This morning I woke up and saw a request from Geek Guru John Murch asking how I arrange my GTD system based on my Make a Make a Mark on Your Customers post. Since I have really been changing it around some, I figured I would outline what I am doing in hopes of getting feed back to make it better.
Let me start by saying I am either highly organized or the worst train wreck in the world. It really depends on which cycle of life you catch me in. I am an all or nothing personality when it comes to organization. I happen to be going through that cycle of reorganizing so its a good time to talk. I have done GTD and other systems on and off over the past ten years. Yes, including toting around a clunky day planner or a Palm/Visor dork indicator religiously.
I have generally experienced three fairly large let downs in every system to date.
1. Content too disparate
There are too many streams of incoming information. Voicemail, email, personal conversation and paper inboxes. Each system was good at capturing one but not all of these incoming streams of information for me.
2. Delegation
The biggest nemesis to organization I have found as my sphere of responsibility has grown is delegation. Information streams into my system and I need to hand it off to someone else. If I hand it off and it leaves my system then I forget about it and I get clobbered later if the person whom it was delegated lets me down. If I hand it off and it stays in my system it creates so much noise I no longer want to use the system.
3. Losing my mind
My brain thinks faster than I can process. It switches context 45 times in a two minute period. I will be struck by some revelation to get something done in a place where I can not readily capture it (say driving) and by the time I get to my destination the thought is long gone and never captured in my system.
When we first started what is now the Best Ruby on Rails Shop we had started a product called Down To Biz to help solve these three problems. We had several prototypes, if you are interested I would be glad to show you. Once 37 Signals released Highrise and we got buried in consulting work we kind of left downto.biz by the way side and my hopes of getting organized to this day are still largely crushed.
Being forced to get refocused made me decided to try to assemble some tools that already exist to combat these problems and give me something that while less than perfect at least keeps me sane. The first thing I did was decide that I need to simplify. GTD is great, but it’s fairly heavy if you follow it strictly. My goal is to get there but start small.
So here is a list of tools that I use and how I use them.
Mail.app / Google Mail
I use Mail.app via google domains (you could just as easy use google mail). In a nutshell, I have made a commitment to keep my inbox empty. All incoming mail gets acted on immediately. It is either responded to or put in GTD sub folder of Defer, Delegate, Incubate, Reference or Research.
If I defer something I add it to my todo list (I will discuss later) and file it in defer so I can reply to the email when the deferred task is complete. If I delegate something I put in my todo list (delegate) and file it in delegate so I can reply to the email if I need a status update. I put things that have potential but I am not sure how I am going to proceed in incubate. I use reference for emails that have no action to take but I might come back to later. In all honesty I rarely use this. I generally will use Delicious to book mark websites (adding a toread tag). The same goes for research.
Backpack
I have tried several dozen todo list products. I have ultimately come back to Backpack. Now that I have an iPhone with a quality browser I don’t need to “sync” my todo list to anything, its always available to me. I do a couple of things to help out. I have two contexts that I use @integrum and @home. This helps me narrow down todo’s based on what context I am in.
Additionally I use lists to categorize todo list items. For example I have a category for blog posts. This way if I think of something I want to blog I throw it in that category. I use this same designation for delegations by creating a delegation category. Backpack’s drag and drop makes it very easy to move these things around.
One of my primary reasons for using Backpack is that it supports OpenID and since we use BaseCamp and Highrise at Integrum and Media Geeks it puts everything in one place for me. I am able to use those systems as additional context switching mechanisms.
Sandy and Jott
The best thing I ever did was get an assistant. Sandy is the best thing that has happened to me. She is a computer that I can email or call (via Jott) to remind me to do things. This is finally the thing to solve problem #3 above for me. I can be driving or at a soccer field and think of something that I need to do. I simply call Jott, ask for Sandy and tell her to remind me to add it to my list. She then will send me an SMS message and email reminding me to add it when expected. For example this morning driving in I realized that I left my phone charger in our Jeep. I simply called Sandy and told her to remind me to move it back to my car tonight. She will SMS me tonight at 10pm to remind me, cause she rocks!
With minimal effort I could configure Jott to talk to backpack and call in my todo’s, but for now I am happy with Sandy relaying the message to me. It makes me feel important having my own assistant!
iCal, Google Calendar, Spanning Sync, iPhone
To manage my pre planned appointments I current use iCal. I do this because i like it a LOT. Additionally it syncs very nicely to my iPhone. However, many people including Integrum use Google Calendar as a way to share calendars. I solved this by purchasing Spanning Sync to sync google calendars to my ical. It is a crappy program, but it does the bare minimum to meet the requirement. If you know of something better let me know. This lets me get all my appointments in multiple places. The thing I like is I can create different calendars for different contexts. I have soccer, work, home, community and other calendars all separate so I can publish and filter as necessary.
Call Weaver/iPhone
Call Weaver is used to turn all voice mail into email for me. Though I find I have less and less voicemail all the time. iPhone voicemail I just listen to when have time. Both kinds get turned into tasks as need be. There are some things like Grand Central that I am looking into as well.
For now this formula is proving useful, but not perfect. I would love to hear how others are abusing tools to get things done.
Thanks for the quick response and post. I have been using gmail, jott, ical, and a white board lately. Obviously the white board is a bit “old school” but I have it next to me when I work day in/day out and since I live/work in the space place, it helps. Although if I didn’t live/work in the space place, I would try and leverage todo labels in gmail.
Again, thanks for taking the time to write this up.
I too keep my email inbox empty. I’m following the Bit Literacy philosophy with email so I either respond, delete, or forward to gootodo. If an email contains important information that I’ll need to refer to later I’ll save it as a plain text file within the directory of the associated project.
I fear using folders in mail as an acceptable way of deferring items as I will often forget to return to them later. Instead I feel that every item I would defer could be converted into a to-do. If it’s something that I want to think about and respond to later then I would make a to-do to ‘incubate’ on that email at a later time. The problem with dropping email in folders in macmail is that for me at least it’s often a file and forget process. Placing it as a to-do on the weekend will bring it to my attention once again at a later time prompting me to take action.
Jim,
I definitely agree with the forgetting. On anything I defer I create a corresponding todo. I only put in the folder so when the item is complete I can readily find the email to respond.
The exception to this is incubate and research. I think you bring up a good point and I think I will start “research” and “incubate” lists in backpack and add todo’s if i file anything in there.
Thanks for information.
many interesting things
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