wissel.net

Usability - Productivity - Business - The web - Singapore & Twins

Where is my trusted system?


In the beginning was my Time System serving as mobile trusted system (and status symbol) and the world was good. My local storage was handled by Mappei which happened to have a 43 folder module more than 25 years ago and an ingenious way to deal with folders. The world was good.
Along came a rapid sequence of PDAs from Casio, Sharp, Psion and finally the original Palm Pilot. With all of them I spend quite some time to create my printout routine to keep my Time System updated. For the Mappei reference system I didn't find any good replacements. Scanners were either to slow or to expensive and the databases where the documents ended too rigid (tagging wasn't invented yet). Then I discovered Lotus Notes and initially used Haus Weilgut's CRM and standard document libraries to keep electronic information. Since necessity is the mother of invention I wrote tooling for Syccess Easy Office that could pull arbitrary PDF into Lotus Notes and deal with Fulltext extraction and meta data (I actually wrote multiple versions. In one I used a tool created by a student which you still can download). The world was good.

eMail was replacing mail and fax and the inbox became more and more important. eProductivity now helps to keep track of references, projects and commitments. The world was good.

Along came the social net and Facebook, Twitter, RSS/ATOM suddenly established new input/output channels. IBM Activities allow to share commitments. Evernote wants to be your reference system and Todeledo and RememberTheMilk want to track your commitments. All of these on a dual screen desktop, a laptop, a tablet and a mobile phone. And the world wasn't good anymore.
When I encounter something interesting I want to capture and process it. Evernote is very good at capturing, but lacks in GTD functionality (so it is suitable for the reference). Also I might want to share that information in Connections, Delicious, Digg or my Blog. Or a comment I make on a Facebook wall also triggers the recording of a new action. Currently I end up with a lot of copy and paste.
IBM tries to rectify this with project Vulcan where a single page can stream all input channels and the sharebox provides the unified output channel, so there is hope (I wonder how they will include Facebook and the other public networks). So the brave new Social Business world poses quite a challenge to GTD practitioners. This opens again then question how GTD needs to evolve from personal to Social Productivity. Sharing is still not easy.


Posted by on 13 May 2011 | Comments (1) | categories: GTD

Comments

  1. posted by Brian O'Donovan on Monday 16 May 2011 AD:
    Sometimes like just gets more complex Emoticon undecided.gif