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I will set up a special email address and forward any messages I have to have local copies of, using Thunderbird to suck them down.

I will uninstall Thunderbird as soon as I can. Another one of my favorite applications, Evernote, now supports auto-import from a POP account. Now, any email message worth saving locally will go straight into Evernote for archiving. If I forward messages with image attachments, Evernote will even perform OCR on the image and make any text searchable.

I have taken the first step toward uncharted territory, fully embracing having my data out there instead of in here. I feel so young!

Last week I decided to switch to Gmail as my primary email client from Thunderbird. I spent some time using it from work and started to enjoy its look, feel and features. Specifically its conversation threading, its ability to mute ongoing mailing list topics that I don’t care about, and its ability to just be out of my way.

It could use, however, a few improvements. The filtering is painful to set up. A few more options there would be nice. And the ability to delete a message and go to the next message with one keystroke. That I miss most of all.

I will set up a special email address and forward any messages I have to have local copies of, using Thunderbird to suck them down.

After a few days using Gmail, I gave Google Reader a try too. My three primary applications are Firefox, Thunderbird and GreatNews, my RSS feed reader. I imported all my feeds into Google Reader and it took about a day before I was comfortable with the keystrokes and process necessary to quickly read my feeds. Reader now supports Google Gears, so I can download content to browse locally offline with a single click.

The clincher, the point where I said this is the way to go for me, was when I looked down at my Windows taskbar and found it nearly bare. There was iTunes and Firefox. Nothing else. I had removed two desktop applications and replaced them with two separate tabs in Firefox.

I bought Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen the first year it was published and read it about once a year, every time I get the notion to be more organized and productive. My friend Eric calls the GTD followers a cult and looking around the Net, I can see his point. However, I bought my copy well before it became an Internet Sensation, so I have to get some credit for not just following sheeple.

Last week I decided yet again to become more organized and productive so I revisited GTD on the Net. I have always had a problem keeping it going, but that was a combination of lack of willpower on my part and failure to find a suitable implementation. I have tried many different methods, both online and offline, both paper and electronic, but none ever felt perfect or even good enough.

I think I finally found my perfect implementation: MonkeyGTD. MonkeyGTD is a standalone application built on TiddlyWiki which is a personal wiki written entirely in client-side Javascript. MonkeyGTD fits my needs because it is simple, yet tailored to GTD (get the 2.1 Alpha version). It runs locally, in any browser I use but it can be pushed to a server so I can synch up from various locations (work, home, where ever). Plus it is logical and well-structured–nothing feels terribly kludgy.

Right now I have been mailing the HTML file back and forth from work to home, but soon I will hookup a simple PHP page that will allow me to save to a server with a click.

If you are interested in GTD and like using a Wiki, give MonkeyGTD a try. If you are looking for a personal wiki to dump your brain into, give TiddlyWiki a try too.