Getting Things Done, the famous task-management methodology created by David Allen in his book, Getting Things Done, can be summed up in three words: “Mind like water.”

The idea of GTD is to get everything out of your head, and into a system you trust. Whether it’s online, on paper or something in between, the point is to create a system you believe in and buy into, and never trust your memory again. Put things into your system, and know they’ll be there when you need them, and present themselves when they’re supposed to. Then, your brain is free of other pressures, and able to be what you need it to be.

GTD is tremendously applicable to people’s work lives, but also in life outside of work. The “mind like water” principle is one that can, and should, be applied to every aspect of our lives. When we’re not preoccupied with things, not thinking about the same things over and over, we’re able to be more in the present, more available to those around us, and more productive in all that we do.

That’s why all GTD practitioners should keep a journal. Your journal should be for your personal life what your moleskine or task manager is to your professional life. Keeping a journal allows you to get thoughts out of your head, into a different location, and lets you not be preoccupied with the same things over and over.

With journaling, you also need to create a system that works for you. For a long time, I kept a journal full of one-sentence memos to myself that I wanted to remember, typically based on some revelation I would have at the most random of times. Then, as I began to write more and more, I started to keep a more traditional diary-type journal.

I’m able to get thoughts out of my head and onto paper, and there’s something cathartic about having my thoughts written down. I even go back over my journal every once in a while (Weekly Review, for the GTDers) to see what I’ve been thinking and where my brain’s been.

Instead of keeping thoughts in, and having them dominate your mind, a journal lets you get it out and then not think about it- not letting one thought dominate your time and attention is key to GTD. With personal issues, this is obviously not as simple, nor as cut and dry as it is with work tasks, but it’s a useful tool to keep your mind empty, your thoughts clear, and your focus on the worthwhile.

If you’re looking to become a journaler, and want to do it online (as I love to), try Penzu. Penzu is a basic, easy-to-use online journaling software that I find really useful.

You just log in, and start writing. Things are saved, secure, printable, exportable, and accessible for you. I love having my journal online, because it lets me journal whenever and wherever the opportunity and inspiration strikes without having to carry a big notebook around with me.

Journaling has been great for my head, great for my GTD practices, and great for me personally. I highly recommend it, and following GTD is nothing more than an excuse to start what, I think, is an important habit for anyone.

A journal can be anything for anyone- use it as a memory-preserver, or a diary, or anything you can think of. A friend of mine kept a journal full of photos, a timeline of important events in his life. Whatever your journal looks like, use it to get your thoughts out of your head, and make room for some new ones.

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Twitter’s getting bigger, better, and more popular. Still, though, there seem to be a lot of people who don’t necessarily get how to use it properly.

I’m one of them, unfortunately. I’m still learning this whole Twitter thing, and am hoping for your input on this post. To get it started, though, here are ten things I’ve been forced to engrain into my memory as I use Twitter.

1. Direct Messages start with either “d” or “dm”- don’t worry, you won’t end up here.

2. To reply to someone, begin your tweet with “@theirusername”

3. Twitter’s people search is AWFUL. The only functional Twitter search is the one at the bottom of the screen. (This one:)

4. Eventually, there’s a better option for the Twitter-er than the Twitter site. Try Twitterific for Mac, Twhirl for Windows, Tiny Twitter for Windows Mobile, or Twitterfon for the iPhone.

5. There are tons of useful bots on Twitter: Remember the Milk, Timer, Mr. GCal, ChaCha, and many others.

My list is short intentionally- I need your help. Basic or advanced, what cool uses, tips, applications or tweaks do you have for Twitter?

(Update: I promise, this wasn’t planned. One of my favorite Twitter blogs, Twitip, just posted a great article about some of the Twitter basics. Definitely worth a look.)

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Every week, I point you to some cool people, articles, and blogs that keep my geekiness flowing.

