#gtd apps

The 4th of July is nearly here.  A day in which we celebrate our forefathers’ victory over oppression and tyranny, a day in which we celebrate our nation’s heritage, laws, history, society, and people… And in my opinion, an excellent day to reflect on all those things we take for granted in our own personal lives…our day job, the things we learned, our loved ones and our hobbies.

In addition to eating and drinking, I try to use the 4th of July (or the 5th of July) as a day in which I review what I done since the beginning of this year; a sort of a midyear checkup to see if I’m one with the ecosystem which is my productivity system.

During my 4th of July mid-year review, I check on higher level goals, put back on track objectives that have fallen behind, and take a close look at what has worked and not worked for me, and of course, take a forward look into this next 6 month of the year.  Here’s how I do it…

Continuing in the spirit of last week’s post, here’s another hack for speed!   Remember, the quicker you get “stuff” into IQTELL, the faster you’ll get “stuff done”!

This hack is for Chrome users because you’ll need to install the Free IQTELL Chrome Extension.

Now, anytime you’d like to quickly get an action into IQTELL – just click “Ctrl + Shift +E”.  You’ll able to type in your action (set the Context, if you’d like), and click Enter.  You don’t have to be logged into IQTELL; heck, you don’t even need to be connected to the internet.

As many of you know, email integration for our mobile apps is in the works.  Also, in a previous hack we talked about how today you can use IQTELL’s Email Gateway to process email on the go.

Well, one of our users took this to another level!  This week’s hack is inspired by one of our users, Chacha (User Forum handle).  I thought it was a clever way to integrate IQTELL and IFTTT to work together.  IFTTT is a neat rules-engine that lets you build business rules which will trigger actions between apps.

My colleague, Sahaf, always pushes everyone into trying Inbox Zero.  As he likes to say, once you do, you’ll never go back to the days of having 100’s (if not 1000’s) of emails in your inbox.  He is that emphatic about it.  After being pushed into it, I have to agree; it’s very addicting!

Many of us keep email in our inbox because we either (a) like to keep things (and this may be in our home as well); or (b) don’t have a trusted system of processing our emails; or (c) both.

Many people confuse Inbox Zero with doing everything.  That is not correct.  We recommend processing email per GTD®: read once, make a decision, and place it into the proper GTD bucket: (Actions, Projects, Someday, Tickler, or Reference).  Enough with the classroom theory – let’s talkReal World.

Many of us have come to realize that there is no one-way to implement GTD.  Here’s a simple example.  In his book, David Allen discusses Areas, Time Needed, Priority, Energy, and of course the “popular” Context.

These criteria can you help you structure and decide what you’d like to get done with the time that you have.  Of course, every GTD’er will decide what works for them.  I, for example, rely heavily on “Time Needed” while the other criteria I rarely use.

In IQTELL, you can personalize which criteria you’d like to use.  But on this post, I’d like to drill deeper.  Even if you do decide to use “Time Needed”, you may want to have different selection values – for example, you may want to show 10 minute intervals.  Others using GTD in conjunction with thePomodoro Technique, may want to user Pomodoros.