AMasur.me

What’s in a “trusted system”?

AMasur — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:13:33 +0000

GTD advocates will immediately call to mind David Allen‘s mantra about putting everything into a “trusted system” so your mind can be at ease–knowing that your ToDo, brilliant idea, future project or simple note will be easy to retrieve when you need it. Like me, you probably took this to mean a paper notebook, a set of folders, a smartphone, a PDA, a web site or a computer software program.

A colleague and I had a quick conversation today today about her new “system,” which is a FranklinCovey paper planner, and wondered if you really need a single thing, or the combination of many things working together could qualify as your GTD trusted system? I think it can…if you’re careful.

Got a list of books you want to read? Should you put it on an Amazon wish list, or store it at Goodreads? A list of restaurants to try? Should it go on UrbanSpoon, Google Docs or a scrap of paper in your wallet? What about a list of gifts to buy? Or, stuff you want to sell on eBay? With so many places you could choose to keep this kind of information, what’s the best place to keep it?

It doesn’t matter. Ok, let me clarify, it doesn’t matter as long as you pick just one and use it religiously for that purpose. If you you sometimes put a book on your Goodreads list and sometimes on Amazon, and sometimes in your paper planner you’re asking for trouble.

At work, I have a notepad I take with me everywhere. If I need to capture something, it goes in my notepad. If that’s not available, it goes into Evernote, which works on my iphone, my PC, and my Mac. In my weekly reviews (usually on Sundays) I sweep things from my notepad and Evernote into their proper places.

Here’s what I use, and what I use it for:

Evernote: Capturing notes on the go. Temporarily storing thoughts for upcoming meetings. Keeping reference items like train/ferry schedules, conference line access codes, and frequent flier numbers.
PasswordMaker: Web site passwords (see my earlier post on this).
Goodreads: Books I’ve read and want to read.
ReadItLater: Lists of web pages I want to read. It conveniently synchronizes your ToRead list across Mac, PC and iPhone, and supports offline reading as well. And, it even integrates into Google Reader very nicely.
UrbanSpoon: Restaurants I’ve been to and want to go to.
Basecamp: Projects for work where at least one other person is involved. My whole team uses this, and it’s gaining traction within the company.
OmniFocus: Personal ToDos and projects, as well as projects for work where no other people are involved.
Paper Notepad: Notes to be transferred to another system later, or just kept for reference.

My colleague mentioned Amazon’s Universal Wish List, which seems like a good idea. I’ll have to check that out. What do you use, and what do you use if for?

Plan by Project. Do by Context.

AMasur — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:29:46 +0000

I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with one of my co-workers about GTD. We exchange ideas, tools and tips every so often. I like these exchanges, because I can count on him to provide very specific and pointed questions that make me think about why I organize the way I do. He’s starting to use an online tool I suggested to manage his ToDos. Getting all his stuff in there, he asked about what contexts I use. I sent him my list, which consists of about 35 different contexts, and one of those exchanges began.

I define context as “the mind-set, location (physical or virtual) or tool you need to actually do the thing you want to do.” For example, if I want to hang the picture in the hallway, it’s really not useful to have that in front of me while I’m at my desk at the office. No matter how much may want to hang that picture, I can only do it at home, where I have my hammer, a nail and the picture itself.

When you plan a project, you’re in “Project Mode. You’re thinking about that project, and you come up with all the related action items you need to do to get the project done. On the other hand, when you actually set out to do those action items, you’re in some physical (or virtual) place where you have the tools you need. If you’re writing a document, you’re at your computer with your word processor. If you’re making a call you’ve got your phone. If you’re getting approval from Bob, you’re in Bob’s office. Each one of those places, people or things is a context. If you’re getting things done, you’re planning by project, but doing by context.

The idea is that when you’re in a particular context, you want to know all the things that are available for you to do at that moment. If you’re at a phone, a list of phone calls you need to make is helpful. If you’re not near a phone, that list of calls is just a distraction–there’s not much you can do about it. Everything on your ToDo list should have a context assigned. This way, it’s easy to see what actions are yet to be incorporated into your system (“processed”). Designing an effective context list demands more than a little thought.