Here’s what I’ve enjoyed reading this week (no New Year’s stuff, that got boring):

MakeUseOf- "My Top 10 Favourite YouTube Videos Ever"

Wired- "Diary of a Self-Help Dropout: Flirting with the 4-Hour Workweek"

Mashable- "The 10 Users You’ll Meet On Twitter"

Search Engine Land- "Tough Love For Microsoft Search"

Lifehack- "The 80 Best Lifehacks of 2008"

Lifehacker- "Everything You Need To Know How to Do in Windows"

O’Reilly- "2008: My Year of Living Smaller"

Happy New Year again! I hope everyone had a good one, and is now recovered from the…fun.

What’ve you enjoyed seeing/reading/watching/sneezing this week?

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Boring. I like sites that are funny, ridiculous, unnecessary and wonderful. Some sites feign usefulness, but they’re all sites you could do without. Except they’re tons of fun.

Here are five sites that skew my time spent/usefulness ratio. I’m not even going to try and explain them, as one click will tell you everything you could possibly need to know about the sites. They’re all worth a laugh, and some (like the spelling of “U”) are my new alternative to Rick-rolling people.

Without further ado:

Is Palin President?

“U” Is Spelled “You”. Get it Right.

Let Me Google That For You

ZOMBOCOM

Cheddar Vision

Now it’s your turn- what’s the most pointless website you’ve ever found yourself on? Share them in the comments.

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This is something of a shameless self-promotion post, but I hope it’s helpful and interesting.

As the New Year begins, it finds me in a transition, blogging-wise. I’m writing for more places than ever, and I wanted to (only once, I promise) let you know where else you can find me on the Web.

Here’s where I’m currently writing:

The 2.0 Life Obviously. But it’s worth reiterating that this blog is still my first priority, and I’m thrilled to be a part of the community that’s developing here. I can’t wait to continue to watch the community grow, and the conversation that’s happening is a blast for me. I’m looking to expand the blog, to make it bigger and better, and hopefully 2009 will be a big year for The 2.0 Life.

MakeUseOf MakeUseOf was one of the first technology blogs I wrote for, and is one of the sites that inspired me to start blogging. Since (I think) November, I’ve been writing for them as a contributor, and as of today, start as a Staff Writer! That means there will be posts by me on the sit every Tuesday and Thursday. To follow my posts, there’s my author page, or my MUO RSS feed. Here’s my latest post (before today’s):

Make The Web Your Notepad With WebNotes (+100 Invites)

Gearfire Gearfire was, for a long time, a favorite student-productivity blog for me. It’s chock full of great tips for students and non-students about how to make technology work for you, particularly in the world of academia. I read it and loved it, and over the course of the fall have been fortunate enough to get involved with writing for Gearfire. Here’s my latest Gearfire post:

Join a Worldwide Study Group with we.Papers

Lost in Technology Lost in Technology is edited by Kyle Judkins, a new friend of mine and fellow author at Make Use Of. I’ve just started writing for his great blog, which I’m very much enjoying doing. Lost in Tech is full of great content, and I’m excited to be able to add something to it. Here’s my first post for Lost in Tech:

7 Google Chrome Features That Rock

Blogging’s been a lot of fun for me, and I’ve been enormously fortunate to be able to write for all of these different sources. I promise to not become too self-promoting, but I just wanted to point you to all the great blogs that made the terrible mistake of allowing me to write for them.

With the New Year, I hope to make blogging a bigger and more important part of my life. It’s been incredibly rewarding for me, and I can’t wait to see what 2009 has in store!

Happy New Year! What’s your resolution?

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There are a ton of great applications out there on the Internet, and many of them have ostensibly the same purpose. Whether they’re social networks, microblogging applications, or email clients, the number of applications far outstrips the number of types of application.

This is not at all unique to the Internet, and is an incredibly positive thing. It fosters competition, the survival of the fittest, and a constant bettering of the product. There’s a push back on this innovation, though, created by people’s resistance to changing their routines.

