At last week's DC Lotus User Group meetup, Jack Dausman was introduced to eProductivity. Jack has a history with GTD and Lotus Notes, and at the meetup presented by Eric Mack, he had his eyes opened to how eProductivity artfully marries the methodology (GTD) with the technology (Lotus Notes).

Jack shared a number of thoughts about this on his blog, including this choice quote:

The rush of IM, the Google Wave (which has obeyed its eponymous sinusoidal form to rise and fall) and the crowd surfing of Facebook mail, all suggest that there is something that must be done to fix email. Eric's resurface of Lotus Notes, though, exposes that fallacy for the working professional. Change how we use email, and the din subsides. Using GTD in email is crushingly powerful and moves beyond managing email to building productive relationships through email.

Read the full post Episode #13 of the Getting Things Done with Lotus Notes podcast has just been published. Be sure to tune in, it's well worth a few minutes of your time.

In this episode, host Eric Mack and special guest David Allen address various tools that you can use to extend and enhance your productive experience with Lotus Notes. They hit on mobile devices such as BlackBerry, and third party tools such as ActiveWords, GyroQ, and more.

You can listen to the episode here. Where are the places in your system that semi-processed items collect, never to be heard from again?

The things that end up in these places are the items you sorta-kinda-maybe know need to go somewhere, but you're not certain exactly where. More importantly, you don't feel like taking the time on the front-end to actually decide.

I call these places "black holes" because similar to black holes in space, items get sucked into them and never re-appear. For many folks, the biggest black hole is the email inbox.

In my system, a big black hole used to be the "Read/Review" context. When I came across denser materials such as meeting notes or lengthy articles needing my attention, they'd end up in this context vortex. That's fine on the surface, but the problem was, I wasn't really certain I was committed to reading these items. Many of them were better suited in a Someday/Maybe entry or in an email folder for reference. Or even just deleted outright.

I should have kept a hard edge on my Read/Review context by reserving it only for actions I was committing to myself to get done. Because I didn't do that, it ballooned into something unmanageable.

When I'd do my Weekly Review on my preferred day of Monday, I'd skip reviewing the Read/Review context because it gave me a headache. Too many semi-processed items clamoring for a decision.

Continue Reading: "Where are the black holes in your system?" » Eric is a recognized expert on high-performance knowledge work and specializes in organizations that use Lotus Software. If you'll be in the Washington, DC area between November 15-20, you'll have two prime opportunities to hear Eric speak.

On Wednesday, November 17, Eric will present to the DCLUG (DC Lotus User Group). Details here. Attendees will receive free GTD resources, plus there  will be a drawing for free eProductivity software!

NOTE: You must RSVP by Monday morning, Nov 15th, because of IBM's building security requirements. Sorry for the short notice but our IBM hosts just relocated their offices.

The next day at KMWorld, the annual conference on knowledge management, Eric will moderate and present on a panel discussion titled "Future Focused Formulas for Enterprise KM Success". He will be joined by Art Murray, CEO of Applied Knowledge Sciences, Inc., and Box.net's VP of Business Development, Karen Appleton. This session will take place on Thursday, November 18.

Both sessions offer you the opportunity to gain from Eric's expertise on knowledge management as well as personal and corporate productivity.

Eric at KMWorld 2009 I've been meaning to write this post for a while now.

Before getting my BlackBerry Torch, I'd heard the native BlackBerry task app was buried deeply within the OS and wasn't too streamlined for efficient use. So I was interested to see if that'd be my experience.

I of course use Lotus Notes with eProductivity, and my tasks sync seamlessly to the BlackBerry thanks to the power of BES. So at least getting the task information to and from the device is quite simple.

Task App Location and Favorites menu
So is the task app buried deeply? Yes it is.

To get to it, you have to go to the Applications folder, which is itself pretty far down the icon list on the home screen. Featuring the Task app doesn't seem high on RIM's priority list, a curious decision because isn't BlackBerry's cachet all about business productivity on the go?

Anyhow, we can easily make the Task app more accessible by adding it to the Favorites menu. I had to hunt around a bit before figuring out that to add new apps to the Favorites menu, you have to press down and hold for a second on the app's icon. Then a little menu pops up asking if you'd like to mark the app as a favorite.

So I did this for the Task app, plus a few others. Here's my current Favorites menu:



I also looked at programming the Convenience Key to point to the Task app instead of the default Camera app, but the Task app is not one of the listed options. Bummer. Sorry for the misinformation, this is not true. The Task App IS an option. Not sure how I missed that when I checked on this initially...

Continue Reading: "Review of the BlackBerry Torch's task app" » I saw this helpful post today by Garrett Wolthuis on how to create subcategories in the Lotus Notes Journal.

What you may not know is that you can also create subcategories in eProductivity Reference. You just need to use the same Main Category\Subcategory format in the 'Category' field of a Reference entry and voila!, subcategory created.

I whipped up a quick screenshot example from my own eProductivity Reference to show this...



Of course, eProductivity Reference is a free download.

Last week's Weekly Tip article featured further information on how GyroQ can benefit your productivity system.

Using GyroQ, you can capture ideas, tasks, and more into your eProductivity system, even when Lotus Notes isn't running!

 

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