Here’s how I created mine, and I’ll share the end result as well.

Think about the typical physical locations you are in on a regular basis. For me, there are three: Home, Work, and Karate.
Think about the key people in your life. Between work (boss, peers, directs, indirects, etc.), family and friends, this will be a long list, I’m sure. Add the truly key people as named contexts, then leave everyone else in a context called “people”. If you find that you need to break-out someone later, no problem.
Think about all the tools you use on a regular basis to get your stuff done. Your list will contain things like your computer, phone, office (at work), files (at home). If you have a house, you might want to include the garage, workshop, pool, guest cottage, horse stable and North 40 as different contexts. Fortunately, I have a 668 sq. ft. apt in NYC, so I don’t have that problem.

An important note regarding your computer is to take it further down to the software applications you use as well. If Outlook is your email program, for example, you will benefit from having a list of emails to write, so you can get into email mode, and crank them out all at once. Switching your focus among a spreadsheet, word processor, email and your company’s online reporting systems takes effort. In most cases, you’ll be much more efficient if you do all your emails, then switch to your spreadsheet. If you have multiple computers, and use one for work, and the other for personal stuff, you might want to do this for each computer.

Think about errands that you typically run, and the stores you normally go to. I don’t own a car, and getting on the subway with 24 rolls of toilet paper is a little unwieldy. Like most New Yorkers, we make occasional “Target runs” to pick up things like that. So, for me, Target is a context. So are the supermarket, the hardware store, and the pet store.
Create a “Waiting” context for things that you are waiting for from others. If you have many of these and many people you wait for things from, you could break it down further. I don’t.
Create a “Someday” context for times when you really want to think long-term about things you might want to do, but don’t have a plan for.

So, here’s my list:

Home
Karate
Phone
Office

Basecamp
Online
Email
Word
Excel
PowerPoint
MindManager
Blog.tutor.com

MacBook

Email
Online
Quicken
amasur.me
isshin-ryu.com
MindManager
Pages
Numbers
Keynote

People

Donette
My Boss
Peer #1
Peer #2
Direct Reports

Direct #1
Direct #2
Direct #3

Indirect Reports

Indirect #1
Indirect #2

Out and About

Grocery Store
Hardware Store
Target
Cultural Events
Museums

Waiting
Someday

Please your thoughts and ideas, or even your list. I’d love to hear what works for you.

And the winner is…OmniFocus

AMasur — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 00:48:13 +0000

If you’re just starting to get into GTD, it’s probably because you have a big list of things to do, and not enough time to do them all. Once you read the book and all the blog posts about GTD you’ll need to figure out what your “trusted system” will be, so when you have to make the critical decision about what you’ll work on next, you’ll have everything you need all in one place. For some, a piece of paper will be just fine. For others you’ll need to find some software to help you keep things organized. I’m in that second group, and have tried several different online and software systems.

In my last post, I was talking about how I was making the switch from Nozbe to something else to manage my ToDos, but I wasn’t exactly sure what the something else would be. Well, I’ve figured it out, and the winner is OmniFocus, from The Omni Group Here’s how OmniFocus won me over, and made me happy to hand over some hard-earned cash as a result.

PS: In anticipation of the new FTC guidelines, which I’m personally quite happy about, I was NOT paid for this review, and was NOT given an evaluation copy of any of the software I will discuss below.

PPS: Thanks to Susan Herman for suggesting OmniFocus. I had checked out their site and had almost written it off based on the lack of information and screenshots, but your suggestion made me give it another chance.

What was I looking for?

An Easy Way to Brain Dump
Flexible Context Hierarchies
Flexible Project Hierarchies
An Easy to use iPhone Application

An Easy Way to Brain Dump

OmniFocus accomplishes this in a very simple, yet powerful way–with an inbox. Go to your inbox, hit return, type a new ToDo, and repeat until your brain is empty. OmniFocus keeps things in your inbox until they have a project or a context, and preferably both.