I may or may not be coining a term here, but I call it “appnertia.”

Appnertia refers to users’ unwillingness to switch applications online, even when there’s a better alternative out there. We tend to choose one and stick to it, regardless of whether or not it’s actually the best of its kind. This phenomenon, though it exists anywhere, is particularly difficult to overcome on the Web, for a simple reason: the usefulness of an application is typically determined by the number of people using it.

In a Web 2.0 world, in which user interaction is the driving force behind the success of a product, numbers change everything. If no one uses an application, it’s useless. With a cell phone, whether or not others use the same model as me doesn’t affect my experience with the phone. Online, though, my experience is fundamentally reliant on the experience of others. This creates an incentive to ignore the potential of a product, and stick with the established, popular choice, even when it’s inferior.

Take Twitter and Friendfeed, one of my favorite examples of this phenomenon. In my opinion, Friendfeed is far better than Twitter. It offers more features, a better interface, a more reliable product, and is simply a better application. I’m sure many disagree, and please tell me in the comments, but that in itself is just an illustration of a bigger phenomenon. I use Twitter for no other reason than because so many others use it. Everyone I know is on it, and it’s a larger and more robust userbase to connect and interact with. It’s an inferior product, made superior by the numbers involved.

Here’s why appnertia could be a problem: it has the potential to squash incremental innovation. Adding a feature, improving an interface or making a product more reliable isn’t going to drive users to a particular application, because one user will only move when all the others do. At its core, it’s a collective action problem: no one wants to be the first to move, and without some moving none will.

There are, of course, examples that run counter to this point- Google, Facebook, and others have shifted users from an established base. Each of these did it, though, by creating such a monumentally better product (than AOL or MySpace, respectively) that they were able to drive a mass exodus to their product.

Friendfeed will never be as big as Twitter. Though it’s better, it’s not better enough to convince people to make the change. When everyone made the change, it would get better and better, and no one would look back. But without a way to mobilize the masses, and promote a product that is not only superior, but hugely different, there’s no way to convince people to move.

That, compounded by the mass inertia that’s created by the usefulness of an application being dictated by the number of users involved with it, means that it’s better to be first than to be best. People flock to the first decent entry into a particular market, and then are reluctant to leave the crowd. Not only is it groupthink, it’s logical groupthink. If no one else switches, it’s not in my best interest to do so.

How do we solve this? How do we make sure that we’re using the best application, in a time when numbers dictate what’s “best” as much as the quality of the applications themselves? What do you think about any of this? And how does it affect how we use technology?

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Let me share my own story by way of example: I went away for a few days, and my friend’s computer was broken. He needed to use my computer while I was gone, so I gave him my Windows password.

When I got back, I wanted to change my password (he has a habit of leaving some, ahem, not nice material on my computer when I walk away from it). So I fired up the control panel, and attempted to change my password to the word "branches." My Windows password is usually the first word that comes into my head when I sit down to change it, so "branches" was the winner.

Except apparently I didn’t type branches. Evidently, I typed the wrong word, twice in a row, exactly the same. Maybe it was brances, or bhrcneas- I don’t know. And that was the problem. It saved my password because I had typed it right, and I didn’t know the difference. Then, when I tried to log in the next morning, "branches" didn’t get me in. Neither did the 8,657 possible misspellings I tried.

Thus began a morning filled with panic, anxiety, and self-loathing. I spent the better part of three hours typing every possible combination of the letters b-r-a-n-c-h-e-s I could think of, to no avail. When I gave up that fight, I tried to look up various password recovery services. I found some, but since I couldn’t get on my computer, they really weren’t especially helpful.

Though I eventually got in to my computer (by doing a system restore from the boot disc- another post), I learned a valuable lesson: make use of Windows’ Password Restore Disc.

A Password Restore Disc allows you to reset your forgotten Windows password without any muss or fuss. It’s quick to create, quick to use, and critical to saving you from situations like mine.

