I've gotten a little out of practise implementing GTD properly because it hasn't really been necessary until recently. As such my system has become very adhoc which poor management of categories and a rather slapdash approach to doing reviews leading to a loss of control on my part. The new job is not so familiar to me and requires a different way of thinking; using broad labels such as work or home have made it hard for me to create the focus of Next Actions that I have really needed. Some distinctions within categories and inboxes have become blurred making it harder for me to manage even basic requirements for acheiving. The net result of all this has been greater stress within the context of an environment that I can do little about.

After reading this article on DIYPlanner I decided to attack the problem at source and I cracked open Freemind in order to work out my goals and categories across both work and home and take a look at what has been working and what has failed.

Using a mindmap I was broke things up into distinct categories based on my current needs for Work and Home. Under Work, there is Teaching, Admin and Attitude. These are then further broken down into relevant subcategories (see the mindmap below). I then broke these down further, either with extra categories or tasks that I need to complete, to get as much down as possible and to help highlight which of these categories are important and which are not.

On the Home side I used the Physical, Spiritual, Social and Cognitive categories suggested in the DIY article. Under these topics I began to list some of the things that I wanted make sure I find the time to do, like Writing under Spiritual or Reading and GTD under Cognitive.

With this work done it was time to see about putting it into practice. I have a long list of inboxes at the moment so I decided to focus on getting that down to just two, on the computer, which can then be supplemented by more mobile methods, like the hipster, later.

I began by looking again at Remember the Milk for ToDo lists instead of using an offline application such as Outlook so that it is easier for me to manage and check my lists wherever I am. As I've mentioned before RTM also has some good features and is fast to use.
My previous categories were area-based, such as Home or Work, but there was no way to highlight what needed to be done immediately. I began by setting up some new lists and renaming old ones. The lists that I have currently settled on are:

• @NextActions
• @Waiting
• Home
• Shopping
• Writing

The @s are to make those appear first on the list. Everything begins life in the @NextActions list and can then be moved if it's more appropriate that it go somewhere else. However I then found that I wanted to be able to categorise items further so that I could keep everything I need in the @NextAction category but still be able to look at a particular area, such as Curriculum. To resolve this I took the list of categories I'd worked out in the mindmap and applied them as labels. For example, "Amend Curriculum Plan" is tagged with Admin and Curriculum. Admin is the big label but Curriculum helps to refine it. (I can also assign names under tasks too, especially useful for @Waiting items). RTMs Overview page includes an section that combines Lists and Labels in a single box with items displayed in a cloud with items at different sizes depending upon how many items are in them making it easy to see lists and projects that have a lot to do (see screenshot above). Finally I printed out a copy of the mindmap of labels which I can keep on my desk for easy reference when creating new items.

Once I was happy that that was in place I started to tackle my email. I still like the gmail interface so I saw no reason to change from that. It's fast and flexible and available whereever I have internet access. The first thing to do was to separate my work email from my personal mail. Work email in my personal space depresses me because it makes me feel like I have to deal with it even when I'm not at work. I have already set up a work email account which I have begun to encourage people to use but not everyone does and stuff just gets through. So I have set up a filter on the worst offenders to forward those messages on to the work account and label them huamao so that I can remove them from my personal mail account during review. I then went through and deleted the work messages from my email account so that it is now just for me (after forwarding ones I needed to keep to the work address).

The next step was then to redo the labels. I have never used labels in Gmail effectively. Some, like "Scotland" (set up to bring together info about a trip to Scotland 3 years ago) could be deleted while others, like Parents' holiday (to track details of bookings for my parents' trip to China at the moment) I've renamed. I also created two new categories, @Reply and @ToRead, for marking those emails that require further action. All others can be archived or deleted. Emails requiring further response are also starred so that there is a single quick click I can do to see what outstanding emails I have. And best of all it leaves me with an empty inbox. My new list of labels in gmail (remember, this is for personal use) is:

• @Reply
• @ToRead
• computer - for anything related to computing such as MS newsletters
  
• family - messages from my family
  
• friends - message from my friends
  
• huamao - messages to do with my current job
  
• info - basically a reference tag, for information like password reminders, flight details, etc.
  
