DIY Planner - Analog / Digital - Comments

My current work setup is on

Tournevis — Fri, 4 Jul 2008 02:57:25 -0400

My current work setup is on sabbatical.

My setup

Courtney — Thu, 3 Jul 2008 18:21:11 -0400

I wish I had a bigger budget for a Circa. But as a newbie, I have a 3-ring binder. In the front I have an inspirational quote, and questions to keep me on track with productivity, like "Is this the best use of my time right now?" and "Who needs to know about the actions I just took?"

Then I have a few sections, separated by dividers:

1. A bunch of note pages, though they are rarely used. (I have a hipster PDA)
2. Calendar, divided into 2-pages-per-week for the upcoming few months, and monthly pages for the next year or two, and one page for events that will occur after that. (I use that page as a reminder of expirations of year-long memberships, etc) Once a month or so I print out new 2-pages-per-week pages, and move stuff from the monthly pages to the weekly ones, and add in my routine appointments and meetings. I know it seems redundant but it saves space for far-off appointments, and since I print out pages a month or so in advance, I don't usually have a lot of appointments anyway.
3. Checklists - not so much used anymore since I have ThinkingRock software, but this section contains my context and next actions
4. Reference - GTD reference, and some brainstorming from the beginning of the year of my vision for 2008. Sometimes I look to this for inspiration and motivation.
5. Contact lists, separated into professional and personal
6. User ID list and password list (in code, in case anyone steals my binder)

I work in IT, where next-actions and projects come fast and furious, so for everyday work I use ThinkingRock software, which is really great and forces you into the GTD mindset. I used to write my next-actions and projects on paper, but they are so dynamic since I switched jobs that it seems I would spend all my time writing and not enough time doing.

I am probably going to add a few sections to my planner for diet and exercise tracking, and possibly work and household routines. Gotta watch that space creep, though - a small planner can quickly become huge!

My current setup ...

davanlo — Wed, 2 Jul 2008 18:39:22 -0400

I use a Moleskine Agenda the Red Pocket weekly Notebook with a page of notes facing a week and two DYI 5x5 card piles. It is a limited edition (ahem ...) but you can find it everywhere.
I use Rotring Esprit foldable fountain pen, pencil and pen. (but i am NOT happy with the ink).

For me this is a good choice because I never forget the *red* notebook and the notes page comes handy to write down everything concerning time based events.

I tag most events with small round color stickers, to separate work (red/purple/orange) from private events (yellow/blue/green).

As a wannabee GTD user, I have two DIY 5x5 Card piles sticked together with a paper clamp.
I use one for work and one for my private "To do" lists. Both have quite the same setup:

Some references: calendar, time schedules, some cheat sheets about management and communication
Lists: to do list, phone calls and emails to make, shopping list
empty cards and checklists.

I separate "to do" from "emails and phone calls" because most of the time this requires a different type of energy or attention level from me.

I love it because daily and weekly review go very fast and for me it's more about the content than the format. If i need one, i can rip a card out to write something. I don't archive the cards (but I feel I should) but for me it's just a short-time memory buffer.

I also use a Moleskine Memo to store post-its, paper clips, stamps, stickers and other tools.

Here is a picture of the complete "system": (but with my older black moleskine agenda) I put some stickers on the moleskine, because I want to identify them easily, as some people shared the same).

Picture

I am thinking about giving up the DIY cards and use more of the pages of the agenda, but this will link tasks to one week instead of letting them float across.

Digital organizers

Anonymous — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:16:35 -0400

I recall seeing my first microwave demo in the summer of '69. At the sage age of 9, I "knew" it was a gimmick.

I abandoned paper scheduling some ten years ago, when electronic synchronization meant my secretary and I could update and reconcile my calendar in a couple minutes each morning, and when the Palm Pilot meant I could hold in the palm of my hand far more information than I could ever cram into a Filofax.

Just how fat would a FiloFax need to be to hold the 4 gig of information my Palm's SD card will hold?

I do miss the sensation of my Pelikan or Parker fountain pen floating across a page of high quality paper, but.....

Oh my goodness. Someone

Jess — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:17:30 -0400

Oh my goodness.

Someone please call the waaaaaaaaaambulance for Big Ol Red.

And while you're at it, call the cops to hunt down the crazed person who held a gun to his head and made him read the article all the way through to the end.

Honestly.

Can't you just be grateful that someone thought to share a tip that might make completing your next project a little bit easier?

Even if you can't be grateful, please don't waste the time of the hard working people who run this site with your petty complaints.

Stepwise Refinement

reepicheep — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:56:01 -0400

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), there is a concept called chunking. In chunking, a person takes information and either breaks it down into manageable parts (i.e. focusing on the details, or breaking down the information into smaller pieces so that it makes sense in relation to the big picture), or takes a detail and asks questions to fill in the big picture around that detail.

