@Craig720:

thats one of the best ideas i've read here in a while.

steve w.

IWantSandy.com in conjunction with Jott.com have worked wonders for me. Voice message yourself and have that voice message converted to text and sent to Sandy... you can send yourself reminders that will appear in your email inbox.

SteveAx

@na2rboy: I've heard plenty of reasonable critiques of the GTD methodology, but an ad hominem attack on David Allen himself is in poor taste.

What does the number of David's marriages have to do with anything? He's not preaching a moral standard or spiritual philosophy; he's advocating a system for getting organized and staying productive.

If I limited myself to only taking advice from people of demonstrable moral superiority, that would be an extremely short list. Everyone has faults and everyone has problems.

Jay Elmore

GTD is too cultish. But if you want to be a slavish drone it's probably a good handbook. But if you want to learn and grow- look around you and look at yourself. Learn what works for you and what doesn't. We all have our own style for GTD- and for the most part the process is the fun part- not something to obsess over. Be an individual and be creative. You don't need a book for that. Namaste.

nat lyon

I've read GTD twice now and did notice it was paper-centric. I know the David does work with CEOs one on one and for folks of that generation that would be the best course.

I'm with you using my gmail account for my inbox. Jott has been my favorite tool that makes this work. I *always* have my cell phone on me, so always have access to my inbox for short reminders.

Google calendar for time-specific tasks and RTM for call / email lists.

No system will work unless I can get my eyes on my tasks on a regular basis. No matter where I am or what I'm doing I'll always look at my gmail account, so that's best for me.

blmjr

It's my 1st post here and would like to say that LH it's the best site with the best people!
This goes out to the online warriors:
* Micro$oft fans: M$ has a Labs similar to Google Labs, there I found this [listas.labs.live.com] which allows you to create lists. You can create a list and tag it "To-Do List" etc. The more items on the list the larger the font of the tag in the tag cloud, so you'd want to keep this tag small.

* gOOgle fans: you can create a Spreadsheet or better yet use [www.google.com] and create all the lists you want. Also, you can download a plug-in and have the lists on the palm of your Firefox [www.google.com] Finally, this website is Mobile optimized [www.google.com]

j5645

@Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor: Are you a Movementarian? =)

[en.wikipedia.org]

The How-To Geek

Hey, planning a wedding takes a lot of organization skills. Much more than simply staying married. So I think he gets props for that.

Kidding.

Sort of.

MikeT

The previously covered Sandy (iwantsandy.com) has done wonders for the whole "e-mail as inbox" or even "e-mail holds everything" idea, at least for me.

I used to cary a Palm, sync it to a to-do manager, have my e-mails, and then, of course, have all the random thoughts I've scribbled on paper that I didn't want to bother entering on my PDA. Now, everything is in e-mail. Sandy takes care of all my to-dos, appointments, and random thoughts/figures. I've heard that you can also update Sandy via your cell phone's SMS and get information back from her that way, but I've never bothered setting it up.

BrandonJ

Married four times! The man is just getting things done. Don't hate on him. Anyway, thanks for this article. I'm still not on board with GTD, but I like how you've streamlined the process. I read about half way through Allen's book but found it a laborious read. He really should write a more user friendly volume especially the GTD movement has taken off so well.

Bakari

@na2rboy: Uh-oh. I guess I should keep my religion and marital status a secret, then. ;)

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor

I don't know much about the book, but as far as for todo lists (mentioned early in the comments) I use Serious Samurize to embed my todo list from a text file I keep on the desktop. It updates it right away whenever I make a change too, so that's nice. I also plan to craft myself a hipster pda soon for an 'on-the-go' todo list that I can later transcribe onto the desktop.

Ducks

Attempting to set aside that he is a minister in the "Purple Rose Ashram of the New Age" church, I have a hard time buying a method of Getting Things DoneTM from a guy who has been married four times. It just doesn't jive.

na2rboy

@piminnowcheez: That makes a lot of sense! It's interesting, at different times over the years, I've been obsessed with different parts of the system. I was on a "how to boil down to-do's to next actions" kick for a long time, a weekly review evangelism bender for awhile, a "how the eff do I get a tickler file that works for me" thing for awhile, too.