• jobs - contacts and other mails that I may need when looking for work
  
• writing - stuff to do with writing, selling it or doing it
  

My work email account (also gmail) basically mirrors all of this but with slightly different categories based upon the RTM ones.

So, after spending a few hours rebuilding my GTD system I am feeling more in control of things than I was. There is a tendency when you feel like you have too much on your plate to sit back feeling sorry for yourself and just try to ride it out while getting more and more stressed. Now I feel like I'm in a position where I can at least be in control of what I need to do, even if the other problems with the job (or, rather, the management) are something that I am just going to have to accept for now.

My error was to be sloppy about reviews which led to poor and ill-thought categories and lists as well as extending the number of collection buckets I was "using" beyond a level that was maintainable. This kind of rebooting has made me feel much happier about what I need to do and reminded me that the most important things for me to keep the system going are the Next Actions and the Reviews.

Assuming, of course, I even stay in this job....

Went to Shanghai last weekend. Ningbo is reasonably developed but is still lacking in a lot of areas - the shops are pretty monotonous, there aren't many bars and mostly it's just the same people out every week. Which is nice but it's good to experience something different for a change, especially as I've been feeling stressed. And Shanghai is very different. It's a truly modern city, with a fast, reliable underground, bookshops with good supplies of English novels, shops of a dizzying variety (everything from specialty kilim shops to Ikea), and a busy but relaxed vibe that makes London seem very quiet.
Mostly I wanted to buy a couple of books, and I ended up getting five. For those who are interested:

• Umberto Eco - The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
• China Mieville - Looking for Jake
• Liz Williams - Banner of Souls
• Mark Gatiss - Vesuvius Club
• Murakami - Norwegian Wood

We stayed in the Metropole as all the cheap places were booked up and we hadn't put a lot of thought into planning it. Still, it's a nicely decadent place, very reminiscent of the 1930s and our room had views over the Bund and a balcony looking over the rest of Shanghai.
Went to the Gongdelin vegetarian restaurant and had a couple of beers in a bar on Saturday. On Sunday I went to meet Victor, a guy I've been in occasional contact with as we share an interest in GTD and moleskines. We had a delicious Xinjiang meal and chatted about computers and time management. He's a nice bloke and I look forward to having the opportunity to meet up again.
After that I met up with Zak who had been looking at violins. As well as walking up and down a street filled with musical instrument shops we also headed to the Yu Gardens area but didn't really do much else before getting the train back to Ningbo.
It seems strange to me that I haven't been to Shanghai for the weekend before now, but I think I'll definitely be heading over again in the next month or so.

Well, term started last friday and it's been something of an interesting week. Some has been good and some has been bad. The good is the actual job, and the small amount of teaching I do, is very enjoyable. I also like getting to know the Chinese staff and generally although there are things that are just plain not working there isn't a lot that I can do about that and I have to just keep pushing while letting things happen. The key example here is the attitude towards hiring more teachers. They are reluctant, still, to talk about paying for advertising or increasing teachers salaries to make it happen. But without more teachers we face a problem with existing parents and also with the fact that we simply cannot expand and get more students. Which brings us to the bad. Last night I got phonecalls from two parents who screamed at or threatened me down the phone because their kids had told them that a new pupil would be starting on Monday. That isn't even true - we had a visit from some parents who are keen to get their child in to the school but it isn't going to be on Monday. Even if it was true we would still have less than 10 children in a single classroom. The problem is that there is a wide range of ages in that classroom, from 5 to 10, and they believe that this is unacceptable. Now, I have spoken to the classroom teacher, Ann, and she maintains that teaching that range is well within her capacity. I am also teaching two of the older students for science and SOSE/History so that all the kids have guaranteed teacher time. Of course, the situation is not ideal and we desparately need another teacher but the parents' behaviour in all this is unacceptable.
I've also been out a couple of times this week with work. The first was on Monday for a meal to celebrate the start of term. This involved my boss, the acting principal Mr Cai, ganbei-ing everyone around the table. Ganbei means empty glass and is like "cheers" except that you do have to empty your glass. In this case, red wine. I was required to go around the table as well so I was thoroughly drunk by the time I got home.
Next, Friday night, we went out for a meal again for the Teachers Day Holiday but the drinking was a lot more subdued as everyone was saving themselves for the KTV afterwards. KTV is kareoke, which I have managed to avoid so far but not any more. The KTV club is basically lots of private rooms for groups to sit around on a sofa and enthusiastically applaud each other for singing. Yes, I did sing one song. But the strangest thing was when I went to the toilet. I was standing at the urinal when suddenly the attendant placed a hot towel on my neck and started giving me a head massage! To say I wasn't expecting it is understating the matter although I've been so tense all week that it was probably a good thing. Anyway, after KTV Zak and I headed into Laowaitan to meet some friends at a bar called Le Cargo, and I got very drunk for the second time this week.
On a non-work related theme Zak and I went to a very nice Lebanese restaurant on Tuesday. We had humus and aubergine dip and grilled chicken and meat with spices. It was great. And there's no alcohol served in the place which was even better.

