gtd and speedreading

As you know, I've started to read the GTD book. For the moment it's being a fairly good read. Very clear concepts, written in a very straight way, and there's little to no 'boilerplate'.

Another book I recently started (that means, this very same weekend) is 'Teach yourself speed reading'. Another clear book with some key concepts to boost the reading proces.

Both books have some concepts in common (in fact, efficient reading is a particular and speciallized version of getting something done).

For example, knowing your concentration and don't forcing yourself to do things you will do better in other conditions. Or the 'prepare' or 'study your enemy' part. both books put lots of emphasis in this preliminar concept of knowing the 30000 feet picture.

Part of this phase is asking you "what you will get of completing this project (reading this book/article)" . Once you achieve it, stop reading. That's a very pragmatic approach, but GTD also have the 'next actions' list, where there are sentences of phisical actions that will move the project on, towards the desired direction.

They both sound like an agile methodology for life, don't they?

Well, I wanted to train a bit of speed reading, so I started to write a program to skim texts. ATM it uses opengl with glut. I'll post the code when it is something half decent.

Warning! c code ahead!!

Here's a good opengl survey about fonts.

http://www.opengl.org/resources/features/fontsurvey/

GTD tools: remind

As you probably seen in one of my last posts, a few days ago, I started David Allen's Getting things done book, and I think I'm starting to grasp the pragmatism of the method. I'm nowhere near fully implementing it in my life (I've only read 1/3 of the book) but googling a bit, I see tools and methods that people use.

Some time ago, I installed remind on my box, and tried (read FAILED) to use it regularly, but now I think it's time to give it another spin in order to manage my timmed 'stuff'.

Remind is a commandline tool (O RLY?, YA RLY) that helps you to manage your schedule/calendar events. One of the big wins of remind is that everything is stored in a plain text file, making it really easy to be parsed or edited from everywhere.

The default file for reminders is ~/.reminders .

Let's see a sample reminder.

REM Oct 09 2009 MSG HAZING CHEEZBURGRS WITH LOLFRIENDS.%

If I run remind command, it will print the MSG line.

Say you want it to mail your friends about your cheezburgr event.

REM Oct 2009 RUN mailfriends.sh

Easy, right?

Now let's go with periodic events. For example, I'd like to know when I have the next smalltalk meeting (every tuesday), and want to be alerted the day before (sometimes the same day is too late)

REM Tue +1 MSG Smalltalk meeting at Citilab %b.

Or Next Perl Mongers Barcelona meeting (last thursday of every month)

REM Thu 1 --7 +1 MSG PerlMongers meeting %b.

I think this deserves some explanation. Thu 1 matches when both Thu and 1st day of the month are true (That is the first tuesday of the month). Then the --7 substracts days to the previous date. That means the last Thursday of a month.

There are ways of setting reminders for a given day AT a given time, and set a duration, but I think that's all I need for this part of the GTD implementation.

Btw, If you want more info on remind, there are some good howtos and tutes online, and remind has a mail-list too (the mail archive is only accesible to subscribers though).

Learning to Learn

When talking about curiosity, and learning in general, I've got itchy feet. That's a well known fact.

Unfortunately, it's also a known fact that my perseverance in a field is not very notable. I've only managed to keep the interest for a long time in a handful of things (from 16 y.o. to 18 in reverse engineering, from 20-now optimizing procedures (say bash, vim, zsh, screen, tiling wm...) and since I was 24 on I've been quite fond of perl) .

I get amazed by new technologies, or programming languages too often, and although that makes me a very aware person of the state of art, I'm not an expert in any of theese. I call myself the 'master of hello worlds' .

Examples are:

• Io
• Haskell
• Smalltalk
• Catalyst
• Lisp
• Scheme
• zsh
• factor
  
• emacs
• ...and a looong list...

For some time I've been addicted (among other things) to trying new programming languages, and read a good amount of literature about those (paradigms, implementations, tips 'n tricks)... But lately I've felt the need for something more general. A kind of 'programming best practices', or some patterns book (not the GoF one but one I can read from cover to cover).

I took a look at some smalltalk book, or more generic books (O'Reilly beautiful XYZ) . But I wanted to go more meta. And remembered a thing I wanted to do since I was about 20. Empower and speed up daily tasks.

Some time ago I read 'Mind Performance Hacks', and was good enough, but most hacks weren't appliable to my daily life.

As an example, this weekend, I started to read articles of:

• lisp
• Catalyst
• squeak
• FluidDB
• Perl
  

As you see, I need to focus (or a girlfriend). And organize myself. And Thought that in order to focus, I'll read David Allen's "Getting things done" once for all. It's been in my TODO list for some time and now I feel it's the moment.

So my TODO ReadList, has grown by 2: GTD, and a Speed Reading book. That's not a very good start :) . Meta-procrastinating Rulez!

Bah, I doubt this post can be useful to anybody but me... If you've read until here, sorry ... that's all... at least you can google some of the words I put here, and learn real things.

Byez

PS: Want more titles? ask in comments.