If you want to give the manual version of SVN a go, check out the WordPress instructions here.

A Word on SVN

SVN is a code repository that provides superb versioning and access controls for development teams. These types of tools are particularly necessary in large development groups where many developers might be working on the same code. If you’re like me, you may have only the faintest idea as to what SVN does. Well, not to fear. These next two videos are going to tell you exactly what you need to do in order to get your plugin’s code into the repository.

Configuring Aptana for Subversion Integration

Aptana is an IDE that is based on the open source Eclipse IDE project. The following video shows you how to download and configure Aptana for connecting to your repository.

You probably noticed that the sound was cut off there at the end.  ScreenToaster was having some problems and it was cutting off recording audio at 4:00 mins.  And I’m so bad at doing these videos that I couldn’t bear trying it yet again for 10 seconds more sound.  Basically I said, “The Subclipse box will show up in the bottom right.  And check out part 3, which brings it home!”

Once you’ve configured Aptana and SVN (Subclipse), you’re now ready to make the connection to your remote WordPress plugin repository.  So, check out video 3 which demonstrates the steps for getting your plugin files into the repository.

Cheers!

Byron

Release Candidate 2 version 0.2.996 (RC3 for 0.3.00) now available at WordPress.

Final Release Candidate before going public with 0.3.00!

I need to do some documentation.  Launch the new home for PhotoSmash.

Note!  This version has Sorting (only 2 choices right now – Date Uploaded – Ascending or Descending…more to come).

Going live very soon!!! I hope…

Beta Testers of 0.2.99?:

First: after uploading this version is to go to Plugin Info and run the Update Database.  If you still get a Database Warning in PhotoSmash Settings page, your database needs to be updated.

Second: note that the behavior of custom forms has changed.  Note that you no longer have to turn on Custom Form usage in PhotoSmash Settings.  You can get a custom form to work by setting it in the Gallery Settings (there is a mass update button in PhotoSmash Settings/Advanced tab/Default upload form setting – this button will update all existing galleries to use the selected custom form). Or you can use the shortcodes in your post:   [photosmash form=your_form_name]

Additional security enhancements around URL’s were made to this version.  It now utilizes WP 2.8 URL sanitizing, and remains backwards compatible with 2.7.

Beta Testers wanted! Go to the PhotoSmash Other Versions download page and download the Development version.  When you unzip, you should have version 0.2.992.  I didn’t make this 0.3.00 so you can use the automatic update feature of WP to upgrade to the Gold version.

There are tons of new features, so please beat it up and let me know what you find.  I’ve tried, kind of unsuccessfully to hide the complexity from the Plugin-n-go user of PhotoSmash, so if you have any suggestions for making the basic plugin more friendly…PLEASE let me know!

A new website, Smashly.net, is on its way also.  It’s just a shell right now, but it will ultimately house PhotoSmash, Supple Forms, and the Smashly WordPress community.  I want to have it ready for the PhotoSmash 0.3.00 official release…we shall see.

Thanks for your help!

Byron

Permanent Alert (posted 4/16/2009): Please note that using 0777 as a folder permission is highly discouraged (DESPITE MY RECOMMENDATIONS IN THE COMMENTS BELOW). Please note that I no longer recommend setting folder permissions to 0777, but rather the upload folders should have 0755. Version 0.2.55 includes the Plugin Info page in the admin section that helps you determine what your permissions are and will let you set them appropriately (unless SAFE MODE is on in your PHP config).

[Here begins the ORIGINAL Post]

I am pleased to announce the release of my first “real” WordPress plugin, PhotoSmash Galleries.  While there are at least a dozen photo gallery plugins available for WordPress, PhotoSmash adds something to the WordPress world that wasn’t there before (at least, I think so).  What could that possibly be? you ask.  Well, PhotoSmash makes it possible for your users to upload photos to galleries right from your Posts or Pages.

For directions in using the plugin, see the Usage section below.

