This was written mostly on the plane back from Mexico City, during which I was reading The World is Flat and using it as a lens to reflect on all I had just experienced, but I wanted to wait until I got at least some of my Flickr pix up before posting.

On the one hand, this city has neighborhoods like Condesa, which is as close to Paris as I’ve experienced in norteamerica, with an urban fabric and economic texture that keeps neighborhoods teeming with the kinds of activities that would have made Jane Jacobs proud – cafes of all national flavors, streetcorner taco stands, shoeshine men, political grafitti, hole-in-the-wall farmacias¸ cab drivers who remember where your house is . . . and more recent additions like tapas bars, hipster hotels, and slick yoga joints. While wandering around, it was hard not to joke that it was the Silverlake of the DF – and even to make specific correlations between establishments in both bohemian outposts. But after consideration I think it compares pretty favorably. Beyond that particular colonia (district), Mexico City is enriched with grand colonial cathedrals and civic architecture, great public parks, dozens of museums featuring international class art, architecture, and archeology, a rich, poly-colonial history, fantastic street life, Aztec architecture, and phenomenal food.

On the other hand, the same shoeshine men have chairs sponsored by Fortune 1000 multinational companies, people buy their sushi at the Superama, and the whole neighborhood is ringed by more nakedly commercial streets with big-box retailers where actual middle-class residents of the city presumably buy their unmentionables. While we didn’t look closely at home prices and rents, it is clear they are going up (a subsequent peek at Craigslist Mexico City confirms this), and the inevitable gentrification is not just making life pleasant for the flaneur, but also showing the back of its hand to longtime residents and via omnipresent rehab sites, swarming laborers, and new construction signs featuring words like “LOFT” – just as it has in Silverlake, Park Slope, Williamsburg, Capital Hill DC, and so many other neighborhoods around the U.S.

It’s the “swarming laborer” part that is one of the most intriguing – and concerning – aspects of the city. Everywhere we went there were domestic workers, and based on the hourly wages implied by the cost of street services from taxis and tacos, there is clearly no shortage of available employees for any given would-be jefe. This makes life great for the tourist – even those who pay the substantial markups these services go for when procured by the international hotels (something we mostly managed to avoid). As when I went to Africa, there seems to be significant human capital here, in a well-enough organized economy, with plenty of opportunity to add to local services or bring new ideas into play. The entrepreneur in me thinks this would be a great place to start a business. . . . many businesses.

But I can’t help thinking Mexico City is an also unwittingly soft target for modern business practices and international ideas. Primitive mural advertising will inevitably give way to conglomerate controlled outdoor media, and the local authorities will fall into line to police this. At some point, it will become intolerable to find prescription medications in suspicious packaging for half off at the corner store. As international entrepreneurs arrive, the shoeshine men will soon follow this Giuliani effect. The big boxes will be the only place “real” people can afford to shop. Eventually, only the rich will be able to afford the good neighborhoods, and – just as in Paris – the middle-class will follow the working-class and the shiftless to the perimeters. Also as for Paris, this will work wonders to attract tourism, given a sub-four-hour flight from LA and a Euro that’s crushing the dollar. (The reason for my trip was a wedding between a New York-based part hindu, part west Indian, Spanish-speaking investment banker and his native wife, and was attended by a veritable united nations of international guests.)

If the bureaucrats typical of state tourism industries realize their dreams, this will become a self-perpetuating cycle. Bringing the cost of real estate up to the point that only the Starbucks’ and McDonalds’ of the world (who are already arriving) can buy their way in.

OK, so this prognostication is undoubtedly an oversimplification. This is, after all, a city whose municipal plumbing leaks 37% of the water that passes through it even as it depletes the aquifer that supports it. It’s hard to imagine any single, monolithic effects from progress (other than the city exceeding its own ability to supply its citizens with essential resources and process its pollution and trash, much as its ancient forbears did). A venture outside the elite neighborhoods brings the unavoidable sight of windowless cinder-block shanties topped by standard-issue PVC water tanks and unfinished rebar sprawling toward the horizons.

(I have to interrupt this parenthetically to note that, as I wrote this, the post-roll from the in-flight screening of Shrek II is currently alternating between images of the ruins & pyramids of Techuatenoc, India’s Taj Mahal, and a man so jowly and well-groomed, I could only assume he was a minister of tourism – a thought seconds later confirmed by a graphic.)

My point, to wrap it up, is that the human capital in Mexico City, fertile though it may be, is no match for China or India, who are turning out hundreds of thousands of engineers a year and steadily building on their various technology platforms, as well as the legal and bureaucratic infrastructure to support them. Forget about orchestrated modern education; this beautiful city can barely keep its lights on. And in this, it strikes me as similar to many countries around the world that will either have to learn to compete with modern economies, become tourism meccas, continue to mine their natural resources until they are depleted, or find some other means to thrive (art?). I suspect Mexico will fall back mainly to tourism — ironically enough banking on the U.S.’s failure to preserve its own wildlands and urban fabric.

I have high hopes for Mexico City and hope that many great chefs and service entrepreneurs will cut their teeth here and make things great for residents, visitors, and expats alike. I know Amy and I enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, if unexpectedly, and certainly plan to return. It is hard to imagine, though, in the long run, that these things will outweigh the forces of globalization enough to last very long.

At the close of my sixth week of an empty inbox (barring a few spikes following a hard-drive crash), I don’t feel too irresponsible responding to Brad’s request to share my GTD setup with the world. I’d say at this point it’s working tolerably well but not at weapons grade, so I’d welcome any suggested tweaks.

Let me start off by noting that the primary constraints around which I have to work are an office email system that’s on Exchange, with Outlook on pc as the supported platform and mail client. Exchange has the benefit of pushing to the supported blackberries too, but that particular combination comes with some unique issues, particularly if you have a limit on server space and have to push archives offline (as I do).

