and excitement you need to get back into the game. It has for me at least.