Download:

Download at the PhotoSmash page on WordPress

View readme.txt
There is a demo at:  PMOPress.com

Features:

• Produces XHTML 1.0 Transitional markup for public facing pages
• User contributable photo galleries
• AJAX photo uploads
• Control who can upload images: admin only, authors & contributors (and higher), or registered users and higher
• Moderate images uploaded by registered users (Admins and authors are automatically approved)
• Receive email alerts for new images that need to be moderated
• Options page for setting general defaults or specific gallery settings
• Auto-adding of photo galleries
• Multiple galleries per post, added using a simple tag system
• Integrates with popular image viewing systems like Lightbox and Shadowbox
• Tweak appearance through the included css file
• Allows loading images to galleries by URL
• Option to set thumbnails to crop to size or maintain aspect raito
• Various display options for captions, including displaying the contributor’s name and website link
• Admins can set how many images per row in the galleries (can be set by gallery)
• Admins can set how many images per page ( 0 turns off pagination )
• Supports Role Manager plugin with “Upload to PhotoSmash” capability (when assigned to a subscriber, they can upload to any gallery and “Photosmash ?” capability (where ? is the gallery ID…when assigned to a subscriber, they can upload to that specific gallery, regardless of the minimum upload user)
• Option for a URL field on the upload form. Submitted URLs can be used as links for captions

Requested Features

I’ll add requested features here as people ask, so I don’t lose track:

1. Give an option to show uploader’s name and link to website
2. Allow image upload by URL.
3. RSS or subscribe for notifications by email
4. Use the on page upload to add photos to NextGen Gallery (I have no illusions about besting NextGen…I’m just aiming for fast and simple, so I don’t mind this one bit )
5. Import photos from existing library
6. Upload a zip file of photos
7. Multiple photo uploads – swf uploader
8. Need to remove the “by-reference” indicator from certain function calls in admin….causing PHP call-by-reference warning.
9. Need to reduce the final file size from 5M to a user configurable variable in the ajax-upload.php settings…it’s letting uploaded files stay huge – slow to download with little real quality gain on screen
10. Need to show Memory capabilities for server in the admin page.
11. Think about breaking up the Defaults page from the Gallery Edit page….just something to consider
12. Upload photos from Flickr or Photobucket
13. Allow admins to set how many photos per row…use table for that
14. Add paging to galleries, allowing admins to set # of photos per page
15. Add CoolIris support (that thing just blows me away)
16. Add tabs to admin pages
17. Send email to Subscribers who upload images: 1) upload successful (maybe – they’ll see it on the gallery anyway if they’re logged in – can’t send an email otherwise) 2) image was moderated (definitely), allow admin to type brief msg or use default msg.
18. Create special role that can be assigned to individual subscribers without turning on uploading for all subscribers
19. Auto-resize upload (allow admin to set maximum pixel size of final images)
20. Create watermarks from custom image.
21. Allow creating new thumbnails to replace the originals.
22. Add option for URL field on the upload form, with options to use URLs in captions.
23. Latest additions widget
24. Mashup pages by tags, contributors, latest
25. RSS
26. Photo-level Comments
27. Star ratings
28. Option for contributors to delete images
29. Sorting
30. Shortcode for Showing individual images
31. Dashboard image approval box
32. Star rating system for photos
33. Upload files other than images (mp3, videos, documents)
34. is there no end to the freaking list???

Soooooo….if anyone makes any enhancements to the code that they think other users might like, please let me know.

Most sites don’t need to let users upload photos, and PhotoSmash handles that requirement as well by letting you set a minimum role for uploading by gallery. If you’re simply looking to do photo galleries that only you or your authors can upload to, you’ve got lots of options in the WordPress cosmos. Where PhotoSmash differentiates there is that it lets you add images directly within your posts and pages without going to the Admin section.

Personally, I needed PhotoSmash for my CityTracs website which I’m porting over to WordPress.  I want to let users upload their photos to the destination galleries there, hence the origins of PhotoSmash. Hopefully, PhotoSmash will find its niche on the Web.

Screenshots

Ahhh…the screenshots:

Here’s a shot from the PhotoSmash options page in the Admin…when you’re actually in there, scroll down to work with individual galleries:

And finally a shot of the AJAX image upload box:

– How to Use PhotoSmash

Using PhotoSmash is extremely simple:

