I’m not too interested in blog posts apologizing for the lack of posting, but this is going to be one of them. I’ll keep it short. If you’re not interested, you can skip it. But before you do, come back soon. Tudutu will (hopefully) be launching before the end of the year.

And it will be totally free.

One of the best things about blogging is being able to see what people want. It became obvious with my posts, that people were not so interested in what I was rambling about, but were very interested in tangible assets, such as downloadable items. So, in that respect, I thought I’d spend less time talking, and more time doing.

I got my head down, and designed a site which I would want to use myself. Tudutu will hopefully become the world’s most advanced task management system, and hopefully the most easy to use. At first there won’t be very many features. Other sites, like the fantastic RememberTheMilk.com, will offer many more features for syncing with mobile devices and external applications, but Tudutu is focusing on something completely different – the problem of wanting to be organized without wanting to make any effort to do so.

So sorry for going AWOL, but I hope it will be worth it for you.

At the official GTD site right now, you can download a full set of all the free GTD articles in a handy zip file. You’ll get the following PDF-formatted files:

• GTD Workflow Diagram
• Advanced GTD Workflow Diagram
• Mastering Workflow – The 5 Phases
• Making Good Use of Car Time
• The Coach as Personal Trainer
• General Reference Filing
• Make It Up and Make It Happen
• Palm
• Organizing a Paper Organizer
• Personal Inventory Control
• Stalking the Wild Projects
• The Threefold Nature of Work
• The Tickler File
• Managing Work on a Vacation
• The Weekly Review

Most of the articles are signed by David Allen himself. And at a cost of $0, they are absolutely top value.

All you have to do is head over to http://www.davidco.com/store/catalog/-Complete-Set-of-Free-Articles-Zip-File-p-16295.php, register, and claim your free set of PDFs. Couldn’t be simpler.

Well, what are you waiting for?

The GTD process starts with items going in your personal in-boxes. In-boxes can be anywhere: on your desk at work, at home in the living room, or, if you do your best thinking there, even next to the throne in the bathroom. The more in-boxes, the better.

When I say the more the better, I really mean, in theory, the more the better. The problem arises at the next step in the process: collecting everything from your in-boxes. You really need to do this every night, otherwise things fall through the cracks. And this, you see, can soon end up a chore, much like emptying the bins. And who wants to do that every night?

I forgot to mention, your e-mail also should be emptied regularly. I posted on that subject before though, so I won’t go through it again now. But anything you have to do which results from an e-mail also has to be entered into your system at the end of the day, so you have to consider it.

Enter the modern mobile cellphone. It’s actually a real help here. Most phones now have quick-on cameras and voice recording. So instead of throwing something physical, like a note on a piece of paper, into a basket, I typically whip out my phone and take a picture of what needs doing. If I can’t take a picture of it, perhaps because it’s an idea, I click the preset for my voice recorder, and record it as a voice-message instead. With defaults set correctly, you can really get a quick-to-make, decent-sounding, small-sized sound file on your phone.

Then, at the end of the day, all it takes is a quick synchronization with your computer, or even a quick look through the pictures for the day on the phone itself, and you’re done. You don’t need to go searching for in-boxes all evening in order to get things done. Once the items have been processed, just delete them and start again.

Photo of phone by Indigo Goat.

Like mindmaps? Want a mindmap for GTD? Here’s a mindmap of an overview of the Getting Things Done book from The Efficient MD:

The Efficient MD: Updated Mindmap / Flowchart of Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen

I just found this videocast of an interview with David Allen on the the BNet Intercom site.

Now, I’ve heard David Allen describe GTD a number of times, but I’ve never heard such a succinct answer to the question of what GTD is, as the one he gave in this interview. He described GTD as:

What’s the work that you need to do, to figure out what you need to do, when the work that you need to do doesn’t let you know what you need to do?

He said it as if he’d said it a million times before, without the slightest pause or hesitation, as if it was just common sense. The guy is obviously a genius.

