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.

My personal GTD system is implemented on Evernote, which has both a web interface and a native iPhone app. Although I always have my iPhone on me (I don’t bother to sync my calendar to the web), I need a desktop interface for doing mass note management, entering long note contents, and cranking through @online notes.

Every note in Evernote goes in one notebook: I have the standard GTD setup although most of my notes are in Next Actions. Every note can have multiple on-the-fly user-defined tags, which I think is vitally important for a GTD system. Evernote can filter the list of notes by tag, but can only do tag intersections (eg: @downtown AND @saturday), not unions (eg: @home OR @downtown) nor other algebra (eg: @home AND NOT @online) – my lists are small enough that that’s not a deal breaker. More annoying is that Evernote can’t do tag hierarchies (eg: all @saturday notes are @weekend), so I end up overtagging. There is no note nesting or linking which I suspect might be useful if I were doing heavier GTD project managment.

I suspect Remember the Milk is better, but I’m not sure it’s $25/year better. I have a design for a better system in my head but I’m happy enough with Evernote not to implement it.

Gordon Ramsay. Here he is in Boiling Point. Work-ego-will gets things done like mad:

In addition to Ramsay’s cooking shows — Kitchen Nightmares is the best small business how-to show ever made — I’ve been looking at pro-workaholism tips. Most are jokes, some are better.

Here’s one that bugs me constantly. Mores around new technology just aren’t there yet, and no one seems to care:

People and existing conversations trump gadgets and potential conversations.

If you stop a conversation to answer your cell, you’re insulting your partner. I take note of slights like that.

The idea that you can succeed at anything without being a workaholic is slavethink; it’s one of the most destructive ideas people propagate without thought. Ayn Rand wrestled with that bugbear in Atlas, particularly with how the Reardens hobble Hank.

Managing what’s on your todo list is, I suspect, the key to super-productivity. As Cuban says, “you can drown in opportunity”.

Kousin and I are working on… Never mind: “the game is to be sold, not to be told.” I’ll get backatcha when I have news.

Getting Things Done is a task management system that has a significant following. The basic idea is that every task you plan to do in your life should go on a central list ordered by context. Contrast that with naive task management: tasks you’re likely to forget go on lists all over the place ordered by priority (or on aspirational days in your calendar).

The theory is that by getting every task down, you are relieved of the stress of keeping to-do items in your head. Having a central list means you can check it frequently to be confident in your system. Ordering by context lets you use small chunks of time effectively. I’m not exactly sure why important tasks get done, but they do – maybe GTD gets you in a groove of productivity rather than procrastinating against the big thing on the top of your to-do list?

The tasks on your list must be actionable without any prerequisite tasks. The full GTD system has a bunch of mechanisms for tracking subsequent tasks, but I don’t use it. Every task on my list implicitly contains a subsequent task: figure out what to do next. I trust the people I delegate tasks to, so I don’t have a system for tracking follow-ups.

I keep two lists, one for work and one for home: work is ordered by project (because @mydesk is the only context), home is ordered by context. I’m currently using the following contexts: @afterwork, @groceries, @home, @online, @phone, @saturday