I have not adhered to the GTD practice yet but try to keep only five or so really important e-mails in my inbox and archive the rest.
David Hall's Life List
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1. Become a better programmer
1 cheer952 people -
2. Read more books
2 cheers10,972 people -
3. write a book
3 cheers25,998 people -
4. See all the films that have won the Best Picture Oscar
1 cheer305 people -
5. Write more
1 cheer3,494 people -
6. Be more sociable
1 cheer712 people -
7. Write for a living
2 cheers329 people -
8. write more poetry
1 cheer914 people -
9. Answer e-mail in time
1 entry . 1 cheer36 people -
10. create silly things
1 cheer32 people -
11. Eat less junk food
1 cheer396 people -
12. Maintain my personal notebook daily
2 cheers14 people -
13. re-learn calculus
1 cheer48 people -
14. Learn to draw/paint.
1 cheer102 people -
15. write essays, articles and blog entries to get my ideas out in the world
1 cheer32 people -
16. Have my wisdom teeth taken out
124 people -
17. digitalize all the family photos
1 cheer67 people -
18. spend an entire day watching the extended version of all three Lord of the Rings movies back-to-back-to-back
1 cheer1,107 people -
19. wake up when my alarm clock goes off
1 cheer7,511 people -
20. write about the books that I'm reading
9 people -
21. Connect my blog more closely to my website
5 people -
22. work on my German
1 cheer17 people -
23. learn to sing
1 cheer2,592 people -
24. learn to take better photos
100 people -
25. start to play the piano again
1 cheer82 people -
26. commit random acts of kindness
4 cheers229 people -
27. Get a PhD
1 cheer2,776 people -
28. work for google
1 cheer395 people -
29. create a list of 100 must-read books and read them.
1 cheer990 people -
30. learn calligraphy
449 people -
31. Learn to speak Japanese
1 entry . 1 cheer794 people -
32. watch all six Star Wars movies (and Clone Wars) in a week.
1 entry15 people -
33. find a job that makes me happy
527 people -
34. Keep a journal
3,012 people -
35. Graduate with my Master's Degree
11 people -
36. Study German every week
2 people -
37. end it
96 people -
38. Stop communicating with people who don't think I'm important enough to them
1 cheer1 person -
39. Write the great novel of our generation.
3 people
I bought Leopard two weeks ago. It solves this problem by saving all downloads in special folder on the dock. Or: Safari does I still have to solve the problem with Firefox placing everything on the desktop.
I grew up in a family where Japanese electronics was the norm. Every time we visited someone who didn’t have a Sony TV I would feel irritated over the bad (non-Trinitron) picture. I learnt the ownership structure of the Japanese conglomerates before I even knew the names of all the countys of my homeland.
Whenever my dad talked about Japan regardless of topic (economics, population, Kurosawa, WWII) I would listen carefully (not that I didn’t always do that).
In fourth grade I wrote a school paper on Japan together with my classmate Jenny. It was way more ambitious than any of the other pupils created. They copied whatever text they had found about the country they had chose to write about onto paper and drew something onto it.
I, on the other hand, looked in a number of books and encyclopedias and wrote a coherent text where my classmates couldn’t produce more than short sentences full of spelling errors. The paper Jenny and (mostly) I wrote wasn’t handed in as a handwritten paper with pencil smears. Instead I spent some time on my father’s workplace to enter the text into a word processor, give it a multi-column layout and print it on a Canon (of course) laser printer.
Eight years later when I had to choose a subject for my special project in high school it was no surprise that I chose Japan, the Japanese post-war economic miracle to be more specific.
Despite my fascination of Japan, its culture, business, technology and history I have never been there. To fully appreciate it I think I have to learn the language as well as the customs. (Of course it could be fun to compete with my sister who studies Mandarin at university level.)


