I’ve been messing with a new computer program or two (or three) trying to get a better system for juggling clients. Right now I have six projects for six clients (and two clients who have projects they’re about to hand to me and a marketing thing I want to get going on for Smart Cookie and the various things I do each week just to maintain networking/contacts, etc.) and they’re all in different stages of completion and need different things.

How I usually manage is I write my to-do list on my whiteboard and this has worked fine but now it’s too confusing. Some of the client projects are pretty similar and I wanted a way to differentiate the common things I do for them while also maybe reminding myself to get similar things done in chunks. Also I wanted something that would let me list things by priority but still let me see how every thing is connected to another thing. Finally I wanted to get it off the whiteboard because somebody small who’s name begins with an M and ends with an N and rhymes with Addison has been known to accidentally erase and/or scribble on the to-do list.

Tall order, right?

Not so much. I’ve been eyeing productivity-type blogs and utilizing some of their tips for awhile. I finally decided to commit and order the book Getting Things Done with an Amazon birthday certificate (knowing me, I’ll glance at it and then hand it off to Brett who LOVES to organize things) and I re-downloaded iGTD only this time I read the instructions.

I can get very easily overwhelmed learning a new system and can eat up my work time messing with stuff, which is certainly NOT productive but once I read the instructions (novel idea, that) I set it up really really quickly. iGTD has you divide your work life into contexts, which are literally where you do things. My current contexts are: email, hard copy (anything that involves actual paper), phone, web, word (as in MSWord). If you had a hobby you could add “craft closet” there or if you were a budding chef, “kitchen.” Then I have projects — one for each of my clients, one for creative writing, one for Smart Cookie, one for personal stuff (like getting Judy’s page back up here).

Each project has its own tasks but each task not only belongs to a project, it also has a context. So I can click and see all the phone calls I need to make and I can see the priority of the phone calls. (Because you can give each task a priority rating from 1 to 5.) I can also tag my tasks so all the web stuff that’s blog related gets tagged “blogging.” Finally I can add a start date and a deadline. (You can also track effort but I don’t see this being very useful for me so I haven’t done that.)

What’s really nifty — and what sold me on iGTD even though it was a different program that inspired me to find a system this week — is that it’s totally integrated with my Mac environment. I can link each task to a name in my address book or a web page or an iCal event. If I’m working in my Mail program, I can hit F6 to link the email I’m reading to a task, immediately adding things to my to-do list without having to click around, copy and paste, etc. (There are some other keyboard shortcuts I haven’t tried yet.)

Wait! There’s more!

Because I’ve become increasingly concerned about backing up what with recent iTunes and blog fiascos as well as long-ago logic board disasters, I linked my gmail to my Mac mail program using imap. Let me explain that a little bit.

What I love about gmail is: I can access it anywhere on any computer, I can archive everything, I can easily search and find things, and tagging. What I don’t love is being so damn reliant on the google system — that scares me. I also don’t always love the threading, the extra clicks to see the email address of the person writing me (or to see the whole header with the IP address), and I really dislike that I can have only one signature. (Between this blog, my writing site, Smart Cookie and Open Adoption Support I’m swimming in identities and would like to be able to choose which one I’m tossing out there.) Using imap to bring gmail to my desktop mail program solves this.

Unlike using pop to download your gmail to your desktop client, imap actually syncs them. When I hit delete in my Mac mail, it gets archived. (I drag it to the trash to really delete it.) When I send something through the gmail imap system, it shows up in my sent box locally AND back at gmail. I can still get my email from any computer but if — god forbid — I get locked out of gmail I won’t lose everything. (This isn’t a far-flung fear either.) So if I check-in at my sister’s, my at-home mail program will mimic whatever I do to the inbox from there.

I can still use gmail whenever I want. I can leave my desktop client running to have a back-up locally or else I can use my desktop client as my main email and use gmail as a back-up. (Right now I’m experimenting but I do love having the signature files back again!!!) My mail program uses folders instead of tags but that’s fine — everything showed up on my desktop neatly filed in the proper folders. (It took awhile to sync — your mileage will depend on the size of your gmail.)

The main reason I switched to running gmail through an imap on my local mail system is that I wanted to use my mail program with iGTD. I wanted to be able to immediately link an email with a task to keep my inbox clean. Generally I use my inbox as a reminder system. If your email’s sitting there, I need to do something to it before I can move it. I always try to keep my inbox below 50 because if it’s on more than one page, I won’t remember to click to the second page and deal with those emails. Out of sight is indeed out of mind when it comes to me. But it’d be easier just to add anything — no matter how small — to a to-do list. Since I do tend to pace my work in context chunks (like addressing everything that needs sent all at once) it’s a lot easier to sort my inbox to-do to their proper contexts than to have them languish there in my inbox, waiting for me to open it and say, “What was I supposed to do again?” (And I just realized, I should add “fax” as a context.)

Setting this up can be confusing but you can do it with most mail clients — google has better directions for tweaking per your operating system.

So then I got a little crazy. I decided I wanted EVERYTHING to sync. That’s when I went and signed up for plaxo so that my iCal and google calendar would sync. (I use google calendar basically because Brett does, too, and it’s how we manage not to schedule dental appointments the same day I have a meeting because being a one car family means we need to be pretty meticulous.) This way if I add something at my desktop iCal it’s reflected in google calendar and vice versa. Plaxo also synced my address books.

Finally I’ve been using Mozy since ASJA members were offered a free sign-up offer in return for blogging it. I told ‘em I’d try it out for a month and then give my feedback here. It so happens that right before I joined ASJA Julia was waxing poetic about the delights of a virtual back up so I was anxious to try it out. My friends, it is teh awesome (that’s how the kids type it these days). Every night at 3am my entire system backs up. It took a few hours the first time but now it just backs up what’s changed. My mail (so my mail is now backed up THREE TIMES — once on the gmail servers, once on my hard drive and once at Mozy — if I hadn’t imap-ed it, my entire life would be in google’s hands), my desktop and all it contains (basically all my current project folders), my documents (every single thing I’ve written since about 1999 and some stuff from even before), my music, my zillions of pictures of the kids, etc. Everything. Normally it’s five bucks a month and frankly, I’ll be paying for it when my time is up. Sixty bucks. You can’t beat that with a stick.

Now you may be saying (if you’re still with me), “But Dawn, how can your Mac handle all of this crap you’re putting on it???” And I will tell you — first Brett installed new memory on my MacBook back when we first got it so it’s a fast, hearty machine. Second I moved my 11+ gig collection of music permanently to my external hard-drive. (The one I used to use for manual back-ups.) It means I can’t really listen to my iTunes on the go but there’s always Pandora. I’m thinking of moving some other not-often-used applications there, too.

If you have questions, hit me up. I don’t know what PC programs there are but I know they’re out there. Do a google on GTD and Windows and you’ll find ‘em! And listen, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. Once it’s set up, it’s just a matter of making it your own.

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