First off, let me acknowledge the it’s been a long time (for me) since my last post.

Bill brought up a good point yesterday while we were talking about blog posts and that my excuse was “well I haven’t been doing anything.” Bill said, “well just post about anything.” And he’s right because in all of the nothing that I do everyday I still manage to come home and tell Lindsey about my day when something happened or when I found something neato on the interwebs. In any case, here it goes:

While doing some quick research for one of my clients my friend Lain. I ran across GTD which stands for “Getting Things Done.”

Wikipedia says that

Getting Things Done, commonly abbreviated as GTD, is an action management method, a trademark and the title of the book which describes the method by David Allen.

GTD rests on the principle that a person needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them somewhere. That way, the mind is freed from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done, and can concentrate on actually performing those tasks.

Through my search I found a link to kinkless.com which quickly led to Five Steps to a Kinkless Desktop. I highly recomend reading it. I wish I had a “before” picture to show for comparison sake, but here’s the after part:

The middle icon (blue skull) contains all of the stuff that was on my old desktop. It’s marked “To Delete Friday July 6th” which is one week from when I started my strict file keeping code. That gives me one week to get rid of all of the junk I don’t actually use and just think that I do. Mean while, a handy script labels all of the files in my Inbox, Outbox, and Pending folder with green, yellow, and red labels. Green means I’ve just gotten the file and haven’t opened it yet. Files without a label have been opened in the last 24 hours. Yellow labels mean that the file is more than a day old and red means that they’re more than a week old! The whole idea behind the labels and fancy icons is to give visual reinforcement to my clean keeping. My file system remembers for me so that I can focus on the actual projects, and trust me, remembering things has never been a strong point.

Of course this whole GTD and Kinkless Desktop thing started, and is based, all on paper. The website 43 Folders is all about a similar system based on 43 roatating folders (31 days in a month, 12 months in a year) to achive the same goal. IT’S SO EXCITING, and it’s worked for me so far. I’ve already dropped 4.5 pounds gigabytes of crap I don’t need off my laptop. Hey, maybe it’ll work for you!