GTD with Outlook Part III: A high level strategy

So far in my ongoing review of implementing the GTD methodology using Outlook XP, I’ve talked about using improved search to make your archives more useful and managing your task views. Today I’m going to take a step back, now that I’ve implemented most of the GTD workflow in my daily routine, and give a higher level picture of how everything has been implemented for me so far and what challenges remain. I will give an outline of my project list implementation but the details will wait for next time.

First: my new strategy to manage stuff in Outlook is simple. The inbox stays clear; I have a list of tasks from which I work on an ongoing basis, and a list of projects that I review daily for next actions. If I’m ever in a place where I can’t make a task note directly, I use my brand spanking new Hipster PDA (a stack of 3″x5″ index cards held together with a binder clip), and transfer any tasks to my task list when I get back to my desk. (The Hipster PDA is particularly useful at the breakfast table, on my bedstand, and other places where the computer should never be.)

That all sounds simple, but the devil is in the details. As I outlined last time, something as simple as how you view your tasks makes a big difference. And the really difficult part, as the GTD methodology attests, is keeping your task list clean and free of multistep projects, which are treated differently. The problem is that Outlook doesn’t provide a good form for project management. So I’ve been running with this recommendation from the Getting Things Done In Outlook page, which provides a modified contact form as a way to track projects together with a customized contact folder and view. Then I build out the project plan in the description field (or, if the project is to write something, I’ll brainstorm the outline right there), and click the “New Task for Contact” button to add the next action for the project to my task list. Doing that adds a link to the project form into the Contacts field at the bottom of the task list, and makes the task show up in the Activities tab of the project form.

So that’s all the major areas of GTD—except that there are a ton of additional details and neat features that I’ve glossed over. Next time I’ll talk about more task tips and tricks, including features in tasks that support the creation of deferred tasks.

Let’s Talk System 7

While I’m on tenterhooks about my new Mac hardware waiting at home, a quick shout to System7Today, a site about using your pre-G3 Apple hardware to its fullest extent. (Pointer via the Cult of Mac blog at Wired.)

The site makes the cogent point that nothing much useful happened in the Mac OS world between System 7.6.1 and Mac OS X (with, of course, the major exception of early Mozilla builds). I mean, if I recall correctly, the only reason they moved to Mac OS 8 rather than System 7.7 was a marketing decision that Apple needed to put the years of vaporware around Copland behind them. But at the time there was such hype for all the new features as they were released: QuickDraw GX! OpenDoc! Cyberdog! Open Transport! The Control Strip! All of which of course are deader than doornails now.

But I grew up with that OS. My first computer related job involved managing some Macs at NASA Langley, which I upgraded to System 7. I was so thrilled when I could run System 7 on my first Mac, an SE/30. I made the PowerPC jump in 1995 to a PowerPC 7200/90, which ran systems 7 through 9, and held onto it for five years until I got my PowerBook G3 (FireWire) The G3 ran Mac OS 9, dual-booted the Mac OS X public beta, and then ran Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.2. The G3 lasted three years until I got the 1GHz G4 TiBook that is my main machine today, and has so far been the only Mac on which I have never booted into Classic. Of course that won’t be an option at all with the MacBook Pro.

Life’s little ironies

I got a phone call from Lisa a few minutes ago that my MacBook Pro arrived this morning, one day ahead of the promised ship schedule and six days ahead of the originally projected delivery schedule. I’d love to be really excited about it but I can’t right now—my head is so stopped up that I can’t really think about it until I get home.

I’m also doing everything I can to keep my expectations realistic about how the experience will be with this machine, so I’m linking without comment to varying user reports at Macintouch about extra noise and possible display and networking issues. But there appear to be many more positive than negative reports about the machine, so I’ll throw out a gratuitous link to a set of MacBookPro unboxing pictures, for those of you that enjoy that sort of thing.

