As you may or may not know, I like to write these posts at MacStansbury.com ahead of time. However, sometimes I totally forget to put in a changed time, or I put in the wrong time. I had a post set up to post at 7 am, and I checked later and found out it wasn't set to post until 5 pm, or 17:00. One small slip, and my entire workflow is messed up.

My server's been doing a dance of joy for the last week (dance of joy meaning crashing intermittently), so I haven't watched it like a hawk as I usually do. That extra rest let me build up a thought reserve, and creativity begat posts. Not to fill up any one day with 17 articles, I spaced them out, in the future.

That's the wonder of WordPress, and all the popular content management systems, they let you schedule posts ahead. Because I can schedule things ahead of time, I get a neat, orderly schedule of posts. I like to keep the 7 am/5 pm times because the early post brings 'em in before work or during the day, while the late post gets 'em at home or while they should still be working, not watching the clock. Knowing the tendencies of the internet-enabled office worker is MacStansbury.com's greatest strength.

This weekend, while using my GTD app, I wrote in some lines, and it became apparent that there's something missing in my app: time. There's no due date, no code for NLT, no checkbox to show that I've missed a deadline. In fact, the only way to put that statement would be to write something like this: Get car out of shop by 5.

As I was thinking about this, and working on a couple of time-sensitive tasks, I wondered if the lack of a time system really helped me out. I was thinking about this when I missed a deadline. Trying to figure out how to annotate missing this, I came to another realization: I had a way to describe this. X.

John's GTD app is only as good as when I crack the thing open and check it. The 18-month gap showed that I still had things to do from 2004. The only person to blame for not getting those tasks done was me. That's also who to blame for missing an assignment; no program, alarm clock, or fancy website is going to be with you all the time, but you will.

status: published
lastmod: '2006-12-04T20:37:13.000Z'