This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Agile Buzz by Mark Levison. Original Post: Random Notes on Staying A Little Bit Organized Feed Title: Notes from a Tool User Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/NotesFromAToolUser Feed Description: Thoughts about photography, software development, reading, food, wine and the world around us. Latest Agile Buzz Posts Latest Agile Buzz Posts by Mark Levison Latest Posts From Notes from a Tool User

Almost exactly three years ago I was trying to use David Allen's "Getting Things Done" (GTD) system and I wasn’t seeing the benefits he promised. In the end I just found that it helped me thrash. I suspect the problem was more my focus than his system – but at end of the day his approach just didn’t resonate with me.

Today my system is a little closer to a hybrid of Mark Forester’s AutoFocus and Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro Technique. I still use MLO as my task manager but on a more granular level than I used to. Instead of slaving over MLO constantly now I use to help generate my list for the day. I use MLO to keep track of a large list of tasks. Mostly I just use the outline to remind of thinks I want to tackle. Daily I glance at the TODO view to make sure that there isn't anything that is date sensitive that I've lost track of. Once it comes to committing to tasks for a day I often use Index cards using MLO, email and anything else as inputs. At the end of a day (sometimes two) I take anything that remains in the card and put into MLO. Then I tear up the card that's probably the most fun part.

Other habits

• I sweep my tabs in firefox every few days and move stuff to reading lists in MLO.
• Once/Twice a week I go offline and go through my email.
• Once a week I take some time to reflect - what is going well; needs improvement; what need do I have the energy to improve; what one thing can I do next week to improve it. Aka a retrospective. This is the hardest one to maintain - because you're tempted to skip it and get more "work" done. Yet its the most important because it drives real improvement.

I use the Pomodoro Technique for:

• a reminder to stay on task
• a way of doing rough estimation every morning

Also on a two monitor setup under Win7 I dock MLO on the far left and leave it in outline mode where I can always see other things I want to do.

Other tools I use: ClipMate Clipboard Extender - because it allows me handle more than one item in the clipboard and to clean (i.e. remove html etc).

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