John Cale, blackAcetate

john cale blackacetate

John Cale is one of a handful of lesser known legends in music today. A founding member of the Velvet Underground, then a year later forced out of the group as the first professional victim of Lou Reed’s prodigious temper, he went on to a career as a producer (Nico, the Stooges, the Modern Lovers, Patti Smith’s Horses, Jennifer Warnes, Squeeze, the Happy Mondays, Jesus Lizard, the Mediæval Bæbes’ Undredtide) and guest musician (with appearances on albums by Nick Drake, Brian Eno, Gordon Gano, the Replacements, Super Furry Animals), as well as a prolific solo career (23 full length albums since 1970, plus 17 released and 15 unreleased movie soundtracks). The most consistent thing about Cale’s work is its unpredictability; as you might guess by looking at his producer or guest credits, his musical tastes span a wide range of genres, with the result that picking up a new John Cale record can be a little like rolling the dice. 1996’s Walking on Locusts was largely straight-ahead country-inflected pop with a few weird exceptions like “Crazy Egypt,” but 2003’s HoboSapiens is all over the map with its sounds and influences and reflects Cale’s fascination with ProTools.

All of which is to say that when I put Cale’s latest record blackAcetate into my CD player and then had to doublecheck to be sure that I wasn’t listening to Big Star, I wasn’t surprised. The lead-off track, “Outta the Bag,” features Cale’s rarely-heard falsetto over chugging horns and rhythm section, and sounds as though Cale spent a lot of time in Memphis during the session. “In a Flood” is a slowly smoldering evocation of the late summer Mississippi that sounds as if the early Cowboy Junkies were in the next studio. And “Gravel Drive” is a balladic evocation of domestic loss that is majestic in its sweep. The arrangements on most of the songs are a lot more organic than on the cut-and-paste HoboSapiens: there’s even some Prince-inflected funk on “Hush.” The common thread stitching the album together is Cale’s magnificent Welsh voice.

Not everything works on the album; “Sold-Motel” is a fairly uninspired rocker. “Woman” plays a rhythmic albeit tuneless verse over thin drum loops against a guitar-driven chorus with no real unity between the two parts. “Wasteland” is a frustrating ambient inflected tune that has some promising moments in the arrangement but doesn’t earn the grand climax it builds to at the end. But these are minor quibbles compared to the quality of the other tracks. On balance blackAcetate is a worthy addition to the Cale discography, an album that takes risks that more often than not pay off in spades.

 

Also posted at BlogCritics.

Dying slowly

As the Tindersticks once sang, “So this dying slowly… I’m just tired, darling/I just need to lay down.” Oddly enough, when Stuart Staples sang those words he sounded like I feel: so congested I can hardly move my head.

So while I wait for the decongestant-induced colored light trails to vanish, a quick pointer to a pair of goodies courtesy of Doc Searls: egosurf.com and isolatr. The former is apparently designed to show you how much you write about yourself vs. how much others write about you (I’m solidly in the middle of the gauge), while the latter… well, see for yourself.

Mash your way to fun and profit

Via the Comics Curmudgeon, I bring you Balloonist, a cross-platform application designed to do comics lettering and layout. But wait! It also features “gouache mode,” in which you can lay in word balloons over existing comics. Like, ones that someone else drew.

And for an example of how cool that can be, I give you (via Sue Trowbridge, via the Comics Curmudgeon again) Mary Worth sings My Humps. Which remix got some ink in the Associated Press (including the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette).

Which inspired me:

garfield

Unfortunately, as you can see by the acne that the Garfield strip sprouted, Balloonist isn’t free, and its $88 registration fee is a little steep if all you want to do is to poke fun at moldy 80s icons. But hey, it’s interesting at the very least.

Can there be happier words…

…than “Apple Store Shipment Notification”? I don’t think so. As I predicted, Apple is jumping the gun on my anticipated ship date by a good five days. My MacBook Pro is currently in FedEx’s system (though not picked up yet) and scheduled to arrive by Thursday.

Of course, Thursday is the busiest day of my week, so I probably won’t be able to do a detailed unboxing report until the weekend. But still… yay.

Update: Apparently new MacBook Pros (MacBooks Pro?) come from Shanghai, China (at least according to FedEx’s pickup records). Who knew?

Friday Random 10: The 400 Blows

So titled because for months, ever since losing my iTunes statistics, I have been steadily working my way back through listening to my entire collection, a process that will take years. I’ve gone about it in two ways, first listening to all my mixes in order, secondly using a set of smart playlists. The most significant of the latter is my “Never Played” playlist, which selects 400 unplayed tunes at random from my library for the iPod (400 was experimentally about the right number to fit the playlist, which might include a large percentage of losslessly ripped songs, onto the iPod and still have room for other content). And the 400 “blows” because I will continue to see numbers like “now playing 21 of 400,” “now playing 16 of 400,” etc. until the library is all listened to. To mix a rarely stirred metaphor, I feel like Sisyphus even thinking about it.

