From early on, and at this time, I am a two device user.  I carry a phone (Nokia 6233) and a Palm TX.  On occasion I swap my Palm over for an iPod Touch (though only when I have assured WiFi).

I can see many benefits to going to a single device, but no single device has yet been good enough for me.

A phone is a simple device, whose task it is to make and receive phone calls, SMS and some simple related functions.

A PDA does (or should do) more, including calendar, contacts, web tablet, and some other applications.

There are many devices out there that do both, but none that I’ve seen that do both well.

Smartphones like the Treo family, O2 devices and others make a solid attempt, but these are still primarily a PDA with phone functionality.  Unfortunately, the phone functionality and the stability of the OS for most PDAs (to date) is sub-standard.  Its ok to have to reboot a PDA on normal tasks, but to have to do that before, after or even worse during a phone call is horrible.

Please surprise me, but I’ve yet to find a smartphone that is a good, stable phone.

Sure there are phones out there that have calendar and contact functions, and basic web surfing.  Some go further, but the T9 input is just not up to scratch, IMHO, for rapid data entry.  Syncing that data is sometimes flakey, and its still obvious that there is a compromise going on between the various functionalities.  Oh, and the screen size of most phones is not really good enough for good function.

Maybe its just that I am too used to the form factor of a PDA.

So, I’ll stay in the two device land until something convinces me otherwise.

What I see how ever is a shift back to two devices.  Nokia and Apple with their web tablets are showing that a different UI and form factor has its place in-between the phone and the laptop.  So I am tracking these devices for their suitability to be a good web tablet and a good productivity device (PDA).

2 minutes ago I received a phone call from a person who identified themselves as calling from Dodo.  Their next statement was “can you tell me who your internet service provider is”?  I said “No”.

Then she said “can you tell me who your phone service is with, is it with Telstra”, to which I answered “why should I tell you that?”.

Then she started on a marketing pitch about why I should join Dodo, since she stated that I’d told her “that I don’t have internet”.

My response was that I hadn’t told her that, but had told her I wouldn’t tell her, as she’d been asking me for personal information without telling me why it was being requested, and what they were going to do with it.  I informed her that under the law they must tell me that.

She paused for a few seconds, thought about it, and hung up on me.

Under the Australian Privacy Act, companies collecting personal information must tell you why they are collecing it, and what they are going to do with it.

If anyone reading this is from Dodo, or knows somewhere there, you’d better take heed.  Not only are you breaking the law in your tele marketing campaign, but your call centre’s customer service sucks big time.  Based on this experience, I would never consider Dodo, and would be likely to warn others not to.

This would be a good case study for Dodo to use “for training purposes”, except they didn’t bother to tell me if they were planning to record the conversation, and allow me to opt out.  So they mustn’t have taped it, because that would be illegal…..

PS. If you couldn’t tell, I love telemarketers calling me unsolicited at home.

It is clear that I am an example of what you could call a productivity geek. I’ve studied various methodologies and used various tools. I’ve been on a search for the holy grail of personal productivity. You’ll note that I rarely use the expression time management. This is simply because I don’t believe in it.

You see time cannot be managed. It is a constant. There are 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day. That makes a grand total of 1440 minutes in a day. No matter how hard you manage your time, you cannot possibly produce even one extra minute in a day. 1440 is a critical number – it is rock solid and rock steady.  Time frankly refuses to be managed, despite our best efforts and great intentions.

I’ve held this view for many years, so when I stumbled upon Getting Things Done a few years back, I was instantly intrigued. Why? Because David Allen never talks about time management. He talks about action management.

You see, actions are the only things we manage. Eating, sleeping, meditating, exercising, work, rest, play are all actions. Some actions are standalone, some are part of a greater “project”. But actions are, by definition, the things we do.

So give up trying to manage time – time is an external concept, and steadfastly refuses to be managed. Instead, look within yourself and focus your efforts on your actions -  on making the most use of your 1440 minutes in a day. You will be more productive.

As regular readers of this blog know, my own system is based on David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology, with some influence from Stephen Covey, Asian and Western philosophy and life lessons I’ve learned in work, life, scuba diving and karate.

