This week is rather unusual in that I’m in Yorkshire, not Shetland, and I’m not cooking this week! I could have lied, made something up, you’d never have known. Would you? Nah. But that’s not right.
Instead I say this: Cook Along Friday will return next week, there will be photographs and I won’t have to type it on my phone.
Have a great weekend, enjoy what you have for dinner tonight and tell me all about it. See you Monday for my favourite Android app.
JFD, boy. JFD. Or, the Art of Getting Things Done (#GTD)
Getting Things Done, a way of organising your thoughts, your tasks, yourself, is quite a beast to get your head around. It sounded very simple when I came across it on Lifehacker. It sounded like just the thing I needed to organise myself. Oooh and there are apps for my phone, programs for my computer and olivine for my browser! This sounds perfect! Because, you see, if a system is complicated enough it becomes another method for not getting things done whils appearing to be extremely organised.
Five labels sit at the heart of the GTD method: Next, Action, Waiting, Someday and (the golden one) Finished. The flow goes something like this:
1. Item enters your world. It gets put into your Inbox.
2. At a suitable time during the day you examine your Inbox and assign a label to each item in there.
3. Anything labelled “Next” you see if you can do straight away. If you can’t, why not? What’s stopping you? Can you resolve that now or do you have to relabel the item “Waiting” and add what you’re waiting for to the Inbox?
4. Repeat for all the “Action” items
5. Have a look and see if anything in the “Waiting” category can be resolved
6. Have a look at your “Someday” list and see if you can do anything with any of them.
7. Anything you complete gets labelled “Finished” and you give yourself a gold star.
By the time you’ve done all that, your Inbox should be empty and ready to receive the next load of things that are invariable coming your way.
In order that you don’t get swamped under a sea of things labelled as “Next” you can apply Contexts to them – are they things you should be doing at home? At work? When you’re driving? (obviously anything involving detailed use of a computer or phone shouldn’t be attempted while driving!). These are “Contexts” and they’re very useful for making that vast task list more manageable.
Then there are project labels. Each project gets a label so you can work out quickly how you’re doing on a given project. There are also “Type” labels – not everything that comes in is going to be a task, sometimes it’ll be a useful Resource, some background Information, a Contact related to the task,a project or context.
So, essentially, everything that you’ve examined from your Inbod should have 4 labels. That way you can filter all this stuff – organise it, some might say – in order to get things done more efficiently. And this is where the apps come in.
As a task manager, when it comes to one you can access from pretty much anywhere (as long as you have it on your person) you can’t beat pen and paper. You can enhance it with the Pocket PDA planner templates at www.gtdplanner.com, giving you task and action lists, project templates… Lots of lovely stuff. And you get a pack of their widgets so you can design your own templates using OpenOffice.
But I’m a geek, so pen and paper didn’t quite cut it for me. I headed for the Internet and found…
Toodledo. Located at www.Toodledo.com this task manager is a rival to www.rememberthemilk.com. Both are excellent tools, both give you all the labels and contexts you could wish for but Toodledo came out ahead because of sub task support and better notes/comments. It doesn’t have a dedicated Android app, unlike RTM but it does connect to the Pocket Informant app. I’ll add screenshots
later. Both Toodledo and RTM are free, so I’d recommend taking hem both for a spin.
Pocket Informant for Android takes the native calendar functions of the phone and dovetails on task management seamlessly. I use it predominantly to add alarms and alerts to tasks, remind me if I’ve got something important to do.
So that’s my gtd setup. Pen and paper to note stuff down, online task manager to track the tasks themselves, phone app to alert me when stuff really needs doing. By and large, it works. But your mileage may vary. And don’t get me started on tracking and dealing with emails! That’s a subject for another day.
This has been done on an iPad, the first time I’ve had a serious go with one. They’re rather good but I hope the new android tablets coming out are going to be better! I’ll add screenshots to the post when I get back to my pc.