Choosing the “Shuffle Songs” menu option on the iPod, which shuffles through the entire iPod, is kind of a relief. Of course the only time I do this is on Fridays, but it’s a nice reprieve nonetheless.

  1. Sufjan Stevens, “Come On! Feel the Illinoise! Part One: The World&rdsquo; Columbian Exposition; Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me In A Dream” (Illinoise)
  2. Sheldon Allman, “Schizophrenic Baby” (Folk Songs for the 21st Century)
  3. Doves, “Words” (The Last Broadcast)
  4. The White Stripes, “Fell In Love With a Girl” (via the Peel Box)
  5. John Cale, “Reading My Mind” (Hobosapiens)
  6. Mission of Burma, “He Is/She Is” (Peking Spring)
  7. PINE*am, “Gymnopedie 0.1” (EP)
  8. Dntel, “Last Songs” (Life is Full of Possibilities)
  9. Tori Amos, “Parasol” (The Beekeeper)
  10. Radiohead, “Fog” (Knives Out EP)

What a bizarre assemblage. The Sheldon Allman track is the worst kind of novelty, a catchy one. The John Cale track includes about a minute of vituperative Italian dialogue over motorcycle noise. The PINE*am track is some sort of clanking electronica track with wispy female vocals over it, and bears no resemblance to the Satie composition by the same name. There are also some serious songs, mostly owing to the Doves and Dntel albums finally surfacing on eMusic.

But “Fog.” Hmm. Might have to do something with this song.

Neko Case followup

Following my cryptic note from Tuesday, a quick confirmation that the new Neko album is in fact the most amazing thing to happen to me musically in many weeks, both because of Neko’s consistently astonishing artistic evolution and the peerless keyboard work of the Band’s Garth Hudson.

I just got tickets for her show April 5 at the Roxy. Should be a good time.

Analog to digital converters, for great justice.

Fury points to a new (old) way to get old music onto new formats: the PlusDeck 2C, a cassette deck in a 5.25″ PC drive form factor. It’s Windows only and would make more sense as a USB (2.0) drive, but for those of us that are stuck with some music that is only on cassette it’s not bad.

I found another solution, too, which I actually ordered: the now relatively venerable Griffin iMic. This is a USB connection on one side, standard audio in jacks that can accept either line-level input from phonographs or normal output from another audio device, like a cassette deck, on the other. This means that I can get copies of some of that obscure vinyl in digital format, finally. I’m thinking that parts of the spoken word record of Kemp Malone reading Beowulf is a good first start (though perhaps not all four hours). The bad news, of course, is that the iMic is so venerable it is starting to be unavailable, so grab it at Amazon while you can, even with a four to six week lead time.

Wow: Lists of Bests is back, kinda.

That was quick. The new Lists of Bests is up and (aside from some Ruby on Rails related error messages earlier this evening), seems to be cooler than ever. User created lists, clean design…

Um. Waitaminit. My login from the old Lists of Bests site is gone. Hope that’s a temporary thing, guys, but it would be cool if you had a FAQ for us old users to tell us what’s up.

Fortunately the Robot Coop team is looking for comments, so go check it out and post your feedback.

How not to capture the digital music market

A week or so ago, when Apple announced its iPod Hi-Fi speaker system, the Wall Street Journal published a fairly penetrating article about the impact of digital music on the hi-fi audio market. Interesting points: customers seem to value portability over sound quality (home audio equipment sales dropped 18% in 2005 while digital music player sales tripled).

As someone who’s doing a lossless ripping project to turn all his CDs into digital music files, who has spent some time and money connecting his home audio system to his wireless network, and who owns an iPod, I think there are several explanations for this. First, a lot of people can’t tell the difference. Really. Second, the convenience of searching by song on services like iTunes and Rhapsody (but not, ironically, eMusic, whose text-searching facility is horrible), encourages digital downloads for impulse purchases at the expense of other music purchases (no more buying an album just because you liked the single, or a greatest hits compilation because it reminds you of high school). Third, it’s not out of the question that people might want multiple iPods. I keep being tempted by those $99 1 GB Shuffles, for instance. Fourth, there are real advantages to being able to take the music that you listen to on your home system with you on your iPod in the car, on the subway, and on a plane.

