Getting Things Done by David Allen

So this week someone asked me if I somehow have figured out 40 hour days. Ironically, in the same day, I had a hard time getting a certain set of tasks done and I felt frustrated about it.  My life in special education has gone from volunteer where I hold babies with cerebral pasly, read books, and sing with the children,  to student teaching and having my own class of students, to becoming an AT specialist, to teaching teachers, to now working towards a Ph.D. in special education and AAC.  A huge 15 foot swell feels upon me.   With p2g about to be set fully loose into the world, doc level seminars, stats class, and keeping the flames of one to one thousand lit, it is time to get back to basics.

In my initial encounter with GTD, the most influential element I found was Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero video from a talk he gave at Google in July of 2007.  Very simply, I understood what he was talking about.  I barely had to watch the video.  I listened and knew.  It felt like a new chapter in my life.  I remember struggling academically at one point in seventh grade and feeling like why am I so disorganized.  What’s wrong?  Now I realize that strategies of this kind are not necessarily intrinsic to everyone.  Truly many people are meticulous in many aspects of their lives, yet for many others getting things done and getting them done efficiently takes strategy building.  In this past year, I have read and listened to Anthony DeMello.  In excellent book, Awareness and only surviving audio recording of one of his retreats, he speaks about listening.  He advocates not just agreeing or listening for what you think you will hear, but simply listening with an aware and open mind.  When I heard Merlin Mann describe inbox zero, I knew that it was something I should try.  Try I did and just like those green eggs and ham, I like it!  Organization and productivity was for me, really I felt it!  Inbox Zero made a simple, yet profound difference in my life.

So I was all amped up at the beginning of last summer and ready to post all about GTD.  Man was I working my system.  We were all set for the big camp I felt so strongly about.  I felt organized, sharp, and alive.  Then slam.. 60 to 80 hour weeks of the most intense teaching, planning, and workin it that I have ever done.  I tried to keep my system working and luckily it had some good bend in it and did not break.  I laugh at how I had planned all these gtd related blog posts.  I laugh because I was planning them when things were humming smoothly.  Today, I write this post to express that our systems are for both when things are clipping along and for when they seem to be stalling out.  So nearly a year later I am posting to share about something that has worked for me, GTD and specifically, the concept of inbox Zero.

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Widgets are small applications that are helpful. In this series of posts, we will describe how they are helpful in three categories of ways. We will look at: widgets for personal productivity, widgets for many different student applications from book readers to digital turntables, and we will also look at how Widgets may affect the way we interact with the web, such as in social networking and iGoogle.

You may have first heard about Widgets when Apple incorporated them into the Dashboard component of OS X 10.4, Tiger. They were quite the buzz. Since then, things have really blown up. Between Facebook, Myspace, and Google alone, Widgets are big business.

Why should we be interested in Widgets? On one level, they can increase our productivity. Just consider how useful iGoogle can be. I remember reading about it on the CoolCat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis and instantly realized how many microseconds I save, not opening up GMAIL, my reader, going to the news, this or that blog, opening up Google Scholar, my university’s library link, etc. Now I simply set up iGoogle as my home page and everything I formerly went to regularly on the web comes to me. Not just my RSS feeds come to me, but nearly everything I do, step by step, I add as a Widget. For me this is very similar to the launchers and visual scene displays we create for our students. : ) Again, much thanks for AT not only helping my students, but helping me in my life and my work helping students.!

Here is a look at my iGoogle page. Note the Zero inbox! : )

Check out iGoogle and note how you can take advantage of the Tabs to create separate, manageable spaces.

Here are two useful widgets to stay current with this blog. Special thanks to Mark Coppin for the Creation of the cool Apple Dashboard Widget.

alltogether.wordpress iGoogle Widget Click on the icon.

alltogether.wordpress Apple Dashboard Widget Click to Download.

alltogether.wordpress Apple Dashboard Widget

Look for the next installment of the Widget Series: Digital Instruments and Widgets. For a sneak peak, check out the turntable set up here.

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