Pragmatic Geek

My previous post covers any background that can fill in the gaps if you’re unfamiliar with Getting Things Done.  This post establishes the baseline of where I’m at for GTD tech.

My current system is MonkeyGTD on a thumb drive.  MonkeyGTD is a micro-wiki, running standalone in a browser without any infrastructure than the browser that opens it.   Being able to move it between my work PC and home Mac is a huge win.  (From a web developer’s pespective, it’s an amazing bit of code.)

As a GTD system, it has all the core features: projects, next actions, ticklers, contexts, waiting on, someday/maybe, etc. Some of the features that have been extra valuable:

• Tickler scheduling – both single instance ticklers on a specific date and ticklers that repeat.  You can set weekly ticklers, and when you’ve done them, it’s 1 click to push it out to the next week and it falls off your view.
• Realms – besides the traditional context, all the items are associated to a realm, enabling you to have the same file function for Work and Home tasks.  You can turn on and off display of each realm, hiding the Home tasks during your working hours and vice versa, without having to maintain 2 systems.
• View “waiting on” by person
• List projects without a Next Action

I am a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system for personal productivity.  I anticipate several of my upcoming posts to be on this subject, so I’m including this post as boilerplate.

I’m not going to make this another blog about GTD.  Nor am I going to make this post a reference post.  Here are a few links that are relevant

• Wikipedia entry on GTD
• 43 Folders intro, also with the popular series, Inbox Zero
• The original book, at Amazon

A few things about GTDers

• The evangelize heavily
• They get frustrated at folks that don’t practice GTD, since things don’t get done as quickly, and it takes more effort to pick of the slack of folks that are too overwhelmed
• They like to focus on tools.  There are endless blog posts about the dangers of spending so much time focusing on your system, rather that the habits of using what you have.  

I’m not a poster child for GTD.  I’ve never been completely successful at the full implementation of the ideas. In 2.5 years, I’ve done maybe 3 weekly reviews.  Over the last 2 months, I’ve achieved email Inbox Zero maybe 15 times, while my physical inbox has never been empty.  Despite all that, I’ve always held it out there as a personal goal to achieve “mind like water.”

I’ve named this blog “Pragmatic Geek.”  At my core, I’m a pragmatist, and these are thoughts about how that overlaps with being a geek.  (I’m also a realistic enough to realize that my thoughts aren’t that unique, and this could likely be “another blog.”)

Pragmatic: concerned with making decisions and actions that are useful in practice, not just theory

Geek: an expert in a technical field, particularly to do with computers.

As a pragmatic geek, I

• don’t dig into every latest buzzword.  The “new” is often just a rebranded “old.”  Rich Internet Apps are just yesterday’s green screens.
• don’t covet the latest gadgets.  There’s a tradeoff between blowing your money on the latest, when the last generation stuff ends up collecting dust after it has lots its “shininess.”
• wait for convergence.  I don’t want to carry one of every device with me, but I’ll be ecstatic when I can get a two-fer. (or three-fer)
• demand good design.  Technology should be enjoyable to use on many fronts, not just because it does the job faster than the competition.
• require a good return on “investment.”  Investment is in quotes, since it’s not just about cash, it’s about the effort spent to get the return.  

I welcome you to link to the RSS, and see the updates as they happen.  

-benJ