Which may explain the last paragraph of the article, which describes a new service, MusicGiants Inc., that sells “lossless” downloads from “the same major-label content sold by services like the iTunes Music Store” for a 30 cent premium. Except, of course, that the files are encoded as lossless Windows Media Audio files (version 9 encoder), which won’t play on an iPod or a Mac and carry Microsoft’s Windows Media DRM; the service is only available for Windows XP computers; major independent acts like Spoon, whose entire back catalog is digitally available elsewhere, or even Sleater-Kinney, are absent from the service…

All this goes a long way toward explaining the last sentence: “Sales,” says the Wall Street Journal dryly, “have been slow so far.” Well, duh. Fighting iTunes’ DRM with someone else’s DRM isn’t the way to go. I would go so far as to say that the only other horses in the race are eMusic, which sells relatively high quality VBR MP3s of independent music with no DRM attached for around $0.25 a track (based on 40 tracks for $9.99 a month), and Rhapsody, who have a deep catalog and an all you can eat business model (albeit with draconian DRM: if you stop paying for the service, your tunes stop working). Those are different business models with different benefits to the customer. The digital music market is big, but so far it’s not big enough to support undifferentiated services offering the same content, only with different DRM.

GTD with Outlook Pt 2: Task views

I’ve spent another week and change on GTDsince implementing good search in Outlook. I’ve spent it exploring the core concepts: capturing all (most) of the stuff that’s been floating around in my brain waiting to be done or dealt with. Discovery number 1: while it’s a relief to capture all (most) of the stuff into lists so I’m not spending all the time panicking about things I’ve forgotten, I’ve learned that I’ve made a lot of commitments that need to be fulfilled. Hence my relatively light blogging as I regain some balance.

My capture systems are just now starting to get in shape. I spent much of my airplane time between here and Vegas (and back) setting up some of the systems and have some progress to report.

First thing: my new favorite view in Outlook (XP version) is the Calendar view, with the small Task pane to the side. Something about having the task view shrunk to a manageable size is really helpful in preventing it from being terrifyingly unmanageable. But the out of the box view, which features only in progress tasks ordered by no particular mechanism and ungrouped, needs work. We can do this.

If you right click on the view title (“Tasks”), you can edit the view definition. I found it most helpful to group it by status. The out-of-box statuses (statii?) in Outlook are Not Started, In Progress, Completed, Waiting for Someone Else, and Deferred. That turns out to be just about perfect for GTD task organization. I have yet to use the Deferred status; I keep the Completed group collapsed and open it when I need motivation. That leaves Not Started, In Progress, and Waiting for Someone Else. Email “next actions” that need responses go to Waiting and everything else keeps getting worked.

Okay, but what about when you need better statuses? This is where Categories come into play. I did a quick listing of categories that made sense from a “next action” perspective: phone, email, mail, computer, research, writing, errands. Then I went to the main Tasks folder, went down the list adding categories, and grouped the whole shebang by Status and Category. I also set the view to show the long description column when present, so I could glance at the list and see information like, for instance, phone numbers. Advantage: the main Tasks view can become a printable view to bring with you for errands and phone calls.

Next up: project lists and how there’s not a perfect system for tracking them in Outlook… yet. (But how one kind of project list freed me from keeping project names in the Category field.)

Farewell to the Source: Ali Farka Touré, 1939? – 2006

I was going to write an obituary to Ali Farka Touré, the amazing Mali guitarist, farmer, and village leader who passed away last month (and whose death is just being made public this week). I was beaten to it by a friend in the radio industry who wrote: “Malian musician Ali Farke Toure has died. I play his music a lot at the station, which is how I was introduced to him. It sucks that this great musician played for so many years and I had to actually go work at a radio station to learn about him. We should have two moments of silence: one, for the passing of Farke Toure, and another, for the humungous blinders that shut America off from most world music.”

I feel the same way and feel as though I’m part of the problem. I’ve known of Touré’s music for at least ten years, since the 1994 release of his Grammy-winning collaboration with Ry Cooder, Talking Timbuktu. But I haven’t proselytized him the way I have other musicians like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or Youssou N’Dour, or even Kathryn Tickell. I haven’t even put his music on a mix.

There is a great remembrance of Touré on Blogcritics today which gives some impressions of the man himself; well worth reading.