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How much of your class is really about memorization? Maybe you should try reading "Getting things done" by Paul Allen instead.

http://www.davidco.com/

I'm a huge fan of Getting Things Done, and it's directly responsible for a lot of positive changes in my life. One of the core tenets of "GTD" is to habitually, obsessively enter the things you need to remember into a "trusted system" where you can find them again easily. Whether that's a notebook or index cards or a Franklin planner or an iPod (my pick), the important part is that you can trust it to store the things that are important to you.

By some definition, my iPod and its planning software (yay Omnifocus!) has made me dumber. I know longer remember most of the stuff that I need to accomplish. Instead, I check it often to find stuff that I could be working on. I don't have to recall the three unrelated things I need to pick up next time I'm at the local home store; I consult my iPod and check them off as I put them in my cart. Neither do I make an effort to remember that my daughters' piano lessons are at a certain time - my calendar is much better at remembering that stuff. I forget all the things I need to talk to my boss about, but I can pull up that list in about 5 seconds.

The enormous payoff is that instead of spending my mental energy on trying to remember a thousand little things that would be crying for my attention, I can dedicate myself to the one task I'm specifically working on at the moment. I have a lot more free time now and I'm much better at juggling all my responsibilities. If I'm stupid for relying on something other than my mind to track all those things, then so be it. I can live with that.

Try GTD. (You can also google for "GTD" and "Getting Things Done".)

But the real trick is to keep your system lean and simple - you won't use it if it's complex.

As a 39 year old psychologist one month away from the big four oh and noticing cognitive slowdown, I would suggest trying not to force the issue but look for a way to hack it. I started using David Allen's Getting Things Done system three years ago and - yeah I know gimmicky business thing blah blah -- it is actually a great way to relieve yourself from having to remember things.

On the technical end I run Tracks to manage my work, there are a lot of GTD-related programs so shop around.

I love David Allen's GTD, and I've a few productivity RSS feeds that I follow;
David Allen Co.'s official RSS feed has a lot of interesting GTD-centric tips.
43Folders is Merlin Mann's productivity feed with a little more unrelated noise.
Lifehacker has a lot of productivity tips, but again, more noise. On the other hand, Lifehacker is also a lot more down to earth.
Get Rich Slowly isn't directly productivity--related, but it's a good reminder to mind your finances.

(I've linked to the sites and not the feeds so that new readers can get a glimpse of the content before choosing whether or not to grab the RSS feed)

To me, and this is probably the engineer in me speaking, the arbitrary designation of the end of the year as a time to make life adjustments is very odd. If there is a problem in your life or something that needs changing, it seems like you should work to correct that whenever you discover it.

"The workers swore that this arrangement made them feel calmer. But did more screen area actually help with cognition? To find out, Czerwinski's team conducted another experiment. The researchers took 15 volunteers, sat each one in front of a regular-size 15-inch monitor and had them complete a variety of tasks designed to challenge their powers of concentration - like a Web search, some cutting and pasting and memorizing a seven-digit phone number. Then the volunteers repeated these same tasks, this time using a computer with a massive 42-inch screen, as big as a plasma TV.

The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind. So her group began devising tools that maximized screen space by grouping documents and programs together - making it possible to easily spy them out of the corner of your eye, ensuring that you would never forget them in the fog of your interruptions. Another experiment created a tiny round window that floats on one side of the screen; moving dots represent information you need to monitor, like the size of your in-box or an approaching meeting. It looks precisely like the radar screen in a military cockpit.

My approach to email is based on two 'facts'.
  1. Computers are better at searching than me.
  2. Computer storage (on the scale of email at least) is cheap.

Thus I keep everything (except obvious junk and spam) in one big folder called 'Archive'. My Inbox is virtually empty except for stuff that I haven't read yet. If I need older stuff then I run a search on my Archive - I use google desktop (I expect people have heard of them).

This way I don't waste time trying to think of which folder an email should go into. Why waste the time organising email that I will almost certainly never re-read - I estimated that I only reread less than 5% of the mail even once. If only I could have all that time back I spent deciding in which of the 98 folders an email belonged. I don't think I ever had single email that didn't belong in at least 3!