If you describe GTD in this way, it’s quite easy to see why you would use it. GTD is not really about what is important to you, your fundamental life principles, or roles you play in life. It’s not even really about setting priorities. It’s simply about having a system to get things done to help you remember what you are supposed to do, when you can do it. It’s about making things so simple, that breaking those things down into manageable lists is more than enough to actually get them done.

Now a confession: the biggest problem for me is that I’m too lazy and disorganized even to figure out regularly what I need to do. So, although I believe that GTD is an excellent way of organizing my life, my next question would be, “how can I get the work that I need to do let me know what I need to do, when I need to do it?”

And that is exactly what I am trying to do with tudutu.

Like so many other young students in the 90′s, I got into web development during the first internet boom. I was a bit bored with my university degree, so I found work at a small startup company during my summer holidays. Before I knew it, and because I was the only person that had even heard of the internet within 10 miles of my company’s office, I soon became not only the developer, but also help-desk manager, sales consultant, and management adviser. It was a bit too much, so I left.

During that time though, all kinds of people called me with ideas for how they could make a million bucks on the web. A few of them actually put their money where their mouth was too: one guy invested a few thousand pounds creating an art gallery online; a couple of kids invested their savings in a quiz site; and a local trucker who had never even used the net started a website to help truckers plan their trips more efficiently (which I still believe is one of the best ideas I ever heard).

I liked the attention I got at the time; people would immediately see me as a way to their personal fortune as soon as they realized I knew how to program a web-site. What I found funny though, was how some people would value their idea over my ability to actually do something with it. I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. It’s just that I question the value of an idea by itself, even those of my own.

I’ll tell you what I mean. One day my own uncle called me up at work. I was really busy, and didn’t have much time for a chat about the family fortunes. I thought it would be impolite to ignore him though, so I took the call. It was important – he’d had an idea. He wanted to make a website to display art online. (I’m sure nobody had thought of that particular idea before.) I told him it was quite possible for us to do that, and that it could be good. However, when I asked him how he would make money from it, he replied, “I was hoping you could tell me that”. Here he was, disturbing me in the middle of my already-rushed peak triple-job working time, just so he could graciously inform me that if I was only willing to put in the hours of hard-slog programming, design a great site, and just think of a way for it to actually work, he might find it in his heart to let me earn a little extra while he sat back and watched. And all because he’d “had an idea”.

So I’ve been thinking, is an idea on its own worth its salt? More specifically, is my (yet unpublished and very secretive) idea for Tudutu worth anything?

For the answer to this question, you should read “Founders at Work”, by Jessica Livingston. (You really should. It’s a marvelous book.) One of the stories in it is the story of Hotmail. The most interesting thing about it is how they came up with the idea. At first the founders wanted to create a database thingy, but they soon discovered that while they were trying to work on it, they couldn’t access their private e-mail accounts on the sly from work. So, even after they’d got funding for the database thingy, they kindly informed their investors that they weren’t doing that any more; they were going to build an online e-mail client instead.

At first everyone thought that the idea of accessing e-mail inside a browser was ridiculous. Even Yahoo turned them down. But, in typical Silicon Valley fairy-tale style, it turned out to be an idea worth a few hundred millions dollars. However, what I found really funny was what came later. There seems to have been some argument over the question as to who actually came up with the idea to change strategy to e-mail. As if it was of extreme importance to the history of the world, one of the founders stated in the book that although the initial investor once claimed it was he who had come up with the e-mail idea, it was definitely the founders who had thought of it. (So yah, boo and sucks to him!)

I’ve heard loads of stories like that recently. “Founders at Work” is full of stories just about ideas, and there are currently loads of shows about entrepreneurs and their ideas on TV too. It must be a trend. In fact, one of my favourite TV shows at the moment is BBC’s Dragon’s Den. It’s a show full of crazy people who think that their new idea is worth a million bucks on its own and try to present it to a panel of potential billionaire investors in order to exchange cash for stock. More often than not, the investors on the show inform the nervous candidates, with typical British politeness, that their idea is most definitely not a business, and is not worth a penny of their (cough) hard-earned (cough) cash without any business actually going on behind it. My wife and I find it really entertaining to watch people sweat over a 2-minute presentation of a wacky idea, while we wonder how these people managed to escape the asylum and get on TV in the first place.