So, in outlook, I’m using the GTD Outlook plugin from Netcentrics. It’s $70, but well worth it imho, and they’ve let me upgrade and had decent support on a couple of re-installs, so I’m happy. (There’s a free trial offer if you want to see for yourself.) Sorry, Mac people, it’s PC only - but I don’t think you really need it anyway.

In GTD, every action has a “context” = where/when you might do it. Every action can also be part of a project. The idea is, at any given time, you can look at a project and see what needs to be done, or look at a context (e.g., “@ office”) and see what your top to-do’s are that you can actually do when in that location. The outlook plug-in uses Outlook’s native task categories to denote context, and its primary benefit is handling: it does things like let you send an email and delegate it to an @Waiting For category at the same time. It also lets you easily add both context and project to a single item (something not easily accomplished in native outlook, and my primary issue with it). Finally, it lets you associate an action with an email and then store them in separate places, which is very helpful except when you lose them.

For me, simplicity is the key to the actions / contexts setup. You need your to-do list to be a dashboard you can really take in at a glance during your day, without sorting through 15 categories of things you should be considering doing. The first time I implemented this (over a year and a half ago), I had way too many contexts, and I spent just as much time looking over all my contexts for the relevant ones as I saved by having them be so precise. Now, my key action contexts are @Yahoo office, @Yahoo calls, @Calls on the Go, @Home, @Waiting For, @Agendas, @Errands, @Lists, and @Someday. That’s it.

I try really hard to park any to-do in one of those areas - and I also try really hard not to let any given category stack up with more than a dozen or two items at the outside. You can’t really have that many priority items anyway, so everything else is something you should try to do, delete, or dump into low priority bins. For a handful of absolutely-must-do-TODAY items, I use the high-priority flag. Once in a while, I add a new context, but only if I’ve thought it through.

If you’re new to GTD, the power of the @Waiting For category is not to be underestimated, and it works really well in this setup. If you’re working out of your inbox as your todo list, there are probably dozens of emails you can’t really do anything about that are just sitting there until you can. Maybe an invitation to a conference you don’t know if you’ll be able to go to yet - simple, park it in @Waiting For and title the action something appropriate (”conference budget approval”). Or park it in your calendar as something you’ll decide after a fixed time. Either way, it’s gone from the inbox and the list of things you scan all day long when you’re looking for actionable items. I have a lot of stuff in that list, and it’s much easier to review it a couple of times a week than to look at constantly.

The other power of @Waiting For is you remember to follow up on stuff. I can’t tell you how many times a week I shoot an email off to someone at Yahoo! and wait to hear a response. This is particularly true when it’s one of those situations where you’re helping someone from outside the company get intro’d internally. It’s very easy to trust karma, delete the original email, and forget all about it - but if you park it in @Waiting For and, on review, notice it’s still there, you can follow up. People are amazed sometimes when I chase down little items like that repeatedly, and you win a lot of credibility taking care of things you’ve been entrusted to in this really simple way.

So those contexts form the basis of my todo list, and since tasks sync to blackberry and you can filter task display on the handheld by category, i can pull up a list of “Calls on the Go” when I’m in my car or “Errands” when I’m at the grocery store. On the input side, I can easily add a new task I think of when I’m on the move or in a meeting - i usually just leave it uncategorized and file whatever’s new the next time I check in from the PC. I also sometimes use downtime to scan @Waiting For to delete items that are no longer open. (If I’m not surfing m.twitter.com.)

The @Agendas category is also powerful. You create an item for each standing meeting you have or each key person on your team, and in the notes field for that item list keep a running list of things you need to remember to talk to someone about but for which you don’t need or want to send a one-off email.  And, of course, it’s all right there in your handheld when you’re having a meeting.
I do take the time to group some tasks into projects, but only certain kinds. For example, Hiring. By doing this, I can pull up the project Hiring and see all the open (and closed) items having to do with candidates in one view. I don’t currently bother categorizing calendar meetings this way, but I think you could.

Filing reference emails is also key - I have a handful of folders that I keep in an outlook .pst file that’s local (not live on the server), and I drop most stuff post-handling into those. They mostly correspond with particular areas of my work responsibility and the major projects within them. Again, the fewer the better, because I frequently have to dig into them to find stuff. I have on general one for “chron”, where I put one-off stuff I want to keep, two general ones for admin (one for sysadmin stuff like password emails) and one for G&A/HR-type office stuff. I also keep a folder called @shortref in my server-synced files so that I can drop, say, the itinerary of my upcoming trip into there and view it from desktop or palmtop. One downside of this is that I can’t access the archives from palmtop or from another computer, and I have to make sure they’re frequently backed up. But since .pst files were not meant to be accessed over LAN/WAN and have a tendency to hang or corrupt when you try, it’s the best I’ve come up with in the absence of an admin assistant.

One problematic element of being in a high-email-volume environment is threaded conversations and ilists. Again, I try to delete or file these quickly once I’ve extracted any actionable elements from them. If i get a long email I’d like to read, I drop it into an @Computer task and mark it low priority.

Finally, I use the Plaxo outlook plugin, which syncs all of my contacts (thus far seamlessly) between my home and work pc’s. You can configure which things you want to sync, and I also sync my tasks and calendar to the web. I’m going to experiment with installing a 2nd copy of the GTD plug-in on my home pc Outlook client (buying the license gives you up to 2 pc’s) and see if that will work too. But web has been fine so far.

Oh, one more thing. I actually lied about having an empty inbox. There’s one email that’s been in there for a month now. It’s red-flagged and marked urgent, and it’s from me to me. The subject line is “GET OUT OF YOUR INBOX”. It’s the only one that I don’t mind seeing repeatedly when I’m in there.