Introduction

I’m not really doing GTD any more. There. I’ve admitted it.

That feels better. Why? Well, it’s just too much to manage for the stuff I actually need to track. I can’t use a single system, as work related stuff has to remain at work, and personal stuff has to remain outside work’s systems. I suspect most people are in this situation, unlike the upper management level people David Allen tends to address his writing and seminars to.

At work, everything has to be in a specific online system, and there isn’t really the time to duplicate all that in another system to apply GTD to.

Personal stuff, like PigPog, can be managed however I want, but isn’t all that complicated, and there’s a big advantage to keeping the work in progress for these articles right here in the Wiki – it means that the whole process is more open, and anyone can jump in at any stage. Anyway, that’s just my reasons.

Who Doesn’t Need to do GTD?

• Anyone without all that much stuff to track. GTD is great when there’s lots of new stuff flowing at you. If there isn’t all that much, it may well feel a bit over-the-top. Not everybody has a life that complicated. Doesn’t mean it’s easy or they don’t do much, but it might not actually take much tracking.
• Anyone who can’t mix personal and work stuff. You could maintain two separate GTD systems, but you’re looking at a lot of overhead. Some people might need it anyway, but not everyone.
• Anyone with defined systems that have to handle their stuff. At work, there’s a system that everything has to be in so other people can see what’s happening. It’s not perfect, but there’s very strong reasons why it has to be used. For PigPog stuff, the ToDo page here in the wiki (no longer exists, but did at the time of writing) and draft posts for the blog can keep everything online, and for the wiki, gives anyone who’s interested visibility of what we’re planning and what we’re working on. Again, strong reasons (nearly the same reasons) to use those systems.

So Why an Article?

If we’re not going to do GTD, why another GTD article? Because there’s still a lot to pick up from GTD even if you’re not doing the full thing.

Things to Take from GTD Even if You’re Not Doing GTD

So what can we gain from GTD if we’re not going to bother with the whole system?

Next Actions

One of the core points about GTD is defining Next Actions – the very next thing you’ll do about something to move it on. This is still a great concept. I still think in these terms about things I’m planning to do. The first action for writing this article was just adding it to the ToDo page, so it was there, listed in public, with a quick note of what it was going to be about.

That one little action was enough to kick-start me into writing it.

Don’t think about all the things you’ll have to do – just the next one.

Capturing

In GTD, capturing is the first stage – any new ideas or thoughts you have should be captured – just scribbled on a bit of paper and chucked into your inbox to process later. I still think this is a really important thing – to let yourself capture thoughts and ideas without feeling the need to do something specific about them at the time, or even think about what you might actually do about them later. Just capture it. Come back to it later, and it might mean nothing, in which case, discard it. It might be a valuable idea, though, that if you’d made yourself try to think about at the time, you’d have given up and lost.

Make sure you’ve always got something with you to capture ideas, even if it’s just a folded up sheet of paper and a pen or pencil.

Lists

Keeping lists is something David Allen is very keen on – lists of things he might want to buy, things he might want to do, places he might want to go, or anything else. Lists are useful, and they can clear things out of our mind so we can stop worrying about them. If you find yourself trying to remember a list of things, write them down, and save your brain for something else.

Trusted System

Even if you’re not doing GTD as such, it’s worth having some sort of Trusted System. However much system you do have, make sure you can trust it. I found GTD too much effort to manage for the stuff that I was tracking with it, so I resisted doing it, and things fell through the cracks anyway – being too organised became a problem. Simplifying has let me trust the system I do use.

So, What Do You Do Now?

If I’m not doing GTD, what am I doing? Do I still have some sort of system? Yes. I do. It’s simple, and works pretty well for me. I’m calling it the PigPogPDA.

What About The Books?

If you’ve not read David Allen’s books, I still recommend them – even if you’re pretty sure you’re not going to do GTD – there’s still penty of good information and ideas, and lots more detail on some of the stuff I’ve covered here.