One thing that took some getting used to was the “Clean-Up” button. When you create a ToDo and add it to a project or context, it doesn’t automatically disappear from the inbox view–you have to press “Clean-Up” for that to happen. Why? Two reasons I can think of.

You might make a mistake, and then you’d have to go to the other view to reclaim your ToDo and put it in the right place.
Sometimes ToDos are really projects, and keeping things in your inbox is a great way to review the list to make those decisions after your brain is empty. If ToDo started automatically filing themselves as you go, I know I’d end up spending more time thinking about them rather than just entering them.

Flexible Context Hierarchies

Plan by project, do by context is one of the most important GTD concepts. When you’re planning, you’re typically thinking about a project, and what you need to do to move that project forward. On the other hand, when you’re doing, it’s usually because you’re someplace and have some time to work. Thinking about that someplace as a context is critical to implementing GTD. For example, if you have a few minutes and you happen to be near a phone, you could look through every project to see if there are any ToDos that you can check off by making a phone call. If you’ve previously identified a context for each ToDo, you already know which ToDos require a phone call, and you can easily filter your list to show all the items in the context “phone,” and start dialing.

OmniFocus uses a hierarchical model for contexts. You can have as many as you like, and you can group them into folders and sub-folders. Having looked at other systems like “Things, Remember the Milk and Nozbe,” I originally thought this might be a problem. They all have contexts that function more like tags, where each item can be tagged to be in as many contexts as you want. For example, you can use some tags to indicate physical contexts (like home, office or grocery store), other tags to indicate priority, and still others to estimate duration (1 hour, 1 day, etc.). However, with great power, comes great responsibility, and in my testing, I found that I felt obligated to create so many contexts that they were hard to keep straight. Context tags are great, but I found myself spending more time trying to categorize each ToDo in 20 different ways than actually doing them–a sure sign of procrastination. So, while the tag model of contexts are admittedly more powerful than the single, hierarchical context list that OmniFocus uses, I’ll stick with the hierarchical model–it’s just more practical.

Flexible Context Hierarchies

One thing from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that has stuck with me–even as I adopt the GTD methodology–is the concept of roles. For me, it’s really helpful to try to keep things like “manager, project lead, team member, spouse (close enough), and me (“Sharpen the Saw” for you die-hard Covey fans)” as separate aspects of my life. If I didn’t do this, I think it’d be hard to think about the kind of ______ I want to be, and the projects I would need to do to get there.

This is something that you don’t have to give up with OmniFocus, because it supports nested project lists. Projects can be in folders, and you can have as many folders and sub-folders as you want, so regardless of how many different compartments your life has, you can create a project list that will work for you.

An Easy to use iPhone Application

The iPhone app companion to OmniFocus is very nice. Of course, it synchronizes all your data (you have several sync technology options), and it uses the iPhone real estate very effectively. Several other apps I tried are really only good for viewing your ToDos, but I find the OmniFocus app good for adding new ToDos, and even projects as well. However, there’s one feature that’s just, well…cool.

My favorite feature is the ability to assign GPS coordinates to a context. OmniFocus knows when I’m home, at the office, the grocery store, the hardware store, my karate class and quite a few other places as well. Using the GPS features, I can not only pull up my grocery list when I’m at the store, but I can also use the app to find what ToDos I “could” get done now, because I happen to be near the place where I have to do them. Cool. Nerdy, but cool.

If you’re still reading this, thank you.

While it’s not perfect, I really like the thoughtfulness that was obviously put into creating the OmniFocus system. If you’re an OmniFocus user, I’m curious to hear how you use it. If you use something else that you think is better, I’m all ears.

Let me know what you think

Sorry Nozbe (GTD Software Review)

AMasur — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 22:24:18 +0000

I’ve been using Nozbe to manage my ToDo’s for about a year. It’s a good system, web-based, has an iPhone app that synchronizes pretty seamlessly, and has some powerful importing capabilities. It works, but for some reason I don’t love it. My subscription runs out in December, and I’m going to switch.

