Evernote, Omnifocus, and my productivity

Over the past several years my job here at Cisco Talos has changed drastically.  I took on new roles, which is awesome and exciting, but in the process while trying to organize and create process and clarity for my team and those that work with my team, I lost my personal productivity.  Something I've written about extensively on this blog.

I shifted from Evernote (which I've been using forever, as readers of this blog will know) to Notes.app, and from Omnifocus (Also have been using it forever) to Reminders.app, all in an attempt to reduce the amount of 3rd party apps I had installed on my laptop, iPad, and iPhone and use a "native Apple experience".

I quickly outgrew them both.   I found out that Notes really tops out at around 2000 notes, then it becomes basically nonfunctional. My notes are not your typical Apple Notes.app "jot down a few things" type Notes though.  I've had a lot of people tell me that Notes handles their notes fine.  My notes have attachments, drawings, photos, complex formatting, etc.  I have thousands and thousands of notes.  I just don't think Notes.app could handle it.  Another feature I missed: Notes doesn't allow you to "Tag".  I can arrange my notes by topic, much like the "Notebook" feature in Evernote, but I can't "tag" something in Notes.app.

For example, how I use this in Evernote, and I'll touch on this later as well...  let's say I am going to a conference.  I get the agenda for the conference, my flights, my receipts, my notes, my meetings, everything that I am doing at the conference, I tag it something that represents the conference.  For example, my tag for "CiscoLive United States" is "clus".  I can find everything regardless of Notebook or arrangement with that tag.   I could compensate for this in Notes.app with something like #clusat the top of the note, and that worked for awhile, but as I said earlier, Notes.app's searching at thousands-of-notes scale is ridiculously slow, and let's not get started with the frustration of syncing across devices.

More on searching...  Notes can find text in a PDF or a Doc, that's fine, but it doesn't show you where in the PDF the text was.  Notes also doesn't do a good job of searching handwritten notes.  Something I do a lot of on my iPad. (I'll get to this later with my comments on Notability and Penultimate.)

As for Reminders.  It doesn't do any nesting of actions, vital to how I work in Omnifocus.  Plus I had a bunch of Applescripts that organized and automated things for my in Evernote and Omnifocus, and I had to rewrite some of them to deal with Reminders and Notes.  Things like being able to simply tap a keystroke, which prompts an entry box so I can create myself a reminder very quickly.  Omnifocus has this natively.  Reminders.app, I had to find one (or write one, I honestly don't remember which at this point)  btw --  here it is.

tell application "System Events"

display dialog"Create a new reminder" default answer"" cancel button"Cancel" giving up after 20 with icon path to resource "Reminders.icns" in bundle(path to application "Reminders")

set reminTitle to text returned of result

tell application "Reminders"

set newremin to make new reminder

set name of newremin to reminTitle

end tell

 end tell

If you use Reminders, and you want to steal that and make a keyboard shortcut that calls that AppleScript (if you use Reminders.app) feel free.

So, after using this new system for awhile, I found out it was a disaster, and in the past two weeks I have dedicated significant amounts of time to get back to my happy place where things were productive.

So, I'm back to using Evernote and Omnifocus again, and I am going write a few posts on how I've developed a system the works for me with these three tools.  Consider this.. part one.

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Please leave comments below.

Great Anti-Email post

Jeff Atwood, blogger and coder over at Coding Horror, one of the many blogs I read, had this post up sometime last year, and I thought it was such a good post that I've recommended it to a couple friends, but I realized I never actually blogged it.

Jeff discusses a similar topic to what I've discussed in the past.  Checking email less often, shutting your email off for periods of time, turn off the "new message" ding.   All great points.

Go check out his post here.  Jeff, great job!

Applying "Getting Things Done" to IPSs

Getting Things Done, or "GTD" for short, as I've blogged about before, several times, is a method of personal organization with a focus on accomplishing tasks.  It's great for applying to email (Inbox Zero) and it's great for organization of your personal life (read some of the articles I've written before, particularly this one).

Some IDS and IPS courses and teachers will tell you to turn on everything, and log everything because that's the only way you'll find anything.  I don't disagree with that, but there are several problems with this philosophy, design, bandwidth, dropping packets, time, money, and performance.  Just to name a few.  Plus, who wants to sit there and look for everything.  Most IDS analysts I know are just trying to keep their head above water.  They want to just figure out a better way to deal with the information that is coming in, not increase the amount of information coming in.  Some people have this same problem with email, which is why I am such and advocate to Inbox Zero and GTD to learn to deal with the increased amount of information that we are being subjected to.

What if we took this same philosophy to IDS/IPS?  While this can primarily work with a Snort based device, such as Sourcefire, it can work with about anything.

Step One:  Turn everything off.
Yup.  Just as a test, create a new IPS policy and turn everything off, if you can.  (If you can't then just move on to Step 2.)  Now the focus of this exercise is only to turn on what is relavant to you, so that's what we are going to do, reset expectations.

Step Two:  Use RNA
(If you don't have RNA, obviously you can skip this step, but go ahead and read it so that you know what you are missing.)  Go to your new policy, use your RNA Recommended Rules Configuration to essentially tie the IPS policy to a certain sensors or series of sensors.  RNA Recommended Rules will take the vulnerabilities that RNA has detected in Realtime (or that it received via the Host API or Qualys or Nessus or Nmap...) and uses the information to give you suggestions about what to turn on in your network.  Use the R3 (RNA Recommended Rules) to provide you those recommendations and then go over them with the common sense test.  As you know RNA tells you what you could be vulnerable to.  Your system is "Guilty until Proven Innocent", hopefully you can take the time and tell your system what your network is not vulnerable to, but lets leave that for another day right now.  Turn on the rules that are relevant to you and your network.  Don't turn on ICMP Port Unreachable.  You'll see why in Step Five.

Step Three:  Turn on any rules that are relavant.
Want to look for Spyware?  Turn on the spyware rules.  Want to look for Chat clients?  Turn on the chat rules, etc.

Step Four:  Push the policy, and wait.
Give the new policy 24 hours if you are on a slow network, or maybe just let it run over your lunch period.  Let the policy run on your network for an acceptable amount of time, you be the judge with your common sense hat.

Step Five:  Look at your alerts.
Now, go back and look at your alerts.  Time to start cleaning out.  For each event I want you to follow a flow, I want you to decide if it is an actionable alert.  Are you going to physically do something with this event?  Are you going to report it to the Desktop security people?  Are you going to block the port at the firewall?  Update the Antivirus?  What are you going to do with the event?

If you think about the next "actionable" event you are going to do with the alert, and you decide, well, I am going to do nothing with the event, then shut the rule off.  No point in running a rule if you aren't going to react to it's logging.  Do you allow AOL Instant Messenger on your network, and your AIM rules are alerting?  What are you going to do about it?  You allow it right?  So you are going to do nothing?  Okay, then shut the rule off.

