Some time ago Stefan Sagmeister showcased a funny guerrilla art project on TED. The artist sticks speech bubbles onto public advertisement and then the pedestrians fill the blank spots with their own thoughts.

In his talk he showed a lot of funny bubbles already however there is also a website which allows you to browse throw a lot of those bubbles and some of them are truly hilarious. Have a look.

Photo courtesy of Bubble Project

While visiting a post office in Switzerland I stumbled upon a really nice idea on how lost keys can be returned to their owners.

The idea is simple, you buy a tag which you add to your keychain. Engraved on the tag is a unique number which is linked to your address. Now, if someone finds your keychain on the street the tag tells the person to throw it in the next postbox. Then the post just look up the address using the ID and mail the keychain back to you. All you have to pay is the postage fee. Beautiful idea and nicely executed. Would love to have the same service in Germany. The service provider has a website which can be found here.

Pretty early on in my professional career I started using simple todolists for organizing my life. However in the beginning of this year I had to realize that my system could not scale to the point were it could support multiple complex projects at the same time. I had the feeling that I was losing control. During that time I used physical and virtual todolists (tadalist). Since I came under extreme pressure I started looking for new ideas and approaches for managing my workload. Then I stumbled across "Getting Things Done" short GTD. It is an easy framework for managing your life/projects orginally developed and published by David Allen. The following graphic gives you a quick overview how it works.

In my case I did not completely adopt GTD. Instead I improved my own approach with ideas from GTD. The biggest change for me was the usage of a so called "hipster PDA".

As you can see it is nothing more than a bunch of index cards which are being hold together by a paperclip. On these cards I note immediately if something pops up in my head which demands an action. By doing so I effectively remove a lot of stress which comes from worrying that I might forget to do something. At the end of every day I look which stuff I actually want to do and sort it into my actual todo-system. My favourite thing about the "hipster PDA" is that I always throw away the old cards. Therefore old tasks cannot distract me anymore. That's one thing I never liked about traditional notebooks.

Another GTD rule, I strictly follow, is that you should do everything which takes less than two minutes straight away. By doing so I effectively remove all the small tasks which normally clutter my todolists.

For organizing all my todos I use stikkit which offers more functionality than tadalist. Especially the tagging support and the possibility to schedule tasks in a calendar + email reminders are two features which I do not want to miss.

Adopting GTD is not done overnight since you have to tweak it in a way that it supports your own style of working. However I adopted a lot of the core ideas and could see how they improved my productivity and reduced my stress level.

For more information regarding GTD look at the most known website on GTD 43folders or check out the book from David Allen.

Last year I visited Brisbane, Australia. One night in the city centre a guy approached me and asked me if I could take a picture of him in front of a Christmas tree. After I agreed he did not give me his camera instead he handed me just his memory card. So I put it into my camera and took the picture.

Afterwards I was impressed about the idea of just traveling with a memory card and basically "outsourcing the camera". It is amazing how much you can sometimes simplify things. This guy definitely kept it simple stupid. Unfortunately when looking into the world of software I have to assume that most engineers never got that lesson.

I have to admit I am not the best person in answering emails in the world. Especially if they pile up I am in trouble. However over the years I continuously adapted and improved my strategy of handling my daily email workload. I started out with just answering them. Then after entering the corporate world for the first time, the amount of received mails quickly increased and I realized that organizing them in folders is a good idea.

This is all nice and easy but I always forgot one final thing: An empty inbox. All email programs and web clients I know come with a special folder called inbox where new emails are displayed. While I have always sorted mails into folders I never fully emptied my inbox. So I never had this good feeling of accomplishing something.

But a series of posts named "Inbox Zero" over at 43 Folders made me think about my approach to answering mails. Now, I keep all my mails in my inbox until I have processed or answered them. Afterwards I move them from the inbox into a folder. For doing so I created a new "general" folder which serves as a place for all mails which do not belong to a certain category or for which it makes no sense to create a new category.

It sounds like a trivial thing to do but it can make a big difference to how you feel about your mails. I highly recommend the "Inbox Zero" campaign. It offers a lot of useful tips about organizing and processing your mails.