We’re all looking for that application that makes our lives easier, helps us do what we need to do without getting in the way with irritating little popups, wizards, and “helpful” suggestions. “It looks like you’re writing a novel! Would you like some help with that?” Yes, Clippy, it would be most helpful if you’d just bugger off and never come back!yWriter, for me, is that application. It does exactly what I need, doesn’t get in the way, gives me very useful feedback and runs on both of my computers – the Windows box at work and the Linux box at home.
Let’s take a spin through the features.When you open the software you’re presented with a brief splash screen. If it’s the first time you’ve run yWriter, you’ll be given the option to run through the “New Project Wizard”. This is the first and only time you’ll be prompted to run a wizard, after that they’re entirely optional. This just sets up your first project, puts it in the folder of your choice, things like that. I’d recommend you install Dropbox if you haven’t yet, set your projects up inside a Dropbox-synchronised folder and then you’ve got automatic off-site backups that you can access from anywhere in the world.
The main interface. Pick a project, any project. Down the left you’ll have your chapters, in the middle the scenes in those chapters, at the bottom the notes on the scenes/chapters. Simple. And this brings us to the key organisational gem of this software – the Scene. Instead of writing your novel as one huge slab of text (as you might if you’re using Word without Master and Sub- Documents), you break it down into easy-to-manage scenes. This is fantastic for turning the task of writing, say, 50,000 words in a month (*cough* http://www.nanowrimo.org *cough*) into the far simpler task of writing 50 scenes, each around a thousand words long. Scenes exist within Chapters, Chapters within Sections, Sections within a Project. Simple. Everything is movable – re-order chapters, re-order sections, move scenes around, whatever you need to do! Each scene keeps a running total of how many words it’s got, chapters add those up, projects give you a grand total of how many words they contain. The software also keeps a track of how many words you’ve written in a day – when you start editing, this number quickly goes into the negative and that can be a little depressing.
As you can see, you can keep track of characters (major and minor), locations, items, notes on the scene, goals (and conflicts and outcomes)… So far I’ve just scratched the surface of what this software can do but each time I find something new, it’s something more helpful than before. I haven’t even touched on storyboarding and scene cards yet!
If you find you don’t need a scene, don’t delete it! Mark it as “Unused” and it won’t count towards your grand total, won’t be included in any exports. You can mark entire chapters this way. My project setup includes a chapter called “I’d like to use this, just not sure where” and contains those scenes that have the germ of a good idea but no real place in the overall story as yet.
Now, the price. You can spend a lot on software to write novels. Microsoft Office isn’t cheap, Open Office is free – and is the word-processor-of-choice for the Writer’s Cafe suite (http://www.writerscafe.co.uk £24 at the time of writing, Linux, Mac and Windows). Scrivener, one of the main sponsors of NaNoWriMo (http://www.literatureandlatte.com £30, only available for Macs at the moment but there’s a beta for Windows). Okay, so not exactly “a lot”, but it’s certainly a lot more than yWriter. It’s free. As in costs nothing. Absolutely nothing. And for that, what have you got to lose? Get it downloaded and check it out.
On Windows, you’ll need a machine with the latest .NET libraries installed to get it working. On Linux it works with Mono 2.4 or better. I’m installing it on my newly-built CrunchBang box here at the office at the moment.
Another very good reason to visit www.spacejock.com – as if yWriter and the rest of the collection of applications there isn’t enough – is the Hal Spacejock series of books. Just to get you hooked, and to keep you coming back for another fix, the first one’s only $1.99. Of course, you’ll want to get the lot for your eBook reader, so this link will take you straight to the shop: http://www.spacejock.com.au/HalSpacejockEbooks.html
So, he’s an author, a programmer, a cyclist and an all-round great guy. If I’ve had trouble with yWriter, he’s responded to tweets and emails quickly and we’ve got everything resolved.
Software: http://www.spacejock.com
Novels: http://www.spacejock.com.au
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/spacejock