What if you don't want to shut off the rule, but only want to shut it off going to a particular machine?  Well, the suppress it based on IP.  What if you don't want to shut off a rule, but it's alerting too much?  Then threshold it.  My point is, do something.

Do that for all the events in the period that you set in Step Four.  Do this once a day, and after you do it, at the end of each time, repush your policy, then do it again the next "period".  Do this for several days.  This step, in case you haven't noticed will need to be done every day.  Every update there will be new things for you to explore and catch.  Begin at the beginning.

Step Six:  What are you going to DO now?
Now, you have a bunch of alerts you intend to do something with.  Now, do you create trouble tickets?  Do you start working with various teams?  You get the point.

Step Seven: Now that your head is above water, you can experiment
After you have done the first six steps satisfactorily to a point where you can handle your IDS and IPS, you can deal with anything that comes in.  You have a process, now you have best practices.  Now, you can turn on rules that you are interested in.  Things that you don't (or might) have to deal with.  Things that you may have had on before but never got a chance to look at.  Rules that alert on obfuscated javascript for instance.  You can go play.

Warning:  Just a word before you start this process. Warn your coworkers and boss that you are about to become much more efficient and start filing more tickets.  Because you will.

Oh, and make backups of your policies before you make changes.  In fact, create new policies based off of your old ones and work off the new ones.



Please leave comments below.

Rambling on Productivity and Email (Part Three)

The Calendar

The essential part of any productivity system is the calendar. Managing your time for your projects is probably one of the most vital portions to getting anything done. Without disruptions, without the cruft of the day, you can focus on your problem.

The essential problem with any environment is poorly set expectations. If you think you are going to be able to have your coworkers and boss read your mind, you are grossly mistaken. They don't know that you may be behind on a certain project, they don't know that you may need more time with whatever it is you are working on. They know what you tell them. In most big corporate environments, one of the ways they can find this out is by looking at your calendar.

I use Google calendar for my organizational skills, because that's what I have integrated into my system, its what our company uses, and it works. However, these ideas should work perfectly for your Microsoft Exchange calendaring system (or whatever calendaring system you happen to use).

Set aside some time

Begin by setting aside some time, usually Monday and Friday, to yourself. This is your time to be able to get things in the proper order and organize your thoughts into a coherent structure. I like Monday and Friday because Monday allows me to plan for the week, Friday allows me to review any last minute details that MUST be done this week, cannot wait for Monday, and gives me time to knock them out.

Obviously the times to do this on Monday are first thing in the morning. On Friday I like to set aside the hour of 3-4. I call this "Review Time". There are no meetings scheduled during this time. This is your sacred time to balance your thoughts. As David Allen says in his seminars on GTD, anything that goes on your calendar is a contract, a hard bet, a commitment. The calendar is sacred. Don't put things on your calendar you "might" do. Put things on your calendar that you are going to do. If you aren't going to do it, make it a "Todo", file it under "someday", and take a look at it in your daily review time.

Right now, go to your calendar on Monday and Friday and block off an hour to yourself, go ahead, we'll wait here.

During this time on those days, you do exactly what I stated above, and see if it helps. I find it useful to set aside, just a half hour, right after lunch to see where I was at for the day, review my To-do list, and then accomplish everything that needed to be accomplished for that day.

Do your best to schedule

You will be surprised how well this works. I ask people, even my wife, to her greater annoyance, anything that I need to be at or participate in, needs to go on my calendar. I need to remember it, and I need to be there. My calendar is how I schedule things and is my organizational tool. My Google Calendar is synced between my desktop and my iPhone, and the web (so my wife can get it). If it's not on my calendar, either I don't know about it, or I can't be there (I've declined). Make sure it's on my calendar and we'll be good. Force your coworkers to be the same way. Stick to the time limits.

Scenario: Some guy comes to your desk.

Them: "Hey Bob -(you)-, Do you have a few minutes to talk about project x?"

You: "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm in the middle of something right now, let's set aside a few minutes to talk about that this afternoon (tomorrow, friday). Can you send me an invite for that at 3?"

Bam. Interruption gone, scheduled time to talk about project x, and you move on with what you were talking about. This isn't perfect. Sometimes you'll have to deal with little interruptions.

Wow. Talk about a perfect example. Seriously. Right after I finished the previous paragraph I received a phone call. Wanting to schedule a furniture delivery. Now, had I not answered the phone, it would have went to voicemail and I then I could have called them back at my convenience, scheduling the furniture delivery time at on my terms.

However, when it comes to furniture delivery, the sooner you book the delivery date, the faster you will get your stuff. So I took the call. I sat down in front of my Google calendar, blocked off the date that my furniture will be delivered. They say they are going to call the day before with the exact 3-hour window of delivery time, which is slightly annoying, but I'll deal with it. Now I know on that furniture delivery day, I will be available.

Back on topic, even though that really wasn't a deviation. Wife just called. Of course I had to take that call.

Scheduling YOUR time is on YOUR terms. Sometimes you can't help it and you have to work around other people's schedules, so you have to be flexible. But don't be flexible once you put things on the calendar. People are expecting to meet with you, you are important enough to have a meeting with and talk about a dedicated subject. Don't disrespect another persons time by saying you'll be at a meeting and then not showing up. If you have a conflict, decline the meeting.

The tricky part is the "maybe" response to a meeting invite. If have to respond with Maybe, and I try very hard not to, I write an email and explain why I replied with maybe. If the person can possibly reschedule for a more convenient time for both parties, then that is fine, however, give the person you are responding to the common courtesy o understand why you replied with Maybe. Then, maybe, then can move the meeting to a mutually beneficial time.

Example: I have a meeting at 1pm that usually runs over. If you send me a meeting invite at 2pm, I'll respond with "Maybe" -- by the way, Outlook calls this "Tentative". Then I'll write you an email saying something like this:

"Dear Bob,

I apologize for having to respond to your meeting invite with "Maybe". I have a meeting at 1pm that sometimes runs over time. If there is another time you'd like to push the meeting to, say, 2:30 or 3pm that same day, that would be good with me as well. I have an opening on my calendar at that time.

Thanks in advance,

Me"

Meetings that run over time are evil. If the time is going to run over, schedule a followup. Or ask the meeting attendees if they can stay, or need to go. If anyone needs to go, let them go. Don't disrespect their time. They didn't disrespect yours by attending your meeting.

