Some things that GTD can't help with

There are some things that GTD can't help with, in case you are wondering. It won't help you when you are dealing with a back stabbing boss. It won't help you get organized when the systems at your company are broken beyond repair. It won't help you feel better when you lose your job (although it can help a bit with looking for a new one.) It's not going to look good on a resume. And it won't help you learn something at a place where they expect you to already know the job when you walk in the door, even when they say it's entry level.

Sorry, I am a bit cranky over being fired today. I have way too much experience in job hunting these days and not nearly enough experience in having a reliable paycheck.

As you can tell, I registered Screenshot (from linkesoft.com). It's a cool program. I wanted to be able to show more about how I'm using my Palm for GTD and that's hard to do when you can't take a shot of the program in action. I also wanted to mention a couple of programs I used that I didn't mention. There is a program called "Make Spot" that gives the colors to use in KSDatebook for the holidays. You can configure it any way you want. I'm just using it as it came. I'm going to add some additional screenshots for the floats and the silent reminder alarm. I looked at these screenshots and thought about reducing them in size. They seemed to be too small, so I decided to use them as they came from the program. I do need to reconfigure it to save as a .jpg instead of a .bmp. I do not rely on a Palm-centric system any more. My job won't let me. I tend to dump things into Palm desktop, in a memo at the very least. There are some quick things that I just do off a steno pad that never make it into my system. And I'm still struggling with how to track what I need to finish on my pages, before they go into finals. I've used Note Studio for this before, as it makes a nice report. I may keep it installed just for that one purpose. I don't need it on my Palm. I do like to print it out for the boss. I may experiment with doing this in a spreadsheet and getting it into PSDB. I just don't know. I can pull stuff from memos into PSDB, so that might work. The advantage would be that I could move this into some of the stuff at work.

The Note Studio set up.

I'm not using this setup any more, but wanted to document it. Someone else may find it useful. This is how I have NoteStudio set up on my Palm.
First is my homepage, where I have a link for each week of the month. I keep the next actions I want to do on the weekly page.

Here's my inbox page. I access this from the icon on the far right of my nav bar. I just do collection here.

This is the work page. My next actions for work, which can be done at any time are located here. It's a contextual page.

Finally, this is the Hard Landscape page. It functions as a tickler.

I also have links, from the Nav Bar, to financial pages, lists, and some other items. I found that using the symbols at the top takes up a lot less room and you get used to knowing what they mean. From left to right we have Work, Home, Browsing, Out & About, Waiting For, Hard Landscape, Financial, Lists, Projects, and Inbox.

Lots of screenshots--long post

So, here is the current set up, using KSDatebook & KSTodo, plus PSMemo. I am not using PSDB yet, but wanted to show you the possibilities it has. It saves files as .csv so that they do sync over from the Palm. First, let's look at KS Datebook. Keep in mind that you can do floats (which I haven't shown here, but may in a later post.)

Here's the month view.

Here's the week view.

This is the combo todo view.

And here's how you can use Teikei to store templates for use. It calls it up within KSdatebook.

Now we're going to take a quick look at KSTodo. I will post a screenshot later of the nice silent alarm feature you can use as a reminder. First, here's a screenshot of the program. The icons at the bottom will take you directly into KSDatebook.

Here's that use of Teikei for templates again. I don't have it customized yet, but will as I have time. Right now, I am using Pam's Chocolate GTD templates for it.

Now we will look at PSMemo. It was hard to give up pedit at first. I find I really like the simplicity of this program. And, since I still use Ptools, I have a lot of the functionality of pedit yet. First the program view.

Here's what a memo looks like. Notice the tools along the bottom.

Here's the menu.

You get this nice popup menu too.

Here's the settings view.

And I found out about this, when I took this screenshot. You can send a memo over to PSDB (assuming you have it installed too.)

Here's that memo in PSDB.

Plain Vanilla

I've been struggling lately, bouncing back and forth between software and systems. I knew things were screwed up but couldn't begin to make them work right. I tried both Word Smith and pedit again and still wasn't happy. Then I put on PSMemo, which I'd downloaded but hadn't really tried. Suddenly the whole plain vanilla thing seemed to make sense. So I started digging around in the Japanese software sites. I noticed that KSDatebook kept getting mentioned, so I downloaded that and the matching KSToDo. It's plain vanilla as they all use the built ins. There is just a touch more power. You get a weekly grid view (that you don't get in the built in datebook). It has "Tasks" which work like the Floats in Datebk5. In KSTodo, you get the icons to pull up all the views from KSDatebook. And, if you have Teikei installed, you can use it from both programs when you click on "Use template". Very slick programs. Find the KS programs here and PS Memo here . Give them a try. I think you'll like them.

I resolved my other issue, the one that really caused me to bounce from program to program. I started doing my weekly review first thing Monday morning. I normally do my Artist's Way morning pages, right after my Bible reading. On Mondays, I don't have much to write about. So I do a full blown review. I also tried to review my Palm first thing when I get to work and update it throughout the day. And it seems to work. I'm clearer about what I need to get done and what is coming up. Best of all, the software was free and I can sync on both Mac & PC. Now I can refine my system, not fool around with new tools.