For background:

I try my best to implement GTD.
I lead an eight person marketing team in a company of about 50 people.
The marketing team uses Basecamp for large, multi-person projects.
I have been using Nozbe for personal projects and work projects that don’t involve others.
I use a PC at work, and until last week a PC at home. Now I use a Mac at home.

Nozbe is exclusively web-based. There’s nothing more convenient and cross-platform than keeping everything up in the cloud. You don’t have to worry about synchronizing data among computers. And, you can access your data from any machine–including ones that aren’t yours. That’s good. The downsides are that it’s slower than a desktop application and the development of some really powerful features is hampered by the web interface. Suggestion: Take a lesson from Evernote, and let me have the choice to use the cloud or the desktop.

Nozbe has a free iPhone app. The Nozbe iPhone app is very good, and it’s free. Thank you for not asking users to pay for an iPhone app on top of paying for the basic service.

The “+ New Action” button isn’t always visible. I find that when I’m adding lots of actions, moving actions between projects, and assigning contexts, the button disappears and I have to reload the page to get it back. In any ToDo program, the most important feature is to be able to add new action items anytime. Suggestion: Create a Facebook-like toolbar at the top or bottom of the page with key commands on it. You’ve got it on your iPhone app. Do the same thing on the site itself.

Nozbe supports multiple contexts. Nozbe contexts work like tags, and are pretty effective. The catch is that the number of projects and contexts you can use depends on the plan you purchase, and to really implement GTD, I find that I need to tag my stuff in lots of different ways. The limits aren’t too bad, because I can always purchase a bigger plan.

What’s most frustrating about contexts, however is editing them. Let’s say I have an action assigned to three contexts, and I want to delete two of them. I have to open the action for editing, delete one context, confirm my choice, then I have to open the action for editing again, delete the other context and confirm my choice again. My personal style is to be fairly liberal with tags as I enter items, and to clean them up once a week-during my weekly review. The way this works makes that process pretty frustrating. Suggestion: Let me delete and edit all the contexts and click save changes only once.

Nozbe has a powerful, flexible importing mechanism that is difficult to remember. Nozbe has developed a very powerful system for importing tasks from many different sources. You can upload a file, send an email, and even tweet your new action items and projects to Nozbe. The problem is that it requires that remember a fairly complex syntax to do all this. It’s powerful, but I can never remember all the rules. Suggestion: Send me back a confirmation when I add items letting me what you did with them, so I can fix it if I made a mistake. If I have to go to website to make sure I did it right, the importing feature looses it’s utility.

On the off chance that Michael (the Nozbe guy) reads this, I hope you find these comments and suggestions constructive.

Right now, I’m searching for a new system, and have been checking out

What do you use to keep yourself organized?

Shuffling off to Buffalo and Pittsburgh

AMasur — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:39:55 +0000

Every two years, the style of Karate that I study holds an international tournament. This year, the Isshin-ryu World Karate Association Championdship Tournament was held in Pittsburgh, PA on June 18 – 20, 2009. Eight people from the the Isshin-ryu School of Karate (where I study) attended. Instead of driving out with the group on Thursday, I decided to take a few days off work, and turn it into a week-long motorcycle trip. I hadn’t been on a long trip in a few years, and a week on the bike sounded like a great idea. Even better, I could visit some family and friends along the way.

The plan was to start out on the afternoon of Saturday, 6/13 from Hackettstown, NJ, and take a leisurely ride up to Middlesex, NY to visit my brother, who lives near Canandaigua lake. Then, head up to Hamburg, NY to spend some time with Sensei Mike Downs at the Defensive Arts Dojo. After that, take a few days to ride around the forests of Northern, PA before arriving in Pittsburgh on Thursday. The tournament ended on Saturday, so I’d just ride straight home on Sunday. Fortunately, I was able to stick mostly to the plan, but Mother Nature had a few surprises in store.

