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.