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It’s a beautiful day and I’m starting to get in a more contemplative mood. At work it’s now the Spring term, which means that the graduating learners are out working for 5 weeks on work placements and the first year learners have just begun the process of making 6 short films over 5 weeks. It’s a lot of fun and since only half of the Screen Arts class is around, it’s a bit less hectic. With the seasons changing it makes for a very nice time of year.
I like being organized, but this past school year has probably been one of my more organizationally challenging years. The course load was a bit heavier, so I didn’t have a lot of time to file things, so my desk is covered with stacks of paper. I’ve been really wanted to implement Getting Things Done and with the help of Merlin Mann’s tips at 43 Folders I’ve been able to some things, such as keeping my email inboxes fairly empty, which makes me happy. I’m also on the verge of getting a more comprehensive GTD setup going with the wonderful kGTD system that is built around OmniOutliner Pro (which I recently upgraded).
I’ve given up on one unified system either electronic or paper to keep it all together, but there are some things that I will keep using and some that I’m moving away from. I really like OmniOutliner and I’ve been using it for a few years to organize all of my lesson plans, presentations and thinking. I also use it for keeping all my marks together thanks to the wonderful summaries that it can calculate.
One of my uncompleted goals was to organize my courses more through Basecamp. While I started to put some things in, I just didn’t have enough time to set it up, but I should be able to for the Fall. Planning and calendars are always fun for me and I have been sporadically using my Moleskine weekly organizer and I’ve stopped using Entourage after a server upgrade lost my address book and made the neat integration of address book, calendar and mail stop working because my address book somehow was lost. Now I’m using Google Calendar a bit, but I will probably spend a lot more time in iCal, since it works with kGTD. With Basecamp and iCal and Google Calendar I can share information through the iCal format and subscribe to various calendars, which is very handy. I don’t like to have my data locked up.
So while it was a busy term with a lot of unfiled paper, it was also a lot of fun. A class filled with some very cool people is going to graduate in June and next year should be a good year too as the filmmakers move from year 1 to 2. I’m happy with a lot less stress right now, and as usual, I’m smiling.