When 'Archive' gets too big I archive it :) In outlook this essentially means moving it into a personal folder (my company has a 100MB limit on server based inboxes). I have a series of dated folders for each of my archive points. This is perfectly adequate as, generally, the value of emails diminishes over time; archived emails are slightly less accessible but I am even less likely to need them so the effort level on average remains low.

When I go through my new mail anything that needs more than 2 minutes thought goes temporarily into 'Action'. Everything else is read and dumped into 'Archive'. When I'm ready I'll go through the stuff in 'Actions' and do what is needed then dump the mail into 'Archive'.

The real joy of this is that my inbox is just that, an inbox and not a cluttered mess - I bet at home you at least pick up the mail from the floor and put it on your kitchen table. I would really urge people to try this as I found the experience very liberating. It would take me two days to clear my inbox after a 2 week holiday, last time I did it in 15 minutes; inbox empty. (ok I had plenty of to do in actions but my inbox was ready to work as an inbox again and I had a sense of the work outstanding)

Most of this I got from reading the classic "Getting things done" book by Dave Allen. I'm not 100% sold on GTD but bits really do work for me.

But there can be good and useful meetings.

Here's what I found on a website: 5 reasons to have a meeting.

There are five reasons to have a meeting. Each may be a perfectly fine reason. Make sure everyone at your meeting knows and agrees with which of these you are there to accomplish.

1. Give information. "Hello everyone. I've brought you all together today to let you know what's been going on about the pending lawsuit. I'd like you to leave here today understanding what's going on, and with as much background as you need to be able to answer questions that may arise from our customers."

2. Get information. "Thanks for coming. We've invited you all here to find out from everyone what we should be aware of that's going on in your division relative to the new product roll-out. We want to know what's happening at all levels in the organization about this, so we can make some adjustments in our plans accordingly."

3. Develop options. "Wed like to spend this afternoon surfacing, formulating, and exploring as many possible ways to deal with the problem we've just uncovered in the new system implementation. We want to make sure we've got everyone's perspectives and all the possible alternatives formulated."

4. Make decisions. "We've brought you all together this morning to present to you the three proposed approaches to launching our new product, and get a consensus decision on which one to pursue."

5. Warm magical human contact. "There are 3 agenda items we would like to cover today. And though we could have done this by email, we wanted to have an opportunity to bring the new team together in one place, and get some time to get to know each other between the lines..."

You may often have more than one of these agendas--sometimes even all five. "Today I'm going to share some information with you, and get some information from you as well. We're then going to explore some possible approaches to the situation, and then decide our best course of action. Meanwhile it will give us a chance to get to know each other a little more as real people..."

Pretty common sense stuff. Right. But, ever sat in a room with someone trying to make a decision, someone else just wanting to do some brainstorming about some possibilities, some people just wanting to get to know who they're working with, and someone else just wanting to get some information about the situation? And they all wind up wanting to kill each other?

It's very valuable to get clarification and agreement on the front end, as to which of the five reasons for a meeting you have going on.

[Thanks to Andrew Grove of Intel for 1 - 4 above, from his elegant management
writing. - DA]

---
Also see: ">http://www.martynemko.com/pub/articles/meetings. shtm

Excerpt:
1. A good reason to call a meeting is for people to give progress reports.

Answer: False. That's better done via E-mail.

(Comment: YEAH!)

2. Each meeting agenda should list the topics to be discussed--for example, the company pay structure.

False. Each meeting's agenda item should list the expected outcome--for example, an agreement on a new pay structure. That reduces the risk that the meeting will be all jawboning and no outcome.

it seemed like it was written because some editor really needed a technology article, fast, and just pulled first thing he could find out of his butt... it didn't really offer anything at all, and when it did, it was all obvious
It may be obvious in retrospect, but the article puts the ideas very well together (and for some reason they even decided to interview the 3 big guys, although their quotes are used very sparingly... may be their next article will have more).