• From Amazon US – Getting Things Done, Ready for Anything.
• From Amazon UK – Getting Things Done, Ready for Anything.

Latest Update: Just correcting a few links.

If you don’t already know what GTD is, you may want to have a look at our GTD Introduction explaining it. This article is just a look at a few of the different ways that GTD can be implemented. It’s not very in-depth on any method, and is only really intended to give you some ideas before I cover the method I use – GTD – The PigPog Method.

GTD is all based on David Allen’s excellent books. You’ll get far more from reading the books than from any web site.

• From Amazon US – Getting Things Done, Ready for Anything.
• From Amazon UK – Getting Things Done, Ready for Anything.

Introduction

As I mentioned in our GTD Introduction, one of the unusual things about GTD is that it presents you with a complete workflow for managing all the stuff you have to do, so it might seem like there’s not a lot of scope for different ways for implementing it. However, there’s a surprising range of ways people have found, some following the GTD system exactly, some varying from it in a few ways. In this article, We’ll cover a few different ways, just to give you some idea of the variation that’s out there. It’s not going to be comprehensive – I’m probably only even aware of a fraction of the ways out there. My article is about how I implement the GTD system, so it seems like a good idea to cover a bit of the variety out there first – the way I do it isn’t the only way.

It’s also worth mentioning here that, although the very existence of this article claims the opposite, the truth is that the method used really doesn’t matter. It’s not important how you do it, just that you get things done.

Some Methods

Anyway, here’s a few ways people do GTD, in no particular order…

Paper and Pen

Even now, a lot of people get on just fine with paper and pen. The GTD system was originally designed to be run with paper and pen, in fact. Even the paper and pen fans have their ‘in-fights’, though – some will use any old bits of paper, and whatever pen or pencil comes to hand, some feel unhappy with anything but a blue-lined yellow legal pad. Some will use nothing but an expensive Filofax and a Mont Blanc fountain pen. GTD is all about making lists, and keeping track of what you have to do, so paper and pen will do the job just fine.

Personally, I just don’t get on that well with paper and pen. My handwriting is terrible. Although I don’t often find the need to search, searching by rummaging through a stack of paper is really annoyingly slow compared to a quick search on a computer. There’s also problems with capacity for carrying. With my iPaq, I can carry pretty much every bit of data I could want, whereas with paper, I’d have to cut down, and keep only a limited amount with me. Oh, and backups are really slow, too

Outlook

Outlook is a very flexible product, and you can use it to implement GTD in many different ways. Using too many of the more complex features, like linking items, can cause problems if you need to sync with a PDA. If you want to use Microsoft Outlook more fully, but still want to sync with a Palm device, you can do so with either KeySuite or Beyond Contacts, both of which replace the built in palm apps with an alternative that more closely mimics Outlook’s functionality. For Windows Mobile, Pocket Informant will give you a lot of extra features, and looks and acts much more like Outlook than the built in apps do.

Palm ‘Plain Vanilla’

Using just the built in Palm apps. This is what David uses himself. David just implements the same lists he describes in the book using the Palm ToDo application (or Tasks on the newest PalmOne machines).

Outliner

Lots of people find that GTD lacks a way of tying what you’re doing now with the ‘higher levels’ – your goals and focus areas. David only ties these together in the weekly review, but some people do find it easier to put everything into an outliner, where they can break things down by focus area. This forces you to think more about why you’re doing things, and gives you a good overview of what areas you’re actually working on. On the Palm, the main outliners used are ShadowPlan and Bonsai. Both are very good, and have very similar features. Until recently, ShadowPlan was somewhat lacking on the desktop, but the newest release (4.0) has a much improved desktop, and it’s Palm program has always been strong. Both products will also link items to todo items. Of the two, personally, I got on slightly better with ShadowPlan, but it’s worth trying both, and seeing which you get on best with.

On Windows Mobile machines, again, Pocket Informant can do outlines with its Heirarchical Tasks function, but these won’t show up on the desktop.

