I personally hate it. But it does serve a good time to listen to some tunes and plan out the day. GTD happens anywhere and when practiced, everywhere.

I try to think about the next tasks that will take my morning so I can get right to it when I get in. I also use this opportunity to listen back on my Evernote voice recordings and even brainstorm ideas on projects.

Bottomline here is we all are busy and get pulled in a hundred different ways all day, cease those times during the day when it’s just you with little or no distractions to get things done.

Posted via email from Jason Resnick’s posterous

Zero Inbox — one of the great accomplishments of any productive day. I’m a big fan of the Zero Inbox methodology. The theory in a nutshell is when you process your email, read the email and think of “what do I need to do with this email?” If it’s something that can be answered right away (less than 2 minutes), then reply directly and then archive the email. If it’s something that I need to look something up, talk to someone else about it, or would just take too long to reply back, then I mark it with a date to process later and archive it. If it’s something like a response to a question that I had for someone, an advertisement, or just something that I don’t need to deal with, then I just mark it with a keyword and archive it.

The idea here is to clean out your inbox, and then when you come to your review of your tasks for the day, you will be able to see what emails need addressing at that time. Before I adopted this method, I found that there would be a few emails that would slip through the cracks. Someone would inevitably call me asking about something that was referred to in an email 2 weeks ago. Then I’d be stuck, because I knew I read it, just forgot about it because something else came up. With this method, each and every email gets dealt with in its own way.

I will go into this with more detail later, but if anyone has any questions on this, feel free to ask. It’s something that has totally changed the way I handle my email and just makes things SO much easier.

Posted via email from Jason Resnick’s posterous

As you can see in the picture, my desk is pretty clean with some exceptions.  You can see my flightdesk off to the left inside the desk.  But for the most part my desk here is clean and I’ve been getting tons of work done lately sitting in that chair.  Today, after lunch I cleaned up my desk at work and the afternoon was a productive one.  So my advice to you, and you can take if you want to (this is my blog, so I’m going to say it anyway ) is if you are having a tough time getting started with a project or task, take a look around you and see if you can straighten up the place a little, you’d be surprised how well less clutter will work.

Posted via email from Jason Resnick’s posterous

1. 

   OmniFocus - The Must Have App for GTD

   Understand GTD and Use OmniFocus to Make It Happen
   Reading up on Getting Things Done (aka GTD) and learning what that methodology speaks to.  Along with my must have tool, OmniFocus by OmniGroup, I figured out a way to trap all that I need to get done.  Without OmniFocus, I don’t know where I would be right now.  This application is my lifeline to all the tasks and projects that I have to do.  I use it each and everyday, all day long.  Every thought, email that requires more than a quick reply, notion, comment, speaking point I have gets put into OmniFocus so that I can take care of it or review it at some later date.  Even if I’m dreaming of some idea that I may ever do in my lifetime, like make a TV show, will go into OmniFocus.

2. What To Do When Out and About
   I have the OmniFocus iPhone app, which helps me remain organized when I’m not sitting in front of my computer.  What is a really nice feature that I use all the time is the Geocoding for Contexts.  This is basically marking a specific location to where you can accomplish your tasks.  For example, I have a context called Grocery Store and I’ve set that to my local Stop and Shop.  Whenever I know I need to buy something, I put it into OmniFocus as an action and assign it to my Grocery Store context.  Then when I make it to Stop and Shop, I bring it up on my iPhone, hit the location button, and that context and all my items that I need to purchase appear right on my phone.
3. GTD in the car
   What I found to be the toughest situation are those where you aren’t in front of a computer or can’t type a task into the iPhone, but have a thought that I need to get down.  An example of this is like when I’m in the car and I get an idea for a project I’m working on.  This is where Evernote has come into play.  If you haven’t checked it out, do so – Evernote!  They too have an iPhone app, but what it can do is be able to take a voice recording and then once I get to my computer, I’ll sync up my Evernote Desktop App and then process those “Untitled” notes into OmniFocus.
   

   My Flightdeck

4. The Flightdeck
   This is not an original idea of mine.  I heard about this first on Paul Boag’s Posterous microblog.  The idea is called “flightdeck” and made perfect sense for me.  When I come home from wherever I may have been, I always walk past my desk.  I empty my pockets of my essentials.  This consists of my wallet, keys, iPhone, sunglasses, and my card pass for work.  These will always be at the front part of my desk where I know that they will be at all times and I will not forget any one particular item.

So there are a few of my tips on having a productive day.  I know that I’ve tried a few different methods over a year now and this is what works for me.  Hopefully you can take something away from this and maybe use it in your day as well.  I know that I’ll be talking more about this topic as we grow, but I figured this post would be a good introduction to it.