Surprise #1: On the afternoon I had planned to start, it was raining. Not just a little rain, either, and it was getting dark. So, instead of a nice, leisurely ride to my brother’s with a hotel stop along the way, I was going to have to make it there as fast as I could. So, I left around 8am and rode straight through ’till 2pm. Fortunately, it was a beautiful day, and a really nice ride. We spent the afternoon Kayaking on Canandaigua lake, and grilled some ribs for dinner. Good to see my brother, sister-in-law and nephew. The next morning, I gave Brandon a ride to school on my Harley, which was fun for both of us.

Day 2 (Monday) was another gorgeous day for riding. I went South through Naples, and West through Dansville to Nunda. There’s a big hill between those two towns, and twenty years ago Eric and I rode that hill on our bicycles. It was the most grueling hill climb I’ve ever done that took us about 4 hours to go up, and about 15 minutes to ride down the other side. I hit 55 MPH on my bicycle (which is a pretty dumb thing to do while loaded down with 3 days of camping gear). On the motorcycle, that killer hill only took about 20 minutes. The rest of the day consisted of a ride through Letchworth State Park and a straight shot over to Hamburg for Karate class. The Defensive Arts folks are a great group of people that I’ve become friends with over the years. Thanks to Sensei Mike and everyone there for their hospitality (and to Racer, Wilson and the cats for allowing me to stay in their guestroom.)

Day 3 (Tuesday) started out nicely–down to the forest areas of Northern, PA. Through Ellicotville, Olean, Shinglehouse and Coudersport on my way to Wellsboro. I pulled in to a motel in Wellsboro. I was planning to drop off my stuff, and head over to Pine Creek Gorge (AKA the Grand Canyon of Pennsyvania), but surprise #2 was waiting for me in the parking lot in the form of a roofing nail in my back tire. Unfortunately, that tire only had 300 miles on it. Fortunately, it didn’t go flat while I was riding. A call to the Harley Owners’ Group got a flatbed towtruck to arrive after about 90 minutes, and they took me over to Cox’s Northern Tier Harley-Davidson, who got me a new tire and back on the road in about 3 hours. So much for the PA Grand Canyon today. Dinner at the local steak place was good. I needed a break.

Day 4 (Wednesday) brought surprises #3 and #4–a full day of rain, followed by tornado warnings near Pittsburgh. It started out as a drizzle on my way to Pine Creek Gorge, which was still nice. I’ll have to go back there for a real visit sometime. The plan was to ride through the Allegheny National Forest along several scenic roads, then find a hotel. The going was slow. The roads were slick. The visibility was poor. But, I did have to get to Pittsburgh by Thursday, so I had to make some progress today. I finally got near Clarion, PA, found a hotel and stopped for the night. Bought dry socks at the local Walmart, and headed to the laundromat to wash and, more importantly, dry all my clothes. I spent the evening eating takeout chinese food, and watching the storm–tornado warnings, lightning strikes and all. Thanks to the woman at the Hampton Inn that let me park my bike next to the building, under good cover for the night.

Day 5 (Thursday) was a short day, just down to Pittsburgh from Clarion. It took about 90 minutes, through some nice rolling hills. Getting close to Pittsburgh, traffic got a little hairy, but it was still just a short. Quick ride. Surprise #5, rained for the last 30 minutes, and I had to pull over on the highway to put my raingear on again. By that time, I was numb to it.

Day 6 and 7 (Friday and Saturday) were spent at the Karate Tournament. Separate post to come later.

Day 8 (Sunday) was a really long day from Pittsburgh back home. Started off nice enough, but about 90 minutes outside of Pittsburgh, the rains came again. No surprise this time, just a long, 6 hour ride back in the rain on boring highways. Unpleasant, but uneventful. The rain letup about Allentown, but Surprise #6 was actually the swarm of bees I rode through there. Fortunately, between the windshield, the helmet, the faceshield, the leather and the raingear, there was no getting stung, but the bike and I took on the nice yellow sheen of bee guts. The drivers in the cars on either side of me just shook their heads and laughed, sympathetically, I hope.

Through all that I still managed to have a good time, but I wouldn’t describe it as the relaxing vacation I had hoped it would be. Maybe next time.