That's the thing about GTD--different people can read the book and different things jump out at them. So, this is my distilled version, but someone else's would look completely different.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor

I love GTD, even though I have troubles keeping up with everything. I've annotated my copy extensively, boiling down the important sections and writing them in the front of the book, so I can reread them later.

Even though my habits have faltered, I figure I still came out ahead during the time when I cleared my head of to-dos and emptied my e-mail folders. I especially like how it covers everything in time, from what must be done next to what do I want to do ten years from now. It asks some very important questions.

bill_peschel

The sentence "...full-on GTD is too complicated and slippery for simple-minded civilians like myself" got me dead to rights.

Wow. Yes. Exactly. Rats. How humbling.

I think maybe I should start my own blog and call it, "Sorta."

Sorta like as in, "half-assed."

Craig720

Great article, and truly relevant for me. I have fallen off of AND lost my GTD wagon lately. I am devoting my Christmas vacation to rethinking and revamping my system down to the basics. I will keep my eye on some online list organizers that are still in development, hoping that I can get in on Betas. Paring this article with Cranking Widgets article [[urltea.com]] has really helped me get ready for my system redo.

michaelramm

I've thought about this boiling-gtd-down problem before, and it's interesing how different your answer is from mine. For me, it's less about any particular system than it is about a few essential habits of thought, the most imporant of which is thinking of tasks in terms of the next action. The only reason I use a "project" category at all is for the process of breaking big to-dos into little next actions.

Next actions, ubiquitous capture, and sorting by context before other criteria (urgency, priority, etc) are to me the essentials, and I use whatever system for execution happens to feel easy in a given context. This, for me, ends up being a combo email-notepad-textfile-ical-igtd system, which I'm sure is more complicated than it needs to be, but lets me worry about perfecting my behavior instead of perfecting my system.

piminnowcheez

@jasonjr5: The book is great. I can't recommend it enough. I've read it a few times, and each time I get something new out of it--it's that type of book.

So many people I know read it, tried it, and gave up (including myself!). This article's mostly for them.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor

Even though I've been visiting LH for a few years now, I just bought GTD last night and started reading it. This was a nice article to come across. I'll be keeping it in mind while I work my way through the book.
I have yet to form any lists of habits, so I guess that means I have nothing that can help anyone, right now... But someday...

jasonjr5

@JonathansToolBarAndGrill: I am easily distracted by check boxes, toolbars and drop-downs, so I use a text file for my to-do's. One item per line, and I use my todo.sh script to work with it at the command line.

This is definitely not for everyone, but it's the only way that keeps me focused.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker Editor

Great article! It makes me feel much better about how I struggle with my inboxes and to-dos. What do you use to manage your to-do lists? I swear by freeware ToDoList, though other commenters on Lifehacker have recommended Thinkg Rock, which I plan to try soon. Thank you.

JonathansToolBarAndGrill

Thanks for the article, Gina.
This is what I have going: 1 Treo650 syncing to 1 computer, 2 tickler systems (1 at work/1 at home), 1 gmail account (many accounts all forwarded to 1 gmail account), 2 physical inboxes (1 at work/1 at home). 2 File systems (1 at work/ 1 at home - quickly converting both to PDF with the ScanSnapS510).
The key to all of this is the Treo650 because it is ALWAYS WITH ME. Any time I have an idea it goes in one of my context based Treo ToDo lists. (I wish I could tag todos with multiple categories so that I could have project lists as well as context-based lists.
I follow the diagrams on this page pretty closely - not complicated:
[smerino.bol.ucla.edu]
The two big challenges I have are dealing with little paper stuff like mail and remembering to check my Followup folder on Gmail (I keep my Inbox at ZERO - Stuff either gets marked as spam, archived, or requires an action and goes into followup). Bills all get opened, scanned, entered to Quicken or Quickbooks, and placed in the tickler folder for the day on which they will be paid - desk stays CLEAR).

dmccall

Ever tried to find the best way to implement GTD on a PDA?

