Miriam Parkinson

Inspired by Cam’s enthusiastic review of the moleskine I have been itching to get my hands on one. I’m a stationary geek – to the extent that I will make a trip to a stationary shop with no intention of buying anything just to fondle the nice paper and pens – so the moleskine appeals to me on several levels.

So I’ve been nagging Colin to buy me one for a month now and finally after dragging him into borders under false pretenses and parking him in front of them he caved in and bought me one all the time grumbling that “it doesn’t even have a soft cover” “you mean the only point of these is that they have an expandable pocket and they lie open flat” and “its pretty expensive for a notebook”.

I am of course pleased as punch with it and I’ve spent rather too much time stroking the pages going “oooh smooth….” but the real concern is the best way to implement gtd using it.

I was thinking that I’d use it for capture and stick to electronic methods for processing and next actions etc. Similar to Patrick’s method. Once I’ve been playing, sorry, working with it for a couple of weeks I’ll let you know how its going.

But now I’m curious…

How to you use your moleskine???

Tags: GTD, Moleskine, Stationary, Productivity, Study

A while ago Cam and Des came up with a Productivity Buddy System for GTDers who frequently fall off the wagon (or who simply think they could benefit from a nagging voice every now and then). The idea was that you would call/email your productivity buddy once a week and remind each other to do weekly reviews etc

The only problem I have found with this is that it is quite easy for two people to choose the same week to fall off the wagon. This means that neither person gets a reminder.
What the system really needs is a safety net to reduce the chance of this happening. So just say each person has two productivity buddies and those two buddies are not in turn each others productivity buddy. What you end up with is a double linked chain thingy of productivity buddies. So that by helping either one of your productivity buddies you are indirectly helping everyone else.

Or maybe I’m just over-complicating things…

Anyways back to study.

This is a series of flowcharts for different parts of the GTD process that I found very useful. I think I will create my own personalized version reflecting my collection places and contexts to make it even more useful… But not until after exams… Goddamn I hate exams. The trouble is that by the time they arrive you’re totally over uni and ready for a break so its hard to stay motivated.

I just completed my first weekly review.

I’ve been pretty successful so far with using pen and paper so what I did for the review is go through everything I had collected this week and either decided to put it down as an action for this week or deferred it to another week by copying it across to a new page of my notebook.
I also went over my projects and added any new actions necessary to those and marked off the completed actions.

I know that my list of actions has a lot of holes in it though but I’m starting to pick them up as I go along. Using the notebook means that I can write them down immediately when I think of them rather than depending on my mind because its absolutely useless for holding that sort of information.

I also intend to implement a tickler file and have a proper inbox etc soon but I am in the process of moving house so there isn’t much point in doing that until I know exactly what my desk will be like there.

After Cam’s success with a Moleskine I’m going to have a go at doing all my capturing, projects and actions in a notebook and then using my T5 for calender, dated to-dos and digital reference material such as contact details and lecture notes.
I’m not yet ready to go out and specifically buy anything particularly pretty for the purpose because I’m not sure whether it will work yet so I’m using an A5 Spirax notebook I bought a while ago and never got around to using.

I have a tab 2/3 of the way though for the projects section of the notebook where I will have 1 or 2 pages per project where I can note down major milestones and next actions and the back couple of pages is for my someday/maybe list. The front section is simply for capture and I’ll put the weeks next actions on a large postit note inside the front cover.

The only thing I’m worried about is that I’ll get hopelessly behind on the whole process bit and won’t keep up to date on the weekly reviews. Productivity Buddy anyone??? Keeping in mind though that I’m shy (yes I know that everyone who met me at the TPN dinner will laugh at this because they have conveniently forgotten about the shy mousy girl at the beginning of the evening) so any correspondence will have to start with email until I’m confident enough to try skype.

1. Stress. Sometimes when I get really stressed out I try to pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
2. Inadequate preparation. Large tasks need to be broken down into smaller ones. If you don’t have all the information necessary to do something it won’t get done.
3. Depression. Kinda obvious really. All that don’t care vibe doesn’t exactly help with productivity.
4. ADD. Major problem for me. I think maybe the easiest solution is to get back on my meds and declutter my environment. Removing distractions always helps. For anyone who suspects they might have ADD try having 100mg (about a cup of coffee) of caffeine. Its roughly equivalent to 5mg (standard dose) of Ritalin so if this helps you stop procrastinating then ADD might be worth investigating.

I think some of the easier solutions would be to get some exercise or meditate. Discussing options with someone else can help you make decisions and get started on projects. Keep a log of what you actually spend your time doing and what you achieve – keeps you honest and can be good to refer back to. Work out what motivates you – everyone has something – and refer to it when you feel yourself falling behind. If you are one of those people who derive satisfaction from crossing things off lists then feel free to make those lists. Perhaps have a notebook with a couple of pages per project (depending on the size) and keep an updated list of every action associated with it.

Finally if you are just totally not in the mood to do anything. Try not to feel too guilty about it. There’s no point in doing nothing if you won’t enjoy it. Just don’t make a habit of it

Productivity is not one of my strong points.
I mean I *can* do it. But its haphazard at best, and when I get depressed its the first thing to go.

I recently read Getting Things Done and it all made sense to me, I’ve tried to implement the whole system thingy but that stuff isn’t really the hard bit for me.

I now have a series of really well organized to-do lists, organized by context and with actions rather than abstract titles. That’s all good. I’ve even made sure there is as little resistance as possible to do the tasks. I know where all my material is. I have little post-it notes on all the pages in the text book that contain uni work I have to do. I’ve got the problem numbers circled so I can do the questions even if I don’t have my tute sheet with me.

But that is all useless if you then sit with the book next to you, write a title at the top of the page, write the first question number and then… Sit and stare at the book. Completely unable to get ‘into’ doing the actual work. Its ridiculous because its not a laziness thing. I am happy to work really really hard at something. Its a mood thing and in certain moods I’m a complete write-off.

Any hints???