Getting Things Done

After Al Martine’s post I’ve decided to finally read Getting Things Done by David Allen. And... thank you, Al, that’s a very useful reading for future MBAs!

What I took from the book:

• Free you mind for creative thinking by organizing your commitments: write them down and don’t rewind them over in over in your head
• Create lists of what you should do, whom are you waiting for reply, what you may want to do someday
• Write actions, e.g. “call to book the table” instead of “birthday dinner”. Always ask “what’s the next action?”
• Instantly do things that you can accomplish in less than two minutes. If it will take more time, add them to your lists
• Review the lists regularly
  
• And a lot more…

I’ve reorganized my lists in Backpack (see earlier post) and the methodology is now working for me! Two lists are my favorite: what I am waiting from someone and Projects - to get a higher perspective on what’s going on.
If interested then check out this Wikipedia entry for more details and tools to implement this methodology (I’d like to try the Lotus Notes tool next).

UPD: Patxi's impressions of the book.

Get things done!

As many of MBA hopefuls who sunbathe and barbequeue and calm themselves stating that tests are passed and rough drafts are written, I'm hypnotized with every article which has a sour "procrastination" word in its title.
This one - A Procratinator's Guide on Getting Things Done is worth checking out for methodology (non MBA related, however, but might be a useful read for interns). As for technology I would advise another tool: Backpackit.
I first read about it in theDivineMissN post and use it ever since to make wonderful to do lists. An example of which I've made below in 37 seconds :)

Worth checking out and has a lot more than that even in free version.

Some tuning: Want to be notified about new messages in blogs?

Here by the ocean waves carry voices…

© Michael learns to rock

Last month I read in Guillaume’s blog about getting notified about recent blog entries by e-mail. I decided, that this is a good idea: not read the blogs from time to time, but be notified as soon as something new comes out.

So, I didn’t want to change my mail-client to Mozilla Thunderbird (by the way, I already have a lot of mail in my mailbox and don’t want another huge pile there!). And I didn’t explore the opportunity of Bloglines, where you don’t need to install anything, but can acquire everything on a single browser-page (correct me, if I’m wrong). Instead, I searched for some programs, that collect blogs, and came across RSS Bandit, so now I have a smiling yellow face in my tray ;)

I’m notified not only about MBA’s blogs, but also about entries in ClearAdmit (it was not easy to find their atom feed!) and Ed Brill’s Blog. Maybe I’ll add some more blogs to my list later :)