1. Download PhotoSmash and unzip…you should wind up with a folder named: bwb-photosmash
2. Upload the bwb-photosmash plugin folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder
3. In the Plugins page of your WordPress Admin, activate PhotoSmash
4. There are 3 ways to add new galleries to your posts:
   1. Under settings, go to the PhotoSmash options page and turn on Auto-adding of galleries.  You can auto-add galleries to the top of each post or the bottom of each post by changing the drop down to the correct selection.  Click Update Defaults button to save changes
   2. Also in the PhotoSmash options page, scroll down below the PhotoSmash defaults section and select New in the gallery drop down.  Fill in the details you want to use for the new gallery, and click the Save Gallery button to create the new gallery.  After the save is complete, select your new gallery from the Gallery drop down and click the Edit button to retrieve it.  The code (like [photosmash id=1] )for adding this specific gallery to any post or page will be in red beneath the Gallery drop down.  Cut and past the code anywhere you like in your posts or pages.  You can also specify multiple specific galleries within a single post or page by putting the tags with their ids in as needed.
   3. PhotoSmash can also create galleries on the fly for specific posts.  Simply enter the following code anywhere you like in posts or pages and a gallery will be automatically created:   [photosmash] The code should include everything in red, including the braces and the = sign.
5. To add photos to your galleries, go to the post or page and click Add Photos link.  I’m not sure what the size limit is right now.  It may vary based on your php.ini settings.
6. If you choose to let Registered users upload photos, their photos will be visible to Admins and the themselves only.  Admins will be presented with buttons for Approve or Bury.  Approve is self explanatory.  Bury simply deletes the record from the database and deletes (unlinks in PHP terms) the files from the bwbps and bwbps/thumbs/ folders in the wp-content/uploads/ folder
7. You will receive an email alert for photos requiring moderation.  These alerts use a pseudo-cron like scheduling scheme that is triggered whenever someone views one of your blog’s pages.  You can set the alert program to check every 10 minutes, 1 hour, or 1  day, or not at all.
8. To edit a photo’s caption, go to the PhotoSmash options page in wp-admin.  Select the desired gallery from the drop down and click Edit.  When the page comes back, the images for that gallery will show up at the bottom of the page.  There will be text boxes beneath image allowing you to edit captions.  Click save to save caption edits.  Approve buttons will be present for images needing moderation.  Delete will be available for all images.
9. To integrate with Lightbox or Shadowbox, simply include the correct “rel” information in the Gallery specific options on the PhotoSmash options page.  You can set your general PhotoSmash default rel in PhotoSmash Defaults section so that any newly created galleries will automatically get the rel.   For Lightbox, set the rel to lightbox.  Shadowbox can use lightbox or shadowbox.  To group a galleries images together as an album for Shadowbox, use something like:  shadowbox[album] as the gallery’s rel.
10. To prevent a post from receiving a gallery when Auto-add is activated, simply enter the following tag anywhere in the post’s content:  

    [/ps]
    

11. To use with Role Manager plugin:  the Role Manager plugin lets you give specific subscribers additional capabilities.  PhotoSmash supports these capabilities by allowing you to give users additional access to galleries that their roles do not allow (e.g. a Subscriber could upload to a gallery that is set to Admins only).  Here are the steps:
    1. Install the Role Manager Plugin (see link above)
    2. In the Users menu box in Admin, click on Capabilities
    3. Add a capability called:  Upload to PhotoSmash
    4. To assign this capability to a user, click Authors & Users
    5. Edit the user you are targeting
    6. At bottom of user profile screen, check the Upload to PhotoSmash checkbox in the Assign extra capabilities section and Save (Update) user…this user can now upload to any gallery regardless of the minimum role you have specified for those galleries.
    7. To target a specific gallery, in #3, create the capability:  Photosmash ? (where ? is the gallery ID #, e.g.  Photosmash 10 ).  You can find the gallery ID # in the Gallery Settings screen in PhotoSmash admin section.  It is the same number that is used in the shortcode that can be used to specify a gallery.  Choose this capability in #6 instead of the Upload to Photosmash capability.  Assigning both would be redundant since Upload to Photosmash gives access to all galleries.  You can assign as many specific galleries to a user as you like.
    8. To add the URL field to the upload form and use the user submitted URLs as the link for your captions, there are 2 settings needed to use feature: 1) you must turn on the field to show up in the Upload Form. Do this in PhotoSmash Settings / Gallery Defaults tab, the checkbox at the bottom of form. 2) There are 2 options in Gallery Settings and PhotoSmash Settings pages under the Viewing tab and in the Image caption style that will use the User submitted URL as the caption link…look at option #3 and the last one.
12. Whew…that’s about it….I think.

This plugin is available through WordPress.org so you will be able to upgrade it with the wonderful automatic plugin upgrade feature in WP 2.7.

If you’ve got ideas, or better yet, code to make PhotoSmash better, please let us know.  Maybe somebody has ideas on how to integrate Flash gallery viewing like NextGen gallery has, or making the upload form more attractive.   Anyway, I’d love to hear from you.