Life Balance

Although Life Balance (For Palm, Windows, and Mac) is centered around an outliner, it deserves a separate mention, as its way of working is a bit different. Using it really rules out several parts of GTD, but it certainly has its good points. You enter all the things you are working on into an outline, and for each item tell it how important it is, how much effort it will take, and where you need to be. Life Balance then decides what you should do, and it tells you. You just have to do as it says. It’s very clever, and although it’s a bit expensive, it’s worth a go if you like the idea of your Palm bossing you around

CyberPoche

Created by Jaques Turbé, CyberPoche (=CyberPocket) is a system for keeping everything in memo pad in the Palm (or any other text based system, really), and using keywords to make things pop up when needed. It’s explained fully in a page written by Jaques, and collated by Teri Pitman.

Projects with Codes

By just putting a code in front of all of your projects, and putting the same code on tasks relating to that project, you can easily find all the related tasks with a search. It’s a simple trick, but it can be quite effective, and save quite a bit of time at the weekly review. I tried this out for a while, using a five letter code for every project.

Dated Tasks

This is another system I used for a while. In GTD, David specifies that actions shouldn’t have dates unless they are ‘hard landscape’ – i.e. must be done that day. This system breaks that rule, but the dates aren’t for when you plan to do the action – they are for the earliest you might need to think of it again. This works very well on the Palm with Datebk5, as it integrates today’s tasks with the Calendar / Datebook view very well. The main problems with it that I found were spending time every day moving forward all the things that hadn’t got done that day, and finding things that I’d pushed forward, but then changed my mind and wanted to do sooner. On the plus side, though, the thought of keeping on moving an item forward one day at a time for a couple of weeks forced me to think a little more about whether I really wanted to do something soon, and if something would only take a few minutes to do, it soon became easier to do it than keep rescheduling it.

PigPog

OK, so this is really the whole point of this article. Put together with the help of a lot of other people on the GtD_Palm Yahoo Group, the method I use is what became known as the PigPog Method.

MarkTAW’s Cascading Next Actions

Mark has come up with a similar system to PigPog that works better on paper – Cascading Next Actions.

GTD – Getting Things Done – is a book by David Allen, giving a series of principles for managing the day to day tasks and projects we all have to do. It is based on the idea that if we get everything that concerns us out of our heads, and into a single trusted system, which is then reviewed regularly, we will leave our minds clearer, and be better able to respond to new inputs.

GTD is all based on David Allen’s excellent books. You’ll get far more from reading the books than from any web site.

• From Amazon US: – Getting Things Done, Ready for Anything.
• From Amazon UK – Getting Things Done, Ready for Anything.

Introduction

This article is intended to cover just the basics of GTD, so you can understand what we’re talking about here even if you’ve not read the book.. If you find the ideas interesting, though, I’d strongly recommend you buy the book, as it really does cover the ideas well, and in a lot more detail than I will here. Buy it through the links at the top, and PigPog will get a little cut

David Allen’s GTD involves clearing your mind of all the things you keep remembering and thinking about, that are nagging at you to do them. The idea is that if you can get these things written down, into a system you trust, and know that you’ll be reminded of them at the appropriate time, you can get them out of your head, and use all that spare head-space for something more useful. Storing cheese, perhaps.

The Workflow

One of the unusual things about GTD is that it gives you a full workflow for managing your ‘stuff’, rather than just a load of tips and tricks, or methods for dealing with one part of it.

David splits the process up into five distinct stages…

Collect

First, we need to collect all the things that are worrying us, or that we need to do something about. David calls this a ‘Mind Sweep’ – sweeping everything that’s on our minds into our system. He suggests one idea to a sheet of paper, and throw them all into an inbox to process later, but the actual method doesn’t matter too much, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the flow of ideas. In DA’s language, anything that holds some part of your attention is an ”open loop”.