Watched a recent Hong Kong film called Election yesterday. The story is about the fall out within a triad from its election of its new chairman and the battle between the two candidates to gain control. It was really good. The film is very naturalistic, with no guns, so is very different from the normal HK fare. In fact the triad leaders spend most of their time in the film locked up as the police try to force them to work out a truce while the gang's factions fight amongst each other to deliver the baton of the chairman's authority to the leader they support.
It does have some faults. Some of the themes and characters aren't developed quite as well as they could have been, including the main theme of the battle between tradition and the need to "modernise" their gang activities. There is an Election 2 which apparently isn't quite as good, or at least is really just a kind of re-run of the original but it's supposed to be still watchable. If I see a copy with english subtitles I think I'll get it.
Today is the school's open day in preparation for the start of term next Friday. I get to meet parents and give a speech which is all a bit scary. I probably shouldn't have had tha second tequila last night but actually I feel fine. This lunchtime I listened to Just a Minute to help me relax.

Today I met one of the richest men in China, the owner of Hua Mao group and my school. He came to see how the place is looking and generally give his blessing for the future. The school itself is really starting to look like a real school, with classrooms and everything.

More playing about with Google, but this time with googlepages. My old website has been moderately popular, mainly because of the cut-up machine, but has been in a considerable limbo since UKOnline disabled the facility to upload changes through any mechanism except directly logging on to their servers. This always seemed to me a shame but at the same time I moved onto Blogger and found that maybe I didn't need a website anymore. However, with Google's new service I decided that maybe it was time to have another look at what a personal website should be.
I did take a quick look at googlepages when it was first announced but found the lack of javascript (an essential for the cut-up machine) and no abiliy to create your own template a bit too limiting. This time around there are still no personalised templates but there is the addition of google widgets, exactly like those used on the Google homepage, which can use javascript. So I spent Sunday evening playing with that and created a cut-up machine (which you can add to your desktop by clicking here: ).
That evening I fell ill with some kind of nasty food poisoning and spent most of Monday and Tuesday in bed. This morning, not really wanting to get on with very much else, I've been playing with the site and have now created a new(ish) homesite. So far it's just content from the old one and I haven't moved everything yet. But not bad for a morning's work.
Not that it has all been that easy. The lack of templates means that I am stuck with the scheme that Google has created and cannot modify it at all. So, if I want to change something on one page I have to go through all of them and change each one. It also means that it is impossible to create a generic menu system. To get around this I had to create another special widget and add it manually to each page. This seems ridiculous when compared with the functionality that blogger already offers and hopefully will be fixed soon.
Aside from that it works quite neatly. The page editor is simple and allows anyone to create a website. You can also upload pages and images (up to 100MB) so if I had wanted I could have used that facility to create a carbon copy of my old website without much fuss (except for the lack of folders).
So now I just have to decide what the website is for. Afterall I do have my blog so what's the point? I've yet to really decide. I think I want to look at the site as a platform for my writing, another plank on the muddy path of treating it as a career, and so there will be content and organisation changes over the next few months. Much of the older content will, I think, be archived off to the side to make way for other stuff. Now that I can. Unless the changes announced to Blogger today change my mind again.
The new home page can be seen at: http://gary.leeming.googlepages.com
Setup your own pages at: http://www.googlepages.com (you'll need a Google account)
Information on creating Google Gadgets: http://www.google.co.uk/apis/homepage/

