A day late. Sorry. Perhaps I should have entitled this one Sunday Snippets. Here are links to some of the best blog posts that I’ve read over the past week.

Personal Quotas

A lot of the things that make us productive are just little tricks. Back on April 14th Steve Pavlina challenged us all with his 30 Days to Success post. In this post he suggested that we implement new habits by seeing them as trial software installations. We try them for 30 days and if they don’t work out we can “uninstall” them. This is a great concept. I’ve used this technique before myself, but never put in the trialware framework. Great blending, Steve!

All too often, on the computer, I will install the trial version of some new software, spend a few minutes playing with it and then not get back to it until the trial period has expired. I think that to get the maximum benefit from a 30 day trial of “life software”, or trying new habits in your life, you need to also do a “personal quota” like he mentions in this post from May 19th. This provides the framework to insure that we actually make every effort possible to make our new habit trial a success.

Why do they call them radio buttons, dad?

I’ve been developing web sites for about 7 years now. I’ve always used radio buttons and never given much thought to why they are called radio buttons. I guess I always assumed that it was because they were round in shape. In fact, I found it a little confusing when I first started Palm development and my radio buttons were rectangular. In this post Eric Mack makes things so much clearer, and takes me back to my childhood years as well.

Getting Things Done With “Delete”

Keith Robinson just started his blog called “To-Done—Working to Live” this month. I think we’ll see some real good stuff there. This article already caught my attention.

When I check my email inbox, the first thing I do is delete a bunch of stuff. If I processed straight from the top down, and actually opened everything, I wouldn’t have time to do it all. Spam and viruses are a real problem. A good portion of the mail I do open is deleted as well. He talks about carrying this over to other areas of our life and getting rid of thing we don’t need. I’m pretty good with this as well. For example, with so many good Bible study tools now online, I’ve donated my Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, and a ton of other Bible reference books to our church library. I try to keep a good check on my closet and donate any clothes that I no longer wear for whatever reason. This minimalist appreach certainly helps me to keep the main thing the main thing.

I would like to take his thought a step further, however. In the Getting Things Done methodology David Allen presents a “Four Criteria Model for Choosing Actions in the Moment” to determine what we should be doing at any particular time. I use a “deletion principle” similar to what Keith mentions here to apply David’s model.

I start out by printing out my task list. Because of my deletion process I find it easier to work my next action list when it is on paper and I can see everything. I have 3 contexts that I primarily use: @home, @work, and @errands. Most of my @work stuff can be done at any time while at work, but some of the stuff requires special circumstances (context). For example, I might have an item for today to talk to my boss about something. I want to keep it visible, but I know that he isn’t anywhere around, so I remove it from the possibilities of stuff that I can do right now.

Once I’ve removed stuff that I can’t do right now I look at the amount of time that I have. I may have several things that will require 2 to 4 hours to accomplish. If I only have 45 minutes before a meeting, I can’t do any of those, so I will scratch them off as possibilities. With the items that are left, I scratch off a few more just because I don’t have the energy for them. This hopefully brings me down to just a few things. From there I can remove a few more because they just aren’t a very high priority. This systematic “deletion” process allows me to work on items for which I have the right context, time, energy, and priority. Those few items must therefore be the best thing for me to work on at that particular time.

Getting Things Done TiddlyWiki

This LifeHacker post brought me back to a cool little program that I first discovered a few months ago, but didn’t give it much thought at the time. I love client-side JavaScript and I’m amazed at the stuff that other developers are doing with it now. The original TiddlyWiki by Jeremy Ruston is a great example. It runs entirely in a browser, offers a lot of potential and power—you can make changes from the web interface and then save it to any file system of your choosing. The latest TiddlyWiki offshoot, GTD TiddlyWiki by Nathan Bowers has captured the interest of a lot of people in the GTD community. I must admit that I spent far too much time playing with this last night. (In my defense, I had a headache so I probably wouldn’t have gotten much else productive done either so this wasn’t a complete waste of time.)

If there was some way that I could synchronize this to a Palm application, I think it would be perfect for me. I would want to be able to make changes to it on my Palm as well however. At this point, it’s output isn’t even usable as a read-only option. (I tried saving it to my card and opening it with WebPro.) I could probably write some kind of “Export to HTML Flat File” feature for it which I could read via iSilo on the Palm, but even that only gets me half way. I mentioned on the GTD_Palm Yahoo Group a couple weeks ago that I could really use something that I could store on a remote web server and synchronize with my Palm. I can see how this tool could be that if someone created some synchronization routines that would work with it. This application is definitely something to keep your eyes on.