Personally, I collect new ideas in my iPaq, either using the voice recorder, or Pocket Informant’s Alarm Notes, where you just scribble on the screen – it doesn’t convert the scribbles into text, just stores them as scribbles. Machines from palmOne have Notes, which is very similar, or you can download Diddlebug. Anything that can be used without needing to think much should do the job – index cards, sheets of paper, or whatever. A small packet of business-sized cards, with or without a preprinted template is a quick and portable capture mechanism.

Process

Processing is the act of going through all the items in your inbox, that you collected earlier, and deciding what they are, and what you need to do with them. They might need throwing in the bin, they might need storing somewhere for later reference, they might just need reading. For many things, though, you’re going to need to actually do something about them.

The question to ask here for each item is “What’s the next action?” This is the very next thing you would do about this item, if it was the apropriate time, you were in the right place, etc. If this one action would complete the item, then it’s just an action to do. If it won’t, then it’s a project, and you’ll need an extra reminder so that when you’ve done that action, you won’t forget about the item.

Organise

You need to keep organised lists of all the things you have to do, and although these could be arranged in various ways, David has specific suggestions for how to do this…

Action lists

These are the lists of next actions you need to do. David recommends splitting these into a few lists, based around ‘contexts’. A context is either a place you need to be, or something you need to have with you to be able to do that action. A list of phone calls could be one context, things you can only do at home or only at the office could be others. Your contexts are unlikely to be the same as mine, and we’re probably both different from David. MarkTAW has a nice article on picking contexts – it’s easy to get carried away.

David suggests placing an @ symbol in front of each of these lists – @ for Action – if you’re using computer based lists (Outlook, Palm, etc), the @ sign will make them sort to the top, which is useful, as these are the lists you’ll be referring to most often.

Projects

I mention above the idea that some items will take more than just the next single action to be complete. These things are projects, and you need to keep a note of them on a separate list, and try to make sure that everything on this list always has at least one connected action on the action lists.

Linking projects to their associated next actions is one of the most discussed parts of GTD, and the trick I use has become known as the PigPog Method.

Agendas

Things you need to talk to people about. If you group the items by person, when you’re next speaking to that person, you can quickly get a list of all the things you needed them for.

Waiting For

If you’re waiting for someone else to come back to you, or waiting for delivery of something you’ve ordered, but it’s something you still need to keep track of, it goes on this list. It’s for anything that isn’t for you to do, but that you need to remember about. You may need to chase some of these things up, but you’ll pick that up when you review, and then they’ll go into either an action list or your Agendas list.

Someday/Maybe

This is the list for anything that you’re not ready or not able to do yet, or just don’t want to. If you want to learn Swedish at some point, but you don’t have time to start yet, it goes here. If you have to prepare a report for your boss, but the relevant information isn’t available until next month, you’d make a note here.

Review

In many ways, reviewing is at the heart of GTD. If you don’t review your lists, you won’t be able to trust them, and your mind will worry about them again. That’s what we’re trying to avoid here. How often, and when, you review may depend on who you are and what you do, but David suggests a single review once a week. Many people find a smaller daily review helps a lot, too. The weekly review is where you tie up your projects with their actions, and make sure nothing has been forgotten about. It should also include getting all of your inboxes emptied, and all of your notes and messages processed.

Do

This is kind of the point of all this. If you don’t do things, you’re not really Getting Things Done. You’ve got all the things you want to do listed – the only question is how to pick which one to do now. Again, David has advice – and it starts with the way we organised our action lists. If you went along with his suggestion, you have your lists organised by context, so you can probably only do things from one or two of the lists right now anyway – so the rest of the lists can be ignored. After that, it comes down to how much time you have, how much energy you have, and how important the things are.

Results

Personally, I feel better organised using GTD than without it. I don’t have the type or level of workload that really needs it, so I probably get less out of it than some other people do. Lots of people report very big changes, though, and I’ve yet to hear of anyone who didn’t get anything out of it, unless they’ve been pushed into it without actually being interested.

