A serious ouch…

We won’t get married anywhere near anything scary…

*****

Emilie snart 4 månader gammal

Loulous och Eeros lilla Emilie är snart hela fyra månader gammal och därför dedikerar jag denna video till henne:

*****

“Getting Things Done” round 2

I have finally worked out how to organize my computer. I spent a long time looking for some kind of freeware that would be able to file documents, pictures and so on conceptually. There are several out there but most of them cost more than around twenty dollars, so with the wedding coming up I decided against buying any right now. I realized I’d benefit the most if the organization would be based on the principles of GTD (see my previous post on the matter for more information) and even though there are excellent programmes available for that, I thought I’d take the challenge of working around money and simply using what I have – a clean interface in Finder, the option to colour code both folders and documents, and finally the option to place some folders in the side menu of Finder. So what I have now is:

• Inbox: the path is Documents > Inbox, but it’s also visible in the Finder side menu (just drag it there from Documents) and in the Dock, and the colour code is Yellow. Downloaded stuff and other stuff go into this one.
• Is it actionable? No – a): Someday/maybe files go into Tickler folders named for instance “Tickler – Knitting” (ideas for next knitting project; inspirational pictures and so on) and colour coded Green (something might grow out of it). If a weekly review shows that I all of a sudden have the time and motivation to make a Project out of a Tickler, the folder name is renamed and recoloured (see below).
• Is it actionable? No – b): Reference files go into Archive folders named for instance “Archive – Knitting” (finished projects) and the colour code is Blue (it’s cold, doesn’t require attention).
• Is it actionable? Yes: Files that are part of ongoing projects go into Project plan folders named for instance ” Project plan – Knitting – Christmas gifts” and the colour code is Red (it’s hot). When the projects are finished the same folders are renamed Archives. Project plan folders are visible in the Finder side menu (drag from Documents) so that I when Finder is open with one click can access their content.

While cleaning up the folder hierarchy I’ve renamed many folders in an attempt to avoid a lot of subfolders:

• Previously: example 1. Documents > Interests > Knitting and 2. Documents > Interests > Running
• Now: 1. Documents > “Interests – Knitting” and 2. Documents > “Interests – Running”

Pictures: I’m trying not to distinguish between file types anymore because it is irrelevant if stuff is picture or text, so only my photographs go into Pictures from now on, the rest will be filed under Documents.

Already I can feel what a huge difference it makes to have Archive files, Ticklers and Project-plan files separated, because the process of defining whether a file is active or not, while scrolling through the Documents > “Interests – Knitting” folder, is now gone. My original division into categories is intact, which is useful since I already have it in my head, but the scrollable amount is remarkably smaller, and when a file changes status all I do is drag it into another already existing folder or I rename the whole folder.

*****

Agony Aunt is advertising

Tango Macabre by Manfred Klein found recently at dafont.com

*****

Pink glasses round 2

Goodness, so much has happened since round 1. The dress arrived weeks ago, the stationery has been worked on for real and a lot of details regarding almost anything between heaven and earth related to weddings has been pondered not once but twice. Now I should put everything on hold for a couple of weeks but find it hard after having breathed wedding for such a long time again. I moved in the beginning of May and got my net back a couple of weeks later, which is when the planning was taken off hold. I can’t wait for the day to actually be here already!

*****

What is this – Winmark???

Denmark is now officially Windowsland, Lalaland, Winland, Winmark or just about any combination of the two that one might come up with. I’ve been helping my fiancé out with job applications for a longer time already and the conclusion is more than depressing; less than 10 % of all jobs within server support and such involve penguins (and of those less than 10 % are suitable for non-Danish speakers). Go away, stay far away from Denmark if you want to work with a computer that runs on an alternative OS. Yes, indeed, keep this country at a safe distance, approximately 1.5 hours of plane ride, which would place your feet solidly in Linuxia, Finlandia. Much better. And cuter too (go see the penguins walk the streets of Helsinki).

I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. How on earth can small companies afford to pay the astronomical money mountains that seem to please Mr. Licence so much? And what about the hospitals, universities, municipalities, towns, blahblahs and blahblahs, which certainly don’t swim in coins either? Each time Mr. Licence has a new whim, he collects his dollar$. Yes stay, no leave. Or how did it go – yes leave, no stay? Mr. Licence loves you like Cable Guy really, haven’t you noticed? And he comes with extra spices too, the type that itches baaaaaaad, but who cares, we love our STD’s. This curse of an OS is resourceful indeed and he has come to stay. Talk about revolución – there is none because we’re already part of the digestional processes in the first of many, pretty licence stomachs…

*****

Are you in hiding too?

