Kolz Blog

The article from last saturday caught me by surprise I must say. I am not used to receiving that much comments on one article and I must say, I love it. Thank you for your input, your thoughts, ideas and follow up posts on your own blogs. Keep'em coming, because it helps me in finding a more perfect way in my own personal productivity. In various comments there were mentions of different other systems that should or could do the trick of making me the stressfree productivity zenmaster I long to be. So as a little follow up to the 5 systems I stopped using, here are 5 mentions of systems I or you could be using... My Life Organized One of the most mentioned apps the last couple of days is MLO or My Life Organized. And I must say, when you check out the site and the features of the program, very interesting...But when I look at the pricetag I am a little bummed out. I haven't tried it yet, but I read reviews and I might try it someday. Text This one is for the textfetish among you. Big textfiles on your Mac or PC, working the way you want. Very simple, very tweakable. Together with apps like ActiveWord, Quicksilver, Getfingertips etc to populate it and live by it. I am not a textperson. Sorry. Tried it in the past for a couple of days but not my cup of tea. There are some excellent resources on making your own textbased system. Check out Lifehacker and GTD Wannabe for starters. Excel I found this little pearl of wisdom while browsing some GTD-feeds this weekend. Again, Excel is not my kind of app. I think it's some teenage angst from the nineties or so, I don't know. But Excel is for making spreadsheets, not building your life around it. But check out the article this guy wrote about his use of Excel and perhaps it is something you want to try out. Moleskine Ahhh...How could I forget. Ye olde Moleskine! The notebook of the great and glorious! And yep, there is my problem with it. I have 4 Moleskines. And I dare not write notes in them. The problem with Moleskines is the same problem with fresh fallen snow in your yard. It's too pretty to damage. You don't walk into a big field of fresh fallen snow with your boots. Snowboarding through it is another thing, I know from experience...but you admire it, take pictures, look at it. And do nothing. Same with my Moleskines. I hate my handwriting and I don't like the way the notebooks turn out for me. All kinds of scribles, crossed out thoughts, half pages with some words...Nope, the Moleskine is more for special occassions I guess. ThinkingRock Several people mentioned ThinkingRock and to be honest, I had it installed already but didn't get around to try it. So yesterday I exported my mindmap and imported it into TR. And I must say, very interesting program! I am not quite used to the terms used in the program like "Thoughts" and "Topics" and turning collected items into projects is somewhat of a hassle, but at first glance, TR looks as something with potential for me. It is easy, small, somewhat configurable and does what it needs to do around the GTD system. I'm gonna try this for a while and see how it goes. So after 5 systems I stopped using, here are 5 systems I could be using and one of them I am actually using. Thanks everybody for the kind words and tips. If you have some more, please don't hesitate to put them in the comments here or at the other article. And Pascal, I'm gonna think about your idea you dropped in the comments. I want to give it another spin than the thought you mentioned :-)