021. Staying Organized with Idea Management
Erik and Leo talk to Jonathan Baillie Strong of ComDev Media about organizing ideas, talks, emails, and more.
Introduction
- A little about Jonathan Baillie Strong and how he met Leo
- Jonathan's best practices for attending a conference
- Jonathan's daily work
Inbox management
- How Jonathan got interested in inbox management
- His general system for inbox management and how it relates to GTD
- How often Jonathan grooms his inbox
- The most obvious benefits to his inbox management approach
- Where does Jonathan put his ideas
- His system for keeping them organized
- How often you should revisit ideas and explore them more deeply
- How to consider which ideas are worth pursuing further, which should get tossed, and which need to sit for a while longer
The One-Touch approach
- Basic concepts:
- Touch each email only once
- When you touch an email, do one of the following:
- Send it to your calendar
- Create a to-do task
- Make a note of the idea
- Put it in a Read It Later app
- Keeping email in your inbox is like looking at mail and putting it back in your mailbox
- How to decide where to send an idea
- Ideas to keep evolving your own idea management system
Jonathan's app recommendations
- Things is a highly-streamlined, highly-recommended task manager
- Gestimer for daily reminders
- Numi is a beautiful calculator app
- Extensity is a Chrome extension for managing Chrome extensions
- Cisco Spark meeting notes, sadly discontinued on May 31, 2019 ðŸ˜
- Video speed controller is a Chrome extension for playing videos faster or slower
- Autohotkey is a great hotkey automation tool for Windows
- Keyboard Maestro is a hotkey automation tool for Macs
- Focusmate helps you focus by pairing you with virtual coworking partners
- FIP Radio for listening to chill French music online
- Snagit for better screenshots (bonus trivia: it's made in OK Productive's neighborhood!)
- Listennotes.com for finding podcasts
- Castbox.fm is a great, free podcast app
More apps and related links
- Tropical MBA Podcast and in particular, this post about Standard Operating Procedures
- Work the System (Book)
- Process Street is great for managing workflows on a team
- ProcessKit has tons of business automation tools and makes it easy to create your own
- Unroll.me for mass-unsubscribing from email lists
- IFTTT to make apps talk to each other automatically and speed up mundane tasks
- Zapier to make apps talk to each other automatically and speed up mundane tasks
- Instapaper to save anything so you can read it offline
- How to Be More Productive with a Daily System for High Output by Nat Eliason
- The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information by Tiago Forte
- One-Touch to Inbox Zero by Tiago Forte
Where to find Jonathan Baillie Strong
- On Twitter: @jonbstrong
- At ComDev Media