Geeked to the max!!!

I have been organising my life with a Tiddlywiki and a copy of Getting Things Done by David Allen. If you do not know Tiddlywiki you are missing out: it's the computer equivalent of a really nice pad of quality paper and a smooth pen; just intrinsically satisfying in itself. Each Tiddlywiki is just one html file, but the thing has been cunningly written in Java so that you only see certain parts of it at a time. These parts are the side and top bars and a few pieces of "micro-content" known as Tiddlers. All of it is remarkably easily customizable -- at least in my experience, and although I have a gung-ho attitude to technology I also have the attention span of a gnat. The best thing is that you can give each tiddler a "tag" or series of tags. Then you can manipulate them, i.e. you can have a tiddler which shows all tiddlers tagged "urgent". I set up a system to sort out my life back in the summer, and now I have found a few more plugins to refine it.

Getting Things Done I gave in to recently because it's like Atkins was a few years back, something people evangelise about fiercely. I find that actually most of what's in it I already had in my Tiddlywiki system, but what I have taken from it is the idea I should think about the next single action necessary for things, and that sometimes things need to be labelled as pending action from someone else. So I now have a TagGrid which shows all the different areas of my life along the top: ChartersWork, ParkerWork, ASNCWork, CollegeWork, ResearchWork and HomeLife; and down the side the four statuses: NextStep, Waiting, SomeDay, and Done. Each square of the grid has a number in it corresponding to the number of tiddlers which are tagged with those two tags, and clicking on that number lets me access each of the tiddlers so I can see what I need to do about them, to move them into Done, or Waiting.

The vital thing is to be able to dump my mind in a way which I know I can get back later, to get rid of that nagging feeling I've forgotten something. It worked well this afternoon when my boss suddenly called and started asking me to do lots of things; I just fed them into my system calmly and then dealt with them one by one, instead of putting them on the back of some envelope in a panicky way. My Tiddlywiki is actually a wiki on a stick, with portable apps too! (I put a picture of Sydney Bristow at the top as she is the geekiest woman I could think of in a whole number of ways.)