Entries Tagged 'Organization' ↓

I saw this on a sign the other day:

Success comes in cans, failure comes in can’ts.

After my post yesterday I decided that today I would avoid the computer as much as possible. It looks like that was the right thing to do. Tonight I sat down and looked at some notes and it hit me: The reason I was stuck was because I didn’t know what to do next.

So, I began making lists. As soon as things started to appear in a nice neat ordered list, it became apparent what had to be done (and the order to do it in).

A lot of programmers like to just jump into a problem and start coding. Sometimes that’s what is needed, but a lot of times what is needed is a plan (no matter how vague) of where you want to go, and how you plan to get there. A To Do list is a basic type of a plan, and once you start organizing on any level, it tends to snowball until your whole project is encompassed by the plan.

At least that’s what should happen if you want to get things done. A Big Plan is made of many Small Plans. By following through on the small plans, you are following the big plan. I can’t believe I let that wisdom escape me, its so fundamental!

I’m probably behind the curve on this one, but I recently discovered in the last day or two how cool Voodoo Pad is. I’ve been using it to make to do lists (I’m trying to get back on the Getting Things Done wagon). I’m really impressed how smoothly the program runs. It doesn’t stand in the way of my data, it simply guides it and connects it auto-magically. That just amazes me, it makes me wish there was a port of this app for Windows so I can use it at work!

So, if you are interested in GTD and are running on a Mac, go get Voodoo Pad and try it out. It rocks.

In an earlier posting I wondered out loud if the GTD methodology was incompatible with school. My work with To Do lists seemed to be getting me no where in my school work.

Upon further reflection, I think I have found the reason why it did not work. For me GTD is about a To Do list that is generated based on very small tasks that need doing in the near future (i.e. the next things for me to do). As a result of this, I never fully implemented the calendar part of the GTD system. The calendar/tickler works by “remembering” things for you that will happen in the future. Since I was only concerned about the near future, I’ve never really done anything with the calendar.

School is built around calendars. Everything, every lesson, every test, is scheduled on a calendar. Combining this information with the topics being covered in the class can yield a To Do list that is several weeks out.

Most people probably know this as a syllabus. One day I’ll learn to look at it.

In my earlier post about School and GTD, I mentioned that the To Do lists just weren’t working for me as well as they do when I use them for work and other projects. Thinking about it some more has lead me to the conclusion that In order to have an effective To Do list, you need to have some level of knowledge about what you are trying to do.

Now that sounds like a really obvious statement, but I don’t think that it is. Think about it this way: If you were asked to make a list of all of the tasks that you need to do in order to launch a rocket into space, how long would your list be? If you are a person who works with rockets a lot, you list might be very long and very detailed. If you are someone who doesn’t work with rockets often your list will probably be pretty short and very general. Guess whose To Do list will be more likely to lead to a successful rocket launch…

While in school, you are typically learning about a topic that you don’t know a lot about. Attempting to make a To Do list that captures the steps necessary to learn something can be difficult if you don’t know or understand everything you are dealing with. That has been my problem, my To Do lists have been too simple for the task I was trying to accomplish.

Recently I’ve had a lot of unexpected things crop up that were out of my control and it was interesting to see my whole “Getting Things Done” fall apart.

First I had to let a few things slip because more important tasks came up. Then it became difficult to get the old tasks done (mostly school work) because they had a firm due date which had been moved up from what it had been originally. Needless to say, this caused a lot of stress for me, which I noticed in turn caused me to be less productive (tasks took longer to finish, etc.).

Now that things have calmed down a bit it has re-ignited my desire to get my to do lists back in order. When things were going smooth I had forgotten about the chaos that had reigned freely before. I had also forgotten how stressful life could be without a plan. Even though you can’t plan around emergencies, I’ve learned that having your to do lists done as soon as you can will save you a lot of grief down the road.

So, find your motivation, make your to do lists/plans, and follow through on them as swiftly as you can. Its better to have free time than to having to be up all night trying to finish something at the last minute.

Using tags to classify blog posts is a great idea. I think its more flexible that just having “folders” that you put a message into like you would with a mail program. Sometimes a message/blogpost/etc doesn’t it nicely into one category, instead it spans several. With tags you can then mark the post with several different tags (one for each idea the post touches on).

This makes searching so much easier because the message will be in each category, so you don’t have to worry about missing it because you didn’t guess the right “folder” to look in.

That’s just such a rich idea to me. Plus it can help build contextual information for search engines which will help people find the correct information they are looking for with less effort. That just rocks.

I’ve got a ton of categories on this site, and I’ve tried to make sure that all of my posts are tagged correctly. My hope is that once I get a couple of hundred posts I’ll be able to look at the tags and build a graph of the site. I think that will tell me some interesting things.