From: Thomas Meigen (t.meigen_at_augenklinik.uni-wuerzburg.de)
Date: Fri Sep 09 2005 - 08:31:42 PDT
Hi Martin Jean,
>Thanks for your sharing your thoughts about GTD and the Newt.
>I am still struggling to implement GTD on a PDA. I have a Palm and a
>Newton MessagePad 2100. until recently, I used the Palm, but it
>broke after only a year. On that machine, I use Life Balance and
>MyWeek and I sync (with more or less success) with Palm Desktop,
>iSync, and Entourage 2004.
>While I am waiting for it to be repaired, I now play a little with
>my trustee Newton. I also have MoreInfo and MoreFolders. Like you, I
>tried HyperNewt and dumped it.
Seems as if I am not the only one who tries to implement GTD in the
Newton environment. It all sounded were easy to me when I listened to
David Allen on his GTD audiobook. But I noticed that the implementation
is more complicated, at least for me. I a way you have to build a similar
organisation of your project material on the computer and with your paper
based material. So in the beginning I was not sure it would be a good idea to
do it also at a third place, on my Newton. But meanwhile, I am convinced that
it is a good solution, mainly because the usage of MoreInfo, MoreFolders etc.
have made it possible to implement GTD rather fine. And most of the project
planning (daily or weekly review) can be done whereever I am.
Now let me anser your questions.
>- Can you confirm that all your Notes folders and global?
They might be local, but I decided to use global folders for
my Notes. For both work and private parts I have the following
subfolders
- in progress (these are the things to do...)
- finished
- someday maybe
I might delete the project notes after finishing the project, but I prefer
to keep them (at least some of them) in the "finished" folder, as some
projects may come back (e. g., the annual processing of taxes etc.).
I also have a global "Waiting for" folder, but this is simply for tasks, not
for projects. Every project in the "in progress folder" has a link to
either a task (also filed in "in progress") or a task that another
person has to do (filed in "waiting for"). Sometimes there are more than
one task that might be important at the same time and I can not see which
comes first. I decided to link 2 or more tasks in that case. It seems easier
than breaking the project in 2 or more parts. However, if it is a larger
project with well-defined subprojects, I do split the project in my system.
I also keep a local folder of "templates" for Notes to save time in
defining similar projects. I lock the these with Supernotepad and make
a copy of such a template using a GestureLaunch script.
>- Can you share with us how you do your weekly review? In
>particular, how do you identify projects that miss a Next Action?
This can be done in two ways.
First, I could open Notes and choose the folder "in progress". Then
I might skip through all notes and see whether a specific project is
finished or missing a Next action.
However, I prefer to mark all project notes as "Show in AAG". When I
open MoreInfo/At A Glance, I can see all project notes in the overview
(given the appropriate setting in the AAG preferences is set
correctly). Then the "link symbol" on the right side of every note
identifies whether a note has an attached task and I can switch to
this task and modify the date or subject of the task. This is the
way I prefer to do the weekly review. It relies on having set up each
project correctly. This leeds me to the next point...
>- Can you explain in more details your Dashboard and Gesture Launch scripts?
Up to now I just played with the scripts provided with these two
tools and modified them a bit. This helps to set up the title of a project
(Script "Title it" from GL), create a new note with the marked text of
another note etc.
What I would like to develop scripts, that
- create a new note in a specific folder (how to set the folder in
Newtonscript?)
- create an additional task and links this task to this note, the task being
filed in the same folder
- is able to pick up the next line of text in the outline note and change the
text of the linked task to this text
it is fine with the current state, but such scripts would minimize the
number of clicks (and possible errors...) when setting up the projects.
I am interested to hear in which way other Newton & GTD users found a
good solution...
Best wishes
Thomas
-- Dr. Thomas Meigen Univ.-Augenklinik Josef-Schneider-Str. 11 D-97080 Wuerzburg Tel.: ++49-931-201-20437 Fax: ++49-931-201-20245 Email: t.meigen_at_augenklinik.uni-wuerzburg.de -- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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