27 September 2006

Organize myself and my ideas

Some while ago I investigated methods and tools to support my self- of. I read every available book on time- and self-management (and even gave trainings on those subjects - but that was long before you were probably conceived). I started with a Palm-Pilot - and seriously failed with it.


Ok - after trying out many approaches, I finally reached GTD (getting things done), by pretty famous David Allen. (you find a very concise summary here).  I'm happy (only happy, not perfectly happy) with kGTD, a (naturally Mac) Omni-Outliner-based implementation of this method (the guys from OmniGroup a currently implementing a native version called OmniFocus). Supported by a variety of MindMaps (to brainstorm and structure ideas of single projects) it works as my "self-organizing-infrastructure. No more to-do lists on paper!


I added two utilities to this setup:



  • iClip to record documents, links and arbitrary snippets of information - too bad it does not directly link into my gtd-tasks and projects.

  • Notational Velocity - a minimalistic notetaking-and-finding application of astonishing productivity and usefulness.