Book list

Yes, it's that time of the year... Lists, lists, and more lists...

Leo Babauta (from Zen Habits) has just published a list of 20 essential non-fiction books. I've read only 8 of the 20, but agreed 100% with their selection for the list, which made me look forward to read the other 12...

New Year's Calibrations

With 2008 quickly drawing to an end, many of us find ourselves pouring over new year's resolutions.

Venkatesh Rao suggests in his blog that we use this time to do an exercise on new year's calibrations instead.

Great stuff! Strongly recommended!

Tracks: an open source web-based GTD application

Tracks is an open source web-based application to help implement the GTD.

From the website:

It was built using Ruby on Rails, and comes with a built-in webserver (WEBrick), so that you can run it on your own computer if you like. It can be run on any platform on which Ruby can be installed, including Mac OS X, Windows XP and Linux. Tracks is Open Source, free and licensed under the GNU GPL.

Many thanks to Michael Vogt for the tip.

Interview with David Allen

The latest issue of the Costco Connection magazine has a story+interview with David Allen. As a bonus, you get a crash course on GTD and its main schematic diagram (below). Well worth reading.

Eat that frog!

Speaking of GTD, this review of the book "Eat that Frog!" (an instant favorite of mine as soon as my friend Scott Bradley recommended it to me, about a year ago) was just published.

Getting back on the GTD wagon

I've been a big fan of David Allen and his "Getting Things Done" (GTD, for short) book and approach for many years. During the Thanksgiving holiday I decided to embark on a "GTD retreat" to try to get back on the GTD wagon. I was encouraged by David Allen's own admission that even he sometimes falls off the wagon (but quickly gets back on it).

My "GTD retreat" consisted of:

• Watching three Google Tech Talks: one by David Allen, and two by Melvin Mann (from 43 folders) "Inbox Zero" and "Time and Attention"
• Adding a few more GTD-related blogs to my Google Reader. The list now contains (among others): Lifehacker, Zen Habits, GTD Times, and Stepcase lifehack.
• Selecting a Mac/iPhone GTD tool. I picked Things (and am very happy with it so far).
• [Very important] Putting all the knowledge into practice, using Things, GMail, and Zimbra (email+calendar) 

I'll be cleaning up my email (and keeping an Inbox Zero policy) during the next few days. I'm sure that the process of going through thousands of emails will generate material for this blog. Stay tuned...