Get Creative Part 1: The Tools

April 4th 2007 Get Creative 7 comments

Creativity is all about coming up with new ideas, interpretations and methods and involves thinking and exploring what goes through your mind. It’s a quality that should be encouraged at all walks of life. You need to feed your creative side with inspirational material, give it the time and attention is needs. Below are the 5 key variables you need in place to get those creative juices running:

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GTD Vertical Map And Horizons Of Focus

April 2nd 2007 GTD 10 comments

The vertical map, otherwise known as the horizons of focus, is a key element of GTD yet it is very often neglected, probably because the GTD book does not go into any great detail about it. As such, much of it is open to interpretation and you will find people using it in different ways. Below I’ve tried to condense some of these interpretations with my own personal thoughts on the matter to hopefully give you all a more clear idea of how it can be used. It is quite possible that a lot of you may have alternative approaches to it, so it would be great if you could leave a comment sharing your thoughts.

50,000ft
This level is where you are ironically getting quite deep about what you want in your life. Imagine it as your ultimate mission statement. Have bullet points to state how you want to live your life, what you want to achieve from it, how you want to achieve it all and what your core values are. It doesn’t have to be specfic or actionable, it can be fairly abstract ie be happy and content. The lower levels are where you take what you put here and start to define specific actions relating to it.

Though GTD adopts a bottom-up approach, the influence of having a 50,000ft level worked out filters its way down through the other layers, meaning you are inclined to pick out more coherent and relevent projects and next actions that push you forward towards these greater goals.

40,000ft
This level is often described as your vision or your 3-to-5 year goals. I personally like to view it as the vision for the next stage in your life. Rather than listing out a precise list of goals ask yourself where you want to be and what you want to be doing 3 to 5 years from now. The 50,000ft level is an abstract ideal for your life and as such it is not practical to work directly towards it. It can essentially be treated in a similar fashion to a massive project and as such you need to break it down. 40,000ft is where you start to work out more managable projects from it with a realistic timescale tied to them.

30,000ft
At this level you tend to be looking at a 12-to-18 month timescale. Items here essentially are the actionable goals that move you towards your next life vision/step defined at 40,000ft. For instance at the vision level you may have put down that you want to own a house and start a family. One of the goals to achieving this - which you would put down at this level - would be to get a new job that pays more money.

20,000ft
This level tends to be the one that most people struggle with because it seems partly separated from the surrounding levels. Simply, you define your current roles and responsibilites and I will be covering this area a lot more in the future. It’s the one level whose influence goes up and down and makes the key difference on what you do now and what you can do in the future. Working down, why would you want to be doing a project or action that you are not responsible for? Working upwards, why be responsible for something that doesn’t push you towards your vision in life? If your roles do not match your plans then you have to consider changing them. For instance, your current job might not match the career you want to be in 3-to-5 years from now.

10,000ft and runway
Now we are getting into day-to-day territory. This is where you define projects and their next actions, the vast majority of which will no doubt be dictated by your roles and responsibilities as determined at 20,000ft. However you also need to look beyond that towards the 30,000ft level as that will provide you with projects aimed ultimately towards your life purpose.

Templates
Below are links to printable templates I use for writing down my own horizons of focus as part of my GTD system. It comes in both A5 and A4 size and is in PDF format (you will need Adobe Acrobat of Foxit to view them). Note, for whatever reason the lines in the PDF file might seem a bit messed up, but when printed out they look absolutely fine.

Vertical Map A5 size
Vertical Map A4 size

Organize IT Recap: Writing S*** Down

April 1st 2007 Recap 0 comments

Here is the Organize IT recap for 01st April 2007. Unfortunately I completely forgot to come up with some highly witty April Fools joke. Ah well, there is always next year

• My Clutter 101 series has been by far the most popular content for Organize IT and has it is quite clearly a big issue for some of you I am going to bring together the first two parts of Clutter 101 and any other future content into a whitepaper of sorts that you can print out for easy reference. It will be an ongoing project that I hope to expand into something quite big. I will put up the download link/page on the sidebar sometime next week.
• Another project I intend on bringing to Organize IT in the near future is my collection of printable templates that I use in my GTD system, in a similar fashion to DIY Planner. Again, keep an eye out next week for further details.
• Did you know there is another Getting Things Done book out there? It’s true and LifeClever has 4 bits of advice from it.
• If you ever have trouble getting into GTD then maybe you need a GTD-lite approach to gain some experience of it first. Or, even better, give WSD a try!
• Don’t forget to join MyBlogLog! Organize IT now has the grand total of…3 members. Considering nobody signed up for the first two weeks that is actually quite good

Comparison Of Mind Mapping Apps

March 30th 2007 Tech 5 comments

I’ve noticed that mind mapping seems to be a bit of a hot topic at the moment with a few sites talking about it. In somewhat of a contrast to this, having covered it a little in the recent past I have recently hit a bit of a brick wall. Beyond doing rough scribbled down mind maps in my notepads for brain storming purposes I have not had any other practical use for it, I have certainly not been able to implement it into my GTD system in a manner that appeals to me, as much as I would like it to.

I recently came across a blog dedicated to mind mapping however. Of particular interest was his detailed chart comparing the main web-based mind mapping tools out there (two of which - Mindomo and bubbl.us - I have covered in the past). If you are interested in mind mapping and taking it further I suggest you check it out. Meanwhile I will see if I can find inspiration for where I can take my mind mapping experiences to next.

Welcome To Organize IT

March 28th 2007 Updates 0 comments

I’ve been getting myself a ridiculous number of hits this last day or 2 after my latest Clutter 101 article got onto Lifehack.org and broke onto the del.icio.us popular list. I noticed that it seems to be customary when this sort of thing happens to introduce the blog to all the new readers and point them to some of my favourite posts. So here goes…

Organize IT is all about bringing advice and tips (as much as possible, specific actionable advice) on living a more healthy, productive and efficient lifestyle. That includes finances, health, relationships, career and personal growth in general. Where possible I try to incorporate productivity tools like GTD and lifehacking into the mix. Some of my best posts to date are below. I hope you all enjoy the content and stick around. Feel free to leave comments and/or subscribe to the feed

• 5 Ways To Organize Your PC
• Ultimate Procrastination Guide
• The Productivity Cycle
• 10 Practical Stress Reducing Tips
• GTD Dictionary: Productivity
• My Evolving GTD System
• Trigger Lists: Focusing On Your Life
• The 5 Benefits Of Saunas And Stream Rooms