021. Staying Organized with Idea Management

Introduction

• A little about Jonathan Baillie Strong and how he met Leo
• Jonathan's best practices for attending a conference
• Jonathan's daily work

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

• On Twitter: @jonbstrong
• At ComDev Media