GTD and the Monkey

I recently read 'One Minute Manager meets the Monkey by Ken Blanchard and Bill Oncken. If you have not read this book, it is a classic from the 90s. Reading it is both an enlightening and entertaining experience.

Let us first begin to define the monkey. A monkey is any task that ends up in your care, thanks to the tactfulness of a subordinate, family member(typically your offspring) that you should NOT be doing. This is a task that shoul have been handled by the person who gave you this task.

Monkeys typically travel upward from employee to boss or offspring to parent. As mentioned in my prevoius blog entry, I was very impressed with David Allen's Getting Things Done, a classic on completing tasks.

Allen suggests that we have 'buckets' to handle tasks. The proverbial bucket may be a paper or electronic to-do list or some variation of the two. We then record all the tasks that need to be done in them.

The Monkey book reveals a potential weakness of the GTD system. Left unabated, the GTD system could be a breeding ground for monkeys. Well, I found a problem that others may have discovered by themselves.

I can only prescribe vigilance as the only solution for now. Be watchful of monkeys in your to-do list.

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Tiddlywiki: The ultimate organizational tool

Tiddlywiki
For the last few days, following the advice of Gina Trapani of LifeHacker, I decided to give TiddlyWiki a spin. I have always been on the lookout for productivity and organization tools. I have read numerous books on this subject too.Among the best of them is Getting Things Done by David Allen.

Over the years, after playing with Outlook and numerous online and desktop tools and was not satisfied with any of them. This was until I found Tiddlywiki.

Tiddlywiki is a wiki/ online notebook that is customizable into a to-do list, a collaboration tool, etc.(Visit their site for other uses of Tiddlywiki).


I was surprised to find flavors of tiddlywiki modeled on the methodology of David Allen's Getting Things Done. Here are a few

• Tom Otvos' d-cubed adaptation
• Simon Baird's Monkey GTD adaptation
• Clint Checkett's GTDTiddlyWiki plus adaptation

I played with the first of these, the d-cubed adaptation. This is one of the most impressive, customizable and flexible tools I had used.

This is a single html file that can be used to keep all of one's appointments, tasks, notes, reminders, etc.
Along with this file, the download package also includes a jar file(Java executable archive). By merely saving the tiddly html and jar file in a folder on your computer, you create a powerful versioing system. Each time you make changes to the tiddly file, a backup of the previous version which enable you to track changes or revert to a previos version

The beauty of the wiki is that it can be stored with the jar file in a thumb drive and can be immensely useful for those of us on the go. One person describes in a lifehacker article, how he carries around his wiki and Firefox portable in his thumb drive and has access to it on any PC.

The tiddly file can also be hosted on a site.
Hosting Tiddlywiki Online

• The most popular of these is tiddlyspot. I must admit that I had problems hosting it on this site.
• Here is an example of tiddlywiki hosted on Googlepages.

Then I realized there was a whole community of developers creating plugins to customize the wiki.

Tiddlywiki Plugin Sites

Here are two sites that have some of the most innovative plugins one can incorporate into the wiki:

• TiddlyVault,
• Eric Shulman's TiddlyTools.

My tiddlywiki has also an addressbook that I integrated from twab. In addition to saving contact information, this addressbook also has tools to import contacts from Yahoo, Google or CSV files.
It also includes an export mechanism

Further, I have a mini browser with my bookmarks I got from Shulman's site. The Tiddlywiki is a small and powerful tool and is testimony that great software functionality can some in the smallest of packages.


Gina Trapani of Lifehacker is a big fan of Tiddlywiki and warns about its addictive abilities. You are well adviced to take her example seriously. Here are links to several articles on LifeHacker about Tiddlywiki.


Lifehacker Articles on Tiddlywiki

Getting Things Done TiddlyWiki
How to use GTD TiddlyWiki
Get organized with GTDTiddlyWiki
Host your TiddlyWiki at Tiddlyspot
Embed any web page inside Thunderbird
Add an Interactive Address Book to your TiddlyWiki with twab
Integrate a Personal Wiki into Outlook's Today pane
TiddlyWiki-SE
Get things done with MonkeyGTD
Grab Text for your TiddlyWiki with TiddlySnip
Ask Lifehacker: Opening one file with a different program?
Hack Attack: Quicklaunch your USB workspace
Take In-Browser Notes to Read Anywhere with TiddlySticky
Tagged single-page wiki, TagglyWiki
ServerSideWiki, hosted GTDTiddlyWiki
Top 10 Underhyped Webapps

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Book Summary: Getting Things Done

The title of this book is somewhat a misnomer. This book is more about keeping things moving than it is about getting things done. The point of veiw of the author are to keep your appointments and deadlines carved in stone but the rest of your actions and tehir timelines flexible. The reward, the author promises is a Zen-like flow state, which he claims a person can turn on or off at will.

The book is based on the following theories:

• Work is not well defined


• The nature of work is dynamic.


• The old tools of time and work management are inadequate.


• One has to separate the woods from the trees.


• Things will stay on your mind unless you clarify them and justify a plan of action and place enough placeholders to remind yourself of them.


• This one is a kicker: One does not manage time, information or priorities


• One only manages actions.


• One does not do a project, but can take actions to move it forward.


• Horizontal Management is the act of bringing coherence across concurrent activities


• Vertical management is the act to thinking of a project from start to finish. It is the act of project planning.

The five stages of managing action are:

1. Collect:


2. Process


3. Organize


4. Review


5. Do

1. Collecting is the art of gathering one's thoughts It could be simple like an in basket or 'sophisticated' as email. The focus is to get it all out of your head, and emptying your collections

2. Process: Analyze your collections: Are they actionable,, part of a project, do-able, delegatable or deferable.

3. Organize:

• Non-actionable actions are of three types; trash, incubation(someday/maybe) tools and reference.


• Projects are outcomes that require more than a single action.


• Actions that can be completed must be done forthwith and do not have to be tracked.


• Calendar items are either time or day specific actions or day specific information.


• Daily To Do Lists are stressful and can be done away with.


• Calendars only need to track fixed appointments and deadlines.

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