The fact is, humans can be really creative. Anybody can have an idea. It’s not the idea itself which is great though – it’s the patience, endurance, and just hard graft which make the idea worth something. But don’t you just hate it when you have an idea, forget about it for a while, then are reminded about it when someone turns up having carried it out, usually accompanied by a small fortune? I do. But the reality is, unless I actually have done something about it, I don’t actually deserve it, whereas the other guy does.

Idea, good. Doing, better.

I’m scared of even sharing my idea, because, as yet, I’ve not found anyone who has come close to it anywhere. I think it’s going to change the world.

Of course, I’m probably wrong. I’ll call the asylum later, and ask them to take me back.

Note: Another thing I’ve picked up from the “founders” book – don’t be married to an idea. Let yourself change it, because even if you’re a real genius, you’re probably going to be wrong. And I am, and I am. (Think about it.)

I think it’s a good time to get the Tudutu application’s specification on paper. I’m not planning to publish it all just yet, but I want to give a general idea of what is different about Tudutu.I’ve learnt a lot about time-management systems in the past. I’ve drunk the kool-aid too – I’ve had loads of planning tools. You name it, I’ve used it – Franklin systems, PDAs, and even DIY-Planners. There’s something in common with all these systems though: despite the promise, they actually leave the time-management to me.

So Tudutu is about really having a computer program managing your time. It’s not just a place to store your calendar items and to-do lists, but actually a tool to manage what you have to do, and when you have to do it. You shouldn’t need a weekly planning session really; it’s something a machine can do for you. Think of Tudutu like your personal butler, reminding you politely of when you need to do something, and taking care of the easy things for you.

I think it’s coming along nicely. I am focusing on a quality product, and want it to be done right. I’m not going to publish before it is usable, nor before it is reliable. I’ve actually discovered that I’m doing something which I’ve never done before: programming in the time dimension. It’s a bit difficult to get the quality right because of that. There simply aren’t any tools to help me with it. I guess that’s a bit exciting, as I’m having to build my own development environment as I go. I think it’s going to be a fun ride, and hopefully, a great product.

Do you believe that you make your own luck? Is there a way to do business which will guarantee you success? Or is success determined by luck? Entrepreneurs have to have skills, and keep developing new ones; but even if you had all the skills in the world, are you destined for greatness? Do you need to make the right decisions to be successful? Do you take risks based on the belief in your abilities?

Or, do you believe that your situation is no more special than the next? Is there a chance that you will fail for one reason or another, maybe for a reason beyond your control? Are the real winners those that make sensible decisions and don’t risk too much?

I’ve just finished reading the book “Fooled by Randomness” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It’s an observation on how we are all taken in by success, and how it leads us to believe that there is a certain thing which caused it. The author asserts that just because someone is successful with a particular business, it doesn’t mean that what they did was the direct cause of the success, nor that they would be able to repeat their success in exactly the same way if they did it again. Observing someone’s success, we tend to attribute their success to something that they actually did, but as we are biased to only want to observe successful people, anything those people will do will seem to us to be certain to lead to success.

It reminds me of the stories I’ve read of people in Scotland living to be 100. Some attribute it to eating porridge every day. But is that really the cause? Sure, it might have helped them be healthy, but if a large proportion of people in Scotland eat porridge for breakfast anyway, a bias arises which leads to those reaching 100 falsely attributing their longevity to it anyway.

Another point the author makes is that you can only make good decisions in hindsight. No one knows at the time of an event what the effect of the event will be. (c.f. the butterfly effect: can a butterfly flapping its wings in India can cause a tornado in America?) Historically, things are interesting, but only after history filters out the noise. Most of what is happening now is just noise, trivial and unimportant. So you can’t always make the “best” decision at the time you need to make it. You can’t possibly know the outcome. You can only see afterwards if the decision you made was one which led to the outcome you desired.

