I finally got around to actually doing something about my computer's security. I have realized for quite some time that hard drives are finite entities that can and do die. Now I have decided that when that happens to me, I don't want it to matter. At the advice of Oliver Gassner I have signed up for service at mozy.com. Since I have almost 10 gigs of stuff on my harddrive (mostly photos; a lot of it from sites-of-memory.de), I opted immediately for their "unlimited" service at $5 per month. It will now continuously and automatically keep another version of everything on my harddrive in an earthquake-secure vault in Utah.

It feels good to have taken action before something happens.

I am facing a huge wave of new work starting in April and have trying to get organized. A little over a year ago, I read David Allen's Getting Things Done at the recommendation of my friend Oliver Gassner. I quickly adapted it to my needs as an academic (the examples from the book are all from the corporate world) and, unlike new year's resolutions and plans to "finally clean up my desk," I actually have stuck to the system. It has improved my peace of mind and productivity.

There are still a few things I would like to do better, however. I still work only with a paper system, and my wish list requires automation, so this is more a request for software ideas for the future than anything else.

Here is what I would like to have:

Wish #1

- I create a page for each project that includes a list of actions that need to be done for that project.

- For each action, I name a “place” or context (office, computer, town, home, etc.)

- …and do so in priority. So the list shows the actions in order of priority.

- I create a page for each place or context.

So far, so good. That is pretty standard GTD methodology.

Now: On that place/context page, I want the system to AUTOMATICALLY put the top action from each project that is marked for that context into the list. The lists on the context pages thus show one action per relevant project – the most important. In other words, I want to note actions only in their project pages and have the place/context pages filled automatically. Is there a system that will do this?

Wish #2

My work life is very much based on a weekly rythm. My online classes work in weekly units. Each class is some variable number of weeks long, eight to 16 weeks. They start at various times. When I have five, six or seven classes going at once, that can get pretty messy. I would like a calendar that does not show days, but weeks. Each week should have the calendar days clearly visible. The content of the week box would be a list of classes with the week number after each class. That way, I could see at a glance, This week, "world civ II" is in week 3, "war and society" is in week 6, "international politics" is in week 5, etc.

I could do this by hand, but I would have to make the calendar myself with Word or something. I would like to be able to just fill in the first week of a class and have the rest of the weeks fill in themselves. Office Outlook doesn't have a weekly view that will do this without cluttering it with other appointments - and it forces me to assign the class to a particular day.

Anybody have any ideas?