Haris Skiadas, who has made massive contributions to writing in LaTeX with TextMate (see for example his screencasts of good use of the LaTeX bundle), has put together a super TextMate GTD bundle. Haris has been hacking on it nearly-continously for several days—I confess to having harassed him significantly throughout development so far—and the bundle is a fully-capable GTD system: You can work with a single document, or as many as you want, can easily move projects around, add tasks, and add and modify contexts. The bundle has a number of commands to generate Next Actions lists, and it will archive completed tasks/projects to a separate log file.
Up until now, I’ve been using the Kinkless GTD system. Lately, however, that software began to feel a little cumbersome, a little too cognitively heavy and opaque. Since it lives in TextMate, Haris’s GTD bundle works with pure text, making highly extensible, and it works great (it even knows how to convert your Kinkless document to its own format). Today Haris capped it off with a script that filters an inbox (fed via Quicksilver) into your GTD documents. Seriously cool. I highly recommend giving it a try if you’re using either TextMate or GTD (or need an excuse to give either one a test drive).
My method was considerably simpler than Merlin’s process: Accidentally delete four years of your inbox. Poof, and cognitive overhead simply disappears.
As does everything you thought you wanted to save.
The Sloth Ethic is a truly great new blog, one that is “dedicated—in a lackadaisical, slipshod sort of way—to the idea that many of us don’t spend enough quality time not getting things done.” Definitely worth spending a lot of time reading (or not reading? I’m not sure which way the sloth ethic would point on that one), The Sloth Ethic’s first two entries highlight the great potential of Moleskine notebooks for efforts at unproductivity.
In How to Take Notes in Meetings, hoffman notes that Moleskines are perfect for meetings: “stylish, practical, and with a pocket to hide very thin biscuits in.” The Marvelous moleskine entry notes the great variety of fine notebooks:
There are many varieties of moleskine for you to buy, arrange on a shelf, fondle and think about maybe, one day, using, secure in the knowledge that you will never give in to temptation and ruin them forever with your inane and inky ramblings. You can buy lined moleskines to not write notes in, squared moleskines to not draw graphs in, and moleskine diaries to not keep your appointments in.
But be aware of the price to be paid:
There is a down side though, to the notebook obsession. A dark side. It is terribly distressing when there’s an occasional quality control failure and you unwrap your moleskine only to find the snout still attached, or a sad little webbed digger paw hanging still and cold beside your handy ribbon bookmark. Do please offer up a thought for the small ones that made your lovely, strokable cover possible.
Douglas Johnston has put together an index card-based version of his neat DIY planner template, and he posted some commentary on it over at 43 Folders. I’m currently using a combination of a paper planner written up in a moleskine and emacs’ planner mode to do this sort of work, and have found it to be a pretty nice system.
