43 Folders

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Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.

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”What’s 43 Folders?”
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Getting Things Done

GTD is a personal productivity system and book by David Allen that we like a lot. Read: Getting Started with ‘Getting Things Done’.

Incomplete tasks and the Zeigarnik Effect

“The Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones.”

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PigPog PDA: A simplified Moleskine GTD system

PigPogPDA - PigPog Creativity Wiki [Introduction]

Michael Randall lays out a paper GTD-based system that should appeal to a lot of folks here.

What Is It?

  • A Moleskine hack.
  • An extreme Moleskine hack.
  • A simplified GTD system (What system? See our GTD Introduction), with relatively little actual organising. May be useful if you fancy Doing GTD Without Doing GTD.
  • A complete personal management system for those who’s needs aren’t too complicated.
  • A rather over-the-top system for dealing with just the capturing and processing end of GTD.

Why?

I was finding GTD a bit much for various reasons, but didn’t want to stop entirely - I needed to be Doing GTD Without Doing GTD. This is the system I came up with in the end. It’s simpler than GTD, and wouldn’t scale to the sort of level that GTD will, but it works pretty well for me, so it seems reasonable to think it might work well for other people too.

Read on for details of a clever system for turning a Moleskine Reporter into a kind of über-notebook, in which capture, processing, and related work are handled using sticky-note flags and some light templating.

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Geoffrey Litwack: Tactical advice, observations on GTD implementation

Really good post on a satisfying hybrid of paper and digital. Full of good insight and “what I've learned” observations. Best of many good lines: “The power of Greyskull is the power of the next action.” Word.

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GTD-style email in Thunderbird

Clever way to use Thunderbird’s excellent (semantic) flags to implement at GTD-inspired email triage system

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To-Done: Scheduling tasks

This is an intriguing idea. Keith converts his important to-dos into scheduled blocks of work.

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David Allen: Handy lists to maintain

David Allen’s suggestions for lists that are handy to keep around.

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Good report of a year using GTD

I enjoyed tuqqer’s detailed review of how he’s tweaked GTD to work best for him over the past year.

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A vacation from the endless lists

Try a nice simple to-do list that you can really manage.

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Efficient little GTD package

I dig how Doug’s combined his tools (and, like, three different memetic atoms) for his Hipster PDA mod.

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Productivity tarbabies and dark nights of the geek soul

Being a whistle-stop tour of 43F posts on the highs and lows of honing your productivity mojo. With special attention to the times when all that fiddling makes you less productive and more stressed out. Sampling from 10 months of posting on keeping your footing when the TODO lists get too numerous, steep, and weirdly fractal.

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