Plugin Conflicts/Recommendations

• Lightbox – there are 2 versions…one works, one doesn’t. This one does.
• Some plugins that utilize the jquery-forms javascript code may conflict. One user found that a Chat box plugin was making continual ajax calls back to the server. This caused the PhotoSmash upload form to fire indiscriminately. You could still upload an image by selecting it and clicking submit, but you would get the 400k error for no reason. If someone has a suggestion as to how I might prevent his problem, I’m all ears…it appears to stem from common use of jquery.forms.js.
• Flutter version .2.51 causes javascript errors in IE 6 when using Lightbox and possibly even other [?]box image viewers.  Haven’t tested with IE 7 or 8.  FF appears OK.  Check out Supple Forms for a Flutter alternative

The Belated Changelog

• 0.2.62 (4/29/2009) – Fixed url validation on uploading images. Fixed css to make gallery table 100% width. Added options for using user submitted url’s as the thumbnail links (option must be set in Gallery Settings to become effective).  Add option to make thumbnail and caption links target new windows (option is only under PhotoSmash Settings).
• 0.2.61 (4/27/2009) Fixed manual creation of new galleries to use PhotoSmash defaults. Now using Colin Verot’s upload class version 2.7 RC2.  Previous version had a Safe Mode “feature” that was causing 400k errors.
• New Feature: (4/26/2009) 0.2.6 URL field added to upload form. 2 options added to allow the image caption to link to those urls. See the Usage section for instructions on use.
• 0.2.55 (4/16/2009) Added Plugin Info page in admin to assist with trouble shooting. Checks folders and tables and server info. Server info code borrowed from the immanent NextGen Gallery plugin by Alex Rabe. Change in folder permission recommendations from 0777 to 0755. Plugin Info page helps with those permissions as well.
• 0.2.54 (4/6/2009) Fixed “delete gallery” error in bwbps.admin.php. Nonce security wasn’t configured properly.
• 0.2.52 & 0.2.53 (3/23/2009) Fixed implosion error in bwbps-photosmash.php on line 767.  Fixed a plugin conflict with redeclaring the JSON class when uploading.  This conflict was found with Twitter Tools.
• New Feature: (3/13/2009)  0.2.5 Added support for Role Manager plugin.  Can now grant specific subscribers access to upload to any gallery or to specific galleries regardless of the minimum roles.   See Usage notes for details.  Also, changed bwbps.js to allow IE uploads to show properly.  Were showing in a single column due to rendering of “margin: auto”
• 2 New Features + bug fixes: 0.2.4 (3/11/2009) Added Tabs to admin pages. Added pagination by gallery. Fixed use of admin defined captions for Add Photos link and Upload form upload message. Fixed CSS for IE for number of images per row.
• New Feature: 0.2.3 (3/8/2009) admins can set how many images to display per row…setting is by gallery.  Can also set default for new galleries
• 0.2.22 (3/6/2009) corrected XHTML validation error – replaced & with & in the ThickBox href on the Add Photos links.
• 0.2.21 (3/5/2009) corrected XHTML validation errors.  Corrected duplication of moderation nonce on front page.
• New Feature: 0.2.2 (3/4/2009) added options for displaying captions, including displaying contributor’s WordPress nicename and their URL
• New Feature: 0.2.1 (3/3/2009) added ability to upload images from a URL
• New Feature: 0.2.0  added the ability to choose to either maintain aspect ratio or crop when creating thumbnails.
• 0.1.99 – in bwbps-photosmash.php fixed <?= WINC to <?php echo WIND; ?>…this was causing some uses problems.  Changed bwbps.js to use standard $j(‘#bwbps_uploadfile’).val() instead of $j(‘input[@name=bwbps_uploadfile]‘).fileValue().
• 0.1.97 – now using JSON.php class in admin Photo Manager page for ajax calls….affects ajax.php. Fixed the same json_encode problem for PHP4 in admin as for the upload
• 0.1.96 – added the JSON.php class to ajax_upload.php to make json_encode compatible with PHP4.
• 0.1.95 – changed the code that handles image files to utilize WP_CONTENT_DIR and WP_CONTENT_URL. This was needed to deal with implementations of WP that did not use the root directory, or used non-standard (but perfectly acceptable) locations for their Content or Upload directories.