Here’s how to do it. You’ll need Windows, an administrator account, a flash drive and about five minutes.

Windows Vista

1. Click on Start and then Control Panel.

2. Click on the User Accounts and Family Safety link.

   Note: If you’re viewing the Classic View of Control Panel, you won’t see this link. Simply double-click on the User Accounts icon and proceed to Step 4.

3. Click on the User Accounts link.

4. In the task pane on the left, click the Create a password reset disk link.

5. When the Forgotten Password Wizard window appears, click Next

   Note: You will need some kind of portable media before being able to create a password reset disk. This means that you will need a flash drive or a floppy disk.

6. In the I want to create a password key disk in the following drive: drop down box, choose the portable media drive to create a password reset disk on.

   Click Next to continue.

7. With the disk or other media still in the drive, enter your current account password in the text box and click Next.

8. Windows Vista will now create the password reset disk on your chosen media.

   When the progress indicator shows 100% complete, click Next and then click Finish in the next window.

9. You can now remove the flash drive or floppy disk from your computer. Label the disk "Password Reset" and store it in a safe place.

Windows XP

1. Click on Start and then Control Panel.

2. Click on the User Accounts link.

   Note: If you’re viewing the Classic View of Control Panel, double-click on the User Accounts icon.

3. In the pick an account to change area of the User Accounts window, click on your Windows XP user name.

4. In the Related Tasks area on the left, click the Prevent a forgotten password link.

5. When the Forgotten Password Wizard window appears, click Next

   Note: You will need a flash drive or floppy disk.

6. On the next screen, verify that the portable media is in the drive.

   Click Next to continue.

7. With the disk still in the drive, enter your current account password in the text box and click Next.

8. Windows XP will now create the password reset disk.

   When the progress indicator shows 100% complete, click Next and then click Finish in the next window.

9. You can now remove the CD from your computer. Label the disk "Password Reset" and store it in a safe place.

Once you’ve created a password restore disc, you’ll always be able to recover and change your password- no matter what it is. Also, anyone with the disc will be able to change your password, so keep it safe and hidden.

Having a Password Restore Disc will save you the inevitable moment of forgetfulness, followed by the moment of panic similar to the one I had. Take the time now to make a disc, and never worry about it again.

(Thanks to about.com for the instructions)

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Here are three small, but cool, changes you can make to your own blog to make it even better.

1. Gravatars A Gravatar is an image that is associated online with your email address. On any blog, including this one, that supports Gravatars, you’ll be able to leave an image with your comment, just by providing your email address. It makes for a more attractive, professional blog, and is really useful for promoting your own brand as well. To add Gravatars to your blog, check out the Wordpress plugin.

2. Mobile Site Most websites don’t look good on a small screen like the iPhone’s. However, using the WPTouch plugin for Wordpress, that problem can be solved. It turns your blog into a great looking mobile site that’s easy to access and read. Are you on an iPhone? Go to www.the20life.com and check it out.

3. Favicon A Favicon is a tiny icon that represents your blog, mostly in the tab section of a browser. See the “2.0″ at the top of your browser, on the tab or window you’re viewing this in? That’s a favicon. It makes blogs look more professional, creates a more coherent brand, and makes for sweet iPhone bookmarks, like this one. For more on how to create one, try Make Use Of.

4. What Would Seth Godin Do? If you don’t know who Seth Godin is, check him out. His namesake plugin for Wordpress is pretty great too- it allows you to display a welcome message to newcomers, based on site data and cookies. It’s nice for welcoming new visitors, directing them, or asking them to subscribe or comment. It’s a great feature, and one all blogs would do well to use.

Those are a few of the new things you’ll see on The 2.0 Life, which I’m hoping make this site a better, easier and more attractive place. They’re also great for any blogger, and I highly recommend each.

What plugins/tweaks do you use for your blog?

