Roughly the TRUTH

Stephen Covey and David Allen present the replays of two recent video casts to keep you centered and productive…

Here are the links and brief descriptions:

Forbes Live Video Chats | Stephen Covey

Forbes.com Vice President Michael Smith talks with the author of the seminal bestseller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey discusses how those seven habits continue to be relevant in an increasingly interconnected world and the evolution of management techniques.

David Allen Getting Things Done: Time and stress management… how to be more productive and get the most out of your time and life

In this fast paced, information rich hour, David Allen creates a mindmap of the core elements of GTD best practices to increase your productivity. You’ll learn how technology - in particular mindmapping using MindManager software – can be a powerful tool to support at least four of the best practices for Getting Things Done

These two leaders in their respective fields have provided a very useful framework for getting your life in order. If you like what you’ve see, I’d suggest the following books to supplement your interests:

Full Featured, Free & a Cinch to use…

If you’re familiar with 37signals’ “Backpack” application, you’ll have no problem getting used to it’s half sister - Zoho Planner. Zoho.com (a competitor of 37Signals) has just released an upgraded version of this personal/project planning application. I found it much more streamlined and less cluttered than it’s Backpack counterpart. Another huge advantage it has is the unlimited storage that accompanies the free user accounts (you may upload files to your account - not to exceed 10mb). You’re looking at $5 per month with Backpack and you still don’t even get as much storage space. I’ve just been using it for a day now, but am already hooked.

A brief overview of the features are as follows: there’s no apparent limitation to the number of pages you can create, and within each page you can add a description along with multiple occurences of To Do Lists, Notes, Appointments and Attachments. In addition to sharing these pages with others, Zoho Planner also provides a comprehensive overview of your To Do’s and Reminders. You can mess around with the demo sign-in and make up your own mind…or, if you’re looking for more opinions, here’s another recent review:

Web 2.0 Journal Product Review: “Zoho Planner” — The Zoho series of online software products from AdventNet has been growing quickly over the last year, and their Zoho Planner product has just been revamped. Designed specifically for the Web 2.0 era, Zoho Planner is an online service for managing task lists and appointments.

There is very little down side to this application, but a few things that I’d like to see added in the future are as follows: a print view (for use with paper planners); persistent URL’s for each individual page (helping integration with components of other various planning systems); sync or export capabilities with MS Outlook 2003 (a feature that no one has perfected to date - not even Microsoft itself)

For the record, I’m only using this as one component of my complete organizing system (based on Getting Things Done by David Allen & First Things First by Stephen Covey). Project planning and brainstorming appear to be the most effective uses for me; but it’s much more capable than this and may even meet all of your planning needs. I’ve had some difficulty finding reviews of this software, so please feel free to add your own or post links to others…thanks for reading!