I've got nothing interesting of length to discuss today, so thought as I often do that I'd string together the random notes I've been collecting on my Treo this week. Enjoy, and I'll speak with you again tomorrow.

--New cellphone audio report - recorded at a karaoke night! Goddamnit, how are my friends Kate and Anna always seeming to convince me to go out to karaoke nights with them? Well, it helped this time I guess that they didn't actually tell me it was a karaoke night until after I got there. Anyway, here is a five-minute conversation with my friend Anna, recorded at the bar on my phone using the free service Audioblogger.com - about what a bunch of sneaky fuckers she and Kate are, and how Anna is expecting her performance of a Carole King song to go later in the evening. ("Anytime I do this song, people are always telling me what a great Carly Simon cover that was. It's not Carly Simon, motherfuckers!")

--Okay, all you fellow "Getting Things Done" dorks - get ready for some more dorky GTD thoughts! (And all you non-GTD dorks can skip to the next item right now, if you want.) GTD, of course, is a remarkably effective time-management system invented by corporate veteran and beachcoming Buddhist David Allen, which many of us have built an almost religious cult around in the last year or two, because it really does have that kind of profound effect when you use it correctly, all of it based on ideas that just naturally make logical sense. And there are of course lots of resources on the web already for learning how GTD actually works (just Google the subject for officially one billion useful links), so I'm not going to get into it here myself, but do want to reiterate the part most important for today's thoughts on the matter - how it's fundamentally based on creating a series of lists, everything from "stuff I might try at 60 if I'm rich and retired by then" to "shit to pick up at the grocery store the next time I'm out." And since nothing stays on these lists for very long, there's no need for constantly reordering them; you simply list it once, then cross it off when you're done. And that's partly why I use a paper notebook, for example, for my own GTD implementation, because that's an easier format to me for quickly jotting down quick thoughts, and since I don't have to start each day reordering a bunch of lists before I can do anything else.

Another thing I happen to do as well is read the web feeds for a number of GTD-related blogs out there, like Lifehacker and 43 Folders and the like; and this is another cool thing about how Allen has set up the GTD system, that you're encouraged to put together whatever kind of implementation best works in your life, so that users are always coming up with these ingenious little things that they're then sharing with other users at these blogs. And one of the things I've been watching this year with some interest is what I think most call "tiddlers," although I might not be using that term correctly (and I don't know why they call them tiddlers in the first place, either).

Anyway, the idea is that there might be certain times in your particular life when the unsorted action list of Allen's, designed to be the most detailed kind of list in GTD, is still not enough; when you find youself adding a hundred new items to one particular action list, for example, and simply need to sort it further to have any chance at getting through it. This is where the tiddler comes in - it's simply an additional method of sorting tacked on to the end of a GTD action list, doing a small amount of constant sorting based on importance, which is usually a no-no in the GTD system.

Say, for example, you're a public-relations executive, and that most of your action lists (like "things to do at the store," "things to do at home") have the usual 10 to 30 items at any given time, like what Allen recommends for GTD action lists; but that a few of your lists (like "phone calls" or "physical one-on-ones") might have 200 items or more at any given moment. What you might do, then, is further sort your phone-call list into three even more specific lists - "Must call," "should call" and "could call," for example, with the idea that you must get through all the calls on the first list by the end of that day. Or assign a priority number to each call on the list, from 1 to 10, and each morning sort the list in descending order. Technically it's not something Allen recommends, because he doesn't want you getting obsessed with sorting your lists and not getting anything actually done, but in this case it's ingeniously applied - it doesn't interfere with any of the normal GTD process, with you actually compiling your phone-call list the normal GTD way you always do, but simply adds one more tiny bit of additional sorting power for specific rare cases when you need it.

And I don't have nearly as busy a life right now as to need a tiddler as part of my GTD system, but I could see a day (especially as I get closer and closer to my arts center being open for business) that such an additional thing would be needed for a certain amount of my action lists. And this I think is an interesting thing about it all, is that it seems smarter to maintain a tiddler specifically in an electronic format, since a necessary part of it involves resorting its items every single day. And this of course is the irony of my particular life - that when it comes to most subjects, I'm otherwise a high-tech-loving, bleeding-edge-embracing nerd, but curiously Luddite when it comes to my GTD implementation. So a situation like that would finally give me a chance to try some of that GTD software I'm always reading such good things about, like TiddlyWiki and Briefcase and more.