Robert’s Rule of Meetings:
“The productivity and utility of a given meeting is inversely proportional to its length and the number of people attending.”
There may be a corollary involving number of handouts or refreshments.
According to my referrer logs, this page is catching hits from people looking for Robert’s Rules of Order. Good old Henry Martyn Robert, no relation. ;)
I’d recommend this fine Wikipedia article on the topic.
VoodooPad is a standalone wiki-like desktop notepad application from Flying Meat software, for Mac OS X. It is generally user-friendly, and even neo-wikizens can grasp its concepts quickly. Some GTD adherents have begun experimenting with the program as their main action repository.
You can download VoodooPad for a free 15-page-per-document trial — or try out the feature-limited VoodooPad Lite with no page limit — to get a sense of what it’s all about.
Check out Getting Things Done With VoodooPad for ideas of how GTD and VoodooPad can fit together.
Under the Pages menu is “Run as script” which will take the text on a given page and run it in the terminal as a script. All sorts of applications.
To utilize VoodooPad as a sort of blog or journal, use date strings for page names, e.g. “2005-03-24”. You can then create month pages (“2005-03”) and list+link the days out there for archives. Upcoming meeting or appointment? Create its day ahead of time, then you’ll have a visual reminder of it when you get around to that day. (This tip applies to most wiki ware.) I use this for meeting notes, putting them on the proper day and linking them to related Project or Department pages. (Back Links really help here.)
As usual, learning the keyboard shortcuts will speed up and otherwise improve your user experience tremendously. For example, create a new page using the Cmd-Shift-o (letter o) shortcut instead of Cmd-n and it will either create the page if it doesn’t exist, or take you to that page if it already exists.
