Author: Patrick Rhone

Have you been considering quitting your job and striking out on your own? Phil Gyford has recently updated and expanded his excellent Beginners Guide to Freelancing. It is a little anglo-centric as he works across the pond but the basic themes are excellent and well laid out.
Lifehacker has a good roundup of 12 Killer Apps for Palm PDAs.
Back in the day, you know that day when all Macs were beige, Acta was a great little outliner for the Mac. Note quite a full featured as others but, for some, less was More (pun intended). Opal is a port of Acta for Mac OS X re-done from the ground up in Cocoa by the original developer. If you are looking for a great, straight forward outliner for the Mac with very few bells and jiggles, it is worth a look-see. (via TidBITS)
Here is a little GTD luv for the Ubuntu crowd – GTD with Linux, Gnome and Tomboy

Every so often someone inspires me in such a way that I designate them my Short Term Personal Savior. There are many ways one can receive this special designation. It could be through a lesson I have learned from them, a way that they are living life that is inspirational or that they are just plain badass.
Today’s Short Term Personal Savior is Neal Stephenson. Here is why:

1. He is hands down one of my favorite authors and I feel probably one of the greatest writers of the last 20 years. I mean, this guy not only writes novels, he writes epics. His last work was The Baroque Cycle which consisted of three books, each nearly 900 pages long… Which he wrote by hand… i.e. Longhand… On legal pads… With a quill pen… Badass!
2. He discourages almost all public interaction in an effort to increase his productivity as a writer. To him, e-mail, speaking engagements, silly questions about petty details in his book that he has not only answered dozens of times but are also easy to find his answers to them on the internets, all of these keep him from doing the one thing he was put on this earth to do – write. Which he explains thusly:

“Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.”

1. His only web presence is a page on The Well the contents of which one could basically boil down to this phrase:

“All of my time and attention are spoken for–several times over. Please do not ask for them.”

He is not trying to be an ass. He is just explaining why he does not even have the time to put up a pretty web page or even hire someone to do so for him. He is caring for his inner introvert.
It is for these reasons that Neal Stephenson rocks the block and is worthy of being my Short Term Personal Savior.

No matter what your political stance, here is a great piece on Presentation Zen about former President Bill Clinton’s oratory style and what lessons one can take away for their own use.
There is a great tutorial on using GTDTiddlyWiki @ Lifehacker. Worth a check out.
Need a little paper pr0n? Here is a great little write-up on the new Moleskine City Book. If they release the San Francisco one before I go to Macworld I will be a very happy boy and provide you, the reader, with a full review and pictures cause I will use the heck out of it.
Getting Real, the book on software design and business practice by 37 Signals is now available on the web for free.

I have to give Chanpory at LifeClever some props. He is turning out some consistently deft content. This post is no exception. I have designed quite a few resumés in my life. I am usually the go to guy for resumé design among my friends and family. I have read a lot about resumé design and practices. That being said, I have yet to read anything as straight forward, well explained and right on as this. This is one to print and save people.
Give your resumé a face lift
Boy I wish I had this a few days ago when my friend Matthew asked me for some tips.

Scrybe is a new, very promising looking, browser based web application with calendaring, to-do lists, notes and the amazing ability to work on all of this info offline and the changes are then synced the next time you have an internet connection. Oh, and they “get” paper as well and offer the ability to print your stuff out PocketMod style.
The Apple Blog takes a look at ways to extend the Mac OS X Address Book in “Address Book: Picked Last for Kickball”
Here is a nice video profile on Apple’s site about the 37Signals crew. (via Daring Fireball)
For those of you using Googe Docs (formerly Writely), here are some useful keyboard shortcuts one can use to get around and do stuff. (via Lifehacker)

GTD cult members, unless you have been living under a rock somewhere, I am sure you have been listening to the Productive Talk series. You know, the one where Merlin Mann is interviewing David Allen of Getting Things Done fame? No? Well, what are you waiting for? Go listen to it now.
Doodle is an online service to help you easily pick a time and date for a meeting for small groups (via 43 Folders).
Looking to bend the will of the Palm OS into a mobile GTD solution? Tammy Cravit says a program called MemoLeaf is the way to go. See the break down in “Doing GTD With Memoleaf”.
EagleFiler is yet another Info Manager in the Yojimbo vein. The difference here is that it stores its library in a Finder format so the data is still in it’s original state and therefore can be used “in concert with the other tools in your Mac ecosystem”. (via Hawk Wings)