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I use Gmail constantly. I have something like 11 email addresses, all of which feed into Gmail. Gmail manages my tasks, my email, my calendar, etc. etc.

I suspect I’m not the only one who has what I like to call "Gmailophilia." Because of that, I’ll share a few tips that make using, navigating and understanding Gmail a bit easier.

1. Keyboard Scrolling As in many other Google apps, use the J button to scroll down through emails, and K to go up. Enter opens the email you’ve scrolled to, and X selects the email so you can do any number of other things.

2. [ and ] Sometimes you’ll get a whole bunch of email that you have to go through at once. Instead of dealing with every email, going back to the Inbox, and starting over, take the easy way. The ] key (next to the P) archives the current message and goes to the next, and [ archives the message and goes to the previous. For dealing with a stream of unread email, this one’s key.

3.  Bring a Label to the Top Gmail organizes your Labels (like folders, only better) in alphabetical order. This can be a pain- maybe "Reply" is your most used Label, but you have to scroll down to find it! Instead, put a "!" or  "@" symbol at the front (i.e. @Reply) to bring it to the top of the list.

4.  Dot Filters Gmail recognizes yourname@gmail.com as different from you.rname@gmail.com, which is different from y.ourname@gmail.com. Using these, you can create filters to send certain emails to a particular place. For instance- if you want business emails to go to one place and personal to another, give yourn.ame@gmail.com to one, and yo.urname@gmail.com to another. They’ll look different to Gmail, and are easy to filter.

5. Emailing other Gmailers If you’re emailing someone with a Gmail account, there’s no need to type their whole email address. Just type their screen name (the part before the @ symbol), and Gmail will send it to the right place. It’s a huge timesaver, especially given that more and more people are using Gmail.

6. Forward, One and All If you’ve got a conversation that you want to send to someone, but only want to send them one message from the conversation, go to the bottom of that message and select "Forward." If you want to forward the whole conversation, look to the right of the messages (between the message and the sidebar) and select "Forward All." Whether you want to forward one message or all of them, Gmail’s got you covered.

7. Attachment Hunting In the Google search bar, search "has:attachments" without the quotation marks. That will bring up all the messages with attachments. To find only attachments from Bill, search "from:Bill has:attachment" to narrow the list even further. It’s an easy way to see all the files in Gmail. Though, if you remember the filename, searching for "filename: in the Gmail search will bring it up for you.

8. Compound Searching Your search can be as detailed as you’d like. Search any combination of things- Sender, time, Label, Chat, to name a few- any number of things. For a full list of the search operators, check out Google’s list.

9. POP and IMAP You can use Gmail easily with any other application, and Gmail’s made the whole process easy. In the "Settings" pane, make sure IMAP and POP are both enabled. Then, check out Gmail’s IMAP and POP configuration pages.

10. Bookmark a Single Email Every Gmail message has a dedicated URL. That way, you can bookmark a single email, because every one has its own URL. No need to copy down or print the information in an email- just bookmark it and refer to it as you need to.

Gmail’s easy to use and powerful right out of the box, but it takes a bit of understanding and know-how to really be a power user.

How do you pimp your email?

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Here’s what I’ve loved reading and sharing this week:

Mashable- "Tweets to Go: 35+ More Twitter Resources for Your Phone"

Dumb Little Man- "10 Awesome Websites To Check Before You Travel this Holiday Season"

GTDTimes- "6 Months Later: Am I Really Still Doing GTD?"

The Atlantic- "Organize Your Life!"

Better Than Therapy- "PC versus Mac versus Linux"

Music Snobbery- "Top 5 New Acts of 2008"

Labnol- "Online Polls: Find the Best Web Polling Software for Your Needs"

Wired- "Steven Levy on His Gadget Wish List for 2009"

Geeked Off!- "29 Ways Remember the Milk Can Rock Your World"

Enjoy your holiday weekend! What’s the weirdest tradition you have at this time of year?

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