This post is inspired because of my latest favorite: LastPass.

I’ve always looked for a great solution to storing usernames/passwords but haven’t found it. I’ve tried keepass, roboform, and the built-in firefox password manager, all with very little success (they didn’t work to my liking).

Now, with lastpass, it stores all the passwords from all of my computers (AND MY BLACKBERRY!!!!).
It also tells me when it has user/pass info for me, something other systems didn’t always do.

Yes, it stores my passwords online, and yes, I’m probably giving up a bit of security with it (although, they don’t seem to think so), but I’m fine with that from the peace of mind I get by knowing I’m always going to be able to get back into the site.

Here are my other favorites:

• Faviconize – I keep lots of tabs open all the time. Now, those tabs are smaller.
• Session manager – because I HATE when I accidentally lose the 15 tabs open in my browser.
• S3 Organizer – because it makes it super easy to put stuff onto S3. I don’t even have to open a new program!
• Delicious – because keeping my bookmarks online and synced is priceless
• LivePageRank – because I like to know what the PageRank is for sites, but I don’t need an entire google toolbar to tell me.
• Multifox – because I’m tired of having to log my wife out of my laptop because she likes to use whichever one is closer to her!

I’d love to hear what plugins you love that make you more productive in your business.

Ever since I read Getting Things Done and The Four-Hour Workweek, and put them into practice, I’ve realized what a drain email is on my time.

Since then, I stopped checking email so often, stopped reading blogs (I only follow 2 blogs: BlackBerry Cool and LifeHacker, and I only read them on my blackberry when sitting on the toilet!), unsubscribed from all newsletters, and stopped answering my phone.

I found that it’s amazing what cutting out distractions will do for your productivity. I actually get things done now. I actually get things done that I don’t want to do! Not only that, but I’ve found that sometimes, I don’t have things to do anymore because I’ve already gotten everything done! (so I go spend time with my family)

Today, via LifeHacker, I read that email is costing the US $70 Billion/year in lost productivity.

Notice on the LifeHacker post, they say “Wonder what our Twitter habits are adding up to.”

So, here’s what it comes down to for me.

If email costs the US economy $70,000,000,000 per year, I don’t care. That doesn’t affect me. In fact, it doesn’t affect most of the people who are costing their companies money. If you work for someone else, and you waste time checking email/voicemail/tweeting, what do you care. You’re wasting someone elses money.

For me, If I’m wasting time tweeting, I’m costing myself money.

I’ll repeat:

If you work for yourself, all the time you spend on interruptions (email, twitter, blogs, newsletters, bright shiny objects), you’re costing yourself money.

I don’t care if you do, I just care if I do.

And that’s why I don’t twitter (except to tell you about this blog post!…lol)

One last word. I understand that there is a place and a time for everything (including twitter). I’m not saying it’s all bad, I do use it for one of my businesses. I’m just saying that right now, for me, it makes me less productive and costs me money.

I’d love to hear why I’m wrong.

Since then, tracks was built and released as an open source system built solely around GTD, and a few other systems have come out that make implementing the Getting Things Done philosophy online really simple.

I’m writing this in hopes that it will

1. make it easier for people to figure out how to implement the GTD philosophy online
2. influence developers of online GTD implementations to make their systems more robust.

Right now there isn’t a perfect system. A few come close, and I think will be right there really soon.

So, here are a few things to consider:

1. GTD is an entire philosophy. The correct implementation is going to be different for everyone. I can’t tell you which will be best for you, I can only tell you what’s best for me (…I guess then, it MUST also be best for you ) and what features you might/should want and why.
2. Because GTD is a philosophy, any system you use should be large. Not large as in bloated, but it should be able to do all things you do now, or might want to do in the future. It’s very common for people to want to implement something like this and when they’re starting they just want the basics, and they can’t see a time when they would want more. Trust me, if you really get into implementing GTD, you’ll want more.
   So, by a large system, I mean an full personal information management system online. I want to be able to manage more than tasks and calendar, I want to be able to manage ideas, goals, affirmations, notes, websites, plans, projects, …
   Backpack it does a good job of letting you create notes, todo’s and pages, but the todo’s aren’t organized correctly for GTD. What I really like about backpackit that other softwares are missing is the ability to create pages of content and notes that are just stand alone notes, not a todo with a note attached to it. You can easily keep your online reference material inside backpackit and keep it organized. With other systems I’ve used you have to fudge the system to do this.
   Being able to keep all your online reference material in a system like this would be a big deal (being able to keep stuff like websites you use infrequently, logins and passwords, windows OS tips and tricks you might read about, anything you might put on a post-it note that can get thrown away).

   If you don’t want this stuff now, you will at some point (unless you already have a good system for this).