Out of Office

I personally am not a fan of the "Out of Office" message. It's a bad security practice. Especially for the security and network personnel. It allows someone sending you an email to know that you are not in the office right now, and right now would be an excellent time to attack the network. Instead, I like to use the calendar for this. Block the time you are going to be Out of the Office out as "Out of Office". I believe in Outlook, they color the "Out of Office" time differently, purple I think. Of course this only works for people in your domain, (exchange wise), or people that have access to your calendar, (say, Google Calendar). But, I believe this to be a more secure and more polite way of handling your Out of Office. If it's important, someone will schedule a call, talk, or meeting, but you have to train your coworkers to do this. If it's not important, you'll get back to the email when you get back. Besides, if it's THAT important, they should just pick up the phone and call you.

I write these articles to give you a broad overview of what works and how to structure it. You have to apply it to your own life and situation. This method doesn't work for everyone, but it sure does work for me.

I just want to echo something that Merlin Mann has said. I hate that the default meeting time in an hour. I wish you could change that in some way. In Google Calendar, iCal, and in Outlook, the default meeting time is an hour long. I want to be able to say the default meeting time is 30 minutes. If I want to expand it, I can. But blocking a whole hour of my time? Working approx 8 hours a day, that's not very much time. Anyway, sorry, pet peeve.

Please leave comments below.

Rambling on Productivity and Email (Part Two)

Managing To-Dos

As I promised a follow up post to my previous blog post here.

I stated, I try to manage things through Todo lists. When I read an email that I need to take action on, I make a ToDo out of it. Simple to complex, I make a ToDo out of it. Not just emails either. If I am in a meeting and I hear an "action item" for me, I knock that out. If I get a shopping list from my wife, I put that in my Todo list as well.

There are several tools that I have evaluated and used over the years, let me go over a few of these and see if any of them help you. The one that works for me is not the one that may work for you. You have to figure it out for yourself. Make the ToDo list work for you, not you working for your ToDo list. If you find yourself spending most of your time in your ToDo list "managing it" (prioritizing, categorizing, contexting... You are doing it wrong. Managing your ToDo's should not be a ToDo within itself.)

1) Google Tasks

Google Tasks is a built in Task manager into the Gmail interface. It is accessible on the left hand side of your Gmail interface near the labels. (Look for the obvious word "Tasks"). I like this method, it's keyboard accessible, works great, and is accessible from the web.

However, There are two reasons I don't use Google Tasks. First is templates. If I want to make a standard "Group" of tasks. Say, 10 things that I must do with each client, I want to be able to template these 10 things, copy the template and use it over and over for each client. The second reason is, for some reason, right now, Google for Domains doesn't support an iPhone version of tasks. This sucks. It works in the regular Gmail, but not in Google for domains, yet. If you have the luxury of using Gmail for your primary email, I'd suggest checking out Google Tasks. Learn the keyboard shortcuts for it, and you'll whiz through it. Best feature? Being able to create a ToDo related to an email (So you can go to the ToDo and get back to the exact email). Shift-t.

2) Remember the Milk, GTDAgenda, Backpack

All three of these are web based services that you can use for ToDos. I tried several of these, however, most of these require an extra step, or an extra website to log in to and maintain. To me, that's not reducing the amount of work I have to do, that's increasing it. I shouldn't have to increase the amount of things I have to do in order to manage a ToDo list. Each of these has their own merits. I think Remember the Milk is the most extensible. (Meaning it has an iPhone app as well.) GTDAgenda was fairly nice. In the interest of Full Disclosure, I was asked to evaluate GTDAgenda and received a free account. I used it very little because of the above reasons. Backpack is overkill. It's like a Wiki, on crack.

3) Omnifocus

Or OmniOutliner.

This is what I use, it's an OSX only application, but it allows several things that I find vital. The only thing that I don't like about it is that it's a separate app on my system (As opposed to Gmail Tasks, which is built in.) If I have an email (or damn near anything on my computer) I can highlight it with my mouse, and mash a keyboard shortcut (which is customizable) and Omnifocus takes what I have highlighted and makes it a Todo. This is the best.

I am able to assign contexts and projects to everything, assign due dates, make reoccurring tasks... etc.

It also allows me to use templates, as I discussed in Number 1. I can set up a series of tasks, then copy the series of tasks by right clicking and saying "Duplicate".

It allows me to Sync between my computer and my iPhone. Now, the way this takes place is, Omnifocus takes it's DB and puts it up on MobileMe's iDisk. The iPhone, with it's accompanying app then syncs with the DB up on the iDisk. Not a big deal, but it can be a pain to have to keep two in sync. I'd rather just use Google Tasks.

Pain in the butt part? It's expensive. Stupid expensive. It's 79 dollars for the OSX app, and it's another 19.99 for the iPhone app. I think this is bull.

4) Things

This is another program similar to Omnifocus. Simpler to use. (Less complex of an interface), but also, it's 49.95 for the App, plus another 9.99 for the iPhone version. It syncs, but not with MobileMe. Your computer that has the app on the desktop must be on the same Wifi network in order to Sync. That's fairly annoying.

5) ToDo.txt

This is a shell script, basically, that allows you to simply manage ToDos in a simple fashion from the command line. You can barely do contexts and project tagging, but you can't do subordinate projects or anything like that. It's a pretty cool little tool if you are one of those people that likes to manage everything you possible can in a command line. I have several friends like that, and I like to be like that too, but this program just doesn't have enough of the features I need to be able to manage it.

6) Tasks in your email client

Outlook, Thunderbird (with addons), and Mail each have their own ToDo system.

A) Outlooks works like this. You can drag an email over to the right pane (in Office 2007), you can also drag an email down to the "tasks" icon in the left pane at the bottom of the screen. Problem with either one of these solutions is, if you move the mail out of the inbox and into a PST, poof. The ToDo is gone. Seems counter intuitive to me. Anyway...

B) Thunderbird has various plugins for Managing Todos. I didn't put many man hours into investigating the use of the ToDo system within Thunderbird, because I didn't use Thunderbird for more than about five minutes.

C) Mail.app -- This is the only Mail program on OSX that has a ToDo system worth a crap. But even it has it's own problems.

You can create a todo based off an email, highlight the text you want and tap the "Todo" button. Mail will create a Todo based on the email. This Todo is stored in a central db that is shared between Mail.app and iCal. Problem is, as of right now, there is no way to get those ToDos on your iPhone. Come on Apple. Plus Mail.app is dog slow when dealing with 200,000 emails. (And gmails imap implementation sucks)

So, currently I am using Omnifocus until the second best (Google Tasks) comes along. At which point I will probably abandon Omnifocus, even if Google Tasks doesn't allow me to template, I will gladly ditch Omnifocus for a less "sync-y" built in, Cloud managed Task manager. I paid the full retail price for both of the Omnifocus apps (basically totaling about 100 dollars for two apps... to manage Todos. (Seriously Omni Group. The Pricing?)) It's a good pair of programs, but it's a bit overweight and expensive for what its use is.