Time Out NY Challenge: 100 Best Things we Ate in 2008

AMasur — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:25:30 +0000

We had dinner with some friends last night, and they told us about Time Out NY Magazine’s list of the 100 best things they ate this past year. Since they publish a list, it seemed like a good goal would be to try to hit all their favorites from last year during this year.

Dinner was at Apiary, which was excellent. I had a pork loin with shaved Brussels sprouts and glazed Tokyo turnips. It was cooked perfectly and wasn’t too sweet. Donette had a black bass, that was very good as well. We’d absolutely go again.

After dinner, we decided to start working on the list, so we headed over to try the Bacon peanut brittle at Redhead, 349 E 13th St between First and Second Aves (212-533-6212). $5. It was a great balance of salty, sweet and just a little spicy. It was hard to stop eating. We recomend you give it a try, and be sure tell us what you think.

Somehow, I managed to get invited to an event at LeCirque this week, so I’ll have to try the cherry religieuse which is described as “a double-decker éclair filled with cherry custard,” sounds good.

Have you tried anything on the list? Let me know.

My Restaurant Reviews

AMasur — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:38:10 +0000

If you know me, you know that Donette and I love going to restaurants. We recently moved from the UWS to the Financial District, so we don’t know the restuarants down here well. I’ve worked in the area for three years, so I know lots of lunch places, but I’m not so well informed about dinners. We’ve found some good restaurants, but have never been very good about writing reviews. However, our recent experience at Secession inspired us to start sharing our thoughts. Here’s what happened.

Secession
30 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10013

It was a Sunday night, and we were simply looking for a new place to try that we could walk to. We found Secession on Open Table. It’s the reopening of a David Bouley restaurant, formerly called Danube. They are known for their decor, which features reproductions of Gustav Klimt paintings, and it was beautiful. It’s a large space, and although the long bench-style seat along the window makes for tables that are a bit close together, it was a Sunday night, not crowded, and quite comfortable.

Donette had their signature roast chicken and I had the wild salmon. The service was very good and the meals were tasty–good flavors (others have said the food was bland, but we didn’t find that). The coconut cake for dessert was very nice. Overall, the meals were good and it would have been a solid, but not particularly memorable dining experience. But then, something happened that completely ruined it for us.

We were about to leave when a couple sat down next to us. They looked over the menu and the waiter (who also served us) asked if they had any questions. They asked if the wild salmon (that I had) was really wild. The waiter said “no, it’s farm raised.” So, we just paid $150 for a nice dinner at a restaurant run by a well known chef and found out that the meal we had wasn’t the meal they advertised. We feel taken advantage of, and we won’t be back.

Was the waiter joking? Was he misinformed? We did not confront the waiter or the manager, so to be fair, we don’t know for sure. But, it seems to us there are so many valid health and ethical reasons behind the dining choices people make that nothing less than complete honesty on a menu should be tolerated. If a restaurant lists Maine Lobster, it should be that. If they can’t get Maine Lobster that day, and that’s what I order, no problem. Just tell me so I can make an informed decision about what I want to eat. Now, we read menus and wonder if the New Zealand lamb is from New Zealand or Long Island. There’s nothing wrong with Long Island lamb. I just want to know what I’m eating.

Now, we’re heading to what has become our favorite local place so far, Harry’s (we’ll blog about that soon), and we’re looking for other restaurants to try. Got any suggestions?

Password Management for True Nerds

AMasur — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 12:47:06 +0000

A little while ago, a friend sent me a link to Sean P. Aune’s list of
16 of the Best Password Management Tools for Firefox 3 on Mashable, and it made me realize that I really needed a better password management system. Like most things, once you start looking, you find a whole world of ideas, issues and opinions that you had never thought about before.

I’ve always had lots of accounts. Why? I like to try new things on the web, and I like to use amasur as my public persona wherever possible. So I have about 200 accounts at various places, and I’m creating new ones all the time. I also try to keep work and personal things separate–nothing work-related on my home PC and nothing personal on my work PC–but web accounts need to be accessed from both. Obviously, this is way too many to keep straight in my head, so I had to find an electronic solution.

