Rationale:
Update
System:
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Advantages:
Full navigation forward and back in a system’s evolution.
Status:
Don’t bother with public libraries. It takes too much effort to take out the books you want (because they’re usually only available through InterLibrary Loan, which takes forever, limits your check out time and doesn’t allow for renewing), and you don’t get around to them in time, and then you have to pay overdue fees.
Better to invest in a book, keep it on your shelf, get to it in your own time.
Use cloth bags for grocery shopping, or make sure you use all of your plastic bags as garbage bags.
Carry a cloth bag with you (I have one that stuffs inside itself, a retractable type), or leave a few in your car.
Have a system for storing, selecting, cleaning and owning dress shirts.
The system is:
Hang up your shirts in the closet
Use only nice strong wooden or plastic (not the full plastic kind, but strong plastic with the metal hook) hangers
Have 11 shirts. 7 for each day of the week, and 4 for contingencies. But when choosing a shirt in the morning, every morning can be a contingency.
Have 3 white shirts, 1 gray shirt, 1 black shirt, 5 blue shirts, and 1 mint green shirt.
Wear them at least twice. If you are doing the proper thing, you can get at least these two wears out of one shirt.
The advantages to this are many:
- Less laundry
- Easy dressing in the morning
- Good unobtrusive fashion
- Shirts last longer
When you think about it, the only real thing you need on a pda is a calendar and a notebook/todo-list. These are things you absolutely need with you as you are out and about. When meeting someone, or when receiving an important call from work, it is essential that you successfully schedule things. The only way to do this is to have a planner with you at most times. But this does not need to be sync\’d with google calendar or anything. It just needs to be a calendar.
Similarly, for your soft landscape, you need a notebook to capture ideas and a to-do list so that you can get done what you need to get done when you are out and about.
Checking email, and twittering, and searching for donut shops nearby are all great things to be able to do, but for the most part they are not necessary. With better planning, you can do this kind of information gathering when sitting at your computer. But scheduling an appointment for work, and jotting down a great idea, or looking at your todolist can\’t be all taken care of simply through better planning, but instead require a ubiquitous kind of attention.
That being said, one can make the argument that neither the calendar nor the notebook are necessary either. With better planning, or simply by dealing with delayed gratification, wrongly made appointments can be changed, ideas can be written on napkins, or remembered later, or forgotten.
For systemsally, the basic level of functional I want to have out and about is the planner and the notebook. Interestingly, a paper notebook is way more functional than any smartphone\’s notebook feature. With a paper notebook you can write much more quickly, freely, and you can even draw and make mindmaps.
The system: Forgo the smartphone. Keep a cellular phone nearby (expect a system on this soon), for your telephone needs, but do not use anything digital when you are out and about. Instead, carry two moleskine large sized notebooks. One, the weekly planner, the other, a lined notebook. They are much more cumbersome physically than a smartphone, but infinitely less cumbersome mentally and psychically than a smartphone.
The advantages of this system are many:
- You don\’t lose a $200-400 investment if they get lost or stolen
- You drive much more safely because you don\’t have anything cool to play with
- You can be much more creative with your ideas, drawings, and lists
- It\’s classy
- You don\’t have the psychic burden of being connected all the time
- You are forced to be more organized when you do sit down at your portable gtd station at home or in the cafe
I\’m sure there\’s much more. Please leave your thoughts in the comments.
That’s right, my first recommendation is for email.
You probably already use it, you probably even like it (if you use gmail, otherwise you probably dread it), but I’m recommending it all the same. Email is free. Email is open both in format (no character limit, no formatting restrictions, text and pictures and links are all good) and in system (anyone can email anyone else, you’re not tied into one service like facebook or twitter).
In this age of facebook, and twitter, it is nice to have a simply inbox with private messages that you don’t have to reply to right away and people don’t know if you’ve read them or not. Like smacob and sally’s dialogue about blogging vs twitter , email is the victor in terms of allowing the writer/user an unrestricted workflow.
And who knew, that only 10 or 15 years after its introduction we’d be looking back at email as “last year’s model” and as a somewhat outmoded communication tool.
If you haven’t already, I recommend you check out email.
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