The idea that "it has become easier to program a cell phone or computer--instead of your brain--to recall facts or other essential information. In some sense, our digital devices do the thinking for us now" is very insightful and not everyone realises that. Perhaps, even this article is not sufficient, but if you learn (not necessarily do, for our purposes here) about things like GtD or keeping notebooks, you start to get a very good picture of how the brain interfaces with external tools. This helps you understand the natural gradual progression of improvements that will lead in a few decades to the exocortex.

i don't think anything is going to change, except there will be more toys to play with.
It's really easy to dismiss the change, but you are wrong. Things will change. It's not just the calculators. It's that part of your thinking really does go outside of your brain, literally. Some thinking process happens outside your cranium and it's not just adding 2+2. And as it happens outside, you gain unprecedented control over your thinking, you can direct it on the meta-level, you can now decide how you want to think, what do you want to think on. Yes, most people don't realise that yet, but we are talking about fundamental changes here, not just some new toys.

First of all you say you're working with 10 teams, but whose team are you on? You can't be on 10 teams, you can't report to 10 managers. I'm going to guess you are on one team and have one direct supervisor.

If the teams are trying to make you work within your team structure that's a separate issue to task management. You need to inform them of the task management structure your department uses, and have them submit requests for work under that structure. If your deliverables are project deliverables, they can be tracked, but they need to be tracked as external deliverables, and most importantly you don't need to track them according to the process that team uses to track deliverables. If you do have to act as a member of many teams dear god you and your organization need some serious intervention.

Anyway, so your problem is really "I have many many many tasks, how do I track them?" As someone else mentioned Getting Things Done is a technologistic agnostic task management sytem that is very popular with geeks, for managing many many tasks at once. You can also google to find links and articles like this one to let you try-before-you-buy.

I've just finished reading David Allen's "Getting Things Done" http://www.davidco.com/ and it's remarkably tech-agnostic. You can achieve all of your requirements with paper and pen. I'd recommend getting a good solid view of WHAT you want to record, and how to arrange it before deciding on any kind of tech solution.

(Then jump straight to ShadowPlan... heh heh..)

Find out why your memory is lacking or diary overly busy - remembering things shouldn't be such a problem. If it is reflect why so.

Your mind is a terrible place to clutter up with stuff that needs doing. It's why you so often have that vague unease that you're forgetting something important. You probably are. However otherwise brilliant your mind is, it is probably lousy at general organizing and task management (remembering to buy new flashlight batteries when you are already at the grocery store rather than when you grab the flashlight to check on the strange noise at night).

The trick is to find a organizing method that works for you - something that I had not done very well till recently.

My sister got my attention by mentioning that, by her estimates, reading a book called "Getting Things Done" and implementing many of its ideas had increased her consulting income by $20,000/year. I am rather leary of the managementOrganizationMethodDuJour but I read the book anyway.

I found the book very valuable and especially appreciated the fact that, unlike so many methods that are closely tied to a particular vendor's books or software, this book says it's about understanding some basic principles. If you like Outlook, use Outlook. Palm? Great. Pencil and paper? They work fine, too.

I can't duplicate the whole book here but the most valuable change I've made - and one which changed my Palm from the infrequently-used paperweight it had become into an indispensible tool - was to eliminate the concept of the todo list and implement the concept of the project and the next-action.

The typical Palm user tries to use the thing by agonizing over due-dates and priorities and categorizing items as "work" or "personal", etc. Instead, use the todo feature as a "project" list where a project is defined as "anything you want to get done that will take more than one step".

You will find that almost everything is a project and if you spend a few seconds thinking about the project you can identify the single next-action that will move that project toward completion. The "notes" feature in the todo list works very well for this.

As an example, say your car windshield is cracked then "fix car windshield" is the project. A few moments of thinking takes you from "I need to find a windshield shop" to "Bob at the tennis-club mentioned he liked the place that fixed his" to "I'll call Bob" to "but I don't have his number" to "it's probably in the club roster". OK, the single next action that will move this project forward is to find Bob's number and the place that it can be done is at home when you have the club roster handy.

This leads to the other important change I made after reading the book. My projects are now organized by "context" - basically, where can I accomplish the next-action. The categories that work for me include "at home", "at computer", "at phone", "with wife", etc. For the example above, the project would start in the "at home" category. After I look up the number and scribble it in the note for that project I would move it to the "at phone" category and so on. A project at the "select paint color" stage might be in the "with wife" category. Whenever I need to go to a store I glance at the "errands" category and see what might be combined into the same trip. While the "priority" feature in most listing programs seems like a good idea it matters little if the absolute most-important item is to send an email and you are nowhere near a computer. But if you are waiting for your flight to leave you may be able to pull out your cellphone and use the time to move items in the "at phone" category forward.

