fplanque: weblog - English

"Giving up the illusion that you can predict the future is a very liberating moment. All you can do is give yourself the capacity to respond... the creation of that capacity is the purpose of strategy."
- Lord John Browne
Chairman of BP

Unfortunately, I'm beginning to think there is no decent GTD software for Windows.

I don't want anything that integrates with Outlook. I don't use Outlook.

I want something standalone. Plain and simple. Something where I can create tasks, organize them into projects, tag them into contexts and filter them a million different ways.

Searching on the web keeps pointing me towards Tudumo, which, frankly looks awesome on paper (I mean on the web). I also feels pretty good when you install it.

Now try creating 639 tasks (basically I copy/pasted a part of my todo list for b2evolution) and the thing turns into a slow bloated .NET application nightmare.

Who needs a todo list manager when you only have 10 things to do anyway ?

Woohoo! For the first time in years my email inbox is empty!

It is really odd actually: now Thunderbird looks like it's frozen and stuck in redrawing the right side of the screen. It's disturbingly white!

But it feels good. The last time that happened was actually 2004! (based on the oldest email that was in my inbox...)

So how did I do it? No merit: I just moved it all into ACTION folders!

Well actually, it's more subtle than that:

• anything that wasn't actionable got deleted or archived
• anything that could be answered or done in less than 2 minutes got handled and archived/deleted.
• anything that required more than 2 minutes got into an action folder.

So far, it's basically plain David Allen's "Getting Things Done".

And so far: there's a hell of a lot of stuff to do in the ACTION folders!

This is where I'm going to start the real optimization... inspired by Tim Ferris' "4 hour workweek". For each item I need to decide:

• Can I *not* act on it and forget about it?
• Can I delegate it to someone else?
• Can I automate it so I don't get the same problem again in the future?
• and last resort: just do the goddam thing!

I'm currently in Austin, Texas attending SxSW interactive. I am not attending the music festival that follows next week, BUT... today I had a very cool cab driver who told me all about it. (He's playing in a band himself!)

There are like 250,000 people attending. And the festival is only on the evenings from 8pm to laaate. Plus, it's only for indie bands.

So what happens with a quarter million people all day long?

Well... the majors would throw parties in giant warehouses and would fly in some of their major artists... Basically the unofficial festival ends up bigger than the official SxSW music. Pretty wild eh?

But it gets better: now some bands think it's even cooler to play unofficial, because it makes it "indier" than the official.

Anyways, kudos to the Austin cab drivers. On average they are the coolest I've ridden with!

From the Free Website Project:

"Last week I wrote a post recommending the switch to WordPress without trying the newer releases of b2evolution, ans since then I’ve had to eat my hat more than once. When you’re a blogger, it can be tempting to rely on a combination of other common knowledge, popular opinion, and intuition. The problem, as we all know, is that many times all three of these things fail."

"Before you rush to Blogger or WordPress, why not take a serious look at b2evolution. I’ve got four alliterative words for you: community, customization, and clean code."

Read the whole post!