Lately I find myself so extremely tired of people who have to hide behind the most creative of aliases when expressing the most creative of opinions on the Internet. Many of those comments can in their abusiveness and complete lack of respect for the opinions of others be flushed down the toilet immediately. Ignorance should be bliss in those instances, but for some reason it isn’t – maybe because those faceless creatures manage to shout so loudly that others can’t resist a reply? No matter the reason, a constructive and mature dialogue can never arise, which to be honest pisses me off more than a little.

When people remain faceless, I simply can’t be bothered to keep a real discussion going any longer. Drop the aliases, step up, stand behind your views and dare be corrected if you have false information, and behave like the men and women you are. In short, grow up already and make the net a better place to be, where something real can be achieved. The bad people of politics will never listen to you, but will keep calling you activists and god knows what more, and meanwhile they can continue to push our societies down the censorship drain  - 1984 is here and now in case you haven’t noticed.

*****

Blue sky, white clouds and nasty planes

There was a time when I thought travelling was glamorous, to be very specific around the time I moved to Denmark and regularly began walking the halls of airports. Now it’s only hateful with hordes of people, who often seem to have no idea of where to find their gates, and the romance is long gone. And to add to the nuisance I feel worse about the environmental aspect of my flying back and forth, as well.

To my great surprise it doesn’t have to cost a small farm to compensate for the emission caused if one is to use the service of The CarbonNeutral Company. For instance a round trip between Copenhagen and Helsinki, which is around 1900 km, would cause a production of 0.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide and thereby lead to a sum of less than 5€ to invest in one of the company’s current projects. The money one invests is used in the development of renewable-energy projects and such.

The CarbonNeutral Company has counters for not only air travel but also other kinds of travel and homes.

*****

Pink glasses round 1

Yesterday I tried wedding dresses on for the first time and was surprised by the amount of fabric in A-line dresses. I went to a bridal shop here in Copenhagen and was met by a woman who clearly didn’t have a good day. She was distant and she annoyed me on more than one occasion, since it seemed like she was just following a protocol of some kind with no real interest in getting me all excited in the situation – and maybe secure me as a customer, as well… (FYI wedding dresses aren’t cheap in any way and most of them need some altering after the first fitting, so it’s more than a simple “ka-ching” with the credit card.) I was there by myself and could have used both positive and negative feedback, but the only thing she told me was that I definitely should go for the A-line shape and also that I can wear strapless dresses since my shoulders have a clear look. Wonder what unclear shoulders look like?

Something good came out of the experience anyway – I now know my size. Wedding dresses change surprisingly much in size, even if they are from the same manufacturer, so I decided to look some more on the net. After having tried five dresses on, I managed to force a short “good bye” from the lady and left with no intention of coming back. For reference I called them today to get the price of my dress of choice and got the same lady on the thread – as sour and distant as yesterday. She couldn’t provide me with a specific price and all I got from her was “Oh, well, it depends on the model and on how much lace there is on it, so the Pronovias dresses cost around 8000 DKK or more”. Great. I wonder why it is so difficult to check the database for a simple figure.

So a Pronovias of the 2009 collection it will be (but I won’t announce the specific model since my guy might read this blog). I paid for it today and had a more than pleasant experience at House of Brides; they certainly know how to treat customers well. Now it takes something between three and five months before it arrives, depending on whether they have it on stock or not, and then the alterations might add a month or more, so it will be ready just in time for the big day.

Finally I can relax a bit as far as pink glasses go. The chuch and priest have been booked since November last year and after some thinking the party place has been reserved, as well. The florist has been consulted, we’re looking for a photographer as we speak and soon the detective’s work needs to focus on finding nice musicians. The only trouble so far was when a woman at the church office called a few weeks ago to inform me about a double booking of the church – “Excuse me!?” Apparently we were supposed to get married in sync with high screams from the baby to be christened… How charming! Eventually the baby was chucked out, so now it’s all about romance and eternal love.

*****

“Getting Things Done” my way

Recently I found a book called “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. It’s not one of the typical self-help books even though it has been classified as such on British Amazon, there appearing on the first page within its category. For a long time I felt that a link was missing between many organizational fragments of mine, so it became vital once and for all to glue them together. And since most self-help books are written in English, what better place to look for a suitable source of inspiration than one of the book shops on the net?

After some browsing I narrowed the books down to two of which “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People – Powerful Lessons in Personal Change” by Steven R. Covey I will tackle next. This one is legendary and the first edition appeared already in the beginning of the 90’s. But let’s return to “Getting Things Done”, hereafter referred to as GTD.