One useful category is the "waiting for" category - the rebate that will be coming in 6-8 weeks, the shop that told you that they will get a quote to you by Friday. When your project is on hold for some external reason you move it to "waiting for" and put a due-date in it. If you hav

For a calendar app, I'm currently using iCal because it syncs with my Palm (albeit poorly, thanks Apple). I really like Remind and I would commit to using it if I could get it to sync with the Palm (I'm tempted to use Remind anyway, regardless of the Palm, I could always output Remind to HTML and sync it with Plucker or something).

For todo lists, I have completely adopted the David Allen Getting Things Done method and I just use plain old text files which I can sync with NoteTaker on my Palm (and vim on the desktop for super rapid processing better than any Todo app I've ever seen).

I'm just a Hipster PDA away from being Merlin Mann.

From -- http://www.davidco.com/coaches_corner/Julie_Daniel /article9.html

Julie Daniel
Keeping Your In-Box "Real"

Since I've been accredited to do the David Allen workflow coaching in the UK I've seen an awful lot of e-mail in-boxes. Different people manage their in-boxes in different ways but one of the things that I've noticed is that, before they do the coaching and implement the GTD approach, most people have some kind of "yuk" feeling associated with their in-box.

It seems that most people have at least SIX different types of e-mail sitting in their in-box. And people tell me that there are e-mails in their in-boxes that they have opened and looked at and then closed twice, three times... even a dozen or more times! David says that we are all too busy to think the same thought twice (unless of course it's a nice thought and we want to think it again!!) But for most e-mails in most people's in-boxes thinking and re-thinking what it's about isn't a whole lot of fun. And it means that every time they look at what's in their in-box they have to re-think what is going on and try to figure out all over again which of the six types of thing each e-mail is and what needs to happen about it. No wonder most people have some kind of "yuk" feeling associated with their in-box!

So what are the six most common types of e-mail I see?

First of all there is the e-mail that they've read and there's no action associated with it and they don't need to keep it for reference. It shouldn't really be in there any more because it's finished with and it should have been deleted. But... they haven't got round to deleting it yet. So, for now, it's just sitting there...

Second is the e-mail that they've read and there's no action associated with it but they think they may need to refer back to it at some later date. That one really shouldn't be in there any more either because it should be filed away somewhere. But...they haven't got around to filing it away yet. So, for now, just sitting there...

Third is the e-mail that they've read and they've decided there is an action on it but they haven't quite decided what that action is yet. The e-mail is parked there as a reminder that they need to do something about it... once they figure out just exactly what it is that they want to do. So, for now, it's just sitting there...

Fourth is the e-mail that they've read and they've decided that there is an action on it and they have actually decided what it is that they want to do but they just haven't quite got round to doing that action yet. The e-mail is parked there as a reminder that, when they get some time in between all those meetings that they have to go to, they really need to do that action that they've decided to do. So, for now, it's just sitting there...

Fifth is the e-mail that they've read and they've figured out what it was that they needed to do about it AND they've actually done that action. But now someone owes them a reply and so the e-mail is parked there as a reminder that they have done something but the game isn't over yet because somebody owes them something back and they might need to chase it. And if they lose sight of the e-mail they might forget that the thing isn't finished yet. So, for now, it's just sitting there...

Sixth - and this is the only type of e-mail that really belongs in an in-box - is the one they haven't read yet.

WOW! No wonder most people's brains hurt when they look at their in-box.

The Getting Things Done methodology makes it safe for you have a real in-box - that is one where the only items in it are the ones you've not read yet. It does this by having a leak-proof system outside of your in-box to track those different kinds of things that you need to remind yourself about. Once you know how to answer those two vital questions; "What's the successful outcome?" and "What's the next action?" and

This book is absolutely awesome. I haven't even finished it yet (procrastination), but I have already implemented a few nuggets I've picked up, with great results. I strongly suggest this text for anyone who feels they have time management issues.