I’d been after a Space Pen. It’s all Merlin Mann’s fault. I’d seen these before, but suddenly the design made sense. Short and stubby when closed. Can’t be pushed open in a pocket. Nice and dumpy to hold. My handwriting is terrible, and I write so that I smudge the ink, so I really should steer clear of gel ink pens, but I like them anyway.

(Clicky Piccies to see them in Flickr, in larger sizes, with any notes and comments.)

The cap part can clip to a key ring, and won’t pull off straight down – you have to hold the pen horizontally, then pull downwards. Very easy and quick to do, but clicks back in quite firmly. Be careful how you carry it, though. I kept mine clipped to my belt, and ended up losing it – I think it got unclipped by the seat belt when I got out of the car, and flipped out onto the pavement.

With the cap removed, it looks like this…

…with the nib still hidden, and can be pocketed without the cap. The whole thing pulls apart to open, like this…

…and the tip just pops itself out. Push together to close again, and the tip pops back in with a nice satisfying clunk.

I also picked up a spare black refill, and a pretty purple one. I like the purple. It’s distinctive, and everyone would soon know who’d written my notes at work. It stands out well on a laser printout, too. Unfortunately, it just smacked a tiny bit of ‘fourteen-year-old girl’. I figured I could live with that until I imagined signing a credit card payment at the shop till with it, and then backed out.

Mentioned Elsewhere

• 43 Folders page on the Cross ion.

Notes and Discussion

(Copied over from before this was a Page in this Blog – these bits would be in the comments below if this was being done now.)

Gary says: This is a really cool pen. I ordered one the same day that I read this review, and it came the next day. I haven’t shared with my significant other how much it cost, but quality is worth paying for, isn’t it? I had a minor mishap this morning in the car park as I was putting my keys away – the pen fell out of the keyring holder! Must have been the angle of the dangle. In use, it is a masterpiece of form ”and” function. The mechanism is very smooth, the ink flows very smoothly, and it feels very comfortable in the hand. My first Cross pen – it might be the last unless I win the lottery!

pigpogm: I’ve just come back from Staples after returning this pen. The rubber part at the bottom started to flex as I was using it, and seemed to have grown with use so it was too big for the space it fitted in. The rubber is a couple of millimetres thick layer that’s supposed to be a tight fit over the plastic it’s wrapped around. After two weeks of use, it just wasn’t tight any more, and the edges around that plastic oval were starting to stick up and get caught.

Fortunately, the staff at Staples were quick to see the problem, and immediately offered a refund. I actually paid the extra to upgrade to the metal version, with rubber grip spots poking through metal on the lower section. Should avoind having the same problem, and with the advantage that I still get to have the same pen, which I really do like.

(Hope you don’t get the same problem, Gary.)

In the pack…

Closed…

Open…

Gary says: Mine came in a presentation case – for no extra cost. When I get home tonight I’ll take a photo and upload it here. So far, no sign of any flexing rubber. (Not on the pen, at least – but that new ‘intimate item’ I got – now that is starting to flex and chafe!)

pigpogm (2005-09-01): Mine got lost some time ago, and I’ve been without it for some time now, but I’ve ended up replacing it. I missed the funny little thing.

I’ve just noticed something quite odd about these pens – the ink smells strangely like curry when it’s wet.

• PigPog’s Productivity Articles

GTD – Getting Things Done

DavidCo

• David Allen’s own site – the official resource.
• GTD Definition – David’s own definition of what GTD is.
• Forums – the official discussion forums.

Other GTD Sites

Wikis

• 43 Folders Wiki.
• MVance’s GTD Wiki – just a one-page summary, really, but very nicely done, and useful for quick reference.
• Jeff Sandquist’s Wiki – Jeff works at Microsoft, and this one attracted quite a burst of attention when it started, so it’s been quite well developed.