After my Todos get into my Omnifocus program, I arrange them in two methods.

1) Project

2) Context

If the Todo is work related, I put it under "Work". If the Todo is home related (ex. Get new lightbulb for Microwave), I put it under home. Context is the "Where" portion of the todo.

So if I need to email Dave about that thing we were working on, the Project will be "Work" but the Context will be "Email".

That way, if I have a few minutes, I can take a look at my Todo list under the context "Email" or "Phone" or something, and knock a few of them out. This allows me to fit in ToDos that I have time for. Which will bring me to my next post on productivity, using my Calendar. But that's for another day.

Please leave comments below.

Rambling on Productivity and Email (Part One)

I know I have written many articles on productivity as it relates to Email and GTD before. Check out some past articles here, here, and here. In fact, that last article is my most hit and read article on my blog, in the (almost) five years I've been blogging.

Recently, with a lot of various changes within my personal lifestyle, such as getting the iPhone 3GS, consolidation of email addresses, and generally trying to establish a workable workflow in life, I've been putting the touches on how to process email and generally work with things in life more efficiently. I'll try and write a series of articles on this, so I don't bore you with one big long one.

First, and probably the most interesting as far as I think, is how I process email.

So, my corporate email is Gmail. My company moved our Email hosting solution to Gmail a bit ago, foregoing the traditional take on keeping email in-house, backing it up, using IMAP or Exchange, having people manage it. etc.. It saved our company a ton of money by doing it, and I find that things are much more efficient now that our email is hosted in Gmail.

First off, almost everyone in the computer industry has a Google account now. It's a hard pressed experience to find anyone that doesn't have a @gmail.com account now. I know a ton of companies that their actual email domain (such as ours) is gmail's engine as well. So it's a familiar interface. There was a bit of learning curve with some of our personnel when we first moved to Gmail, but so far it's been great, and if you are a business with the flexibility and need to reduce the amount of machines and backups and people that you are currently maintaining, I'd seriously consider taking a look at Gmail for your corporate enterprise.

Anyway, back to productivity...

Accounts and Consolidation

All my email accounts forward to one account. One. I virtually have about six email accounts for various things (such as emails originating from this blog), but all of them are forwarded to one account. This makes consolidation of email and processing much easier. In Gmail under "Settings", and then under the "Accounts" tab, you can put all your email addresses you have under here and it will be able to "Send mail as:" for all of the accounts that you forward to your one account. Below the accounts you are specifying are two radio buttons.

"Reply from the same address the message was sent to"

or

"Always reply from default address"

If you want to have all your email coming out of your one "consolidated" account always be that single address, leave the bottom radio button checked, however, if you want your email to be allowed to be sent as the address that it was received on, check the top radio button. This will allow all of your email to be addressed from the proper account when you reply or forward.

Labels

Gmail has abandoned the traditionalist thought of "putting email into folders", and after a while so did I. Now, for those of you (like me) that were used to their email coming into the inbox, and then having a series of filters, either in Outlook or Mail.app, as you would read in my previous articles, to put those emails into folders, Gmail is a bit different. Instead of sorting things into "containers", you may have one email that is "tagged" with different containers. These tags and containers are called "Labels". Think of an email like a piece of paper. You can label this piece of paper with several things to remind you where to find this paper. So, let's say it's work related. You might tag it with "Work". What if it's a receipt? But it's also work related? You might tag it with "Work" and "Receipt", and maybe "Expense Report". The email doesn't exist in multiple copies, it's just labeled additional things.

There are two types of labels in my opinion. Types that I call "Straightfoward" and "Dynamic". (You won't see those terms in the interface, I just made them up.) Straightforward for me, is a static label. For instance. Anything from the domain "Sourcefire.com" is labeled as "Sourcefire". This can be considered a static folder, or Straightforward label.

Then I have another type of label that I call "Dynamic". This label spans across "folders" and labels. An example of this is, "Customers". Any email I get from a customer, I label as "Customer". These emails probably exist in about three other labels (receipts, to-do, Sourcefire, etc) but are also tagged as "Customer" so I know where to immediately go find an email from a customer.

Filters

Filters are a way of automatically performing different actions on emails. Applying labels, deleting them, marking them as read, skipping the inbox, etc. I talked about some of the things you can do with filters in this post. So I encourage a read of that. I use Filters as "How can I possibly get this email out of my inbox in the most efficient way possible if its something that I don't have to read right away".

For instance. I belong to about 20 or 30 listservers of various natures. Computer listservers, Apple listservers, Gmail listservers even. Things that interest me, things that I like to read or participate in. (This nets me about 1000 emails a day) But you know, these aren't things that need to be dealt with immediately. Sometimes, ever. The Listservers that aren't as important bypass my inbox directly. Read the above post on how I do this, and you'll see.

The point of this is, the email that I don't need to DEAL with right away gets put away.

When an email hits my inbox, I have one of three actions that I do with it.

1) Read it, Reply to it.

2) Read it, Make a Todo out of something it contains.

3) Read it, Archive it.

That's it, either write them back, make a Todo, or get rid of the email. I don't keep things in my Inbox. Inbox Zero is what I attribute this to. I follow the principle of "if an email takes less than two minutes to respond to, do it. Do it right now." If I think I'll need to write a long winded response, or I'll need to look something up in order to get a proper response to your email, I flag it as a Todo, and I Do it when I get done the inbox process. If I need to forward it, I do it. If I read it, digested the email, and it contains no action, I archive it. I'll write a blog post later on Todos and how I process those.

Another key thing if you follow my advice for email consolidation with Gmail is -- keyboard shortcuts. Seriously. You have got to learn these things. Go into your "Settings" in Gmail, and enable the Keyboard shortcuts. Go back to your inbox and Hit "?". Question Mark. You will get a nice on screen display with all the shortcuts that are available in the Gmail interface. It will take you about two weeks to master these, but after you do, you'll be flying through email. Almost too fast. Make sure you actually read what you are doing. Sometimes I'll make the mistake of checking off several emails at a time and archiving them. Accidentally archiving one I needed to deal with.

The reason I attribute some of my workflow process to the iPhone 3GS is, this is the first iPhone where the Gmail web app wasn't a complete dog in terms of performance. Prior to this version of the iPhone using the Gmail web app worked just fine, don't get me wrong, but it was slow enough to just tick me off enough to not want to use it. Now with the iPhone 3GS, the processor is faster, it executes javascript faster. It's become my replacement for the built in app on the iPhone now. (Oh yeah, and cut and paste helps a lot too when trying to put stuff into a ToDo list.)

Until next entry...

Please leave comments below.

Let's be productive by minimizing clutter Part deux

As usual, when you start dealing with one thing in your life, you tend to narrow in and focus on it. Which is great, however, what if you have several things to do in your life, as most of us do, how do we manage creativity and productivity?

