Always being concerned about that next email, IM or todo list item can really hinder the GTD mentality. Melitiously keeping your inbox at zero and clearing IM’s and email as soon as they come in just to feel fulfilled is really distracting.
I keep my inbox at zero pretty much at all times, the downside is when emails start to come in it is hard they are hard to ignore. They are like that one dead pixel or that zit that just came out or no where. You just want to get rid of it as soon as possible and move on.
Just when you get it moved to a task or respond here comes another one. I have decided to only check for new email every three hours and clean it to zero before another three hour block of work.
Being so efficient doesn’t always pay off, I am going to opt for the distraction less few hours during the day to see if it helps out.
After two weeks of downtime my new Mac Mini has arrived. Its an eBay purchase so the 30% discount was worth the extra week of wait.
Ended up getting the processor I wanted but opted for minimal ram, hard drive and just a dvd reader since those parts worked well on my defective mini.
First step, open it up and rip it apart. Two putty knives and some elbow grease was all it took. Next unscrew all visible screws and lay it all out. The photo shows the dissection in progress.
After all the old pieces were in I fired it up and gee golly it worked. It was like it never left the desk. The old hard drive didn’t even blink on the new motherboard and recognized everything as if it were there all along.
After twenty minutes and eight updates the system was rolling. Syncing all my files back from my laptop took another ten and we were back in business.
Now on to reactivating Time Machine, the software that froze my old mini each time it loaded. I can officially conclude the old mini was freezing due to a defective motherboard. This new mini is backing up 50 gigs of new data as I am typing without any issue.
Last but not least just for kicks I reassembled my old mini with the new parts in it just to see if it would boot. Sure enough it did and stayed on for 15 minutes before I turned it off. Just my luck, I am going to leave it on all day tomorrow just to see if it will freeze, if successful ill be selling a working mini on eBay instead of a parted out version.
I am just glad this whole ordeal is over with and I can stop thinking how much fun it would be to throw my mini against the wall.
Recently at both work and home clients have been asking to start their projects immediately. We have a billing system at work keep track of project progress but it doesn’t do a great job of scheduling projects for the future. Which makes it hard to justify how many resources are tied up at any given moment in the future.
I have always been a proponent of the GTD (Getting Things Done) method so I started trying out software. What I found was most suck at getting things done, I was left with a clunky and confusing taste in my mouth.
Then I tried Things and it changed my life. It allowed me to create all my projects, teammates and tasks with just a few clicks. Organize them into areas and begin work. It could not have been simpler or look more elegant.
Below is a screen shot from a few days ago listing the projects and their next steps. Things for today are listed in red and other peoples tasks have their names by it all in one screen, it is like a dream come true.
Translating from Things to our billing system which has a task manger I thought everyone would get freaked out seeing soo many far future tasks but I got quite the opposite reaction. They enjoyed seeing what was coming up and during downtime or when their brain was fried they could go on to a future task and get it out of the way.
Efficiency has gone up about 200% due to Things. If you are in a situation with multiple projects with multiple deadlines or clients this can be a life savor.
Check Things out, download the preview at Cultured Code.