Tags

• Technorati GTD Tag – find everything mentioning GTD, live.
• Del.icio.us GTD Tag – see the latest sites people have tagged for GTD.
• Flickr GTD Tag – photos tagged for GTD – can have some surprising insights.

Blogs

• lifehack.org.
• 43 Folders – one of the best sites out there. Mainly Mac-centric, and the home of the HipsterPDA.

Oh dear. Cory’s had enough of Casio. Mine is still away for repair – been away for over three weeks now. I’d only had it for two months.

Boing Boing: Casio: cool cameras, terrible service — buy something else

Here’s the problem in a nutshell. The cameras are very failure prone, and the repair service is terrible, and the company doesn’t honor its warranties.

I bought mine from John Lewis, so I’m hoping that if Casio won’t honour their warranty, at least John Lewis might be more helpful. I’ll keep you posted. Maybe I’ll learn my lesson a bit quicker, and just buy a Canon in future.

Mind the Step. Assuming you’re reading this, we’ve successfully moved PigPog’s blog from ‘http://pigpog.com/blog/’ to ‘http://pigpog.com‘. If you’re not reading this, maybe you should be.

Anyway, this means that the front page of the site is now the blog, and everything else will be arranged from there – probably including moving the articles from the wiki into the Pages on the right hand side of the blog.

You Broke All My Bookmarks?

No, we didn’t. It should all still work as before – if you visit a page on PigPog with ‘/blog/’ if it, our web server will know what to do. For the more technically minded, we’ve set a redirect so that anything under /blog/ gets redirected up a level. The result is that Apache ends up giving the browser exactly what it asked for anyway, and the browser knows it’s moved.

RSS Feeds?

No change. Should always have been pointing to ‘http://pigpog.com/rss’ – this has always been a redirect, and it actually redirects off-site to FeedBurner, anyway. They should find out about all this as soon as they request the next update and get redirected. If not, I’ll update them manually.

How Easy Was It?

(Ignore this bit if you don’t care)

Very easy, actually. Just moved all the WordPress folders up a level (well, copied them, actually, I like to be paranoid), changed the addresses in the two lines under ‘Options’ in WordPress Admin, then added the redirect to httpd.conf. The only tiny problem was that pages started getting redirected to the nasty-looking real URLs instead of the nice ‘pretend directories’ that WordPress does so well. I just opened the ‘Presentation’ page in Admin, and saved it without changing anything – all started working nicely again.

Found out that if WordPress has been set to serve a page where a real page exists – we had an ‘/about/’ folder, and a WordPress Page called About, for example – WordPress doesn’t grab the URL. The original real file gets served. If you don’t want that, rename one of the two, or just delete the real file. Seems like the most sensible way to work, though it’s probably an upshot of how the imaginary folders work. I think WordPress becomes the handler for all 404 errors, then just redirects back to the original 404 page if it can’t handle the request either.

If you’re still reading at this point, you’re probably very bored. We’ll start doing some tests of moving articles over next.

Enjoy…

I’m an admirer of all the greats when it comes to productivity, Allen, Mann, Randall … but when it comes to setting up a workable productivity system for myself, something I can live with and actually use, I haven’t found the one for me yet. I tried GTD, and fell at the first hurdle. I tried a Hipster PDA, and it fell apart in my bag. I tried a PigPog PDA, and lost the plot when I got my moleskines mixed up and drew a carnation in it.

So here’s my latest adventure… the D(asterisk)I(asterisk)Y(asterisk) Planner. Developed by Douglas Johnston, he took all the cool geeky elements of the professional time management packages that cost a fortune, created a load of custom forms and made pdfs for folks to grab and download and create their own custom made productivity system. Now others are joining in on the site and creating all manner of custom made forms for us to download, print, and gloat about if we ever run into the CEO of Filofax.

Building

There are loads of templates to choose from, and while many of them weren’t designed for the planner size I’ve chosen (A4 – more on that later) they printed OK with the ‘scale to fit page’ option in Adobe Reader.

