OK Productive

021. Staying Organized with Idea Management

May 26 '19

Introduction

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 😭
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