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Newton management (Palm works, too)
mcwitt | Sep 18 2006
I use a Newton, on a daily basis. It does handwriting like no other machine, has an excellent primitive outliner mode, and exports OPML to the desktop for easy processing later on. I use it for my dates/tasks management, brainstorming, note-taking in meetings, and so on. It's a collection place, and a place to do some processing of that collected material. I bring up my hacked method of organizing my life (or links to things I wrote elsewhere) simply to share how an organic filing system arises over a decade's use. Moving away from it now would really hurt. The links to what I wrote for another group, without any further explanation, are at: It's relatively brief in both cases, but it's how I manage my life as an academic. I'm sure you can do a Palm in the same fashion (using NoteTaker rather than the anemic memo), and my Alphasmart Dana would do much of it really well, too. Anyway, the point is to look at the system and not the hardware that I use. Enjoy! 6 Comments
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 Smaller scale implementation...Submitted by mcwitt on December 15, 2006 - 7:05am.
Hi, Todd, Thanks for posting your comments on my Newton use. I downloaded your system and tried it out very briefly before I realized that it was way, way more complicated than what I usually need. I don't really know of any academic who has successfully implemented GTD with all its micromanaging of actions and projects. Seriously, my problem is that I have too many projects (I have 3 PhD and 7 masters students actively working on roughly 5 major and 15 minor things, overlapping in responsibilities, and so on, plus I teach 4 different courses a year and assist on 3 others). To reconfigure EVERYTHING into a GTD system doesn't seem worth the effort when I have a system that already works for me well enough that I am able to get through life. Mostly, my communications are email based, my duties are Newton based (I don't use iCal to backup, for example), and I plan my day around those elements. I have Mail Act-On and MailTags to maange the daily flow of email, and spend a bit of time in the morning thinking through which things I'll do that day. MoreInfo lets me be project specific on the Newton, cross referencing among the projects I have. Perhaps the biggest issue in moving to a full GTD system is that last micro level - defining the actions in a project. I often don't know, and let creativity rule the day as it happens. Like Merlin Mann has said - how small an action do you pick? When writing my final exam, do I put an action for each question I ask? Or for the sub-elements? For a calculation necessary to understand a sub-element? Or do I just put "write final exam" and let my mind take over as I do it? I prefer large grain planning, in other words, and GTD flows across too many grain-size boundaries for my taste. As a result, I really LIKE what you are doing, but it's not for me. It's an excellent implementation of GTD (though it slowed my Finder down to molasses speeds, until I turned off folder actions again), but it's not for my work. I simply spend too much time on the Newton. » POSTED IN:
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