After a quick glance through the options available, I settled on the following:

• Day Keeper – useful for at home and at work.
• Yearly 2005-2005 planner page – particularly useful for me when calculating annual leave entitlement.
• Monthly Planning – living from paycheque to paycheque as usual!
• Journal – for general notes.
• Crossroads – in memory of the legendary ITV soap… or a way of figuring out how to achieve my goals.
• Story Idea – intended for proper writers, but possibly useful for planning articles.

I also added blank paper of various kinds including colourful sugar paper, and a ‘scrapbook’ section which currently contains a signed picture of Metallica (all’s I’m saying is that my day goes better if I’m not far away from a picture of Kirk Hammett, okay?), a cartoon of The Beatles and some of my guitar drawings. It’s going to be an area of pics that gladden the heart and put a smile on my face, which is often useful when in the office… and I’ll add pictures of the cats, and yes, my very own man (very seldon seen) with guitar soon.

Problems

I’d bought a lovely slim binder for all of this, only to discover I couldn’t turn the pages through the small rings! Fortunately I had an old 2-ring A4 binder lurking behind the sofa. It’s a bit flimsier than the 4-ring binder but a bit of elastic trickery soon sorted that – a rubber band, some PVA glue and some masking tape soon added a bit of moleskine-style security to my new planner.

Will I be able to live with it?

Well, here’s the thing I’ve discovered with all of these systems, there are pros and cons to all of them. I’m sacrificing portability in favour of having something I can stretch out and really scribble away in. Hipster PDAs and PigPog PDAs are great but don’t give you much option for scribbling like a demon. An A4 planner might be a pain in the arse to carry around, but I stand a better chance of getting thoughts, ideas, observations and scribbles down on paper this size than I do with anything smaller.

Super Size Me!

I’m going to do a Morgan Spurlock and try living and working with my new A4 D(plink)I(plank)Y(plonk) planner for 30 days. If my liver turns to pate I’ll be sure to let you know.

PigPog is the heady combination of Michael and Sam.

• The PigPog Network – other blogs and sites we run.
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Why ‘PigPog’?

PigPog was a cat. ‘PigPog’ wasn’t his real name, but it was what we called him. He had a fight with a Peugeot. He lost. He died.

• Picture of the original PigPog

When we came to look for a name for our site, it was about the only thing we could think of that was reasonably pronounceable, spellable, and available. It seems to work.

Privacy Policy

It seems a bit over-the-top to have a privacy policy for a personal site, but we have to do it to keep the advertisers happy, so here goes…

We keep logs and statistics to track things like how many people are reading which articles. We don’t track any sort of personally identifying information for this – we don’t know who you are, unless you sign up and tell us.

The software that runs PigPog, Drupal, uses cookies to manage logins and preferences. A cookie is just a tiny little file that your computer stores and passes back to Drupal when you return to this site.

Third party advertisers on this site, like Google and Chitika, also use cookies, which get passed back to their servers. We don’t have access to those cookies, and it’s entirely up to these third parties how they use them.

Your browser probably accepts all cookies, unless you’ve specifically set it not to. In your options settings, though, you can choose to have it reject them, or only reject cookies from third parties, like advertisers. You can also manage and delete specific cookies if you like. If you do delete cookies, or disable them, you’ll probably find you have to log into sites again, and put settings back as you had them next time you visit.

Now why not go have a real cookie? They’re much tastier.

Pencil Revolution: Review of Dixon Tri-Conderoga.

Sounds like a nice pencil, and certainly looks a bit different with its soft black finish and black eraser…

Dixon bills this as “The World’s Most Comfortable Pencil.” With competitors like the GRIP 2001 from Faber-Castell, the Ergosoft from Staedtler and from Dixon’s own Tri-Write, these will be hard shoes to fill. But it turns out that the Tri-Conderoga is as unique as the other triangular-shapped pencils on the market, perhaps even more so.