“But soft, what light from yonder window breaks? ’Tis the East, and Juliet is the sun”.
Sunrise over Rottingdean (you can just make out the windmill on the edge of the old golf course), taken from the sea wall of Brighton Marina. This letter took me ages to take, just because I needed a location with decent scenery that wasn’t going to take me ages to get to at some ungodly hour of the morning. This was under a minute from our holiday apartment in Brighton Marina, and I was rewarded for my early get-up with a beautiful sky.
I confess to being something of a creature of habit and routine. If I don’t sing “I locked the door and the door’s locked” to the tune of ‘I Fought The Law’ when I lock up in the morning, I worry all day I’ve left the house unsecured. If I don’t have a coffee between 10 and 11 of a morning, I get a bit grumpy. And the weekend hasn’t started until I’ve had my Friday evening G&T.
It took a while for this ritual to become fully established. The bewildering array of Gins and Tonics available on the average supermarket shelf leads, in my experience, to decision by discount, the gin and tonic of the next few weeks being determined by what’s on offer at the point of purchase. This can lead to some interesting discoveries, but more often it just gives disappointing or undistinguished results.
So, as you’d expect, I set out to get myself an opinion. I generally prefer my cocktails sharp and dry, so was looking for a combination of spirit, mixer and garnish that would stand up to each other without introducing any unnecessary sweetness.
My go-to gin is classic Tanqueray Export. It’s ginny enough to stand out in a cocktail; more aromatic than a Gordon’s or Bombay Sapphire, but not as overpoweringly so as some of the specialist or premium gins. I love the Botanist, from Islay distillery Bruichladdich, but found it overcomplicated a G&T. I also really like the cold-distilled Oxley Gin, which has a wonderfully clean ginniness, but I don’t think it justifies the £50/l price tag.
I don’t know why I was surprised that the majority of the name-brand tonic waters are really quite sugary. Schweppes and every supermarket own-brand I tried were too sweet for my taste. Of the supermarket own-brands, only Waitrose’s didn’t have a horrible artificial aftertaste (but it was still too sweet). Britvic was slightly less sweet, but the driest (and therefore the favourite) by far was Fever Tree. It’s definitely more expensive than the big brand alternatives, but it’s not like I’m having them every day. Yet.
Finally, a note on garnish. Purists tell me that lime is the traditional slice for a G&T, but in my house lime is for rum- or cachaca-based drinks. I like a lemon slice, with a small squeeze of lemon in the bottom of the glass before I build the drink.
Since this original taste test, Fentiman’s brought out a tonic water, for about the same price. We were given some as a substitute for the Fever Tree in our online shop, but weren’t impressed.
Everything has to be folded
My name is Tim, and I’m a pagefolder.
I’d like to think I have a healthy relationship with my Stuff. I try to look after it, but I’m always secretly pleased when something new gets a bit of a scratch or a ding, so I can stop being precious about it.
Books, however, are another matter. I love reading, but I abuse my books purposefully and without mercy. I object strongly to the fetishisation of the printed word, to the idea that the act of printing and binding confers value upon the text, no matter the quality of the writing. And I hate being told books are ‘precious’.
Books are for reading. Books are for poring through and marking passages in pencil. Books are for cramming into your coat pocket as your train gets into the station; for chucking into a bag at the last minute; for reading in places with water, and sand and grass and mud. Books are for lending to friends and giving to strangers.
I got fed up of flipping between the text and footnotes in my copy of Ulysses at Uni - I tore my copy in half down the spine to make it easier. I am on my third copy of The Big Sleep, the previous two having lost pages and covers to their annual rereadings. I have bought Getting Things Done eight times in total, and have gifted, lent, defaced and lost every copy.
So yeah, I fold my page corners. And it warms my heart when I find someone’s got there first.
I suppose this would have been an obvious choice anyway, but the inspiration for this came from going to the Tate Lichtenstein retrospective on the same day as having an email conversation with my friend Cathy, Who is currently undertaking a set of photos inspired by artists.
