Back from Vacation

Laura and I just got back from our month long, eleven city escapade (Phoenix, Flagstaff, Grand Canyon, Vegas, Calgary, Vancouver, San Diego, Encenada, Cabo San Lucas, Los Angeles, San Francisco). It was truly an amazing experience and Laura and I both came home promising to vacation more often. Over the course of the next several weeks, I’m going to post about the trip as I go through the 1400 pics/vids and decide what to keep and what to toss. I figure it’s the best way to remember the trip and avoid giving Laura a blank look on my face when she asks me “Remember that drive from Santa Barbara to Monterey” three weeks from now :-).

Getting back to work after a month of absence when you’re an entrepreneur means only one thing: overtime. When I got back, the amount of work needed to be sorted through was overbearing, so I turned to David Allen and his Getting Things Done – The Art of Stress Free Productivity book. I’ve been using Omnifocus, an organizational tool developed with the GTD concept in mind since December of 2007, but never read the book. After reading the first 60 pages of the book, I feel like I have the basic tools of organization at my finger tips and proceeded to dive into my Omnifocus projects, reorganized them, assigned due dates and defined clear expected outcomes (i.e. acceptance tests). Yesterday, I was able to complete 17 different action items (i.e. “To-Dos”) which took off some of the stress induced heat. For today, I have gardening related activities to knock off the list as my grass is as burnt as a defenceman trying to stop a rushing Alex Ovechkin.

Niraj.