Neural Interface

After I introduced GTD yesterday a little bit and I tried to show my personal requirements for an organizational system, I want to jump today right into the implementation of several parts:

Mails

Mail is the most important communication tool for me. I not only get a lot of emails everyday, but these emails vary quite naturally in their importance (“Server crashed” vs. “Invitation to talk in a month”), in their context (Where/With what can I do this?) and their association (Where does this belong to?).

Now, when you think of email, you will soon notice, that these things are not represented in any standard email you might receive. Instead you need to use programs and  to attach the additional information to it.

I thought about switching to Gmail, but soon figured out that this is would be to inflexible for me. Instead I tried Thunderbird, which similar to Firefox supports Plugins.

Labels

The first feature in Thunderbird, that I can’t live without anymore is labels. I tried other applications, but labels bring me back to Thunderbird every time. It allows you put a tag on every email with one click (standard configuration is 0-9). You can assign a name to each tag and and each tag can also have a color.

I use this to quickly triage through my inbox and mark all mail into one of the following  categories:

• @ACTION – This email requires an action (or an decision on what the action is) as soon as possible.
• Waiting For – This email has been answered or is indicating that I have to wait for another thing to be done.
• Defer – I’ll put that into my calendar or have it resend to me later… see more on that further down.
• Archive – I am doen with that or it doesn’t need my attention. I rather save it and have it out of my sight after one month
• Delete – This option is used very rarely by me. Every message I delete was not even worth having it just in case…

Additionally, I make project tags as needed.

Filter

Now, whenever a mail comes in, I can just hit one button and now what by the color of the mail, what I have to do. I next setup permanent searches. You do that by clicking on File -> Find -> Search Messages. Then I set one search up for Waiting for, one for Defer and one for Archive. One additional search is for everything that is not Waiting for or Defer or Archive.

This allows me to see all emails that I need to act on in one way or the other. All these searches are saved as folders which is basically the same as Smart Folders in Apples Mail app. I have this idea from here.

Priority

Thunderbird intends that you use the label/tags for prioritizing. But as I use it different, I need a second, seperate system for that. Here comes a nice little add-on in to play that is called Priority switcher.  This allows me to have additional priority information added. Unfortunately, I am not able to do that with a key press, but I need to use a mouse. Works well for me as I don’t use the priority feature extensively.

Calendar

I don’t use Thunderbirds Lightning add-on to manage my calendars (10-15 at any given point). The reason is, that I want to have it as a stand-alone application and as Sunbird is discontinued, I had to look for something else.

In general, I use Google Calendar, but I never use their website, but share the calendar via their CalDAV service. In Mac OS X I then use iCAL to sync. This ensures also, that my iPhone is always update to date once I sync. For Linux, I am still looking for a good Lightning alternative but I am stuck with it for now. If you know any nice program for that, let me know :)

No To Do lists in calendar or mail!

I tried to use the various To Do features of iCal and Thunderbird but all of that to unclean. I use pen and paper when I am on the road or need only short reminders. For the other setups I use Things. I plan to write a more detailed review about it in the next days.

Dedicated Apps

In the last couple of weeks, I additionally tested a couple of programs and applications that complete my setup. Most of them are pretty much well known and I will reference them just shortly to give an understandng how they fit into my setup.

DropBox

Having a thumb drive with you helps to keep most files in sync. However, I have the problem that I am not always have the permission to mount a Thumb drive on a given computer or the file system of the stick is not readble on a certain machine. This is why I use dropbox to sync my most important files and some libraries between computers. Most notably I use it for Zotero.

EverNote

Ever had a great idea but no paper nearby? Ever called your home to leave a message for yourself on the answering machine? I certainly did, but since I use EverNote, this is a thing of the past. Evernote aspires to be your externalized memory for your whole life. It is supported almost every where. I have it on ebery computer and on my iPhone. One note in my physical inbox is to check EverNote and triage through it as well. Many of my  valuable ideas are still in  there and are tagged, geo-tagged and searchable.

Hard Drives and Folders

This is my current battle zone. I found it easy to organize my daily life according to GTD, but it always fails as soon as I leave the standard applications and need to work on files on my computers. Why? There is no way of keeping things somewhat synchronized, no way of tagging or prioritizing and no single kind of Inbox. Everything is totally cluttered in some obscure hierarchy that has been developed an epoch ago! Mac is a bit better, it allows at least some sort of color labeling of their files, but no name can be attached to it at all.

What’s the GTD approach?

I used the Desktop as my basic system as everything below is already a occupied by certain things (such as the Music and Picture folder on Mac and the .configuration files under Linux.) My Desktop has three folders:

• @Inbox
• Projects
• Reference

In Inbox, I save all files that I download. This might be from Firefox, download clients or newly generated documents. I then use the midnight command or a similar program under Mac/Windows to copy it in to the right folders that are above my Desktop.

Project is a folder where make links or aliases to my current projects that are somewhere else on my computer. Some of them point into my development folders, other to websites or certain documents.

References is pretty much a general reference system that i s comprised into different broad categories, such as Experiment, Forms and Documentation/Manuals.

This is actually the first time, that I feel like my Desktop is useful. Whenever I need quick access to a project, I switch to desktop and get there with at most to clicks. The Inbox needs obviously  a constant celaning to be useful, but this make sure, that I don’t find e.g. documents on my hard drive where I don’t know what it it could be until I open it.

This far from what I want to have, but it is good enough. I also thought what I would like to have on a computer in order to be completely satisfied. What I have come up with would require a new Filesystem I think.

GTD-FS?

This is just an outline of what I think a GTD-FS would need. Some things are actually in ZFS, some features I know from git.

• Automatic snapshots instead of saving
• Tagging
• Prioritizing
• Color labeling similar to Mac OS X
• Division between operating system and user system. To an extent where a user does’t need to know about it. (/home/andrej is already confusing sometimes for people.)
• Innate  searching

HFS+ will be replaced within two years. Also, NTFS and Ext3 are really outdated by now and every new approach I have seen is not really convincing except ZFS. However, the ZFS future in limbo and the inherent licensing problem in mind, I think we will see a new challenger arrive. Maybe, it will really change something on this front.

That’s it for now. Feel free to drop me a line or a comment if something is unclear. :)