That stands for “get(ting) things done” and I’m generally a fan of that. I’m also a fan, however, of GTD in the most lazy efficient way possible. This explains why I almost never use my carbon-based agenda unless I have to. Below are a couple of speed-hacked things I do to keep track of who, what, where, when, and how to get work over with.
- EverNote:
EverSince I heard about this program ($50 to license, free for me since I grabbed it from Giveaway of the Day) I’ve been using it to amass notes about everything. Basically, EverNote keeps an ongoing tape/list of separate notes from all over the place. It can handle formatted text, pictures, lists, etc… (basically anything worth noting). With a Firefox extension, I snag interesting web clips, tutorials, guitar tabs, and notes for school reports and essays with a click of a button. This is insanely useful if you’ve ever wanted to save anything for later/forever but didn’t want to fumble around with saving the page as an HTML file or just text in notepad. I can label notes with tags, search through them by tag and text, and even lock specific notes with passwords. The great thing about EverNote is that it keeps track of the sources of clips, so if I snag an article talking about, say, calculating pH of weak acids and bases, it’ll save whatever I selected, and then append a “Go to view actual webpage” link to the original site–extremely important if I want to be citing the source later on. It’s too bad this is pay-ware since I’d think most students and tutorial monkeys would find this quite useful. - Launchy:
I’ve been using Launchy for quite awhile now. Herm’s got a piece about Launchy detailing what it’s good for. I use it for all the mundane stuff, like launching applications, opening folders, and even calculating simple math. I’ve also taken Launchy to updating my Twitter-gCal-RTM, searching the web, emailing people, updating/grooming my iTunes library, and even defragging my harddrives from the command line.** It’s such a useful program since nearly everything I could do with a mouse and clicking I can now automate with a few keystrokes. Wonderfully fun. I was worried that the new Launchy (ver. 2.0) wouldn’t play nice with my plug-ins, and it doesn’t, but I’ve made some batch files that get the job done anyway. - SyncToy:
I’ve got two external harddrives: one to store, another to backup what I’ve stored. I really like to have everything the same between the two of them (i.e. exact copies of everything) but I’m forgetful enough to not remember every change I’ve made to one when I’m manually backing up stuff. That’s why I’ve got SyncToy. It’s still in Beta (ver. 2.0 anyway), but it gets the job done. Basically, you can set up pairs of folders for it to watch. Any changes made to one can be duplicated onto the other. This can be customized to fit your needs (i.e. echo changes one way, sync changes both ways, or contribute additions one way but never delete removed files). This makes for an extremely fast back up of specific folders that gets everything and cleans up after itself. SyncToy is free to download from MS.
And that is that for today. It’s about time I actually get some things done. Lab report, here I come.
**If you would like to get in on this fun, get UltraDefrag (slim but so succexy open source disk management utility for Windows iterations) and then copy this batch file that I made (yes, me) into your batch files folder, and invoke with “defrag” [tab]. See the Read Me included in the zip for more information.
[UPDATE]: Apparently, the -c function detailed in the Read Me for the defrag batch is no longer available for UltraDefrag 1.2.3 so that won’t work, but -a and normal defrag options still work like a charm.