NorthWest Miscellanea

If you have not seen The Cooler, 2003, with William H. Macy, Maria Bello and Alec Baldwin, it is not a risky rental. Odds are you’ll like this, or like it a lot.

I’m waiting for a DVD to arrive from an online purchase I made a week ago. I hope it gets here soon.

And I don’t know if I’ll have to contact them before receiving the package. But before reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done book, I never had a good, organized way of knowing what to do, or where to find the ‘electronic trail’ of receipts, if I had to contact the company.

Here’s what I do now, when I order anything online (or standard mail order from a catalogue).

I have a template Memo on my Palm Pilot that has the following “fields” to enter:

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Since I started writing a small program for Windows, I wondered what I was going to use for trackings all of the different features that I was going to think of, and then how to track the bugs that comes up that I will need to fix.

I started to consider buying a real Bug Tracking program, but instead of looking for a snazzy, sophisticated expensive solution, I asked myself: what do I need to do with this info and how easy do I want to make it to add and delete info?

When you know what you want to do, you can sometimes look around at the software you are already using and find something that does it.

For instance I use SplashShopper for my Palm Pilot for grocery shopping. It comes with a Desktop companion. So I just use the Desktop software as a database to handle that stuff for this program:

.. without being flustered.

I get a lot of email from many different sources.

• I’m on newsletters of all kinds that deliver tips on doing business on the web
• Newsletter that deliver motivational self-help type stuff
• Email from my own office email account - I mail myself a web link to research later, such as comparing prices on an MP3 player

It goes on and on..

When I log in and see my email, I get all of the above, PLUS a lot of email that I answer very quickly, and that I KNOW I can delete with confidence.
( such as a hello from a relative, or friend, or an email from my bank telling me my Estatement is ready )

If I’m not in the sit-down-at-my-home-office-chair mood, and I just want “process” all email now, so that I don’t have to repeat mental effort, I simply take any email that takes more than two minutes long, and shove it into a folder on the left (outlook express is shown):

If I get a long newsletter email from Joe Vitale (who sends long newsletters, or links to free pdf’s or audios) , then without hesitation and not even reading it, I drop it into the – Large or Lengthy Emails folder.

When I have spare time, say on a weekend when I’m the mood to dig into some long emails, OR.., I know I will be taking a train trip and I feel like printing out some stuff, here is my convenient bucket of emails, where I KNOW I haven’t gotten to it.

If I then go into the Large or Lengthy Email folder and start reading ( and I make sure I have time to finish the whole article before starting it) after finishing it, I put it into the Already Read folder for Marketing folder (if I do in fact want to keep it).

This avoids making this mistake:

I’ve seen many software apps come down the pike since the Internet has been around, and even before, that want you to adopt a complete system that manages all your data in one interface. It completely changes your desktop, and prompts you during the installation to scan everything on your hard drive, and has you creating categories so that you know where everything is from now on. Even though I’ve been very saavy with PC’s, my curiousity always took hold to try out the ambitious attempt, but I always dumped it when I realized there are simpler less invasive ways to organize your data.

I like the “meanwhile” approach. While waiting for some perfect nirvana solution to being the master of all of your incoming data, I just create a “box” for information here or there in various applicatoins, that works with the way that I particuarly work.

For instance, on email:

What do you do with these emails that come in, that confirm your order has been processed and also lists the items, the cost, maybe a customer service number. I get a lot of these for Amazon, so I don’t bother saving these, because I already have an entry in my Palmpilot for Amazon, with customer service emails, etc..
But when I order, say a motivation CD from a website I don’t frequent very often, I have a folder in Outlook Express simply called Maintanence. This word just sound right to me, to me. It might not to you. I also use this folder for emails that arrive, telling me how to unsubscribe toa a newsletter that I just joined.
As soon as an email comes in, I immediately process it by putting it into a folder. So, until that perfect data management system comes, I create my own un-glamourous solution.

I wanted to blog about the mountain of data that I am constantly trying to manage - there are so many different formats of data:

-Ebooks - PDF’s and Word files,
-TreePad, an organizational tool I use
-Zip Files
-All the web sites that you have bookmarked, or.. html files that you have saved by doing a CTRL-S on the keyboard while in Firefox
- Email of course.
it goes on and on..

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