Reading Time: < 1 minuteGTD Times has a nice article today about tips to survive the holidays using GTD.  This time of year gets very hectic for many people, and staying on top of your GTD system can help quite a bit.

Their tips include:

Staying on top of your calendar — How best to deal with various party invitations, keeping your calendar blocked out for shopping and remembering to plan for prep time if you’re hosting a party.

Use your tickler file — You’ll have lots of date specific items coming your way; events, invitations, coupons, etc.

Simplify shopping

— They suggest using a shared Google Doc to manage your shopping lists.  My wife and I use Google Wave for that, though in this case it works pretty much the same.  Good tip.

Weekly reviews — They’re always important, but this time of year they’re essential.  Don’t skip them!

All in all, it’s a great article.  Check it out, and then let us know of other tips you have for managing your life this time of year.

Reading Time: < 1 minuteAs you probably have heard, Google Wave

released to a much larger (but still invite-only) audience last week.  I’ve been playing with it for a few months now, as I was fortunate enough to get invited to the developer preview earlier in the year.  It’s got a ton of potential for collaboration, and will probably get extended to other uses far beyond Google’s original goal.

My question: could GTD be one of those uses?  If so, how would it work?

Offhand, I’m not sure how it would go.  However, with tagging, searching, sharing, and maybe a “to-do” list type gadget for it, it might work.  Any ideas?  Does this have potential to become a great GTD tool, or is GTD better left to the “normal” task management solutions out there?

Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Reading Time: < 1 minuteGmail Labs has some of the coolest stuff.  I try to keep it as clean as possible (Inbox Zero!) and I’ve shown you other small time-savers from Gmail Labs, like “Send & Archive“.  This is along those lines.

Recently, Google made it where you could hide labels (if you’re not familiar with Gmail, labels are similar to folders) from the sidebar on an individual basis.  I took that opportunity to hide most of mine and keep them out of the way.  Now they’ve added a tool in Labs to let you hide any that don’t have unread items in them.  This keeps them all out of the way for me, unless something drops in to one of them.  Most of the time, those e-mails would go in my inbox too, but I have a few mailing lists and such that I have go straight to a label.  This will alert me when those arrive.

This is certainly not as cool as “Send & Archive” (which I still love), but it’s a nice tweak nonetheless.

Reading Time: < 1 minuteI’ve written before about how small things can make a big difference: Getting rid of your email folders in Outlook, Using “Send & Archive” in Gmail, and things like that.  This is another example of that — it’ll only save you a couple of seconds, but it’ll save you those few seconds often

, and it adds up to decent savings.

The project list in Nozbe can get a bit long for some of us, especially in Nozbe 2.0.  I’m waiting for them to compress the size of it a little bit more.  In the meantime, this will help.  I often have to scroll down pretty far to find a specific project.  When I click on it, the project data would load in the center panel, but then I’d have to scroll all the way back up to the top to see it.  Now, when you choose a project on the left, the view automatically scrolls back up to the top.  Like I said, it’s a very small change, but very useful.

If you’re still confused about what I mean, check out the video below or read the full post

on the Nozbe blog.

Reading Time: < 1 minuteLate last year, I was considering getting an administrative assistant for myself.  I simply had too much to do — to many e-mails, too many tasks.  I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hire a local person to help, or just use a virtual assistant.  During that internal debate, I was also trying to get more organized.  As you can see in my initial post on this blog

, I dove into GTD and started using Nozbe to manage it.

The result? I have no need for an administrative person of any kind.  By keeping my email inbox at zero and my task list up to date, I can easily find the information I need and get to work.  Having another person in the mix would only serve to complicate things.

I’m sure there are many jobs that require an assistant of some kind.  Anyone that deals with a large volume of incoming calls and meetings would do well to have someone sift that information for them and keep their schedule up to date.  However, I’m finding that simply dealing with email and tasks is best managed by myself.