I find myself always on the quest for better productivity and better ways to perform things.

One thing that I find to increase productivity and generally lower stress is to clear. I didn’t say Clean, I said clear.

One of the basic things that is taught, on like Step 1, of Getting Things Done (GTD for those of you that love abbreviations) is to clear and empty. Take everything off your desk, empty your inbox, etc, and then perform actions on everything. Recently I wrote a blog post issuing my New Year’s Challenge to everyone about clearing off your desk and reducing clutter, paper, and digitizing everything you can. Because, you know, how easy is it for you to perform Boolean searches for post it notes?

So here comes the second part of my challenge, assuming you have performed challenge one, clearing off of your desk and surrounding area, hopefully putting things away and digitizing as much as you can, step two has to do with your computer.

Step Two:

Desktop. Your Desktop. I want you to perform this in two steps. First step, is to change your desktop background. Your kids and dog will understand I am sure. Get rid of anything busy, photos, etc. What I want you to start off with is a black background. You can make one in Paint if you are using Windows, if you are using a Mac, I’ll let you get away with Grey just to make life simple. (There is a grey solid color background built into OSX.  Linux users, since you have to compile your own fonts, I think you can figure out how to make your desktop black. BSD users too, since you guys actually have to build your keyboards out of small pieces of a scrabble board and a leftover IBM keyboard without scissor keys....

Rid your desktop of all icons. Okay, I’ll let you have one or two, maybe the trash can, and the Harddrive icon. For Windows users I’ll allow you, say the Recycle Bin, and My Computer, or whatever is on the Windows Desktop nowadays.

Get rid of all your shortcuts (put them in the dock, or the quick launch section of your Task Bar), put your Shortcuts in a stack or something. Better yet, learn to use Butler or Quicksilver and do away with your Shortcuts all together.

Take all your pictures on your desktop and put them in the Pictures folder

Take all your Documents and put them in the Documents folder.

No excuses. Black Background, no icons.

Now, auto hide your Dock, or your Task bar. Get rid of it. You should have One icon maybe two, and no TaskBar/Dock.

For extra credit, you mac users, feel free to use MenuShade to get rid of the Apple Menu (unless you actually use it for things like Google Notifier like I said in a previous post.)

Okay, so now, I want you to work that way for a minimum of two weeks. Nothing on your Desk, Nothing on your Desktop. If you have things like Firefox that dumps your downloads on your Desktop, Create you a “Downloads” folder in your user profile and point Firefox there. Same thing with IE or whatever. OSX already has a downloads folder, tell Firefox to go there.

Two weeks. Make a conscience effort to keep things off your Desk and your Desktop for two weeks. Until it becomes natural. Then give me feed back on how it’s working for you by posting in the comments.

Yes. I do this.

BTW -- This methodology of working does really well with an app like Spirited Away, which auto hides apps.

I’ll explain why you are doing these exercises after my third and final exercise that I ask you to do. But for now, conduct one and two, and work with that for awhile.

To be successful with the “clear Desk” thing, you have to have someplace for people to put things instead of “on your desk”. Try an inbox or a special place on your desk to set things, then train your co-workers, spouse, secretary, and dog to place things in this space.

iPhone 3G review

Okay, so I have had my iPhone 3G with iPhone 2.0 software for a solid week now.  

BLUF:  I like it.

Now, I live in a 3G area.  Which means I get the full capabilities of the speed, and it's nice.  Browsing the internet is faster, Mail is faster, everything is nice and quick.  Even the apps I use.  The truth is, I was considering not getting one, but the touchscreen stopped working on my old iPhone about a month ago, and therefore, I had to upgrade (oh darn).

iPhone 2.0 software

--

This is the greatest feature about the new iPhone (and the old iPhone too) is the apps.  Now that you can have apps, it's awesome.  I hacked my phone in the past but there were no apps that I was excited about and I really didn't care to do it again.  There were really three apps I wanted on my old iPhones software.  

1) something to manage my to-do's

2) some kind of music buying app

3) Instant messenger.

Well, now I have Omnifocus for the iPhone (and the mac, and it's great, everything syncs up..  awesome.  Although I do have to call Omnigroup out on something.  They say that their databases sync via "MobileMe".  Now, if I said that to you, that would imply you have to-do syncing through the cloud right?  Well, not really.  All that happens is your Omnifocus DB is stored on your iDisk, and your devices have to sync to iDisk, so while technically true, it's ill worded...anyway..  Omnifocus is great, I recommend it, little high in price, but... yeah)  So that takes care of my to-do's.

2)  Some kind of music buying app.  Well iPhone has had the iTunes store for a while, and it has been great.  But there are occasions that you didn't know what the song was that you heard on the radio and you wanted to know.  Well now my iPhone has an app called Shazam, that will listen to the song I am listening to and tell me what the song is.  Awesome.

3)  Instant Messenger, well I got my AOL IM, but it's just not as polished as I think it should be.  It should be iChat'ish.  Come on Apple, do your thing.

Of course I have some other apps on there as well, games, facebook, pownce, twitter..etc..  and I use them, but they are just add ons.  Not must haves.

The GPS is awesome, quick too.  While it doesn't TELL you where to make turns, it WILL follow where you are at on Google Maps, and you can just get your directions through there.  So it works just fine for a GPS phone.  I'd like to replace my Car GPS with the iPhone, which requires two things.  A touch bit better GPS turn-by-turn software, say from Tom-Tom or Garmin, and a Car Charger.  No car charger yet.  Let's go!

All in all..  Excellent phone, I highly recommend it for people who live in a 3G area.  If you don't live in a 3G area, then don't worry about it, because the speed won't help you.  Get your software update.  

However if you live in a 3G area, or you like the 'flush headset jack' idea, or the fact that it fits better in your hand (with the rounded back), then get it.  The iPhone 3G FEELS thinner.  But in fact it's a 0.2 mm thicker in the middle.  But you probably won't notice.

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iPhone 3G review

Okay, so I have had my iPhone 3G with iPhone 2.0 software for a solid week now.  

BLUF:  I like it.

Now, I live in a 3G area.  Which means I get the full capabilities of the speed, and it's nice.  Browsing the internet is faster, Mail is faster, everything is nice and quick.  Even the apps I use.  The truth is, I was considering not getting one, but the touchscreen stopped working on my old iPhone about a month ago, and therefore, I had to upgrade (oh darn).

iPhone 2.0 software

--

This is the greatest feature about the new iPhone (and the old iPhone too) is the apps.  Now that you can have apps, it's awesome.  I hacked my phone in the past but there were no apps that I was excited about and I really didn't care to do it again.  There were really three apps I wanted on my old iPhones software.  