Now before I get to heavily into this discussion, I want to emphasise that it is important to focus on working with your productivity system, as opposed to on it. I see a classic trap (one that I have been guilty of falling into myself) is to procrastinate by working on the system too much, trying to change things, playing with every tool/gadget/application available. You really need to understand the techniques and principles of your system before modifying it too much. See my post on Shu-Ha-Ri and GTD for more discussion on that topic.

Last year I had a list of 5 applications that I counted as favourites.

• MindManager
• ActiveWords
• Anagram
• Copernic Desktop Search
• Bloglines

Whats interesting is that three of the 4 still number in my new expanded list. One has been replaced by a competitor, for reasons I’ll discuss.

So without any further ado, here’s my newly updated and expanded list of Favourite Personal Productivity Applications.

1. ActiveWords – still a big hitter. This tool allows you to control your PC from any application and in context. The addition of the InkPad for TabletPC’s has been fantastic.
2. Anagram – an easy way to capture stuff directly into Outlook or Palm Desktop. I debated whether to leave this on the list, as I don’t use Palm anymore, and I don’t like the current iterations of Outlook. But I still use Anagram to get stuff into Outlook and then onto my O2 XDA IIi.
3. Backpack – this is a fantastic web based tool from 37Signals. Its a place where I can collect my “stuff” online, as well as organise it. Its the repository for my Next Actions and Projects lists, and a place where I collect stuff for projects, presentations and so on. I really love the ability to be able to email stuff to my pages, the mobile version and the ability to share selected pages with selected people. It is elegant simplicity personified.
4. Bloglines – as I maintain a blogroll of approximately 300 feeds, and use several computers, I want a good browser based tool to manage my feeds well, and keep stuff in sync. To be honest, I got fed up with Bloglines for a while (when they had lots of availability issues), and defected to NewsGator/FeedDemon. I had FeedDemon on 2 main computers, but the syncing engine from NewsGator was temperamental, and I don’t like their NewsGator Online version in a browser. Bloglines has improved heaps, and are back on my list.
5. Firefox – what a great browser. Especially since the release of version 1.5, I love this browser, and with more of my favourite apps being browser based (e.g. Bloglines, and several AJAX/Web 2.0 apps) I love the tabbed interface, and the extensions. Some great extensions include Performancing for Firefox (blog writing tool), Xinha Here, Livelines, Foxmarks, IE View, and the cool del.icio.us extension.
6. gmail – I’ve moved all my personal email over to gmail. I love the labelling capabilities, the archiving and the easy search functionality. I do wish they’d listen to users, and give us a delete button.
7. Google Desktop Search – Last year I rated Copernic Desktop Search, and I still really like that program. The reason for the switch – Google Desktop Search is well integrated to gmail and MindManager, and has an easy browser interface.
8. Lotus Notes – a perennially cool application. Email in Notes is wonderful – I really appreciate simple touches like Send and Save. The collaboration functionality is outstanding, and I believe this is the best enterprise class messaging system. I am not sure why I didn’t include Lotus Notes last time ’round.
9. NetVibes – an outstanding homepage based on the AJAX framework. This is my dashboard – I can see a bunch of key stuff in one place. On my page, I have websearch, and then feeds from tech.memeorandum, DIGG, del.icio.us/popular and Tailrank. I also have a display of my own MyComments field. This way I can quickly view whats popular in the blogosphere and also track my most recent commenting activity on other blogs. I’d like to see a world clock on this page to track current times in other zones. I have played around with other AJAX desktops, including Google IG and Protopage, both of which I like. NetVibes is the best for me though.
10. Skype – my IM and VoIP tool of choice.

There are a couple of other applications that are on the radar, but have not yet made the leap to be a favourite for me. These include Writely (online word processor) and AirSet (online PIM). Writely is very cool, and I think will make the grade very soon. AirSet I am less sure about. Its interface is a bit clunky, and I dislike that I have to sync through Outlook to my PDA.

Its a funny thing, but I think that there is a mindset that its easier to play with a system than to just do the stuff the system is prescribing.

Playing and experimentation is in itself a good thing – a very good thing. But it needs a time and place, and that time and place is when you’ve really bedded down the methodology, and are using it well.

Next Actions, Weekly Reviews, Waiting Fors and leakless collection habits are all things that need to be second nature before you’ve earned the right to tweak.