My first solution was to keep list of all my passwords in a notepad file, which is about the most unsecure (or is it insecure?) thing you can do. But after about two days, it got too big to actually find anything. Then, I tried the IE and Firefox features to manage passwords, but they don’t sync across browsers, let alone PCs. So, I decided to just use an Excel file that I kept on a USB drive. It was practical, and a little better on the security side, because the file was password protected. For a long while, I carried my trusty little file around on my USB drive, and it was a decent solution.

Like most people, with so many accounts, I found myself using the same (or very similar) passwords for many sites, and I was bad about changing them frequently. Then, I saw an article (can’t find the specific URL, but there are several stories out there) about identity thieves that buy computers from bankrupt companies, and that, the security at those companies can be very loose–passwords and account information not always encrypted. Hmmm…since I create new accounts at the rate of several a week, and many of the sites I’m check out aren’t around a year later, I should change the way I manage passwords, right?

Where to start? What should you look for in a password manager? Here’s my list of password best practices:

You SHOULD have a unique password for every site.
You SHOULD have to remember only a single master password (or a few at most), and it (they) should be very secure.
You SHOULD NOT store your passwords on a server or a website.
You SHOULD be able to synchronize your passwords for use at multiple computers.
You SHOULD have a way to get your passwords when you are using a public or friend’s computer.
You SHOULD NOT create passwords that people who know you would guess.
You SHOULD NOT answer “security questions” honestly. See Wired’s story on hacking Sarah Palin’s email account. If she had chosen to tell Yahoo! that she met her husband “at the summit of Mt. Everest,” she could have saved herself a bunch of headaches.

Now, back to that list on Mashable. Which one to use? It’s a tough call, and the criteria are often at odds with each other. For example, if you want to have a unique password for every site, you won’t be able to remember them all. So if you want to use them across mutliple computers, they have to be stored somewhere that all your computers have access to, right? Well, storing them centrally does make it possible for a really seamless user experience across multiple computers, but it also forces you to put a lot of trust in whomever wrote the tool to keep your passwords safe. I’m not that trusting, and you shouldn’t be either.

With most of the tools on Mashable’s list eliminated, I found that some tools don’t actually store your passwords anywhere, and decided this is the way to go. These tools rely on hash algorithms to actually recreate your password each time you need to log in to a particular site. Basically, they take a master password that you create (and only you know), and combine it together mathematically with information about the site you are creating an account for (usually the domain name) to come up with a unique password for that site on the fly. Here’s a picture to explain how this works:

This way, your passwords are not actually stored anywhere, and you only need to remember one, master password that you keep “super secret”. Aside from the obvious advantage of not having to worry about your password file getting into the wrong hands, the other benefit is that it’s a snap to keep multiple computers synchronized, because there’s nothing to really synchronize. You simply use the same hash algorithim and same master password on each computer, and you’re done. The theory is that even if you told someone what site you were logging in to, and what hash algorithm you were using (there are many), they would’t be able to determine your password unless you gave them your “super secret” master password.

There were a couple on the Mashable list that worked this way, but the one I ultimately chose is PasswordMaker (www.passwordmaker.org). This post is getting long, so I’ll dive into more detail about Password Maker later. Besides, the details of doing this are only for truly paranoid nerds. If you’re looking for something your grandparents can use, stick with what IE and Firefox do “out of the box.” It’s simple, and it works pretty well.

Let me know what works for you,

-Adam

Nozbe Initial Reactions, and an easy Email Template

AMasur — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 01:26:36 +0000

I tried and started using Nozbe today, after playing around with it a bit yesterday. So far, I like it enough to pay the $7 for my first month, and give it a go. If it works well, I might have found myself a new ‘Getting Things Done’ (GTD) compatible application.