1) something to manage my to-do's

2) some kind of music buying app

3) Instant messenger.

Well, now I have Omnifocus for the iPhone (and the mac, and it's great, everything syncs up..  awesome.  Although I do have to call Omnigroup out on something.  They say that their databases sync via "MobileMe".  Now, if I said that to you, that would imply you have to-do syncing through the cloud right?  Well, not really.  All that happens is your Omnifocus DB is stored on your iDisk, and your devices have to sync to iDisk, so while technically true, it's ill worded...anyway..  Omnifocus is great, I recommend it, little high in price, but... yeah)  So that takes care of my to-do's.

2)  Some kind of music buying app.  Well iPhone has had the iTunes store for a while, and it has been great.  But there are occasions that you didn't know what the song was that you heard on the radio and you wanted to know.  Well now my iPhone has an app called Shazam, that will listen to the song I am listening to and tell me what the song is.  Awesome.

3)  Instant Messenger, well I got my AOL IM, but it's just not as polished as I think it should be.  It should be iChat'ish.  Come on Apple, do your thing.

Of course I have some other apps on there as well, games, facebook, pownce, twitter..etc..  and I use them, but they are just add ons.  Not must haves.

The GPS is awesome, quick too.  While it doesn't TELL you where to make turns, it WILL follow where you are at on Google Maps, and you can just get your directions through there.  So it works just fine for a GPS phone.  I'd like to replace my Car GPS with the iPhone, which requires two things.  A touch bit better GPS turn-by-turn software, say from Tom-Tom or Garmin, and a Car Charger.  No car charger yet.  Let's go!

All in all..  Excellent phone, I highly recommend it for people who live in a 3G area.  If you don't live in a 3G area, then don't worry about it, because the speed won't help you.  Get your software update.  

However if you live in a 3G area, or you like the 'flush headset jack' idea, or the fact that it fits better in your hand (with the rounded back), then get it.  The iPhone 3G FEELS thinner.  But in fact it's a 0.2 mm thicker in the middle.  But you probably won't notice.

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I ditched Mail Tags

I recently wrote a post on GTD with Mail.app and iCal and everything like that, and I mentioned that I use Mail Tags.

Well, I uninstalled it.  I noticed that it really didn't provide me any value added that I couldn't do with some Smart Folders.  So now I have two more Smart folders and no more Mail Tags.  I still keep all my email (except for listserv email) in one mailbox named Read.  

Basically instead of the traditional way of using email by putting it all into separate folders, I put everything into one folder and search it by using Smart Folders.

I created two more search folders to make stuff a bit easier, one called "Today" and one called "Yesterday" so I can look for email by day.

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GTD in Leopard, with Mail.app and iCal, redux, again

Okay, so, again, I've redone (refined) how I GTD with Mail.app, I've added the Inbox Zero method of Email processing from Merlin Mann.  Check out 43folders.com for more info.

The above picture is my inbox.  I've obviously removed a couple things from sight ;).  I have two add on apps for Mail.app, one is MailTags, and the other is Mail Act-On.  When email comes into the inbox, I use the thought process of "what do I need to do here", if I need to respond and it won't take but like a second, I'll just respond right then.  If I need to plan my response, or need to look something up in order to respond, i'll flag it.  Now, you can flag with the flag button in Mail, but I have a Mail Act-On rule to flag it.  Check it out.  If I need to do something with the email, or something in the email, I'll create a to-do with the built in to-do system of OSX.  I highlight what I want to "to-do" and I'll hit the "create to-do" button.  Then I file the email.

Now, let me preface the next paragraph, by saying that all the listservers I am subscribed to go to their own individual folders automatically.  I read listserver email once or twice a day.  Obviously, the email that goes to listservs doesn't get processed in the same method as the rest of my email, and each listserv has it's own individual rule.   Some listservers get read a bit more, internal corporate listservs, snort-* listservs, and the like get read a couple times a day.  Stuff like full-disclosure gets read once or twice a week.

I have one mailbox, called "Read".  All email goes in here.  Email comes into the inbox, I read it, flag it, or to-do it, or whatever I need to do, then i have a quick Mail Act-On rule (I hit "`1", look at your keyboard, i hit those two keys) and my whatever I have currently selected goes to the "Read" folder.  I don't have different folders for "Waiting" or "Action" anymore.  I have ONE folder for all non-listserver email.  Now, I do have "Smart Folders" within my email, which are essentially complex searches that are set up to look for specific things.  For Example:

This is a Smart folder called "Flagged", it's sole purpose is to look for flagged email.  You know, ones that require later action and what not.  I don't need to have a bunch of separate folders or whatever, I just dump everything in "read" and flag it.

Another example:

Now, this is a complex rule that I have set up to use MailTags.  Anything that I am waiting on:  people to get back to me, more information, information I am waiting on or something.  I flag the email with "@waiting" or "@followup", and then I have a smart folder to look for one of those two Keywords within MailTags.

My email processing is so much more efficient now.  Oh and one more thing.

I set my email to check every 15 minutes (instead of every 5), AND I turned off my Mail Sound so email doesn't DING all the time.

For those of you that HAVE NOT seen it, check out this, it's Merlin Mann explaining Inbox Zero.  It gave me many of my suggestions above.  Maybe this will help you.

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Focus

I've written before about maximizing your core efficiency.  It was a good article, but I thought I could make it better.  It seemed to me that there was something missing.  I had points in the article, but not inspiration.  Not things that kept you going.  Let's see if I can fix any of that.

When I wrote before I talked about focusing on your job.  You were hired to do a job.  Maybe several jobs, but that's what you were hired to do.  All the other stuff is cruft.  If you maximize your efficiency and performance of your job, not only will everything else fall in line, but you will have more time to do whatever else you like to do.

Be calm.  Assess what you need to do.  Let's take a job that I have some experience at.  Since I am an IDS guy by trade, let's look at a typical IDS analyst's job.  What is the analyst there to do?  Pause here when reading this article.  Think for a second.  What is the analyst there to do?  Many of you will think of all the things that you do as an analyst or as a security professional.  You review logs, you review IDS's, you do pro-active scanning, you might even do a little penetration testing.  You probably write some documentation, SOP's, procedural documents, and the like right?  Am I am about right here?  Okay, so that's what you do during the day.  But what is your job?  If I asked you to describe what you do in one sentence or less in as few words as possible, what would you say?

I said this to a room of analysts one time.  We all gathered in a conference room and we sat around the table and I was given the task of organizing these individuals into a team.  I asked this same exact question, and we went around the room.  I heard some descent answers.  One liners.  

I said, "My job is to catch the bad guy."  That's it.  That's my job.

I stood in front of about 200 system administrators one time giving a speech about security, which, even though it should be part of every system administrators job, it's often put on the back burner.  But here I was giving a speech to a packed room.  I made another statement that day, it's a point blank in-your-face statement.  

