Following Up

In line with my experiene

I was bad about writing things down until about 5 years ago, when I first read GTD.  The boss that I just left made a comment that he appreciated I was good at following up and getting done what I said would get done (maybe not as quickly as I'd promised -- gotta work on that underpromise/overdeliver more), but writing down has really helped for me. The combination of writing them down, getting them in a trusted to-do list, and reviewing them daily to weekly (as noted in the cast) has been a _huge_ win for me. 

Some aspects that help me:

* At work, I almost always have a portfolio with me, as Mike & Mark suggest.  It's maybe not as far up the scale as it could be (fake leather), but it's unobtrusive).  I always take notes.  To-do's get flagged with an asterisk in the left column.  Urgent to-dos get flagged with two asterisks.  They get a check mark when they're either done or in my tracking tool and the notes get filed.

* I use Things (from Cultured Code) on the Mac and iPhone for tracking to-do, agenda items, and waitingfor items.  I do hear good things about OmniFocus, and I've not really tried it, but I really like how I can track things with Things.

* Items for others are in the @WaitingFor tag, with the date I made the request as part of the title and the due date assigned (if there was one).  Things to discuss with someone get the @Agenda tag.  I preface these with name: (e.g. Bob Smith:).  That way, I can do a quick filter on Bob Smith: when I'm about to meet with him.  For my O3 with my boss, I print the filtered list and take it with me.  For O3's with my directs, I do a filter in Things and turn the computer so we both can see it (and I take written notes).  The @Agenda list/tag has been a real boon for me.  When I'm heading to my boss's staff meeting, I do a quick look through @Agenda items for my peers, to have things on the top of my head for smalltalk before the meeting.

* And for those times I'm just out in the hallway or out and about running errands, I keep a small stash of 3x5 cards in my shirt pocket.  That becomes an alternate inbox.  There have been many times when someone around me has needed a piece of paper to write something down, and I just hand them one of the blank 3x5 cards.  It'

Using a pda changed my life...

Some 2 years ago when I installed a task-following software on my iPhone it changed my life so I fully agree with the podcast.

My recommendation is an app called "2Do" because it has a very convenient "dashboard" showing you what you have to follow up now and in the near future, nicely sorted with a button to switch between showing all near tasks and showing only the most important/urgent tasks. You can customize what does "urgent" or "important" mean exactly.

I also testify that the suggestion to note only on paper I heared on Manager Tools some time ago helped me a lot. Nowadays tablets are more social as you are not hiding behind them but I still prefer paper and I take my tablet to meetings only for the moment when some obscure data is urgently needed.

I also noticed a funny psychological fact that dressing the tablet in leather portfolio-like cover made it much more socially acceptable. We are probably hard-wired to look at techno-objects with distrust.

BTW plz turn the rich text editor off here on the blog as it bugs a lot on Chrome and is unusable on Safari. It also makes the plain text version unusable in both browsers.

Using a pda changed my life...

(sorry for double posting: this is bugged by the rich-text editor here)