Third Shelf » gtd

Personal Knowledge Management with a Wiki

Sydney du Plooy — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:35:39 +0000

In the excellent book Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware (Pragmatic Programmers) by Andy Hunt, he suggests that every programmer should have a personal wiki in order to manage knowledge effectively. A sort of exocortex. A place where you can keep ideas, thoughts and nearly anything you want outside your brain.

Ever received one of those emails that you just have to keep somewhere? That snippet of source code that might come in handy? That chocolate muffin recipe? Why not put all of it into your wiki?

My personal choice of this kind of wiki is TiddlyWiki. Simply because all of the content is in a single HTML file. Fan of Getting Things Done? TiddlyWiki can easily be configured to support the Getting Things Done methodology. Have a look at d-cubed for example.

Bear in mind that it has a learning curve to it, but if you are willing to stick to it you will surely reap the benefits.

Some of the features include:

Tagging
Searching
Text formatting, including support for monospace
Highlighting
Block quotes
Tables
Headers
Save with backups
RSS feeds

I would suggest the following plugins to really spice-up TiddlyWiki:

Check out TiddlyTools and TiddlyVault for other plugins. It supports themes, which can be downloaded from TiddlyThemes. There is also a great cheat sheat available.

OneNote 2008

Sydney du Plooy — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 18:35:40 +0000

One more favourite tool that I have come to like a great deal is OneNote 2008. Straight from the box I got used to the ease and the flexibility that it provides to capture and layout my notes. It is almost easier than a notebook.

Currently I am designing a website and the way that OneNote helped me organize the research is amazing. Not only that, it has a very handy screen capturing utility that can be invoked at any time using the Windows Key + S.

It also allows you to capture side notes at any point in time by pressing Windows Key + N. Very handy stuff indeed.

Some features of OneNote 2008 includes:

Gathering your notes and information in one place;
Automatic saving of your notebooks;
Organize information in the manner that you want with complete freedom;
Prioritization and management of your tasks and your to-do list more efficiently;
Themed notebook pages;
Sharing of your notebooks;
Text highlighting;
Using pens on the note surface;
Automatic source linking when pasting information;
etc…

I think I might have abondoned my Moleskine for good after discovering OneNote.

Remember the Milk

Sydney du Plooy — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:14:59 +0000

Most of the time I find myself running around like a mad thing and inevitably will forget fairly important things. Things that can land me in a fair bit of trouble, if forgotten. Out hunting for a decent task and time management application (I’m sorry todo.txt), I finally found and settled on one, RememberTheMilk.

The feature list and flexibility of this web application is outstanding. For starters, it integrates smoothly with the concepts of Getting Things Done. Here is a post on how to set it up for GTD.

You can add tasks from almost anywhere, be it mobile, Launchy, e-mail or even their own website. There are also a couple of ways to interact with your task lists, such as:

Remember the Milk Tool – Lets you add tasks rapidly from the system tray
RememberTheMilk provider for Thunderbird – Lets you access tasks from within Thunderbird
Add tasks with Launchy – Lets you add tasks directly from Launchy
Embedding tasks on your desktop – View your tasks embedded into your desktop
Or, write your own, with their extensive API

For offline access it uses Google Gears, so that you can continue to work with your tasks offline, and then synchronize when you are online again!

Some of the features that just make it that much better, is that it supports:

SMS reminders
E-mail reminders
Recurring tasks
Multiple lists
Tags for tasks
Weekly planners
Locations integrated with Google Maps
Synchronize to BlackBerry and Windows Mobile
Notes on tasks
Contacts with whom tasks can be shared
etc…

Well done to the Australian Team!

Logging code changes

Sydney du Plooy — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 11:46:25 +0000

Recently, I had to embark on a huge refactoring. Of course, one change leads to another change, which leads to another and so on… After a while a lost myself in the chain reaction and had to put a stop to it. By reminding myself to make one small change and then run the unit tests, it was a lot easier. The way it ought to be.

But, now I was building up a whole list of pending changes as I moved through the current refactoring process and somehow had to remember all of the changes that I had made. This is where I stumbled upon a great thing that helped me out. I call it the Code Changes sheet.

It is a simple document that a co-worker drew up as a to-do list, which I took and then changed slightly. It has space to simply write down items, tick them off and then add a date when all the changes were checked in. It’s a great thing to have when the time comes to write that nice ‘little’ check-in comment.

So, feel free to download the code changes sheet here.

Productivity heatmap

Sydney du Plooy — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:45:48 +0000

On Productive Flourishing I found another useful tool. A productivity heat map. A really intuitive way of discovering your optimal productivity times.

How it works: It’s simply a circle with the hours of the day marked on the outside and divided into into slices. Time slices if you want. The idea is to colour in the time slices or partial time slices with colours that indicate the level of your productivity for a given 24-hour period.

The author suggests the following four colours, from most productive to sleep: red, orange, yellow, green and gray. I unfortunately did not have that many highlighters at hand, so I had to make use of only three. Here, is how I used them:

Green: The time where I was surfing the net, reading blogs and drinking coffee or eating lunch.

Yellow: Period where I was concentrating on certain tasks but not sold out to a specific task.

Orange: In the zone and totally lost and focused on the task at hand. For me, this lasts around 2 hours.

I found the results rather interesting and now know when to schedule mundane tasks and when to sit down and wipe out a task. So, go ahead and download the blank heatmap template.