Spent the weekend in Miami, talking over my future with my parents (who despite it all are pretty decent advisors) and getting a touch of a sunburn. The biggest goal of the weekend was to de-stress- so I continued to read Getting Things Done, which so far has just been really dead on about my problems, if not necessarily all of the solutions- mostly the suggested solutions seem right, but the constant prattling about paper and file folders, when I have search tools galore in front of me, seems odd. Anyway, I was inspired to start cleaning up my desktop on the flight back. Because of the lack of network, I wasn’t able to actually remove too many things from my action list, but I was able to review some things and clean some old things out. Felt really good, for example, to delete all my old LSAT and GMAT notes, and delete a slew of other stuff out of my home directory and my Desktop. And I’ve bitten the bullet and completely rearranged my desktop- I’m running gimmie, tomboy, and deskbar as my only real interfaces right now. I’ve even turned off nautilus rendering the desktop so there are no distractions visible when I’m trying to focus. (I would love to run gdesklets on a layer so that I could nuke the weather and clock applets, but I need to file a slew of bugs first.)
GTD is going to be slightly frustrating software-wise- tomboy is almost perfect for it, but not quite (because it has no categories), and a perfect Getting Things Done desktop would allow you to use the same tags across basically all objects in your life- my files, my tomboy notes, my emails, and the people in my life would all (ideally) use the same tags so that when I wanted to find information relevant to what I’m doing right now it would be trivial. That isn’t coming any time soon, it looks like, though who knows, stranger things have happened :) If I could even just get it consistent between evo and tomboy, that would be the feature that would make me take my personal mail back out of gmail and into evo.
(Of course, I appear to have left Getting Things Done on the plane, the same thing I did with Effective Executive. Maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me something.)
In other news… this is a really nice example of effective open source development.