Most of Allen’s clients are apparently business people from higher levels of management, but the luxury of a hectic daily life isn’t theirs only, so I decided to give his method a go. It doesn’t seem very meaningful to cite him word for word, since I could end up copying the first two chapters of his book, which is why I’ll take “my way” as an approach instead.

Background. I’m a medical student at a university where there is one single exam per semester and where there are neither specified litterature nor reading lists available other than those made by fellow students. The challenge is to find out which books suit me personally, what specifically to read and when. And all that needs to be worked out rather quickly due to a high pace since day 1 of a new semester. Needless to say it also has to be coordinated with the rest of a student’s life, which has turned out to be quite a challenge indeed. The task of kicking oneself into movement may seem so displeasing that procrastination might begin to flourish – which it does. Charming behaviour, not to be expected from a person intelligent enough to realize how much damage (s)he is actually causing… Sadly, I know that many others join me in this horrible pattern twice yearly and most feel as bad about it as I do. So now comes the punch line/cliché/whatever you wish to call it: “I have a solution to the problem”.

Stop procrastinating. By using the Getting Things Done method you can expect results, get things done. Time for next cliché: “You need to stick to it or it won’t work”. Try it! It’s simple, doesn’t require you to do major changes (other than maybe clean up among your stacks of paper and emails), doesn’t promise you things you can’t achieve, doesn’t ask for the impossible. It does however require some initial thought, some commitment to get the project going and some persistence, because it’s still you who needs to do the work. But if you do it step by step, you almost can’t avoid getting sucked into the next phase of the process. And from my experience you can achieve a lot already by reading the first two chapters, which aren’t really that long and don’t take up too much time either.

The method. GTD consists of five chronological stages, all very clear and logical, so don’t expect anything difficult. The only hard part might arise when you must prioritize between two or several options, but for that there are some pointers to be read in later chapters. So, five stages: 1) collect, 2) process, 3) organize, 4) review, 5) do. For you to have a visual, check this flow chart out (it’s from the book). What has been visualized are the actions you need to do and the eight different places where information might end up, either temporarily or permanently. In essence, the deal is to maintain the overall level of organization as high as possible all the time, so no time or energy is wasted on worrying about things that might have been forgotten and which things to choose from the so-called “Next-actions” list, thereby creating as stressfree an environment as possible. Sounds cliché? Yes, but it works for me and many others. For a nutshell version of the method, please read this blog, A Primer on Getting Things Done, at 7P Productions.

My way. This is GTD applied to my daily life:

• “Stuff” comes to me primarily from three directions; by email, phone or mail. I 1) collect the “stuff” in the respective inboxes, the “collection buckets”.
• As soon as possible, preferably as soon as I’ve noticed the “stuff”, I 2) process them to avoid any “open loops” that unnecessarily load my memory. To process an email/sms or a letter means I decide whether I should “do an action” or not.
• When I physically move an email away from the inbox to some other place, I’m already at the next stage, at 3) organizing. I’m using gmail, so in my case, if it isn’t actionable, it can now end up in three different places, the Trash (wasn’t important enough to archive), the Starred folder with a specific label attached to it (it’s a “tickler”, a potential “project” in the future) or the labelled Archive (for future reference). If the email is actionable however, it always goes right into the Starred folder, again with its correct label, and stays there until the “project”/the specific part of the “project” is done.
• There are three options for mail that isn’t actionable either; paper recycling, a working folder and an archive. In the working folder all unfinished project materials, for instance unpaid bills, stay before they are archived.
• “Stuff” in the shape of sms I haven’t organized that well yet, but the aim is to empty the inbox regularly.
• All my current “projects” I have written on a list that I keep on my iPod touch. The programme I use is WritingPad, downloadable for free in iTunes, and very smart since it detects words you trace over the screen, so you don’t have to type letter after letter.
• Material related to unfinished projects are kept in the gmail Starred folder and in the physical working folder.
• Now comes the fun part, the calendar. I use iCal on my mac and iPod, so they can easily be synchronized; what is written in one place syncs to the other. The only exception is the To Do list in iCal for which I’ve had to find an alternative on the iPod, but I’ll get back to that later. The calendar is sacred – only three things go there, the “time-specific” actions (appointments), the “day-specific actions” (things that need to be done on an unspecific time during that particular day) and the “day-specific information” (extra information for that day, for instance a family member’s appointments or directions to an appointment). What is in the calendar is done without further discussion and I keep an automatically updated calendar of lectures and other school stuff there (appointments), as well as many other calendars to distinguish between different types of functions. So far I haven’t added any day-specific information in other places than as notes to already existing events.
• The “next actions” I’ve decided to monitor as To Do’s in iCal, giving them different priorities to make it even more clear what really needs to be done. The high priority is given to the extremely hasty things only, so there are many things of normal priority and many of low, too. The things done get tagged no priority if I want to keep them visible instead of deleting them.
• Apple has for some mysterious reason decided not to integrate the To Do function of iCal in the Calendar for iPod touch and iPhone, so now my “Next actions” are monitored with the help of To Do’s, a free application available in iTunes store. It’s extremely annoying though to update the list manually, so I’ve decided to add only the high- and normal-priority things there and keep the rest, less urgent ones in iCal only. And of course I add anything on-the-go to the To Do’s if I’m not at my computer.
• Finally, if you have delegated something or are just waiting for a response you still need to make some kind of note somewhere. My “waiting” items are monitored in iCal as low-priority things on the To Do list with the word Waiting added to them.
• To stay on top of things; iCal and Calendar plus To Do’s are the two places I need to look in order to get an overview before 5) doing. It’s all about choice and therefore the previous step, 4) review, is done once weekly. By cleaning up the potential clutter in badly processed collection buckets and poorly updated “projects” and “next actions” lists as well as the calendar and temporary or permanent archives I make sure that all “stuff” has been transformed into actionable “projects”. Reviewing all places means I don’t lose energy on worrying and also intuitively can feel what I need to 5) do, how I must prioritize.