The composition here is inspired by Lichtenstein’s Golf Ball. I set a tripod up on my desk, and sat the golf ball (borrowed from my father-in-law) on my wedding ring to stop it rolling around.
OK, so I got properly stuck on this letter and have cheated horribly. This isn’t a Foxtrot. It’s a Foxglove. But what’s a syllable between friends, eh?
Some Milk, yesterday
I’ve been using Remember The Milk as my task manager of choice ever since I started doing Getting Things Done in 2008. RtM is a flexible and robust online task manager, which fulfilled my main need of syncing between mobile devices while also being usable at work via a web app. While it’s not specifically GTD-focussed, RtM has several features which, with some fiddling, allow a GTD approach to be maintained. As well as being assigned to lists, tasks can be given tags and locations, and Smart Lists can be created from this metadata using the very powerful Search syntax.
I’ve had more-or-less the same setup for the last 3 or 4 years, with only the occasional tweak needed to keep things ticking along, and it’s been well worth the $25 annual Pro subscription. Recently, though, I’ve started to find myself bumping against the limitations inherent in any system coerced into doing a job it wasn’t designed for. Two aspects in particular were sticking points: Projects, and Tickler Items. Ahem.
In GTD, a Project is anything which requires more than two actions to accomplish. But one of the beautiful things about the GTD workflow is that you don’t have to know this when you capture it; that’s for later. The lack of an easy way in RtM to take a task and convert it into a project (with its own associated tasks) at the appropriate time meant that I only did this for Big Projects, and a number of ill-defined multi-step tasks languished on my list.
Tickler items, apart from having an obviously hilarious and unfortunate nomenclature, were another hugely powerful aspect of GTD which I never satisfactorily implemented. A tickler file, after which is named Merlin Mann’s hugely influential 43 Folders, is what allows a task to be “incubated” until such time as one is able to deal with it (this is not the same as a due date). For example, my MOT is due on the 8th May. I can get it done anytime during the month leading up to then, but until the 8th April there is no point it being on my mind. A tickler file allows this action to only appear to me when it is relevant, and despite much hacking of Smart lists and due dates, RtM couldn’t provide a satisfactory way of handling this.
Eventually it all got too much. Maybe I was procrastinating, but at some point last month I started looking for another service. Thankfully, Macdrifter had done much of the heavy lifting, with a two-part breakdown of basically every task manager in the entire internets. I tried Nozbe and Toodledo before settling on Nirvana. Last week, I moved all of my life out of RtM and migrated to Nirvana full-time.
Nirvana has been built with GTD in mind, and it shows, from the GTD-consistent naming conventions (Contexts not Tags, Actions not Tasks) to the thoughtful design which allows you to step through the 5-step workflow easily and intuitively. One side-effect of it being so strictly designed around GTD principles is that I find am forced to process items more thoroughly and I therefore have less unprocessed Stuff floating around in my system.
It has well-implemented support for Projects (including converting an Action to a Project in one click) and allows for ‘Scheduled’ actions, which is a much less silly name than ‘Tickler’. There’s also a very powerful feature called ‘Reference Lists’ which solves the problem of lists of things that need to be captured but are not yet (and might never be) Actions - details of jobs gone out to pitch but not actually won, for example. These can be easily converted to active Projects and Actions with one click.
Nirvana is missing one thing - a native iPad app - which I thought would be a dealbreaker, but the web app is very usable in Safari and overall, the benefits of not having to battle against my own hacks outweigh the slight inconvenience of not having touch-optimised targets.
I’d still recommend Remember The Milk to anyone looking for an online task manager, whether they’re interested in practising GTD or not. It has a lot of powerful features and the free account isn’t unnecessarily hobbled. However, if you’re planning on jumping into GTD with both feet, Nirvana is the better, more fully-featured option.