As a computing scientist I do this sort of thing all the time and did so for many years before NLP was even a twinkle in the eye of those who think it is a good idea. I look back to the late 1960s/early 1970s and the work of computing scientists like Edsger Dijkstra, Niklas Wirth, Tony Hoare, Don Knuth, Ole Dahl, Michael Jackson, and many others who devised various methods that we computing scientists now called stepwise refinement.

Also as a computing scientist writing programming language compilers and run-time libraries I'm well used to chunking (or in the parlance of the 1959! Algol-x report thunking) by putting information on the run-time call stack.

Now as a sign language interpreter I use chunking to over-come the limitations of my short-term memory (mine's only about four or five items deep rather than the average six or seven deep). Collecting related information together into chunks. Don't need NLP to do this; so suggest that this is a NLP technique is gross misrepresentation.

Using NLP across disciplines

Imagineyourreality — Thu, 22 May 2008 19:01:19 -0400

I used the NLP concept of chunking and applied it to a project. How I used it might not fit the strict definition of how it's used in NLP, but then again the point of NLP is to create flexibility in thought and communication. IMO, using the concept of chunking in a project still works and is just an application of the concept in a different medium than it might normally be used.

Taylor

The Creative Health and Wealth coach
Stop settling for less and start Really Living your Life
Contact me for a half hour consultation at http://www.imagineyourreality.com/scheduling.html

Hmm... The more I search on

brontide — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:24:53 -0400

Hmm...

The more I search on NLP the more my "psycho-babble" and "pseudo-science" meter goes off. Everyone seems linked to things like hypnotherapy, "breakthrough" weight loss, and motivational speaking.

If it works for you then great.

The thing to remember about

elf_man — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:35:07 -0400

The thing to remember about NLP is that it can be effective, but you have to actually use it instead of just addicting yourself to seminars. Unfortunately, peak experiences are a problem with any of these things. Although it occurs to me that GTD has some of the same problems, when people constantly rework their system instead of actually using it. Hehe.

Immediate halt

reepicheep — Wed, 21 May 2008 17:21:08 -0400

I didn't notice the topic assignment for this article; the recent posts page is where I start. However, I stopped two words in at NLP ... no waste of my time. But reading your comment was useful and not a waste.

Nicely done, and a good

Metropolitan — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:49:00 -0400

Nicely done, and a good reminder to reduce the scope of things. I work in software testing, and breaking projects down into little pieces is pretty much the only way to get them done!

Neat, I had never looked

brontide — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:55:35 -0400

Neat, I had never looked into NLP before and it's got some very good ideals. The only issue is that it has no relation to the topic that you posted about.

"In Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), there is a concept called chunking.": Chunking in NLP is about communications, not organizing projects. Chunking is about identifying the granularity of the person you are communicating with and then altering your response.

http://www.nlptraining.com/index.asp?fuseaction=showarticle&articleID=11

I could see if you wish to consider the work you do on a project as part of a "conversation"; in that respect you need to make sure you chunk your time in a way that will be compatible with the project that you have. In your case a newsletter is a "small chunk" conversation, while something more generic like writing a book would be a "large chunk" conversation that needs to be lead down the path to "small chunks" so the time would initially have to be scheduled in larger blocks before it could be chunked down to smaller and smaller blocks.

It sounds more like you are engaging in something more akin to Gantt charting than NLP though.

Cheers,
Eric

Implied use for analog/digial

innowen — Wed, 21 May 2008 04:43:01 -0400

I am sorry this article "wasted" your time. Not all articles located in one particular category may appease your appetite for that category.

I felt it belonged in this category because to me, chunking implies that you need to write down your thoughts in an organized fashion. We use the Analog/Digital posts to highlight techniques/systems, products, or thoughts that relate to the category. Analog is a paper-based or thought-based activity, while digital implies the use of computers or hand-held systems. Chunking out a project, can be done using analog (paper) or digital (programs like Madcap Flare or LifeBalance).

In technical writing, which is my profession, we use chunking (also known as leveraging or single-sourcing) to build manuals. I've designed manuals by taking small chunks of text, like a description or a single topic, and writing out what the text is down on an index card. These index cards get stacked up and broken into phases, so that when I go to write a particular iteration of the manual, I enter the text (or expand upon that subject) into an application, like Madcap Flare, that gets used to create and publish the manual.

/innowen

Chunking

Big Ol' Red — Wed, 21 May 2008 04:08:09 -0400

Why is this article located in analog/digital? I didn't see anything in it related to Analog/Digital. I wasted my time reading it, because it had nothing whatever to do with the subject group in which it is found. It has nothing to do with what I was looking for when I clicked on the category "analog/digital".

I went through college with

Raleigh — Wed, 21 May 2008 00:56:01 -0400

I went through college with an HP Jornada. SOO much cheaper than a laptop ($100), longer battery life (~6hrs) and a 3/4 keyboard, and instant on.

I would pound out papers between classes while others would not because of start up and shut down times.

D*I*Y Planner - Analog / Digital - Comments