Yeah me too. It almost drove me nuts, until I settled for using memo's on my Treo as lists (similar to your todo-lists).

For the "hard landscape" I use the Treo's calendar.

NotDone

@JAY ELMORE:
You have reflected my mind exactly. Thats how I too feel when it comes to taking advice from people. As long as the person doesn't preach something that he is not doing then why should we bother?

Once I heard that Covey's Seven Habits were criticized because Covey himself was not able to succeed. Then everyone started questioning how can he preach something that doesn't work for himself. Thank God, its not the case with David.

Venki

Thanks for your GTD confession...kinda makes me wish people still did 'webrings' we could all do our GTD processes.

Finding a system that works for you is crucial. I found DA's methods WAY too paper centric and though I keep a minimal file for things like warantees and birth cert. I store all reference info in my wiki.

I use Vitalist (Jott to voice notes to vitalist) for personal use and actually use follow-up flags in Outlook at work (filed in @action, @waiting, @someday). Sometimes I forward email to myself so I can change the subject or create new emails as tasks. It works surprisingly well, and even better in 2007.

Inbox zero is a major foundation of my GTD. I'm still working on actually doing a regular review though.

mahalie

Gina, I have to admit that I geeked out over Buddhism partly because of how many lists there are in it. The Buddha was a list-maker!

MikeT

The valuable lessons I got from Dave Allen are (1) to continually break projects down at every stage into doable next actions so that I keep moving things forward, and (2) to minimize how many lists and in-boxes I maintain so that I always have confidence that I can quickly determine what needs doing without having to trust memory, or having to remember to check a dozen places where I may have left a reminder.

For lists I have two homemade todo tracking applications (one for work using Microsoft Access and one web based app for personal life using my LAMP server on an old laptop). Both applications allow items to be prioritized (1-4) and scheduled to pop to the top priority on a certain date (the tickler file function).

My "someday-maybe" list is just the items in my application with low priority that I haven't yet assigned a start-work date. If I ever decide to really do them I will put a start-work date on them and bump up the priority.

I don't have a separate Projects list. Instead I just lead off each todo item that is part of a project with a very short project name that functions kind of like a tag. If I filter on the project name I can see a list of all the next actions associated with that project. When I complete a next action on a project I make sure that I write down a new next action for that project so that the project doesn't drop off my radar.

For inboxes I have my email and a bowl in the house that I throw paper items into. I try to move things quickly from my inboxes onto the appropriate todo list application so that my inboxes don't turn into defacto secondary todo lists that have to be reviewed.

I have gone entirely paperless thanks to most stuff coming in by email these days plus a scanner for the rest. After years of digging through old paper files trying to find things, and trying to find new space for bulging files, and sifting through old papers to figure out what to throw away and what to keep, and making labels for folders, and having to find a copier when I wanted to share something, I decided paper was a big old pain in the butt and I was done with it. I can't imagine ever going back at this point. When you think about it, paper is just a database technology, and not a very good one.

AndyFromTucson

Back on topic...

I'm 90% electronic (like most people around here it seems) and my capture system is based on
OmniFocus; I like it because I can use Quick Entry to dump stuff into it when the app is running, and the Quicksilver action to dump stuff into it when it's not running. Now that I have IMAP thanks to Gmail, I'll probably begin to take advantage of the ability to link files and mail messages to actions.

My electronic filing cabinet is two folders: a folder on my Desktop called "Projects" with folders of associated files, and an "Archive" folder for everything else. (This was inspired by Ethan Schoonover's Kinkless Desktop screencast.)

Like Gina, I do keep a filing cabinet for the paper-based documents in my life. I don't do the "43 folders" for a tickler file: rather, I mine the useful info out to be added to Google Calendar, and keep the physical document in a plastic filing folder until they're needed. After that, they are trashed or filed as appropriate.

Jay Elmore

I'm almost completely paperless at this point.

- Outlook organizes email, project files and schedules
- Cute Reminder for quick note capturing, daily to-dos (things that don't need to be archived or tracked) and one-off or non-work reminders
- Easy Noter for large data tasks (captures project info from a myriad of sources into logically organized folders)

Keter