For medical students at University of Copenhagen. This is my idea of a pleasant start of the semester:

• Find out what book(s) you want to read, preferably before the semester begins – I like the comment sections on studmed.dk.
• Are there available reading lists for those books or do you need to make some yourself?
• Mentally divide the semester into courses and treat them as blocks that end with exams even if no self tests are arranged. Respect the course time schedules or you will inevitably fall behind soon (!), thereby creating nothing but a hellish exam period – take it from a student who has tried this on more than one occasion.
• Work out a very detailed plan on what you need to read and when – lecture themes will guide you to what are the most important topics within a specific field, but especially during the organe courses read a little on everything. You don’t want to flunk an exam just because you didn’t read anything at all on the physiology of the thyroid gland; yes, you might have scored well in other subjects and cases, but chances are you have not, since you didn’t manage to get through the whole pensum. There almost never is anything such as good luck at this University, so before the exam you check out all the questions on third semester, even the neuro ones… Just cover it all!
• Plot all of it in your calendar. My “read today” things become all-day events in iCal, since it’s not necessary to read something at a specific time. This will help you become convinced that this is actually the only time you have for reading those particular pages or chapters the first time(s), since there are other things you need to read tomorrow and the day after that. I particularly believe in the power of this part, the visualization of necessity!
• If you don’t have time in the beginning of a semester to investigate all courses, then just make sure to repeat the process before each course begins so you don’t fall behind. Am I repeating myself? Well, repetition can work for some people such as myself.
• It might seem silly, obsessive even, to be this organized (overly maybe?), but since you have to stick to some kind of method, process or whatever when you study medicine at this particular university, why not choose GTD? At least you know what to expect of it and what it expects of you. And as a bonus you’ll grind through the whole pensum, your bills get paid on time, you’ll remember to change the battery in that watch you love, you’ll squeeze in some work via FADL, there will be time for that healthy exercise, and all those novels you want to read, sweaters you want to knit or band sessions you want to attend you’ll be able to enjoy to a greater extent, since there is not much to worry about, no other place you should be (the library for instance).
• About making notes: I recommend registering your studentconsult books. For instance during renal physiology their Boron & Boulpæp image library (same pictures as in the books) saved me and I was able to add short comments wherever necessary to pictures that I had copy-pasted into a file of my own. Then I just had to remember the pictures and if I need them now, I directly find the core information. Check the Information management category of this blog out for productivity tools, as well; you might like making mindmaps, concept maps and other notes where you actually must process the information somehow.
• Before I become too chirpy, I’ll let this be the last bullet.

Conclusion. Don’t decide against GTD just because there’s a lot of jargon. You’ll catch up fast and I recommend reading the second chapter twice or until you feel you’ve grasped the main idea anyway. The trick is to find the right tools to handle your workflow and even if it shouldn’t be a matter of how technological your solution is, there are some advantages to keep the daily-used tools electronical. Not all PDA’s are horribly expensive anymore, although I personally steer clear of anything that hasn’t a beautiful mac user interface. Automatically updated calendars and synchronization are a huge hit, but the archives need to be nice to handle too, so consider something that isn’t completely horrible to look at and difficult to use. Ordning & Reda is hugely recommended – it’s pretty. And before I sell my soul to some brand, I stop for now. I hope you enjoy the GTD ride!

*****