Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

As I mentioned briefly in a previous post, I’ve been reading David Allen’s excellent book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stree-Free Productivity. I’m done with it now and starting to implement it. I’ve installed the GTD Outlook plugin (not strictly necessary, but worth the $70) and am really enjoying using the system.

The overall purpose of the system is to free your mind of all the things you’re trying to remember so you can focus and use all of your brain’s space for active processing. Anybody who knows me well will have heard me talk about making choices to get stuff out of my head. Well, this book talks about creating a trusted system to do just that.

Using a series of lists to manage action items by context was a huge boon for me. Now, when I’m in traffic, I can look at my list of calls to make and can easily knock off a couple of tasks in free time. If I’m at home and have 10 minutes, I can quickly scan my list of tasks for one that will fit in the that time. I think it’s already helped my productivity and my confidence that things aren’t slipping through the cracks, and I’ve just begun to really use the system.

I read a slashdot thread on it, and someone there suggested that this system appeals to engineers because the flow of information in the system is similar to that used by programmers all the time. I think there’s something to that, but I suspect anybody can learn to think that way with a little practice.

Thanks to Greg for the pointer to Blockbuster’s online rental beta test.

My 15 minutes of searching turned up a few differences in their catalogs, but only at the very tail of the catalog. For example, Blockbuster carries The Picture Bride, a 1994 Japanese film I saw in an art house theater in Sunnyvale. I’ve never seen it anywhere else. Netflix, on the other hand, has Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the PBS miniseries. Both carry Nova specials, musicals like 1776 and Into the Woods, and popular foreign films like White. Blockbuster doesn’t have a separate category for foreign films, choosing to mix them in to comedy, drama, etc. I think that’s a mistake, but they’ll probably fix it eventually.

So why is NetFlix doomed? It’s not because Blockbuster is going to undercut them on price. It’s because Blockbuster throws in two free rentals per month from their stores. That means I can have my queue of “movies I meant to see” but can still get the immediate gratification of “I want to see this particular thing today.” That’s going to bring a lot of people off the sidelines, I’ll bet.

I’ll probably switch when their beta is over. We already rent a couple of movies a month at the blockbuster, and at $4 apiece, we’re already halfway to the monthly fee.