"The bad-guys are already in your network, right now, as I stand here and speak, they are in your network.  Now what are you going to do about it?"

Think about that for a second.  Am I right?  Some of you will say no, I'm wrong, and go back about your business.  But I am saying it for a reason.  The Bad-Guy IS in your network, right now.  Still think I am wrong?  You aren't paying attention to security.  When I mean you aren't paying attention, I don't mean that you aren't reading the mailing lists and such.  I mean you aren't paying attention.  I am not going to explain to you what I mean about the Bad Guy being in your network, that's for you to figure out.  If you think I am wrong, it's also for you to prove that I am.  At this point you may be thinking that I am being a bit cocky.  No, I am being brash for a point, take the time to think what I mean.  

The Bad-Guy is in your network.  What are you going to do?

Your job as a network security analyst is to catch that bad guy.  What are you going to do?  Let's take it a bit bigger and look at security from a department perspective.  

Let's say you are a security department head for a corporation.  Not big, not small, or huge, or tiny.  It doesn't matter.  The difference between a 100 person startup company and a multi-trillion dollar organization is complexity.  The security of it is no more less or more secure, or no more or less important.  It's just more complex.  

Do not be afraid to roll up your sleeves on day one.  

Be honest with yourself, your employees, and your supervisors.  Don't be afraid to tell them the truth.  Even though the truth may not be what they want to hear.  The person hearing that truth will value you more for it in the end.  I didn't say blunt, or rude.  I said truthful.  You don't have to be an a** to get people to understand you.  You also don't have to tell people the whole truth to your point across.  Get in there and get dirty.  

When I go to a customer's site, on the first day I like to have a meeting with everyone I can.  Management, support staff, analysts, forensics, etc.  Sit them down and clearly state what we are all going to accomplish during this time.  

Don't lump too much into one time period.

Often times I am only on site with a customer for 4 or 5 days.  Sometimes I am onsite with customers for 4 or 5 months.  There is going to be a certain amount of things you can accomplish during this time period, and there are going to be things you won't be able to accomplish sometimes.  Don't stress over it, it's just the way the chips fall.  There is more time available, if it's truly important, I can come back.

Don't beat around the bush.

I kinda already said this up above, but face your challenges.  Putting them aside and procrastinating about projects, no matter how small or large, will only make them get worse.  The small ones will get bigger, the big ones will get monumental.   You've laid out your tasks, now get to it.

Never say anything you aren't sure of, and if you do, make sure the people you are telling that something to knows that you aren't sure.

If you are going to make a statement, make it.  But be right.  Better to not open your mouth and let people think you are an idiot, then to open your mouth and remove all doubt.  If you don't know the answer, and you have to give an answer, give them your best guess, but make sure they know it's your best guess and that you'll get a better answer for them shortly.  Then go get the darn answer.  Don't be afraid to ask for help if you need it.  You don't know everything, no one does.  But collectively a problem that seems like a mountain can shortly become a molehill.

What are you good at?  Make that list, then delegate the rest.

What are you good at?  IDS?  Packets?  Cisco devices?  Windows host based security?  Focus on that, become the absolute best you can be at that specific task.  Delegate the rest until you are the best at #1, then learn your #2's.  If you aren't good at Cisco devices, don't act like you are, find someone that is, hook up with them, learn from them if you can, and move on.  Do what you are good at.

I consider myself to be good at a several things, packet analysis, public speaking, explaining complex things in layman's terms, and teaching others.  I know I am not good at configuring firewalls, can I do it?  Yes, but that's not my core.  I know I am not good at writing documentation, can I do it?  Yes, but that's not my core.  But stick me in front of a large audience of technical people, CEO's, CFO's, and janitors, I can make sure everyone in that room gets my point, and am well understood.  I wasn't born with that, I had to learn it.  When I was first asked to stand in front of people and give speeches, teach, etc.  I sucked at it.  I was horrible.  But I was forced to do it, hundreds of times.   I use the old horse analogy.  If you fall off, get back on.  I wasn't good at teaching or public speaking at first, but I had to do it, so I did it, and I learned.  I didn't take courses at teaching or presenting, but I read books, I watched the masters at work, and I learned.  Now I am pretty confident and pretty good at it.   If you want me to come give a talk at your organization about security, etc.. my contact info is at the top of the blog.  (It says "Contact").  Let's talk.

Now, get a piece of paper (virtual or physical) and draw a line down the middle so that you have two columns.

On the left column, make that "I'm good at this" list.  Then make a separate list of things you wish you were better at on the right.  Take all the time  you need to do this.  Even if you aren't good at making lists. (put it on the right.)

Now look at your left column.  Really?  Are you really good at all those things?  REALLY GOOD?  Any you can concentrate better on?  Anything in there that you wrote down that you probably should have in the right column?  In your column of things I wish I was better at?  Go ahead, erase them and move them over to the right.  

Now how many things do you have on the left?  Probably 5 or 6 things.  Maybe 10.  Your right list should be much longer.  Now, what are your next steps to get better at the things on the right?  Anything you can do easily?  Get to it.

I'll make this a two or three part series.  So expect another post along these lines shortly.

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GTD in Leopard, with Mail.app and iCal, redux

Remember that blog post I had like three months ago about GTD with Mail.app and Leopard, and iCal, and to-do's etc?  

Well, I found this article over here that basically expands on upon the point, I thought it was excellent, if you are a GTD person, check it out.

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Google Calendar and iCal Syncing

Well, I wanted a way for my wife to be able to accept events on her iCal, have it sync, automatically to her Blackberry, and even more, sync automatically with my iCal.  So, I found a nifty Google app called Google Mobile Sync for the Blackberry that automatically syncs the Blackberry and Google Calendar.  Great.  That's what I needed.

So I made a calendar in Google Calendar under my wife's Google account and tied the Blackberry to that.

Now I had to get her iCal (where she presently has all her events) to be able to sync with her Google Calendar.  Here is the tricky part.  You can read and subscribe to a Google Calendar, even setting permissions, per user, but you can't write to a Google Calendar (you can't use webdav from iCal to publish to Google Calendar.  That sucks.  (Hey Google, fix this, I know a couple of you read this blog.  I have logs, I have logs...)

So I found this app called SpanningSync which syncs your Google Calendar and you iCal (both ways).  Which is essentially the solution.  Only problem with this solution that I see is that you have to pay for the app.   I mean, I don't mind paying for software, I think coders should get paid too, but 65 bucks?  It's a tad bit much.  If it were, say 29 bucks for lifetime usage, then that would be the way to go.  Anyway, I hope this helps you all.

What are your distractions?

Part 3 of 3 of my self question series.  What are your distractions?

