Author Archives: Patrick Rhone

Remainders, Resolutions and the Rest

One of the things I sometimes like to do when I do not have the time for a long and topic specific post is to do a few short blurbs on some things that have been capturing my attention lately. This is one of those times…

  • One |of my new year resolutions is to try to dress better. I have actually made this a resolution in years past but have not been very good with the followthrough. I love nice clothes and love to wear them but more often than not simply find it easier to throw on jeans and a t-shirt. This goal has been helped by the discovery of the clothier Kuhlman. They have very fine, Italian tailored clothing for reasonable prices. I have bought three of their french cuffed shirts in the past week. Beautiful fabric at prices that were hard to believe. Paired with dress slacks or even chinos and one is sure to walk just a little taller.
  • Speaking of resolutions, I recently had an epiphany. Following the GTD principle of vertical mapping, the need to have yearly resolutions is taken care of by 30,000 ft. goals. These are the goals that are supposed to be 12 to 18 months in focus anyway and if your daily actions and projects are in alignment with this, as I have discussed here before, than your resolutions will naturally flow through and be part of a regular review process. Therefore, stop making resolutions and start getting things done.
  • Merlin Mann at my personal fave 43folders has been running an excellent “resolutions” based series of posts called “Fresh Starts and Modest Changes” that have cover many interesting topics including:


    Modest Change: Learn the qualified “yes”

    Modest Change: Cancel something

    Fresh Start: The Email DMZ

    All well worth the read as always.

  • I have recently been playing around with an mindmapping and brainstorming application called Pyramid by MindCad. It is a simple and straight forward mind mapping application with a good tutorial and solid feel. I am hoping to see more applications of this sort when I am out at Macworld next week but so far have like what I have seen with this one.
  • My fave webapp company 37 signals has been teasing us once again with the promise of two more great applications:

    Sunrise: A web based “CRM-ish” tool to help small businesses manage their contacts and customer relationships.

    Campfire: A web based communication and collaboration tool.

    I can hardly wait for Sunrise as I think it will be just the kind of thing I need to help me with Machine Methods. Not sure how much I may use Campfire but I have been surprised at how much I have used Writeboard even if just for personal use.

That is all for now. I will try to do some posting from Macworld next week. Considering that Bethany will not be out until Wednesday I should have few distractions and lots of late and lonely nights for writing.

It’s Official

Bethany and I have officially set a date for the wedding.

* June 17th, 2006 *

Save the date in your calendar of choice.

Backpack and The New Org-fu

As promised, here is an update to how I am using Backpack these days for my GTD implementation (That I often refer to as my Org-fu). As I mentioned previously, the newly added feature of having multiple to-do lists on a page really helped me a great deal. It was the one feature that I wished it had from the start. Now that it does, it has really increased my productivity and allows me to do daily and weekly reviews much more efficiently.

Before, I had all of my context lists on separate pages. While this was OK for single action items within the context at hand, it was terrible for multistep items (i.e. projects) and for reviewing. Because I had things spread out over many different pages, it was very difficult to get that “big picture view” that the weekly review process is kind of supposed to be about. Furthermore, there are many projects I have that are outside of a context that need to be somewhere, for these I had a separate project page but, because of the inability to have multiple lists on a page, It was very formatting intensive to keep organized.

Now, with the new multiple to-do list feature in place, here is my current page structure:

  • Today (Home) – This remains the same as before. Basically, the things I want to accomplish today.
  • @Action – All of the single action items go here and are divided into multiple to-do lists according to context.
  • @Errands – Why is this separate and not under “Action”? Because these can only be done in one “context” while out and about. Also, this is one list for now, undivided since several things could be handled in multiple places (i.e. “Buy Milk” could happen at the grocery store or at Target).
  • @Project – Here they all are, each project gets it’s own to-do list. Since I am reviewing this several times a day, as well as tracking next actions in my Pocket Moleskine, there is no need to duplicate these on the “Action” list.
  • @Someday – My someday/maybe items. Things I may want to do someday but are not top of mind right now. A single list for now.

Note that I use the @ sign simply to sort these pages above the others on in the list of pages on the sidebar. I have other pages for other non-Org-fu items. I have a page for gift ideas, one for planning my trip to Macworld, a personal wish list and our wedding registry that I make publicly available. Backpack is very useful like that.

There you have it. Down from 11 pages to just four. Less is more sometimes.

In addition, another new feature that has been added to Backpack is integration with Writeboard. Writeboard is another product by 37 Signals that allows one to write and share text and compare multiple versions of the document to see what has changed. While it is great for collaboration on a document I have been using it as a basic online text editor. It is great for doing things like the basic text of journal postings like this one.

More in keeping with the subject at hand, I have been using it for the vertical mapping I have been working on recently. During the review process it is nice to have these 20,000 ft. and higher maps in the same place as my projects (10,000 ft.) and Next Actions (Runway). This keeps me focused on always having things properly aligned.

If you have not checked out Backpack yet I strongly urge you to do so. It is a really great tool for personal organization. Many of the posts I have made about it are linked in this one so check them out as well for more info.