37 Signals has let slip a cool new demo of upcoming features in Backpack. This will be a major upgrade that includes the ability to drag any page element to anywhere else on the page so you can mix up lists, notes, files, etc. This also means you can drag any list item to any other list. There are also new page separators to help you group items together on a page. All of this is just a portion of the new stuff coming. Let me just say that I can’t wait to see how this improves my using it for GTD and all the other things I use it for (it will do so markedly I suspect). Once released and I have a chance to play with it, I will give a full review right here. Stay tuned…

Merlin tries to nail down his five top “no-duh” lifehacks in 300 words. Boy does he seem to nail it on the head.
Giles over at MacDevCenter lays down some smack for the text junkies. Some good text tips here in. It finally got me to give a serious look at John Gruber’s Markdown text formatting wizardry. Once I was able to grok the syntax which was not all that far from Textile which I already knew, I knew I had found nirvana. Using it to write this post right now.
Just after I posted about using Basecamp for GTD yesterday, I jumped over to my feed reader only to discover that LifeDev had also posted on the same subject. They don’t have context hack though. Soylent Green is Contexts!
Lovely Design is aptly named. They have some beautiful paper pr0n. Take this lovely journal made from found paper and envelopes. Every page turn screams possibility.

Long time readers know that I am a fairly regular user of Writely, an online web based word processor. Writely allows me to be able to store and work on documents from any computer with a web browser. Well, Writely was gobbled up by Google some months ago. Now, their assimilation with the hive mind is complete and Google has rebranded and merged it with their online spreadsheet tool to give you… Wait for this amazing and catchy name… Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
From the copy:
“If you’ve ever struggled to keep track of different versions of spreadsheet or word processor files sent over email, Google Docs & Spreadsheets may be right for you. Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a web-based word processing and spreadsheet program that keeps documents current and lets the people you choose update files from their own computers.”
There you have it. Writely users are now redirected to the new URL where they will find all of their documents still just as they left them. They will also find that it is still the same old Writely with the same old features. It is just a little bit more Google in flavor than before.

I have been using Basecamp for some time to implement larger multi-tiered and ongoing projects. Lately, I have been using it even more to manage projects for the team I lead at work. While I am using Basecamp mostly in the fashion it was intended for, since proposing my ideas about changes to my GTD implementation in Backpack, I have been pondering how some of those same changes (as well as some other useful hacks) could be applied to using Basecamp for GTD as well.
The Setup
Basecamp is designed so that, on paying accounts, one can manage multiple projects. A “project” in their definition assumes a y large one with the need for multiple sub-projects, messaging, colaboration, milestones, etc. – in other words, a lot like most people’s daily lives. The free version only allows for one project which is just fine for one’s life so this setup assumes that you are going to use one project for your GTD implementation.

Basecamp, like Backpack, allows you to create multiple lists under the To-Do tab for a project. For a GTD implementation one could have one list for single action items (i.e. projects with only one action) and then a list for each project (i.e. anything which requires two or more steps). You can see in the picture above an example of this setup. That part is pretty straight forward and pretty much inline with my @Projects setup in Backpack.
The Context Hack
I am sure you also notice in the picture above that I have set contexts for items in bold. I also bet you are wondering how that was achieved. Here is how…
People. That’s right – People.
Basecamp allows one to add people to a project and assign To-Do list items to those people responsible for them. Therefore, I thought, if people were actually contexts, then you could just as easily make the person’s name the context you want, give them an e-mail address (I just used the dummy Gmail account I have for such nonsense purposes), an equally nonsense password, and… um… tada! You have contexts which you can assign to those list items.
Another advantage to this is that Basecamp allows one to view just To-do items assigned to a specific person. Therefore, if your person is a context, you can use this hack to just list specific contexts:

GTDynomite!
Of course, one can use all of the other features of Basecamp as well. For instance, you can use the Messages section for notes, set Milestones for important projects, etc.
Basically, with a little outside of the box thinking and repurposing, one could easily use a free Basecamp account as a real and effective GTD solution with the ability to organize actions as well as viewing and printing by both context and individual project lists.