Profilactic Mashup - robthompson

Google Reader: Part II: Action Support Folders and Tickler Lists: 2 GTD Tools We Hardly Ever Discuss

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:56:02 GMT

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A new folder: the Action Support folder, which is not the same as a Project Folder. Apparently.

Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two part series on Action Support Folders and Tickler Lists. The first part can be found here.

In the prior post I wrote a little about a recent coaching call I had with DAC Certified Coach, Julie Ireland and shared how she recommended that I set up my Tickler List and how I connect those items in it to my calendar where such items have a hard landscape deadline of some sort.

A number of readers chimed in with interesting comments and additional good suggestions - be sure to read the comments from the prior post to see some other excellent ways in which people are making sure that their reminders are doing their job.

Today I wanted to talk a little bit about the other rarely mentioned folder - the Action Support folder and how Julie recommends that it should be used as well as to briefly touch upon another folder that Julie suggested I incorporate into my system the “In Progress” folder.

In Julie’s system Action Support is a highly specific and constrained folder that contains only items for actions that are going to be undertaken in the very near future. She was careful to distinguish between items in an Action Support folder and items in a Project Folder. The former, she says should generally contain items specific to individual actions - a shopping list for the next trip to the grocery store for example versus, say a spreadsheet with statistics that is being used as research for a white paper that you are writing. The latter of course should be placed in a Project Folder specific to that white paper - one among the likely many resources that are being used for that particular complex project.

An estimate for an auto repair would also go in the action support folder provided that this was a one-off occurrence and not a restoration project for instance.

My problem is that I have certain things that I’m doing that require more than say a single document in support of a single task, but perhaps multiple documents in support of a single task. Let me give you an example:

Right now I’m disputing a bill with my insurance company. I’m reluctant to call this a project (in spite of the fact that my insurance company is determined to turn it into one!) for two reasons, first because it is just a single situation that should be possible to resolve with a single thirty minute period @phone - however it does require supporting documentation, to wit a bunch of insurance documents that I already have in my (making me) Blue (and) Cross folder.

I’ve already gone to the trouble to pull the documents that I needed out in preparation for the call. The issue is that every time I sit down at the phone determined to get this solved I dial the number and get a message that it will be thirty minutes before someone can take my call. I don’t have thirty minutes to sit around on hold during the day - does anyone?

So now I’ve got the paperwork out and ready to go but the call may not be happening for another day or two. I don’t really want to put the documents back into my BlueX folder only to have to go get them again in a day but I don’t really want to leave them stacked on my desk either (which is what I had been doing anyway prior to my call with Julie).

The In Progress folder is her solution to a situation like this. I can simply put the documents into this folder (which should never have more than a couple items in it or there’s some other problem that requires more coaching then I am capable of providing) and they’ll be ready to go when I find either that I have thirty minutes during which I suddenly crave an elevator muzak concerto or when I win the game of cell-phone roulette and actually get a real person instead of a machine when I call my delightful insurers.

Julie recommends that the In Progress Folder be located in your in box or somewhere that’s within easy reach so that you can access it at a moment’s notice when your context is appropriate for tackling some task for which you’ve already prepared thanks to this convenient strategy. It’s a lot better than having a bunch of documents that are too active to put away but not quite ready to be in use that moment.

I’m sure that some of you have other strategies that allow you to deal with similar situations in an equally efficient manner. Perhaps a few of you would be kind enough to share your methods with other GTDtimes readers? Let us know in the comments. Thanks.

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My Blog (LearnSigma.com): Shared Items - November 20, 2008

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:00:26 GMT

Write your first book online with FortyChapters, we'll show you how. November 20, 2008 - Worth checking out if you want to try to write that book! Tweetag - Browse the twittosphere November 20, 2008 - Toyota tag Tweetag - Browse the twittosphere November 20, 2008 - Tweetag - GTD tag Tweetag - Browse the twittosphere November 20, 2008 - Tweetag gives [...]

My Blog (LearnSigma.com): Shared Items - November 20, 2008

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 12:00:25 GMT

Google Reader: Write your first book online with FortyChapters, we'll show you how.

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:49:35 GMT

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Worth checking out if you want to try to write that book!