3. It should work with all technology, even if it’s not technology you use right now. If you really get into using your online GTD system, you will want to always make sure you can get stuff out of your head and written down no matter where you are. If you don’t send text messages now, you will some day, to write down ideas you have as you’re driving. The ability to send these to your todo list is a big deal.

   It’s also a big deal that the system you use have the ability to contextualize these as you send them.

   As far as I know, all of tracks, vitalist, toodledo, and backpackit allow you to email todo’s/notes to your todo lists. Tracks is the only one I know of that will allow you to contextualize the todo’s as you send them.

   For me this is a big deal because I send between 2-20 todo’s to myself every day via email. If I send 15 notes, or goals, or affirmations, and they all show up in my “inbox”, I’m not very happy that I now have to go and re-categorize them. This is the reason I’m sticking with Tracks for right now. Vitalist and Toodledo look like they’re more full featured than tracks, but they’re lacking key features that make the system really, really usable.

4. The reason I’m writing this is because Vitalist and Toodledo have some features that Tracks doesn’t have that I want and think would be helpful in keeping me organized. They both have the ability to sort your todo’s, and to prioritize them (or star them…like in gmail). Tracks doesn’t have this. They both have import functions too, which is really nice because I’m free to switch between the two. Tracks doesn’t have this.
5. It’s important that the system you use is fast and easy to add tasks to. If it doesn’t use AJAX (where the page does stuff without having to reload the whole page) don’t even bother. It’s also important that the system has a way to get your tasks/lists out of the system, and in front of you on a regular basis.
6. Free. Free-ness is important. Sure, I’ll pay for things, I don’t mind that. But when I have to pay $10/month just to get the minimal amount of use out of something, it bugs me and I’m really hesitant to make a long term commitment (toodledo). For $10/month you can get a really, really good hosting account online. This is the reason google is sooo successful. They provide the best apps online, and they provide them for free. People click their ads.

My point with this was to explore some of the options that are available with online GTD systems right now. The big 3 that I see are tracks.tra.in, Vitalist, and Toodledo. All 3 of them are really close to doing everything I’ve said, but none is quite there. As you make a decision for which one to use (if you’re not using the GTD philosophy somewhere, you’re missing out on a lot of time and money and brainpower for yourself) look at what you currently want for features, and then look at these 3 softwares and their potential for future use.

[tags]GTD, Getting Things Done, GTD online[/tags]

After reading David Allens “Getting Things Done” and having his system change my life I have stumbled upon/created a system for personal productivity that uses technology to make me more productive.

If you’re not paying the $20/month to be able to do email from your smartphone, I think you’re wasting the biggest productivity tool you have. I’ve always said that outside of being a phone, most pda/smartphones are just toys. They look cool and sound great, but in the end, they’re just eye candy. Toys to play games with in your down time and keep people’s contacts in.

Here’s my podcast of How To Turn Your Smartphone Into A Million Dollar Tool instead of just having a phone and a toy.

Or you can play it here:

The website I use and talk about in the audio is http://tracks.tra.in.
I also use Google calendar.

Here is the php script I use to email myself the todo’s.

Here’s a video of instructions:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=816501744180957431

[tags]gtd, getting things done, gtd online, blackberry, smartphone[/tags]

It turns out that tracks is a web based application that was specifically developed with GTD in mind. From what I can tell, and from the research I’ve done, tracks is the perfect online implementation of David Allens book Getting Things Done.

Tracks has lists that are context based (@home, @work, @phone, @car, @whatever you want) and it has projects so that each task is assigned to a context and a project. When you do your weekly planning, you can easily look at each project and decide what the next actions to do are and assign them to their appropriate context.

What’s even better is that it has a sweet ajaxy interface which is very uncommon of most open source projects, and even more uncommon of a project that was done for something so specific as this. I mean, this project wasn’t meant to be the end all todo list online, it was meant to be the perfect implementation for GTD online.

I think they’ve accomplished it.

And, it gets even better.

The owner of tracks.tra.in is very open to suggestions. So, in the past week he added a feature to his hosting service that allows you to post todo’s to your lists via email. And, even better than any other “post todo’s via email” implementation I’ve seen, this one allows you to easily assign a task to a context and project from your email subject. It’s so sweet!

So, for my specific implementation right now I have about 30 projects and 8 contexts:
@computer
today
@home
@phone
@car
@waiting
@someday
@email

Daily I go through the tasks in all the @ context lists and add them to my ‘today’ list. That day I try to get those things done. This saves me the mind power of having to review my other lists all day long and keeps me focused on what I should be doing, instead of wandering through the rest of my todo’s.

I’m a happy camper.

One more thing…Right now his hosting is free!

[tags]GTD, Getting Things Done, tracks, Best GTD Implementation[/tags]