How do you spell relief? e-m-p-t-y

I finally convinced my wife today that we should try out rememberthemilk for our TODO items. We're already avid users of gmail and google calendar, and these tools are great for scheduling and basic communication, but there's a class of tasks that don't deserve a calendar spot, and don't really work well in e-mail, that just don't get done.

Along the way it seemed to me that we should probably buy a copy of Getting Things Done although I'm already rather a fan of
7 Habits et al. I also came across a handy PDF outlining how to manage your e-mail - namely keep your inbox empty. So I decided to apply these tools together and transferred my e-mail into rememberthemilk and was surprised - amazed - at the level of relief that created! Wow, there's a real risk here of getting satsified just by organizing the TODOs as opposed to actually doing them. At the same time, it's important to realize and accept that a big and growing inbox is in and of itself a source of stress; a suitable management system like GTD's 43 folders or rememberthemilk may help reduce that, if combined with an active effort to do the things in all those folders or on all those lists.

Certainly it's easier than ever before to get organized with tools that are freely available. As more and more software companies realize that they can make money by providing "free" or "almost free" services in your web browser, they've produced a huge range of choices - good, usable choices - for everything you need - e-mail, documents, spreadsheets, calendars, and TODOs. It's great! Now, I need to focus on actually doing some of those TODOs...

The Zen of RSS/Blogs

I may, slowly, be beginning to understand the point of blogging and RSS as a pair. You'll have to bear with me if you've been into blogging from the beginning; I have to say that I personally was taken completely by surprise by the blogging craze and have had to work pretty hard to come up with something to post to this essentially unread blog every week or so.

Now, however, I'm starting to see it. The beauty of a blog post, as contrasted to e-mail or usenet (does anyone even remember usenet?) is that the author has to post with no real expectation of getting any responses. And the author is expected to post regularly; it seems that the real bloggers write multiple posts every day. Out of this mishmash arise a few blogs that are truly noteworthy; those end up in the RSS readers of the users ... it's a kind of double quality control. First of all the poster has to try to write something worthwhile or nobody will ever read it. Secondly, the RSS feeds that are good will eventuall show up where like minded people can find them, enabling a kind of monkey-see, monkey-do approach to quality control.

The feed reader interfaces are pretty good too. Not much challenge to guess which one I'm using, but there is plenty of choice and I'm sure everyone can find a favourite. So if, over time, I can fill my RSS reader with things I actually want to read, I will be left with the problem of finding time to read it...