It’s hard to calculate the exact savings, but let’s go with this: $10/hour, 20 hours/week = $200/week or about $800/month. That’s some nice savings!  Factor in the small costs to get GTD in place (buy the book, get a filing cabinet, perhaps pay a little bit for some software), and you’re still saving a ton of money.  Not bad.

After months of waiting (and being teased with a partially-finished beta a few months ago), Nozbe 2.0 has finally been released.

I’ve intentionally waited a few days to talk about it, because I wasn’t sure how I felt.  My initial reaction was pretty disappointed. While it looked much better than previous versions, it had some substantial problems.  Here are the comments I left for their developer:

1 — No filtering on Next Actions. Why?
2 — Next actions don’t show which project they’re from until you click on each one. MUCH harder to scan through them.
3 — The list of projects still take up WAY too much space in the sidebar. Granted, I have a lot of projects (53), but it’s pretty bad. On Nozbe Classic, the bottom of my last project in the list is 1490 pixels down the page. In Nozbe 2.0, the last project is 2053 pixels down the page — a 500+ pixel increase!

I was feeling kind of bad for them at this point.  While they were very legit concerns, the blog comments were full of things like that.  We were all appreciative to the team for getting it launched, but it appeared it was in big trouble.

In fact, I even started looking around again for an alternative to Nozbe.  The two that came the closest were Vitalist and Toodledo,  but they couldn’t measure up to Nozbe even with some of the broken features.  Nirvana HQ is looking pretty slick, but it’s a closed beta and I haven’t been able to get access to it yet.

However, the very next day Nozbe posted an update that addressed every concern.  Point by point, they answered each question and explained how they’d fix it (or why they wouldn’t/couldn’t).  They even fixed item #2 from my list above right away!  There are still some issues, but they’re getting resolved quickly.  On top of that, the new features (like “notes on tasks”) are very useful.

As it stands now, I consider Nozbe 2.0 the best GTD app out there. I’ve long felt that Nozbe has been the best, and with the recent bug fixes to 2.0 they’ve kept the crown.  Hopefully Michael and his team can knock out some of the other small bugs and feature requests in the next week or two and they’ll have a pretty awesome product.

Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis tip might not work for everyone, but it has been great for me.  I use gmail for most of my e-mail, but I need to use Outlook at work.  For years, I had a complex series of nested folders in Outlook, along the lines of this:

• Staff
  • Bill
  • Jane
  • Steve
• Website
  • GoDaddy
  • Hosting
  • Problems
• Programs
  • Adults
  • Children
  • Mission
• …

And on, and on, and on.  Probably about 150 folders in all.  I was very proud of myself.

The problem was trying to keep myself at inbox zero.  Gmail makes it easy with their “archive” feature (and with cool things like “Send & Archive” in the labs section), but Outlook doesn’t do that.  Instead of quickly archiving an e-mail and moving on, I had to think about where it goes.  Does the one from Steve about the Missions part of the website go in “Steve”, “website” or “missions”?  I’d probably spend 10-15 seconds deciding where to file an e-mail, then drilling down to file it.  I get maybe 25 emails/day on this account, so that’s 25 emails x 15 seconds/each x 260 workdays in a year = 27 hours/year I spend just filing e-mails.  Brutal!

If you handle your inbox properly, you don’t need to fish for past e-mails very often — you just deal with them and move on.  I have Xobni installed, which makes the search process much faster when I need it, so that solves the search issue.

My solution? Treat it like gmail.  I now have a single folder called “archive” under my inbox.  When I’m done with an e-mail, I “archive” it.  Much faster and much easier.

How do you handle your folders in Outlook?

Reading Time: < 1 minuteWhenever I feel like I’m falling off the wagon with GTD, it always comes back to my inbox.  If I don’t keep it at zero, things pile up quickly and I lose some control.  Even if you’re not a believer in the complete GTD system, Inbox Zero can help you out a LOT.

This video is from a few years ago, but has some great tips on how to achieve (and maintain) inbox zero. Merlin Mann really knows his stuff. Check it out: