the old drawing board

had a great meeting with a group of filmmakers yesterday--we're getting together every other week to work on scripts. this time we went through Sky, titled Twice Removed for this round, but i'm still obviously shopping for titles.

after more than two hours of great feedback from the group (thank you, julie, ria, and milena!) i took the train home, kind of daunted by how much more work obviously needs to be done but psyched to realize i have an idea of what all that work could entail. in a moment of gtd clarity i found myself scribbling next actions into my notebook.

gtd? you ask.

anybody who knows me can tell you i'm a list maker. big time. (well, i think i'm obvious about this stuff, but as i typed that i wonder if i don't hide it some. a few years back i wrote a play about a list-making woman (Hit the Muscle), and some of the comments about her organizational habits--i'm guessing they would have been phrased differently had the commenters realized i do something like that myself.)

so when i heard that an organizational guru had based a whole get-it-together plan on crazy detailed to-do lists, i had to check it out. the basic idea is that if you've got everything you want to do, listed in the form of actionable items, on paper then you won't wake up in the middle of the night worrying if you've forgotten something. there's a zen to it. an excuse to indulge my love of checklists? i'm there.

that was about a year ago. since then i've tried different methods of listing--paper to-do lists, plug-ins on my google homepage, an excel spreadsheet. now i'm using kinkless gtd, scripts that run in omni outliner pro that divide tasks by where they can be done, track when things are overdue, and manage recurring tasks.

in all it's been going well. i'm knocking tasks off the list--getting things done. i still have a hard time remembering to look through my in boxes (physical and virtual), but a process that needs a little fine tuning is better than no process, i suspect. also, i've had a few days this week when i worked on the windows side of my dual-boot computer (omni outliner is mac-only)--not sure what to do about these windows-fests, apart from getting in the habit of booting into os x before getting to work for a check-in.

nothing like tinkering with tools instead of tackling the to-dos.

that reminds me, i should copy those next actions from my notebook to my official list.