Getting Things Done
i am using a new system to get myself organized. it’s all based on the book titled, “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. i went to an podcasting presentation on my campus last week to see what the Apple representative had to say and just to make sure i wasn’t missing anything in my workflow. he mentioned a neato online resource called, 43 folders. 43 folders is a blog-type site that is all about Getting Things Done and is inspired by David Allen’s book. but, the 43 folders website caters to Macintosh users. the solutions are mostly Mac-based and there’s many tips and tricks, etc. i am totally changing the way i approach “work.” while i was never the kind of person who gets stressed out over mounds and mounds of work on my plate, i have found that i am less than efficient in figuring out how to attack the bigger picture items (e.g., writing an article).
so, i started using a new application (Omni Outliner) and implemented a free prebuilt system called kinkless Getting Things Done (kGTD). this forces me to write down everything i need to do and turn everything into actions i can take. and, this includes house-stuff, which pleases my wife very much. ;~)
anyway, we’ve neglected our family website that we started when our daughter was born in 2000. we add entries every month . . . or two . . . or three, but it gets much traffic from the extended family and beyond. i built it originally in HTML and then shifted it into PostNuke. This was before blogging tools were really known; though, that’s really how it was used. i have spent the past few days setting up a new hand-installed WordPress blog on our server. i customized the theme and then i installed Menalto’s Gallery. i even figured out how to get our old photos imported into Gallery 2.0 (painlessly at that). these efforts have been fun and have been weighing on my mind for a long time. in the next few days, i am going to set up a way for my wife to add blog entries by merely sending emails to a special address i create. i want to make the usability of this family site as easy as is possible so that she can jump on board and contribute often.
and, while this has been family related, i am scheduled to present at the MACUL conference next month and i will be speaking about my experiences installing various MySQL databases and how i use these tools, so this has been helpful for me.
Technorati Tags: lancaster, MySQL, wordpress, gallery, MACUL
February 24th, 2006 at 8:11 pm
as part of my renewed efforts at getting things done, i think i’ve discovered why my comments were not being indicated on the main blog page . . . my commenting spam filter needed to be upgraded since i upgraded to WordPress 2.0.
but, i have to make a comment to test whether it’s working or not . . . so this is it.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:54 am
[…] And this takes me back to the problem I now have with how I’ve done things. I have had a family website since the 1990s. I registered our last name and have kept a journal (mostly about my kids) for the grandparents and other family and friends. We get A LOT of hits on this site. In the old days, I used this site for experimentation (now, my atticmooses site is for testing, but somehow I snuck my blog on here instead of my professional site???). For the first many years, the whole family site was coded in HTML. I used BBEdit to write all of my html. Somewhere along the way, I discovered Dreamweaver and that’s been my tool of choice (or a combo) ever since. In 2001 or so, I switched to PostNuke (a Content Management System). And, just last month, I converted it all and switched to WordPress (same as this blog). That being said, when the site was all HTML-based, I added a neat feature that would allow my users to go to a control panel-like page and choose 1 of 4 styles for the whole website. I used Javascript to set a cookie and the chosen style would last for as long as they visited my site, but they could also change it any time. This took a bit of time to figure out. […]