Recently I decided to try Mailbox again. I had initially dismissed the app, probably partly due to the hype and partly due to the fact it messed with my folders, created new ones, and starred things without me wanting it to, however recently I have been spending more and more time using my iPad, plus I have seen a couple of colleagues using it.

As a stand alone app I have really gotten to like Mailbox’s deferral system. I am quite often on the road, or in meetings, so I found it really helped my keeping to a zero inbox. I do have a concern that from a GTD purists point of view I am just creating another Inbox with the deferred items, however the fact they pop back into my email, which is ultimately my main influx of information and hence drives inbound tasks, is incredibly useful. It acts as a pretty good reminder system for things I don’t really know what will happen yet, so maybe aren’t ready to be made into tasks.

I have read a lot and tried to do a lot regarding productivity over the last few years. A couple of days ago I read this article which was linked to from the Simplicity Bliss website.

One thing the article spoke about was prioritising your tasks and how to do that within a Getting Things Done framework or tool. I use a system in OmniFocus where I create some high level folders to structure my projects, I have one called Immediate and one called Focus. I use these to try to provide focus to the multitude of tasks and projects I am involved in.

Today I realised that there was a potential flaw in my plan. I never scheduled any time to do any of these. Like most other people in management positions my time got taken up by meetings, client visits, processing emails, travel and various other miscellaneous activities, however when I start to plan my week I would never block out any time to devote to them.

No great surprise I find myself processing the same projects in OmniFocus again and again. This week I am going to block out time and try and progress these, on my own terms, not caught up in meetings, not in the evenings, not at 6am in the morning, or on a flight or train.

Over the last year I have been becoming more and more reliant on Markdown. Pretty much everything I write is in Markdown, most my writing starts in nvALT, whether this is notes from meetings, emails, or anything longer I could be writing.

Writing

As an editor nvALT does a good job, however for anything that is longer than a few hundred words I normally use a dedicated editor. Depending on the nature of what I am writing I would say my top three are: TextMate, Folding Text and iA Writer. TextMate I like because of the autocompletion on the Escape Key, so if I am writing quite a technical document which has a lot of repeated words then it seems the quickest way of writing.

ResourceMine.net

I originally set this site up as an experiment, however I have been impressed with Octopress and want to use the site as a place to dump my thoughts. resourcemine.net was a domain that I had registered, so I configured the DNS for this domain.

Over the weekend I registered jonmead.me, jonmead.com and jonmead.co.uk and I am going to use jonmead.me for this site.

After setting up the DNS for the jonmead.* URLs, these are the steps I took.

I have spent the first half of this week in an internal Rittman Mead sales workshop, during which there have been a lot of discussions about the past and future of Business Intelligence, or Business Analytics as Oracle are now calling it.

One thing that struck me was the change in Business Intelligence compared to when I started working in the industry.