The next book on my reading list is “Founders at Work”, by Jessica Livingston. I’ve read 2 chapters already, the stories of PayPal and Hotmail as start-ups. They were both really enthralling. Interestingly, the founders of both those companies attributed their success to luck, at least in part. I’d always been taught that one makes one’s own luck, but these very rich founders of some of the most valuable companies in history seem to think otherwise.

Another good point from the Founders book, was that the owners of Yahoo turned down Google for $1million, at a time when its owners would have gladly sold Google for that amount. Yahoo also didn’t compete with Hotmail because they didn’t think anyone would ever want to use web-based e-mail. So just because Yahoo are one of the most successful companies in the world, it doesn’t mean that everything they touch turns to gold.

This week I also listened to the SmallBizPod podcast. A recent show aired an interview with Ben Casnocha, another successful entrepreneur. He acknowledged that randomness plays a big part in his businesses too. He even tries to do random things himself, in order to be find success in random places. He might visit a conference on a topic which he has never had anything to do with before, or learn something totally new. The host of the podcast commented that he didn’t believe in luck, and, as the comments from the listeners demonstrated, most other people don’t neither. But maybe there’s something to it.

I think it’s important, and smart, to take this possibility of randomness into account. 50% of start-ups in the U.S. fail in their first year, and 95% in the first five years. That’s an incredible risk. Obviously no one starts a business believing that they are going to fail, but most of them do. It’s really hard just to survive. But I don’t want to just be a survivor, I want to be a winner.

Buy an O’Reilly book these days, and you get a free trial subscription to Safari Bookshelf. It provides online access to a myriad of the latest books on a wide range of technical themes. And although the main benefit is the search facility, it’s not just like Amazon’s Search Inside; you also get to read the whole book. Various titles are often available in the actual print format, so you can see the book as it is printed on paper.

Recently, Safari also started offering video tutorials. The videos are provided by Lynda.com, who’ve been doing video training for 12 years (apparently, it’s one of the longest running sites on the web). As you’d expect, the tutorials are thorough and professional. If you want to learn a quick new technical skill, these videos are perfect.

Currently, the range of tutorials covers Office 2007, Microsoft Expression Suite, Ruby on Rails, HTML, Flash, etc. There are others on making better use of e-mail, blogging, and podcasting. I found about 100 current titles in total. (That should keep me going for a while.)

Safari offer the tutorials as part of a subscription service. Lynda.com provide a cheaper subscription service too, but you don’t get the extra benefit of the books for a small supplemental price.

Even if you don’t get anything else from it, one of the biggest benefits of learning GTD is that you can finally learn to keep your e-mail inbox empty. I love it!

I struggled for years to keep track of mails. I hated to have to go back through my inbox, wondering if I had anything important in there from yesteryear which I desperately needed to keep. Now I never, ever have to worry about that. My inbox is always clean.

What’s the secret? Basic Getting Things Done processing.

First, set up a few folders. All you need is a “waiting for” folder, and a “reference” folder. The “reference” folder has many subfolders, all named by context or theme.

When a message arrives in your inbox, you have a few choices:

1. Is the message worth keeping? If no, delete it straight away. (80% of my mails disappear like this.)
2. Do I have to do something about the message?
   1. If yes, and I can respond in 2 minutes or less, I do it. Then I delete the original message. If my response needs a response from the person I’m replying to, I put a copy of my sent message in my “waiting for” folder. (I can review that later, as there are only ever a few messages in there anyhow.)
   2. If I can delegate, I do it. Forward the message, and if I need a response, add a copy of the message to my “waiting for” folder.
   3. If I need to do something about it later, I either
      1. drag the message straight to my calendar, usually as an all-day event, or
      2. add a quick next action to my task list. (Usually I never need to do this with mails.)
3. If the message needs no action, but may possibly be interesting at a later time, I simply drag it to one of my reference folders. If I need another reference folder, I quickly add one, then drag the message into it.

Your inbox will stay empty, and if you ever need to find an old message, it’s in the reference folders.

Simple!