Great book, read it. And if you don’t, scan the index, it reads like a list of do’s and don’ts.
The book describes the Action Method, which resolves around persisting, following up, managing action steps(todo’s that start with a verb) and relentless execution. It’s not easy, but it makes sense.
I actually read this book during summer holiday. I’ve been, uh… practicing since then. On thing that stuck with me in particular is that connectivity is inverse productivity.
I found it much easier to focus on the action step at hand without all the distractions from email, IM, Twitter, etc. But when you are offline, you need to prepare yourself with all the docs and libs you need, put the whole internet on a floppy if you can1.
Behance developed a web application specifically for following the Action Method, but as you can imagine, having your task manager ‘in the cloud’ while working offline, is not ideal.
I need something that syncs between my laptop and my desktop, but works great offline. CouchDB seemed to fit the bill perfectly. After I started a homebrew solution and one based on the Backbone MVC framework, I found this.
Those who don’t understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. – Henry Spencer
Why not use mighty tools such as text files and rsync(or Dropbox)? Googling for todo.txt shows I’m not the first to have that idea. There is a more or less agreed upon format, and even a GUI.
Good luck with that, I’m going back to my task list, which features cleaning the kitchen.
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Half of my action steps at the time consisted of “Download X” ↩