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to Colin Verot for making his upload class available through the GPL.  PhotoSmash uses Colin’s class.upload.php for manipulating images and making sure the correct folders exist.
• Thanks to Cory and Michal for their work on the JSON encoding class.
• Thanks to the WordPress community for sharing, inspiration, patience, and passion.
• Thanks to my alpha/beta debuggers…I won’t name names, because I don’t want to leave anyone out. But you can see much of there contributions in the first 120 comments below.
• Thanks to Alex Rabe for the immeasurable NextGEN Gallery, which has helped me figure out a few things and has provided inspiration and the occasional snippet of code…particularly in the area of the Tabs in admin pages and the styling on the pagination.

Finally, if you do end up liking PhotoSmash enough to use it, that will be a thrill for me.  If it makes your life easier in some way and you want to throw a little donation my way, that would be an even bigger thrill and much appreciated.  Either way, I hope you like P’Smash.

Jimmy Wales Headlines TechEd 2008

This year, SAP had web celeb Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, in to kick off the 2008 TechEd event in Las Vegas with a keynote on Monday night.  So, how was it?  Well, I don’t know what his reputation as a speaker is, but it wasn’t exactly a Steve Jobs level performance.  What he lacked in pizzazz, however, he made up for with his personal substance.

I’ve watched more than a few presentations from folks like Guy Kawasaki, Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates over the internet, but this was my first in-person celebrity speaker, so I was kind of hoping to be blown away.  It was good…just didn’t blow me away.  It is worth a listen if you’ve got an hour…sorry, the link is a stream, so you can’t download to your iPod (though Google could probably tell you how).  Here’s the link to the Jimmy Wales TechEd keynote.

Here’s a short list of accomplishments that SAP listed when introducing Jimmy:

• Creator of Wikipedia
• WikiMedia Foundation
• Founded Wikia.com in 2004
• Wikia Search
• Pioneer Award from EFF
• 12th on 2007 Forbes Web Celeb List
• 2008 co-chaired annual World Economic Forum in Middle East
• Board of Social Text
• Board of Creative Commons

With a to-do list like that, it’s a wonder he has time for an SAP event.

Some Wikipedia stats:

• 280,000+ volunteers
• 10M+ articles
• 150+ languages
• 31% of all internet users use it

Jimmy talked about the very humble beginnings of Wikipedia.  He started out in 2000 working on a free encyclopedia project called Nupedia and became frustrated with the “top-down” nature of that project where the articles were written by experts without user/community input.  In 2001, he did a restart with Wikipedia using the quintessential Web 2.0 notion of community produced content.  Check out the full timeline of Wikipedia’s history on, where else but, Wikipedia here.

Wikia and Other Projects

The idea of community being in control was very much a focus of Wale’s talk.  His new projects are also centered around that.  Wikia is one of his primary projects today, focused on allowing people to create topic focused wikis as well as democratizing search. The vision for Wikia is: To become the world’s largest sustainable, free-content, user controlled media company..

Frankly, if Wikia can get its kinks worked out on search, it provides some really awesome features that put the community in control of the search algorithm.

He discussed several of these briefly, including:

• Users can annotate results
• Edit the results text
• Star results to reorder results ranking for a given search term
• Highlight a result, allowing other users to see your highlighted result item

But let’s face it.  If any of these features ends up working, Google can have them in place with the single flex of a pinky.

One very cool thing Wikia are doing is using a tool called Grub to create a distributed web crawler.  Instead of having their servers crawl the web by themselves, they are hoping people will help them out like the Folding@home project, to use spare compute cycles (and bandwidth) to crawl the web for them.

Philosophy of Benevolence in Design

A guiding philosophy behind Jimmy’s work is what he calls “benevolence in design”.  You can see it completely at work in Wikipedia.  Benevolence in design says that most people are going to do the Right thing most of the time, so design your applications around that belief.

Now, if you’re an SAP guy and you’ve got any touch points with GRC (and even if you don’t), you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Over my fired, fried, and forgotten body!”

Well, you’ve got a point there when you’re talking about building software that is going to drive something that is regulated by SOX or the FDIC, the FDA, FAA, FCC, or pretty much anything that the government is going to take a good hard look at.

Benevolence…not Something They Teach in Business Schools

While benevolence by design says that you should build in means of fixing things when people step off the deep end and do something bad, this is usually not going to work in the business world where you have bosses or government agents who don’t fully appreciate the incredible benefits of living in a world where there are no locks on the doors that prevent people from doing random acts of kindness at will.

I saw this funny commercial last night.  This young woman was trying to sell her boss on some Green initiative (some tech company as I recall), and the boss was saying:

“That will be great news for the tree huggers and the greenies.  But my bosses don’t eat granola.”