Well, I survived the typhoon. Actually we didn't even get any rain here in Ningbo although it was pretty bad in the south of the province. This week I've decided to finish with my part-time work with Web English School as it was just taking up too much of my time. My new job as Dean is really starting to take off and I want to be able to focus on that, and write, and the money isn't so important. It paid for my phone and got me a little extra, so that's ok.
As a writer I like to collect news articles, bits of science and odd words that I uncover on the internet. Previously this meant adding links to your favourites (and, latterly, delicious and bloglines) and forgetting about them. Then, almost inevitably, when you came back to read the article it wold be gone, moved or deleted, meaning extra wasted time searching Google for some remains of a half-remembered idea. Scrapbook for Firefox is a plugin that allows you to select a piece of text or even a whole web page and save it to your hard drive. It also has the ability to categorize your snippets into folders, add notes of your own, search and highlight text. All very useful, until you move to China and leave your computer behind.
Recently Google announced Notebook, an application that does pretty much the same as scrapbook but with the advantage that all your information is stored at Google, can be shared with others, and accessed anywhere with the internet. It also integrates with Firefox so additions can be made quickly simply by right-clicking on a selected piece of text or page, just like Scrapbook...
I've been using it a lot to collect articles and research information but I feel I haven't been using it all that effectively. Sure, it's a repository of information I want to be able to read when I want but what else can it do? This week I started using the enhanced Google homepage again and rediscovered the wonderful Word of the Day. I decided to add a word from the list to the Google notebook and realised that I may be able to use it more effectively. This morning I went into it and set up four different notebooks: Inbox, Words, Inspiration and Novel. Inbox is the default. Everything added goes in there. This saves me having to continuously alter which Notebook I'm adding to which is not an easy or intuitive process, especially from the pop-up window. Now, once a week I can go through the Inbox and file things into the correct notebook. Interesting articles that may be a starting point for an idea in Inspiration, words I like into Words, and research for my novel, well, you get the idea. Each notebook can also be divided into sections, which can be useful fo separating out specific information further. So now I can spend even more time on the web "researching" ;)
Google Notebook is still a labs (beta) product and does have some flaws and some omissions. There is AJAX implementation to create a nice interface but it can be a little unwieldy at times. Options such as collapse all are only available through a drop-down menu and they should really have instant access icons. You can create sections within a notebook but notes added just seem to be thrown into the latest section instead of at the top where they can be filed easily or, ideally, asking you which section you want the note in when you drop it onto the notebook. There is also no "tagging," a concept so integral to Gmail which would also work really well here as it is impossible to have notes in more than one section. The option to be able to quickly highlight text would also be useful as would being able to view the note full page or as a pop-out.

Well, people travel for new experiences so last week I went bowling for the first time. It was an event organised by Web, the school where I'm doing some part-time teaching. It was a lot of fun although I didn't score that highly. I think it was around 80.
I have had another busy week. The work for the new school is starting to really pick up. Lots of forms and policies to get sorted before the start of term, new parents to meet, and new teachers to recruit and fix up with their visas. And when I'm not doing that then Web are asking me to do extra classes, which I am now having to turn down. I haven't had a day off for a few weeks now; so much for my long holiday... Spent yesterday afternoon in a teahouse working through some stuff in a meeting. The teahouse was pretty nice; quiet and comfortable. You pay about 50 or 60RMB for a cup of tea but you get endless refills and free food so it's expensive but a good place for go spend a couple of hours.
I downloaded Office 2007 Beta last week as I do miss having One Note and I wanted to test Outlook's iCal features. Seems pretty stable and I do really like the new interface. It's such a simple but powerful change that it almost seems a wonder no-one thought of it before. Now, instead of lots of drop-down menus and obscure icons the two are combined into a single "tabbed" interface. For example, the Home tab includes all the basic editing and style functions which are divided up into specific boxes and labelled with what they do. And if an option isn't there, or you are not quite sure what you want to do, many of them can be extended by clicking on the bottom of the box to provide more information. There is also a big Start button type thing in the top-left which opens out into the standard save, etc, but just, well, looks good. If I could be bothered I would post some screenshots but there's probably plenty out there.