I’m always extremely slow to pick up a trend (let alone a hype), in mathematics as well as in real life. It took me over a year to know of the existence of blogs and to realize that they were a much easier way to maintain a webpage than manually modifying HTML-pages. But, eventually I sometimes get there, usually with the help of the mac-dev-center. So, once again, I read their gettings things done with your mac article long after it was posted and completely unaware of the Getting Things Done (or GTD) hype.

At first, it just sounds as one of those boring managament-nonsense-peptalk things (and probably that is precisely what it generically is). Or what do you think about the following resume from Getting started with ‘Getting things done’ :

1. identify all the stuff in your life that isnÕt in the right place (close all open loops)
2. get rid of the stuff that isnÕt yours or you donÕt need right now
3. create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
4. put your stuff in the right place, consistently
5. do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
6. iterate and refactor mercilessly

But in fact there is also some interesting material around at the 43 folders website which bring this management-talk closer to home such as the How does a nerd hack GTD? post.

Also of interest are his findings after a year working with the GTD setup. These are contained in three posts : A Year of Getting Things Done: Part 1, The Good Stuff, followed by A Year of Getting Things Done: Part 2, The Stuff I Wish I Were Better At to end with A Year of Getting Things Done: Part 3, The Future of GTD?. If these three postings don’t get you intrigued, nothing else will.

So, is there something like GMD : Getting Mathematics Done? Clearly, I don’t mean getting theorems proved, that’s a thing of a few seconds of inspiration and months to fill in the gaps. But, perhaps all this GTD and the software mentioned can be of some help to manage the everyday-workflow of mathematicians, such as checking the arXiv and the web, maintaining an email-, pdf- and BiBTeX-database, drafting papers, books and courses etc.

In the next few weeks I’ll try out some of the tricks. Probably another way to state this is the question “which Apps will survive Tiger?” Now that it is official that Tiger (that is, Mac 10.4 to non-apple eaters) will be released by the end of the month it is time to rethink which of the tools I really like to keep and which is just useless garbage I picked up along the road. For example, around this time last year I had a Perl phase and bought half a meter or so of O’Reilly Perl-books. And yes I did write a few simple scripts, some useful such as my own arXiv RSS-feeds, some not so useful as a web-spider I wrote to check on changes in the list of hamepages of people working in non-commutative algebra and geometry. A year later I realize I’ll never become a Perl Monk. So from now on I want to make my computer-life as useful and easy as possible, relying on wizards to provide me with cool software to use and help me enjoy mathematics even more. I’ll keep you posted how my GMD-adventure goes.

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apple, arxiv, geometry, GMD, GTD, mac, non-commutative, OSX, Tiger

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Posted in iMath
Written on Thu, 14 April 2005 at 8:08 pm
Tags: apple, arxiv, geometry, GMD, GTD, mac, non-commutative, OSX, Tiger
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