FortyChapters is a service that helps would-be authors make the first steps towards writing a novel. The step by step approach helps you build up your story in a structured and logical way.

Google Reader: Tweetag - Browse the twittosphere

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:47:42 GMT

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Toyota tag

Google Reader: Tweetag - Browse the twittosphere

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:45:24 GMT

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Tweetag - GTD tag

Google Reader: Tweetag - Browse the twittosphere

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:44:43 GMT

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Tweetag gives you a unique way to browse through all the public tweets published on Twitter.com.
The Tweetag homepage displays the 40 most frequent topics being discussed on Twitter (based on our automatic tagging system). The size of each tag represents its relative importance.

It means you can tell what most people are talking about at a glance (e.g. "Are they talking more about Obama or McCain?").

By selecting certain tags, you can also define the scope of your search and discover new topics related to them.
You can add tags to the selection by clicking on them. A click on a tag in the "selected tags" bar removes it from the selection.

Google Reader: Philosophy- Squashed Ayn Rand- The Virtue of Selfishness - Condensed Abridged

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:55:02 GMT

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“Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived. Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter of any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral or appropriate to man’s life on earth.” So said Nathaniel Brandon, her collaborator on this book, to which Scott McLemee has added “Or so she admitted with all due modesty, whenever the subject came up.”
Born in 1905 in St. Petersburg as Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum, Rand emigrated to the USA, where she found fame in writing plays, and novels such as ‘The Fountainhead’ and ‘Atlas Shrugged’ which brought a Russian-style dogmatic vehemence to a hard and clear version of American libertarianism.
With the true convert’s passion, she took to the idea that The United States of America is somewhat better than other countries, “the first moral society in history” as she put it - an idea which, bizarre as it may seem from the outside, is actually very sincerely held by many Americans.
As a political polemicist Rand is irreproachable - her words have reached the heights of power, and that’s what matters. But she gets a lot of criticism from technical philosophers for having achieved those heights largely by the ingenious trick of simply inventing her own definitions of terms. If you decide what it is that 'conservative', 'altruism', 'liberal', 'social', 'the real world' or 'most people' means, then it is very easy to look as if you are right. Indeed, she calls her system “Objectivism”, yet it is almost entirely subjective - she usually begins with moral judgment and only later finds reasons for it, she rarely objectively relates her ideas to the external world, and when she quotes from authority it is frequently the authority of her own previous works.
Rand remains little known outside her adopted land, but her legions of fans there mean that it would be wise to understand Rand if one is to make sense of that, rather important, country.

"Selfishness" just means concern with one's own interests. The Objectivist holds that man must act for his own rational self-interest. Does man need values? Philosophers have avoided this question. So-called “society” is only the collection of individuals, so it cannot provide the answer, nor can “God”. Galt says that "Rationality is a matter of choice." Even the survival of parasites who loot, rob or cheat depends on victims who have rationally created things through their own productive work. A mere robot could have no values, but for humans that which furthers their own life is good, that which threatens it is evil. Even love is only good because one gains advantage from the loved one. One need not help others unless it furthers your own interests, though you might give essential aid for as long as an emergency lasts. Neither wealth, nor jobs, exist in given, limited, static quantity, waiting to be divided. Benefits have to be produced, so there can’t really be any conflict of interests among rational men. There can never be conflict between freedom and control. To submit to any control is to open the way to complete subjugation. One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment, never fail to take sides (for there is no ‘gray’, only ‘black’ and ‘white’) - which means taking responsibility for your judgments. If you want to help the poor, the ill and the disadvantaged, you are free to do so, but no “society” can rightly force you to help others. State-run “humanitarian aid” and collectivized health care are akin to robbery. Socialism, solely run by power-lusting intellectuals, has failed, in England as well as Russia and Nazi Germany, because it tries to subordinate the real interests of real men with a non existent "society". It hides its failure behind grand monuments, unlike the splendid and freely-made skyline of America’s New York. Only true and free capitalism can uphold freedom. Unfree countries, with their show trials, political executions, censorship and nationalization of private property cannot claim any rights whatsoever. No free nation must, but any free nation can, invade them whenever they wish, to restore individual rights. The only duty of government is to protect individual rights, especially against violence. Taxation ought to be voluntary - perhaps by a lottery, or by taxing contracts. Racism is the foulest version of collectivization - treating individuals as mere parts of a group. Only truly free capitalism can guard against it. Guard yourself against moral intimidation, where your enemies say that only bad people can hold your views, by having moral certainty, and being willing to stand by it.