That sentiment probably roundly applies to those of us in business software today where Benevolence in Design would be the issue versus energy savings.  Our bosses don’t really hold hands and sing campfire songs.

But let’s assume that we are running a business that is controlled and run by the community.  What benefits does this philosophy hold for our applications?  Here are a few:

• You erect no barriers that would discourage wide participation in building content and community
• You actually invite fanatical participation from people who want to ensure that their special areas of interest are not molested
• You build a society that appreciates the comfort of knowing that people are playing by the rules and when they don’t, they are discretely removed if they are incorrigible

One of my favorite quotes from Jimmy’s speech was:  Human life is possible at scale.  Ultimately, he’s right.  When we live in the context of each other, we have a mutually beneficial incentive for doing the right thing.  And ultimately, that’s really what SOX is trying to do in what some would call a Draconian fashion…bringing visibility to the goings and doings of business.

Thanks for a good talk, Jimmy.  I hope you wildly succeed in your vision: for everyone on earth to have free (as in speech and beer) access to the sum of human knowledge.

Byron

NetZero has a solution. It’s easy to use and it’s FREE! Of course, they want you to upgrade to their premium service, but the free entry level deal is perfectly usable.

The way it works is simple:

• You sign up and pick a phone number. You can pick one with your own area code, or get one in another city if you want.
• Set up your voice mail greeting
• Tell Private Phone how many rings before voice mail picks up
• Set alerts to email you or text you on your mobile when you get new voice maik

You’re off and running!People call you and leave a voice mail. You get an alert. The email alerts can even contain the voicemail. If you upgrade to a premium service, you can get the call forwarded.

You have to call them back on your real phone number, so if you want to keep your number anonymous and talk, you’ll need something like Jaxtr (check out the TechCrunch writeup).

The other very cool thing is that you can download messages or even embed links in your web pages/blogs, etc. You can leave yourself voice notes through your phone and save them to your website. I love the idea of being able to visually archive voice mail.

I’ve just started using this myself, so I don’t know of all the kinks, but I’m sure there must be some.

So, here’s a list of phone related links that may be of use:

• PrivatePhone.com – this is the NetZero offering
• Jaxtr – allows you to have your computer broker a phone call, thereby protecting the numbers of both parties
• 2ReCall.com – allows you to record a phone call by first dialing an 800 # before calling the other party
• GotVoice – similar to PrivatePhone without the extra phone #. Lets you manage your voice mail using your computer. You can get your regular voicemails emailed to you, or listen to them online. This is another one I’m excited about!
• 1-800-FREE411 -the name says it all…free 411 calls. Need a phone number, you don’t have to burn your cash on 411 calls. Just listen to a brief advertisement and 1-800-FREE411 gives you the info you need…for FREE!
• [Update] GrandCentral - this service has been getting good/mixed reviews from TechCrunch, NYT, and others. The idea is that GrandCentral will issue you a local phone number that you can give out in lieu of all your other numbers. You can set up rules relating to callers. When someone calls who isn’t whitelisted, they give their name and you get a call and decide whether to take the call or send to voicemail. Whitelisted callers are passed right through based on your rules. Theory sounds great…it’s still in Beta, so kinks may exist.

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-based

So…here’s the cheat sheet (my distillation of the Wikipedia article) :

2 Minute Rule

New task comes in…if it can be done in less than 2 minutes, just DO IT!

Core Principles

Collect

• Capture everything you need to remember
• Store it in your bucket (PDA, day timer, boxes, file cabinet)
• Process buckets at least once a week

Process

• Start at top
• 1 item at a time
• Don’t put anything back in the bucket
• For items that require action, do one of:
  • do it (2 minutes or less)
  • delegate it
  • defer it
• For items requiring no action, do one of:
  • file for reference
  • trash it
  • incubate for possible future action

Organize

• Next actions
  • Every item must be assigned a next action
• Projects
  • Periodically review to be sure it’s moving
  • Must have a next action assigned
• Waiting for
  • Must have list of “waiting fors”
  • Review list
  • Check action due or reminders needed
• Someday/Maybe
  • list of items that you may want to do someday

Review

• Next actions – review daily
• Projects, waiting for, and someday…at least weekly

Do

Make it simple and fun to do the actions…if you can!

Organization and Filing System

Calendars - should only be used for appointments and deadlines

Filing system - whatever you like…suggests alphabetically ordered folders. If something doesn’t fit an existing folder add a new one

Tickler file (43 folders) – suggests using 12 folders for the months…31 folders for days of the current month