This weekend was fairly productive. Well, productive with the exception of the time spent mashing up various bits of hardware in a failed attempt to install Vista on a test machine – it seems that Promise don’t ship Ultra100 drivers for my aging motherboard! So it looks like it’s time for a newer test machine (All donations will be gratefully received, there’s a PayPal link at the bottom of this post!) I bought my primary desktop via the Dell Outlet, might be time to look there again!

Anyway, here are a few things that I found interesting this weekend:

Getting Things Done – podcasts
David Allen, of Getting Things Done fame, is podcasting. Actually he has teamed up with Merlin Mann of 43 Folders fame. The shows so far are:

Productive Talk on Implementing GTD
Productive Talk on Interruptions
Productive Talk on Email
Productive Talk on Teams
Productive Talk on Someday Maybe
Productive Talk on Patching Leaks
Productive Talk on Procrastination

There’s an MP3 download available, so it’s possible to transfer them to your generic MP3 player and listen to them whilst commuting.

Giving Things Up
I discovered Steve Pavlina’s blog whilst I was looking at Outlook productivity tools (more about this in a moment or two). Steve has a lot of interesting content on his blog. Posts that caught my eye were related to giving things up: giving up coffee and giving up TV. Prior to completely giving up TV, it’s probably worth trying to reduce the amount of TV that is watched first.

Kind of related to giving things up (long lies), I also found his thoughts on how to become an early riser worthwhile reading. It’s a two-parter, the second part can be found here.

Tied in with getting up early, Steve has some tips on how to get when then alarm goes off – how to avoid the “another 10 minutes” procrastination problems!

Elsewhere, I found some good stuff over at Dave Cheong’s blog. Most notably, waking up early and consistently and 18 ways to stay focused at work. Two excellent posts, I wish I could have an office/study as tidy as Dave’s – it takes time and effort, may be I’ll get there.

Personal Development Ideas
This weekend also saw me discover the work of Gleb Reys – the PDI blog. I found this site whilst reading reviews of My Life Organised. Life just seems to be somewhat hectic, I’m spending a lot of time just trying to stay afloat, may be I have to do too much? Anyway, I’ve been looking at software tools that can help me with Microsoft Outlook, David Allen’s GTD work and the 43 Folders filing system. So far I’ve been looking at such tools as ClearContext (as inspired by Omar), Speedfiler (as endorsed by Omar and Scott). I’ve installed both Speedfiler and ClearContext to see if they’ll help me manage (and dispose of) the thousands of e-mails that I’ve got spread over three PST files.

If anybody knows of a good place to buy a good set of the files that make up 43 Folders, please let me know as I’m struggling to find anything that is close to suitable.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Getting Things Done, Productivity, Speedfiler, ClearContext, Outlook