Google Reader: Philosophy- Squashed Wittgenstein- Investigations and Tractatus- Condansed and Abridged

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:53:16 GMT

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Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 1889 from a family of prosperous Austrian steelmakers and musicians, with an unfortunate family trait of depression- three of his four brothers committed suicide.
He was educated at home until the age of 14, then at the Realschule in Linz, where Adolf Hitler was a fellow-pupil. It has been argued (by Kimberly Cornish, in The Jew of Linz) that Wittgenstein is the hated Jewish boy mentioned by Hitler in Mein Kampf. Wittgenstein went on to study aeronautical engineering at Manchester, the complexities of which led him to question the basis of mathematics and seek an explanation from one of its wise men- Bertrand Russell of Cambridge.
At first Wittgenstein believed that the Tractatus, by viewing all problems as problems of language, had solved all the problems of philosophy, and subsequently gave up academe to work as a schoolteacher and a monastery gardener. Eventually, he criticized his own views and found a new philosophical method and a new understanding of language in the posthumously-published Philosophical Investigations.

THE VERY SQUASHED VERSION
1 The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
2.04 The totality of existing states of affairs is the world.
2.12 A picture is a model of reality.
2.141 A picture is a fact.
2.172 A picture cannot depict its pictorial form: it displays it.
2.19 Logical pictures can depict the world.
2.223 In order to tell whether a picture is true or false we must compare it with reality.
2.224 It is impossible to tell from the picture alone whether it is true or false.
3 A logical picture of facts is a thought.
3.01 The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world.
3.1 In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses.
3.3 Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning.
3.332 No proposition can make a statement about itself, because a propositional sign cannot be contained in itself.
4 A thought is a proposition with a sense.
4.001 The totality of propositions is language.
4.003 Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical.
4.0031 All philosophy is a 'critique of language'. The apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.
4.11 The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science
4.461 Propositions show what they say; tautologies and contradictions show that they say nothing.
4.464 A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible.
5.3 All propositions are results of truth-operations on elementary propositions.
5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
5.61 We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either.
5.621 The world and life are one.
5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.)
6.13 Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.
6.2 Mathematics is a logical method.
6.21 A proposition of mathematics does not express a thought.
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world.
6.431 At death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.
6.4311 Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death.
6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.
6.54 He who understands my propositionsme recognizes them as senseless. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up it.)
7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

Google Reader: 9 Firefox Extensions For The Information Whore

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:38:24 GMT

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Ubiquity: If you want to install just one extension in your Firefox then this is it.The Mozilla labs product can do alone what about 20 Firefox extensions would. This extension lets users to give commands by typing in and thus connects web with language. You can submit a story on digg, post tweets, translate text, get word meanings, add events to your google calendar, search on wikipedia and I have just started. The Mozilla developers continuously update this extension and add more features to it.

SageToo: This light weight RSS extension can fetch the desired information right into your browser without you having to lurk around Google Reader. There are other similar extensions as well which can do the same job almost as well, but what makes Sage different from its peers is the News Reader layout.

StumbleUpon: This is no-brainer that that you get to browse some good finds on the web using that StumbleUpon toolbar. StumbleUpon has definitely went toolbar-less but I would still recommend installing it as the latest version sans any toolbar lacks in promoting interactivity.

Brief is another Firefox extension meant for reading RSS feeds and it is the closest to Google Reader that you can find among Firefox Extensions. It displays stories in a similar manner to that of Google Reader but its layout and presentation of feeds seems less cluttering. You can also bookmark and tag stories within.

Feed Sidebar: This is pretty similar to SageToo and Brief in functionality and it also displays you RSS feeds right into your browser window. The better thing about it is that users can see the feeds in the sidebar while in the above mentioned two extensions you needed a full page to read feeds.