At the risk of using another martial arts metaphor, in karate there is a concept of learning called Shu-Ha-Ri.

The first stage, Shu, basically entails rote learning, without asking questions. Things should be done the way that has been shown, and absolutely following both the methods and the principles.

The second stage, Ha, involves personalising the system. In this stage, it is acceptable (within limits) to modify the methods without changing the core principles to suit your individual strengths and weaknesses.  Having explored the Shu stage in depth, you should be keenly aware of your strengths and weaknesses.

The third stage, Ri, is a natural progression where one develops their own “style within a style”, deeply studying the core principles and modifying both the methods and the principles where appropriate to suit one’s own process.

In the martial arts, Shu-Ha-Ri has no set timetable. It is observed, not driven. It happens naturally – when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. But in essence, it can take 5 years to move through the Shu stage into Ha, and then another 5 years or more to move through the Ha stage. Incidentally, this means that someone of early black belt level is generaly still in the Shu stage.

I wonder if David Allen’s metaphor of black belt in his Getting Things Done (GTD) approach is coincidental – maybe his message is that people should learn and internalise the basics before getting too experimental. I am not suggesting that it should take 5 years before we adapt our GTD implementation, but it should take however long is required to internalise the methods and principles, before modifying the methods.

Lets not forget that David Allen has been doing this stuff for 20+ years.  In my books he has earned the right to modify methods and principles to develop his own system.

It may be a bit of a cliche, but time is one of the few constants in the world.  We all have 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and so on.  No matter how hard we try, time just want stand still.  It has momentum, and moves along at a constant speed of 60 minutes an hour.

So its kind of a misconception to have the belief that time can be managed.  We can only manage ourselves, and our actions, within the time we have available to us.  Into that limited bucket, we need to pour rest, work and play, in some combination that gives us the return that we desire.

Everything we do is an action – whether it be sleep, eat, attend a meeting, complete a report, send an email, take a customer to lunch, take a loved one to dinnner,  drive to work, go to a movie, have a dive or whatever.  Whatever we don’t do isn’t an action – its an idea for a future action.

So, for me, personal productivity is all about managing the actions that we take relative to the commitments we make/have in life.

I guess this is why I’ve taken to David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach.  GTD drives us to catalogue our entire inventory of actual and possible actions (and the projects they are associated with), and organise them into a system that will remind us when and where we are best able to tackle them.  It provides a framework in which to keep that catalogue alive, and topped up with actions that are associated with fresh and exciting new projects.

We need to handle our priorities in life.  But we need to live those on a day to day basis that revolves around taking on and executing actions that relate closely to the work we do, and the life we live.

So that said, here are several applications that I use on a regular basis throughout the day

• MindManager from MindJet Systems.  Simply the best mind mapping tool I’ve found yet
• ActiveWords. A terrific way of re-defining the human-computer interface.  Just say the word, and ActiveWords will take control of various pre-defined and routine functions for you.  Buzz Bruggeman is the guy behind ActiveWords, and is certainly a wonderful ambassador for both the Blogosphere, as well as GTD
• Anagram from Textual is a simple way to capture text, contacts, appointments, etc, straight to your Palm Desktop or Outlook environment.  It is smart – you simply highlight text, and it makes an effort to determine what it is, and what information goes into various fields.  A real time saver
• Copernic Desktop Search.  A fantastic and simple interface to search your desktop.  If you’re not using desktop search, you should be.
• Bloglines. I’m on the go, and regularly use three computers, plus my Palm.  Keeping my blogroll in one place, and in sync is powerful, especially as I’ve come to depend on Blogs (I really mean RSS feeds) as a primary news source.

I’m sure that these apps will not be “news” to most on the blogosphere, but I just thought that I should give some credit back to them for productivity benefits they have provided to me.

Named for William of Ockham, Occam’s Razor is summed up by the following Latin phrase “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccsitate”

Literally translated, this means “Plurality should not be assumed without necessity”.

More simply (‘scuse the pun) it means that when there exists a simple solution, don’t search for a more obvious one. Or to quote Einstein – “Everything should be made a simple as possible, but no simpler”.

Now this a theme worth living in life – one thats easier said than done!Occam