Open Mic @ The Auction House

It took me a few months, but I finally made it out to the new open mic that is literally about 2 blocks from my house.? Audubon’s Auction House on Merchant Street now has a weekly open mic night on Wednesdays hosted by Russ.? There were about 50 people there!

I ended up going on 2nd to last, but I got to see some good acts.? Jerry Thompson is one of my new favorites.? He writes interesting songs that don’t fit into traditional categories or fall into the typical trappings of folk music.? I also loved a song written by another performer about selling his soul to the devil for pop tarts.? I can’t remember his name though!? Does anyone know it?

How to Handle a Service Failure

I recently mentioned my extensive use of tadalist, created by 37 Signals, as part of GTD. Tadalist is a free project, but they have a number of web based paid project management programs such as BaseCamp. They had a two hour downtime today and posted the following messages to keep customers updated.

37 signals

 

Despite having the downtime, I would feel very comfortable paying for their services knowing they keep their cusrtomers this informed.

Getting Things Done

I heard about David Allen’s Getting Things Done a long time ago and I procrastinated in getting it.? It sounded like a system I could use, since my day usually consists of handling (and keeping track of!) a thousand tiny tasks.? I got the book for Christmas and according to my wife it’s the best $10.00 she ever spent.? From time to time I might comment on how my system is working, so here is the gist of it:

You can’t trust your brain, so everything you need to do must be kept in a system outside your brain.
Some of these things you need to do may take more than one step.? These are projects.
Put every project in a list and from there, generate? a list of next actions for each project.? A next action is something that can be done right now or in a given context (an @hardware store list or an @phone list).
Mercilessly complete the next actions.

The revelation of how powerful this is for me came when I? realized my previous to-do lists failed because I’d have projects mixed up with next actions and single tasks.? “Make dinner reservation” would be right next to “Redesign website.”? Instead, making dinner reservations should be next to something like, “choose font for redesign.”

I still get stuck on some actions and in those cases I usually break it out to as tiny a task as possible.? Ridiculously so.

Software helps, so I’ve been using ta-da list.? Originally I used iGoogle, but their to-do lists looked bad on my phone.

Best Of

I’ve added a new link section on the right for some of the best posts on bengarvey.com.? After looking through them for a while I realized I have been doing this site for a long frickin time.? Got any suggestions for best posts I’ve missed?? Disagree with any of my pics?