POP Suite Part 4: Electronic Organization and "Brain Trust" Part 1

Welcome back to the Productivity and Organizational Progress (POP) Suite. Today we're talking about electronic organization.

We're jumping straight to the nitty gritty here. In today's age, "paper-based organization" is an incredibly small percentage of the organization management we conduct; mostly all of it is electronic.

I think the best first step in structuring and organizing your electronic management first starts with "contexts" of electronic. By "context" in e-management we do not mean "store", "house", "office", etc, but rather applications! Just capture all your contexts for these types of information

Rss Feeds
Email
Web Bookmarks
New Notes
New Tasks
Projects
Reference Files

With the plethora of freeware, shareware, and quality commercial ware it's far too easy to slip into the time-consuming trap of just "application hopping". Where you download a new Gtd app or Rss reader about every month and jump around from app to app and waste a lot of your time migrating and reconfiguring preferences. Not a good usage of time! And worse, application-hopping creates a general sense of disorder and incompleteness. Remember, the backbone of Gtd revolves around having a capturing system that your brain actually trusts (trusts enough to stop repeatedly reminding you to get milk and bread at the grocery store, when you're nowhere near a grocer store). So if you application hop, that cognitive trust will deteriorate. In a way, your brain and your thought-collection system works a lot like credit bureaus and length of history! The longer length of history you have with credit, the better the credit score; the longer length of history with effective idea capturing and processing within a given program, the better the "brain trust" with that system.

There's two approaches to dealing with those above forms of information: one app per media type or a conglomerate program (like devonthink). I've been experimenting with (yes I'm still building up "brain trust")

Rss Feeds -- NetNewsWire (allows archived clippings, online syncing, great management tools)
Email -- mail.app (exceptional)
Web Bookmarks -- (VERY tricky category because of the voluminous amounts od data a short web surf can accumulate; using Devonthink, combined with many safari folders, or simply dragging links to a desktop folder management system all work, but using only one of those works works better than multiple)
New Notes -- text files or a preferred gtd app (1 of the 100s out there)
New Tasks -- "
Projects -- "
Reference Files -- Devonthink and/or finder

Can you think of any other forms of collection data that recquire certain applications?

How about actual "doing aplications" for

Spreadsheets -- numbers.app
Powerpoints -- keynote
Word processing - Neooffice, Pages, or textedit

Invest time into researching hte best app for each type of data context so you trust it and use it and develop lengthy "brain trust".