Productivity

I deeply regret to inform you that my illustrious colleague Eric Mack has revealed the real secret to my success.

This doesn’t just apply to technology, folks. Any poem I attempt that takes more than two minutes to write gets likewise round-filed. Clearly, haiku is about all I have time for, and usually without all that restrictive syllable-counting nonsense.

Speed poetry, like speed chess? Now there’s a perverse thought.

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Part two of this series deals with some of the corollaries between Extreme Programming and GTD^® and is aimed as much at those who manage programmers as those who actually write the code. Again, it is available on The David Allen Company website and 43Folders.

Part one of a two-part series on best practices for applying GTD^® to software development is now available on both The David Allen Company web site and 43 Folders. I lay out software development and teamwork best practices we lived and breathed building GTD Connect. Hopefully a lot of the concepts extend beyond software development, into how to apply GTD to other long-range group projects. Part two is due out tomorrow. Enjoy!

Just a quick note to say that David Allen Company has kicked off a public podcast feed. The first podcast is a great interview between Merlin and David all about procrastination. Why not put off what you’re doing and listen now?

I recently had the pleasure to sit down with David Allen, Merlin Mann, and Eric Mack in the studio to record a panel discussion on technology and productivity. If you’re signed up to GTD^® Connect, you can hear the complete discussion wherein we touch on a very wide range of topics sure to delight GTD fans and geeks alike.

David Allen’s GTD Connect membership program is finally live to the public. GTD Connect includes an amazing web site with tons of rich content, events, and interactive applications to keep members engaged with maximum productivity and cutting-edge ideas and tools. This is stuff everyone needs to keep up in the world of information overload. Just not everyone knows it yet.

GTD is a workflow methodology that has basically gotten me to where I am today profesionally. So, naturally, I have a keen investment in supporting the Mac community in implementing GTD. I also happen to work for the inventor of GTD. Thanks to David for blogging about this, and for giving me the opportunity to share some of my own insights about using the GTD methodology with a Mac.

Inspired by the combination of AppleScript and Quicksilver, I cooked up a hands-free way to skip tracks in my playlist without activating the iTunes application or taking my hands off the keyboard. Then it occured to me that I could combine this with the iTunes track rating system to ‘tune’ my iTunes playlists on-the-fly to play the tracks I like more often when the “Play higher rated songs more often” box is checked. So I made two more scripts:

Sometimes, the little things in life can be so rewarding. Like not having to toggle between applications to skip a song in my playlist. I wrote three lines of AppleScript:

tell application "iTunes"

	next track

end tell

compiled them as an application called ‘skip’, and popped them in my Applications folder. After a catalog refresh, I can now invoke Quicksilver, type ‘sk’ (it auto-completes to ‘skip’), hit enter, and move to the next song. All without having to leave the application I live most of my life in … vi.

If you use a Mac but haven’t heard of Quicksilver yet, you’re wasting clicks and keystrokes. It is the equivalent of ActiveWords in the Windows world, but with a host of community-contributed plugins and a deep framework for customization.

In fact, I used this framework to remedy something that was bothering me once I became better acquainted with Quicksilver: lack of browser-independent web searches. If you have been frustrated by not being able to use a browser other than Safari, OmniWeb, or Internet Explorer to display the results of Quicksilver Google searches, check out the AppleScript at the end of this article.