What makes your job harder?  Are you pressured to answer your Email as soon as you get it?  Are you pressured to complete a project given no milestones or end goal?  How many projects are you working on?  GTD says the most projects you can track in your head at a time is 7.  Do you have more than that?   Can you work on multiple projects at a time?  

Can you cut back anywhere?  Can you delegate any of your projects to other people?  Is it possible for you to get help on your projects from other people?  Why are you doing the project?  Because everyone else is incompetent?  Because it's your job?  Because you are being relied on more heavily then the other people in your department?

Can you focus on one thing at a time?  Is your mind Multithreaded or Single Threaded?

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Why were you hired?

In my recent quest to make all things more efficient, I ask the question in the topic.  Why were you hired?  Seriously, sit down, look at your job, look at your job description.  What are you supposed to be doing, now, take that, and compare it with what you are actually spending your time doing these days.

You were hired for a reason, let's remember what that reason was and focus on it.   Were you hired to sit on conference calls?  Were you hired to check your email every five minutes?  Can you get away with checking your email every 15 minutes?  How about 30.  How about twice a day?

How can you get further in your job?  What can you study that will make you better at it?  If you are an IDS analyst, have you studied perl?  TCP/IP?  Snort?  Intrusion theory, pen testing, exploits, reverse shells, shellcode, malware?  Think about these things.  What can you do as part of your daily job to make your job better and be better at it.  Are you inundated with stupid projects?

I just post this in hopes that you'll do a self reflection.  Everyone needs to do this every once in awhile.  Stop, and think about if you are still on task.

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Using your tools to focus

Recently I've put up a couple posts talking about refocusing on Getting things Done and making sure you are working as efficiently as you can in life.  I've focused on vim, mutt, and Mail.app.  

But what about the other apps?  Outlook being the primary one?  Basically my point in the posts was to get you thinking about what tools you use and what tools can make you more efficient in your life.  Are you using those tools to their fullest potential?  Are you using your to-do system in Outlook?  With yourself?  Are you using it with other people?  How about the calendar?  The Journal feature?  The Note system?  Are you using those?

How do you use your tools.  Can you use them better.  That's what I want to inspire you to think about.  Now, some of you will go, and you will say "hey, Joel has a thought here, let me try and use the to-do's"  But how many of you will reform the way you work around it?  

I challenge you to do so.

The other part of this post is a question for my readers.  Thunderbird.  By show of hands, how many of you use Thunderbird?  Probably alot of you judging by the statistics on my web page hits. (mostly firefox.)  Now, out of those people, how many of you use any GTD plugins for Thunderbird?  Care to share what they are?

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Mail.app in Leopard, GTD, and how I made things a bit more efficient.

I was using (and still do) use Mutt to read my email when I am remote and don't have access to a descent connection.  (Which seems to happen alot to me lately for some reason).  So what I do is ssh back home and run mutt in screen.  Great.  Works fine.  You also may remember from a previous post about how I keep my Next Actions list in Vim on a separate screen.

Welp, I found out two things:

1)  Mutt doesn't render images well, (read: at all) and it's a bit difficult to automate the opening of things via mailcap if you are remote.  Therefore, what good does it do me?  Well the advantage of mutt was the ability to use macros to automatically file things at a push of a button.  Mail.app doesn't have this functionality by default.  Then I watched Merlin Mann's presentation that I have posted on the blog as well, and he turned me onto a program called "Mail Act-On", a free plugin for Mail.app.

Essentially this program allows you to create "macros" for filing your email (or for doing ANYTHING to it, coloring it red, filing it in a folder, flagging it, whatever).  So, I said "hey, let's take a look at how we are doing things here".  Can we make this even more efficient, and better looking.  

I have been using Mail.app since I first started using a Mac and I love it.  It's a simple easy to use Mail client that did what I wanted it to do.  Just in Leopard, it got alot better.  The ability to have Notes and To-Do's, with the ability for To-Do's to sync with iCal was it for me.

So, I got rid of both Mutt (i'll still use it for the above purposes, like I said, but for everyday use, I am going to Mail.app) and my vim outliner next-action items list.

So what did I do?  Well, I created a Note in Notes for every context I have "@home", "@work", "@waiting", "@someday" you get the picture.  In each of these Notes in their appropriate context's I put my Projects.   But this time instead of indenting and using my "--", "?-" system, I just type what I need to do, highlight it, and click on "To-Do".  It makes a nice To-Do and I can set priorities, due dates, even drag these ToDo's into iCal for a specific date and time.

Seemless, much easier and less to maintain.  That's what it should be about.  Don't let your GTD solution run you, you need to be running it.

Bonus feature?  If an email comes in that needs a Todo created out of it, I highlight the text, click To-do, and it's in my system for tracking.  Very nice.

I did ask Apple for two things though their bug system tho.  The ability to Nest To-Do's, and the ability to sync Notes and To-Do's with my iPhone.

Now, alot of people ask me (I get alot of emails about my posts, I think people are afraid of using the comment system.  Which is fine, either way you want to do it, of course I encourage you to use the comment system so that everyone may benefit from your thoughts as well.  Plus it's a great place to put the URL of your blog) how I take my To-Do's with me.  Well, if I am going to the store, and I want the shopping list to go with me, I'll send an email to myself and let it sit in the inbox.  That way I just check my email on my iPhone and there's my list.  

This will all be fixed when Apple implements all the feature requests I have asked for. 

1. To-Do Syncing with Leopard and the iPhone 

2. Notes syncing with Leopard and the iPhone

3. To-Do, Contacts, and Calendar syncing with .Mac

4. Notes Syncing with Stickies (the other notes app in OSX)

5.  The ability to nest to-do's.  (arrange To-Do's by a project)

Hopefully Apple takes some ideas to heart and implements them.  However it won't be good until you can sync all that stuff OTA.  Wirelessly.  Even via Bluetooth would be awesome.  That way I don't have to find a cable, plug it in, yuck.  

I don't want to sync my songs that way, just my contacts, calendars, notes, and todo's!  It would take forever to sync songs and videos.  I don't care.  I just want the ability to be in my office (and my iPhone, which sits in the kitchen), and my wife and I are getting ready to walk out the door, and I can fire up iSync, click Sync, my iPhone syncs with my laptop, and I grab the thing and walk out the door.

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Getting Things Done (GTD), with David Allen himself.

In addition to my 43folders "Inbox Zero" post from earlier, I am going to post this video as well.  This is David Allen, the creator of GTD (Getting Things Done) of which Merlin Mann (43folders) based his work off of.  If you are interested in either, I suggest a look.

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Inbox Zero

Merlin Mann, who is the author of 43folders.com, presented this talk at Google about Inbox Zero.  Or processing your email.  I suggest a check out.

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