It Rains In Triplicate

So I asked my boss for a recommendation for a book on management. He told me to read Good To Great, by Jim Collins.

So, only a chapter in right now, but the fundamental premise is that great companies have common characteristics that are worth learning and studying. However, a great company is defined as one that has a stock price that out paces its sector by 3x for 15 sustained years.

I may change my mind, but I do question a little bit the validity of stock price as a measure of a company’s success.

The kid just doesn’t seem all that interested in the Baby Einstein line of toys any more. I’m really looking for a store that sells the competing products, specifically Baby Teller (just like Baby Einstein, but bigger and more destructive) and Baby Machiavelli (teaching the kids the really important lessons) lines of product.

Sigh. Long day.

So, several months later I’m still trying to follow a GTD practice. However, the pure GTD practice, as enabled by OmniFocus leaves a few things to be desired …

• Next Actions as your list of what to do next is broken when you have too many active projects
• Just because you have a project that has some effort allocated once a month or every other month doesn’t mean it is on hold
• Sometimes you need to plan what you need to get done in a non-ad hoc fashion

My major insight is that I really have five levels of immediacy I work against:

1. Due today or tomorrow (something that has an actual due date)
2. I want to get it done this week
3. I want to get it done next week
4. I want to get it done soon (in my copious free time)
5. I want to keep track of it and get it done someday

To enable this practice, contradictory to the next action / get something done, see what’s next for the project you are focused on, I’ve made the following changes to my OmniFocus practice:

• My major perspective is called My RADAR. It contains a list of Due items (with Due set to +2 days) and a list of flagged items. When an item is flagged, it is on my immediate list of things to do for this week.
• I have two secondary perspectives, called @nextweek and @soon. Both are a simple search for items with @nextweek and @soon in the comment field. I have applescripts to add and remove these tags. I really, really wish that OF supported tags. I love OF, but I keep gazing longingly at Things.app because of the tag support. (Both of these scripts are pretty trivial)
• Every sunday, as part of my weekly review, I troll through @nextweek and promote most items to “flagged”
• When I come across something I really want to look at or work on in the near future, the @soon tag acts as a reminder. It provides an easy way to figure out those things I want to get done when I have a few free minutes

Ultimately, my practice may involve too much multitasking to fit into the next action paradigm. That may be a property of my work, of my side projects, or my mental model. So far, my biggest issue with this practice is how far outside of the intent of the tools I have to work. The lack of tag support in OmniFocus is pretty painful.