The first thing I needed to do was get everything out of my “old” system, and into Nozbe. After hunting around for a while, I couldn’t find anything in the application that resembled an import feature. So, I decided to make my own quick and dirty one that leveraged Nozbe’s, very flexible, email inbox. You can email tasks to yourself using a simple, plain text format that lets you specify a bunch of parameters. I copied the list of supported parameters below from the Nozbe blog.

Name of your action
D – stands for “Date”
T – stands for “Time needed”
@ – stands for the context
P – stands for the project
N – is to mark this as my “Next Action”

There was a catch, though. I had to import more than 100 tasks, and typing (even copying/pasting) them into an email one at a time would be very time consuming. Since I love Microsoft Excel, I exported my task list from Outlook, and made myself a quick, Excel template to massage the tasks into the right format.

Here’s my Super-Simple, Nozbe To Do List Converter Template. Basically, you enter your action items in column C, and fill out the other parameters as you wish for each action. The formula in each row crunches everything into a Nozbe compatible format. You just copy column A, paste it into an email, and send it to your Nobe Inbox—pretty simple.

It just saved me a few hours. Let me know if it works for you, too.

Three Things you Should do in Outlook Right Now to Keep Yourself Sane

AMasur — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 20:23:55 +0000

I was listening to the folks at Manager Tools the other day. It’s one of my favorite podcasts, and they recently just launched a new audio blog that deals with smaller management issues. One I heard dealt with Microsoft Outlook’s ‘desktop alert’ feature (aka the Toast, because it resembles toast popping up in the lower right corner of your screen).

It reminded me of the three most important things you should do in Outlook if you want to be more productive. Here are my three favorite Outlook tips:

The Toast Popup

Burn the toast!
You need to set the Desktop Alert feature so it doesn’t pop up every time you receive an email. Not every email is so important that it’s worth interrupting what you’re working on. It’s sort of like a phone ringing while you’re having a one-to-one meeting with one of your direct reports. If you answer it, you’re basically telling the person you’re meeting with that you’d rather spend your time on whatever might be on the phone than with them.

If you’re a responsible manager, you’re always working on the thing that is most important at that time, so it’s really unlikely that whatever that new email says is more important that what you’re doing. Stay focused on what you’re doing, and you’ll be much better off.

To turn off the toast:

Go to Tools>Options, and click the “Preferences” tab.
Click “Email Options…” then “Advanced Email Options…”
Under “When new items arrive in my Inbox, uncheck the 1st, 2nd and 4th boxes.
If you want to know, at a glance, whether you have new email waiting for you, keep the “Show an envelope icon in the notification area” checked.

Set a few exceptions
OK. Every once in a while, you do get an email that is really important, and you do want to be interrupted when it happens. Maybe you’re in IT, and you get an email notification if a server goes down. Ok, you need to know. The way to go is to set a few rules that will get your attention. When I get one of these important messages, my desktop alert (right, the Toast) pops up, and I get a dialog box showing me the critical message. The dialog box is there so if I’m away from my desk, I’ll see it as soon as I get back.

There are so many different options when creating rules in Outlook, that I won’t go into all of them here. The rules help in Outlooks is pretty good, so hit F1, type “rules,” and you should be good to go. The goal is to write enough rules to catch the really important stuff without having too many false alarms. It may take a while to find the balance that works for you.

I consider a message critical if it is

marked important,
from an “alert” server,
from Donette, or
from a small list of specific people and I am in the To field

Note: I also have a chicken little rule that processes messages from a small list of people that I’ve identified as likely to mark things urgent when they really aren’t. This rule runs first, and takes messages they mark important, and changes them to be not important. The names on my chicken little list is a closely guarded secret.

Keep your Oulook on the Calendar or Task view, rather than Email
Sounds simple, but it works. When my Outlook starts up, it’s on my Task list. It’s more important to keep what you planned to do today in front of you all the time, rather than email. You can find this under Tools>Options. Click the “Other” tab, and “Advanced Options…”.

Also, when I’m done with email, I either minimize Outlook, or switch to my Task or Calendar views to prevent distraction.

Hope you find these helpful, and let me know what works for you.