Google, GTD, organization, and life
A round up of what I’ve done since leaving Cambridge, approximately chronologically:
- Slept, ate, and washed
- Failed to go to a Pirate Party on account of needing yet more sleep, and generally not feeling great
- Went to Dorset for lunch, came back again (up to here is the weekend)
- Went to Wales for a week, leaving all my Cambridge luggage strewn about my room and having frantically repacked enough for the week
- Came back, slept, ate and washed
- Failed to go to Cornwall for the weekend on account of being tired still, and the event having suffered from slightly less-than-complete organisation
- Spent the weekend clearing up, tidying, sorting out a term and a summer holiday’s worth of paper and junk, making PC work, syncing work and settings from laptop back to PC, solving organisation problems
On the last point: I can’t remember if I’ve previously mentioned here that my trusty Sony Clie PDA had a slight accident at the beginning of the summer, and has now gone to the great eBay in the sky. I finally cleared up the Palm Desktop software today, and have started to take the gadget apart as a token “burial”. (Well, some bits might be useful…)
Since losing the PDA, I’ve based my organisation around a cheap Sainsbury’s pocket-size notebook, which has worked fine through my reasonably-relaxed summer. But I don’t think it’s going to cut it for Uni life, somehow. I started reading up on Getting Things Done at some point this summer, which has snowballed into an attempt to, somehow, really get my work life into some semblance of a system. I’m not pushing GTD explicitly; I just want to find something that works for me. Lots of surfing later, I’ve found a whole host of websites on time management, “life hacks” (real world tricks that save time etc) and so forth – see my del.icio.us account for details. I have various firefox extensions to this end, such as Better Gmail, GTGInbox, and Zotero, all of which seem to be useful.
I use Google Apps’ mail service exclusively for email now. The system I have in place is quite complicated, and involves having my Cantab address (you don’t have to wait to graduate to get one!) gradually take over as the address for mailing lists, automated email from websites etc, signing in to things etc – because that is the only address that, as far as I can see, won’t ever die. So doing this now will save me having to ever go to eBay, Amazon, eBuyer, etc etc, to change my email address. Cantab currently forwards to Hermes, and everything arriving to Hermes (still lots of stuff that doesn’t come from Cantab, of course) is forwarded by Sieve to stuart at sjcuthbertson dot me dot uk. This is a Google Apps account address, so I basically see Gmail, just with a different domain in the top-right corner.
Certain mailing lists that I want to archive get forwarded from here to yet another gmail address (not an apps one, as then it’s not dependent on my paying for the domain for ever), to stay for evermore. That way, if my main Apps email ever starts to get full, I can delete back copies of the mailing lists. Hermes still pops incoming mail into various IMAP folders on arrival – that way if I do ever need to quickly pop into Hermes webmail for arcane reasons, it will be fairly manageable. But I’m thinking of telling it to drop all the mailing list bulk as (in one case at least) It’s Just So Damn Busy Sometimes. It’ll still go through to Apps first.
I’ve also now uploaded all my IMAP folders to Gmail and labelized them, thanks to Mark Lyon’s Gmail Loader. It does a neat job of bulk-forwarding an mbox file to Gmail, while maintaining the original headers. This brings me to a grand total of 6% of my space allowance 
My challenge now is to get to grips with using Gmail for GTD principles, and working out an effective GTD-esque strategy for my life. I really do need some kind of gadget that can go beep 10 minutes before every appointment I have, so I’m considering buying a middle-of-the-range smartphone with usb-sync and -charge, a calendar view on the desktop, and the ability to add calendar events nicely, similar to how Palm does it. My current phone, a Nokia 3100, can do alarms at a given time but doesn’t really do calendaring. I also need my phone to sync to/from Google Calendars somehow, which I can then use in conjunction with the phone while I’m near my PC. I will probably also combine this with a GTD notebook for speedy adding to inbox, which I later process to Gmail, and also for notes and things which would be tedious to enter in the phone.
The alternative is another cheap Palm PDA, which I’d be more familiar with, but which would mean I’m back to two clunky pocket gadgets. I don’t really want to do that. My problem is in separating “hard” calendar events from todos and reminders – I can put hard calendar events into a smartphone but if all my todos are just on Gmail, then I need to be able to see a computer to know what to do next, and I won’t always. I considered a Blackberry, from which I could always see Gmail, but the costs are prohibitive for a light phone user like me (
