MentalPolyphonics

The core of a Getting Things Done system is an always-available task manager. You also need constant access to a calendar (that stores only time-specific activities): I use the iPhone native calendar, which I don’t bother syncing with Google Calendar.

Whenever you might have spare cycles (commuting, waiting for something, etc.) you need access to a To Read pile. It’s likely you’ll have a few piles that are more or less portable. I’m still looking for a good place for web material; maybe Instapaper is it? I have a To Watch playlist on YouTube, but mostly I just ignore people when they recommend videos (sorry Alex! I’ll explain why in another post).

Your life has a bunch of inboxen like email, voicemail, face-to-face discussions, your imagination, etc. GTD advises having as few as possible. It’s important that once you examine an item in an inbox, you either complete it immediately or move it to your task management system (“zero your inbox”). I actually keep a small, separate task management system for email both at work and personally.

One issue is that Google Reader doesn’t work well with GTD. I need to figure out how to separate the feeds that are inboxen from those that are “maybe read”. For now it’s separate enough from my GTD system that it doesn’t cause chaos.

As requested:

1. create an Evernote account
2. create 3 notebooks¹:
   • “Next Actions” or “To Do”
   • “Maybe” or “Someday”
   • “Projects” or “Dependents”
3. make Next Actions your default notebook
4. delete the example notebook
5. create two tags:
   • Contexts
   • Projects
6. create a bunch of context tags in the form “@place”; drag each under the Contexts tag
7. as-needed, create project tags in the form “.name”²; drag each under the Projects tag

You have a few inboxes in your life: email, voicemail, face-to-face discussions, your imagination, etc. When a task idea comes up, figure out what the action is:

• If you can do it and want to do it, put it in Next Actions.
• If you’re not sure whether you want to do it, put it in Maybe.
• If you need to do something first, put the original action in Projects, create the prerequisit action in Next Actions, create a Project tag and tag both actions with it.

Throughout the day, check your Next Actions list filtered by context. (Evernote allows you to create tag union and intersection saved searches by Control-clicking tags.) Review your Maybe and Projects lists weekly or as often as you feel necessary and move actions to Next Actions as appropriate. My Maybe and Projects lists are very small but I think it’s important to have somewhere to park things.

There are three other notebooks that you might want to create after you’ve tried this system:

Inbox

if you’re using Evernote’s clipping or message-receiving features, you won’t want to dump everything directly into Next Actions

Waiting

when you delegate tasks, GTD advises putting them on a list for regular review; I don’t do much delegation, but I suspect it’s better to create follow-up triggers in your calendar

Recurring

you’ll have some tasks that aren’t strictly time-dependent but must be done every once in a while, I find it useful to store these in a notebook

¹ You could have a single notebook and use tags for status, but since any given action is only going to have one status, I don’t see the advantage of this.
² Other naming conventions have been proposed.