Also, here's a nifty diagram related to the system that will make sense once you read the book.

After reading David Cole's 'Getting Things Done'

Actually, it's by David Allen.

Getting Things Done is one of the best systems out there for getting - and staying - organized. I've struggled with this issue for years, and this is the first system I've found that helps. For the first time in 10 years I have free time!

Oh, and getting back to the original topic:

MACHINE 1:
~/.procmail - I HATE SPAM
~/.projects - textfile list of all my projects
~/coding - hopefully self-explanatory
~/documents - OpenOffice type documents, with subdirectories for templates, old school papers, packing lists, etc.
/archives - stuff that has been burned to cd/dvd but that I want fast access to
/incoming - I moved all my to be sorted directories here, and little by little have whittled down the contents
/tmp - downloads, limewire, etc. - Anything I want to save will be moved into the appropriate place.

MACHINE 2:
D:\iTunes - all of my mp3s are now handled by the wonderful program iTunes
D:\VIDEOS - backups of old home videos, anything downloaded worth keeping, dvd editing projects
D:\GAMES - Games and their patches

I have gotten in the habit of sticking everything important in CVS. Not only does this mean I can access everything I need from the various machines on my lan, but I have one and only one thing to back up each week. Makes life much simpler, although it is tough to stay disciplined and not just save everywhere.

David uses plain PalmOS, not some fancy GTD software:

and let me tell you, he is one amazing person. I have been to his seminar (and one of his trainers' seminars) and it really makes you think about the way you do things. You start by extracting your brain into pages and pages of thoughts (called a brain dump), and then you practice moving each item into this process (the GTD process) whether you define it as a project, an action to complete a larger project, or just a "Someday Maybe" that is important only in the long term. There are a lot of details to the process, but you really need to read the book or go to one of his seminars to understand it fully, and even then you need a lot of practice and dedication beyond that. I highly reccomend both the seminar and the book.

One thing I have to say about GTD is the end result -- you end up with a process to control your life. I can't remember the quote David had -- but basically, his idea was that if you had all the "things" controlled, then you were free. Its honestly a sort of nirvana -- when you reach the point where you have everything you do into this system, and it becomes part of your life, then you don't have to think about the system anymore. So, whatever you had before -- oh, I have to do this and this and this today, but right now I'm doing this with this other thing on my mind but I really want to do this... becomes I am doing this. It's an amazing feeling. But there's more to it than that, so go to David's site and get into it.

There's also an Outlook plugin available.

I like using Ecco Pro and Shadow Plan. Details here and here.

Several others have recommended Life Balance, and that is my choice too. LB follows a philosophy of assigning priorities to different parts of your life in order to bring things into balance. So, for example, if you feel that work is taking too much time out of your life you lower the priority for work all work tasks are accoringly moved to a lower place on the list according to home life and any other categories.

LB is hierarchical, so you can schedule tasks so that they don't show up until subtasks are complete.

While I mentioned the LB philosophy of balance, I have started using David Allens Getting Things Done approach. Life Balance works with it quite well and actually helps to keep me doing it.

I have both Palm and PC versions of Life Balance. the two synchronize so I can use either one. When I bought the Palm version it was the most expensive piece of Palm software I had bought. I begrudged them the money, but I'm hooked on the program. I have since bought the desktop version, which is easier to use when I'm at my PC.

David uses a plain PalmOS organizer and PalmDesktop with no add-ins.

Here's how I handle email. Keep your inbox empty. When you come to your email you probably have some messages in your inbox. Decide if you need to read something. If not, delete it (spam, stupid forwards). After you read it, decide what you want to do about it. If you need to take some action on it, and it will take less than 2 minutes, do it now. Some messages the only action was to read and enjoy or benefit from the information, but now you can delete it. Other quick actions are to mark appointments on a calendar, put something on your project list, or otherwise capture the relevant information. Other things that need to be done, but must be done in some other context (location or time). Move messages that you want to act on into an "@action" folder. (The @ puts it at the top of the list of mail folders usually.) Review this folder regularly. You can move messages to reference folders, but prefer deletion over storage. Also, get off as many mailing lists as you can.

Credits: Ideas mostly taken from here.