Read It Later: It’s pretty obvious that you are not capable of putting in all that Megabytes of information into your tiny mind. Not every content needs to be just looked at and forget, you do stumble into some posts and stories now and then which you wish to spend more time reading carefully. Read It Later is a relatively new extension which also won the honor of Best Firefox 3 extension. This extension allows users to save the links to be read later. Further, the saved links can also be synchronized.

Foxmarks Synchronizer: This extension is a must for anyone who uses multiple computers. Foxmarks lets you synchronize the bookmarks across different systems. You just need to have one account with Foxmarks and you may get all your links in your Firefox web browser from where ever you are.

TwitterFox:There should be no doubt about the fact that Twitter has also become one of the source of information. Twitter users like Rober Scoble and Guy Kawasaki keep tweeting useful links on Twitter which you might find interesting.

Juice is a new Firefox extension which allows you to find the information about a particular word or a video right inside a sidebar in the window. It aggregates a quick summary of the topicfrom the sources such as Wikipedia, Youtube, Google News etc. I gave it a try but then I unistalled it because of my hatred towrds sidebars in Firefox. But I would still recommend if you have faster machines and bigger displays to let a sidebar take away some space in return of some relevant information.

Do you spend minimum three hours lurking on Google Reader? Do you StumbleUpon a LOT in the anticipation of finding great content. Do you read Wikipedia even when you are not going to need the information ever? If you have answered Yes to all the questions then there is a high probability that you are an information whore. Let me just make it calm because this is not odd and there are thousands of people like you who do exactly the same thing. I thought it would be nice to share some Firefox extensions with you, which I believe will let you do more in less time and that’s saying that you would be able to waste your time on more things in the same time.

Google Reader: 15 Tools for Your Twitter Toolbox

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 01:35:40 GMT

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Spending all this time on twitter tools, how do you make time to tweet?

There are hundreds of Twitter applications on the market, many of which have been covered previously on this blog, including a number of clients, such as TweetDeck and Posty. With the Twitter ecosystem continuing to grow, as evidenced by last night's post on SocialToo, I wanted to touch upon a few that I use, and that I feel are unique and useful. This post highlights fifteen different Twitter tools that I believe would be excellent additions for your Twitter toolbox.

Last.fm: This Will Destroy You & Lymbyc Systym – Processed Spirits

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:57:02 GMT

http://www.last.fm/music/This%2BWill%2BDestroy%2BYou%2B%2526%2BLymbyc%2BSystym

Last.fm: This Will Destroy You & Lymbyc Systym – Freedom Blade

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:52:46 GMT

http://www.last.fm/music/This%2BWill%2BDestroy%2BYou%2B%2526%2BLymbyc%2BSystym

Last.fm: This Will Destroy You & Lymbyc Systym – Brutalism & The Worship Of The Machine

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:48:45 GMT

http://www.last.fm/music/This%2BWill%2BDestroy%2BYou%2B%2526%2BLymbyc%2BSystym

Last.fm: This Is a Process of a Still Life – Things/Cells/Beings

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:37:37 GMT

http://www.last.fm/music/This+Is+a+Process+of+a+Still+Life

Last.fm: Ghosts and Vodka – Doo Dee Doo Dee Do

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:29:00 GMT

http://www.last.fm/music/Ghosts+and+Vodka

Last.fm: Ghosts and Vodka – Cowboys and Sailors

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:26:14 GMT

http://www.last.fm/music/Ghosts+and+Vodka

Last.fm: Ghosts and Vodka – Nicholas Prefers Dinosaurs

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:22:39 GMT

http://www.last.fm/music/Ghosts+and+Vodka

My Blog (LearnSigma.com): Lean Six Sigma and a Particularly Virulent Case of Chicken Pox

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:40:38 GMT

I’m amazed at how rapidly lean six sigma is spreading across non-traditional industry sectors, rather like a particularly virulent case of chicken pox. Firstly, in aviation: for example, the is the fastest-selling new airplane in aviation history and uses composites on the airframe to allow the huge structure to be built in just one piece. [...]

Last.fm: Ghosts and Vodka – Mechanical Bull Rider

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:28:34 GMT

http://www.last.fm/music/Ghosts+and+Vodka