StartupCafe

A favourite hobby of all GTD-ers is to talk about their own customised form of GTD. Just look at here or here for instance. If you use GTD, please share your tips below (or leave your name in the comments – it would awesome to have a GTD Geek night).

My Implementation

To give you a favour of what to expect, here’s some of the parts to my implementation of GTD (the full system would take too long to explain!)

Collect

• Office Inbox – box to keep any bits and pieces in, e.g. scrap notes.
• Gmail Inbox – self explantory
• Mobile phone – I’ve set up my N95 to sync with Outlook, which in turns syncs with Toodledo (see below). It’s a faff to set up, but it works well.
• Moleskine Diary – For any seminars/meetings/conferences I go to. I could have used a normal notebook for this, but with a diary, I can have a rough idea of when the meeting was and flick through that month. To the amusment of my friends, I also have a contents page for my diary.
• RSS Feeds – in my Bloglines account
• Evernote – list of all the articles/anything I want to read
• Delicious – my bookmarks

Process

Email – I keep a zero inbox. When an email comes in, if it takes less than 2 minutes, I reply. If it takes longer, it gets labelled and archived:

• @Next Action – Action Item
• @Waiting For – Waiting for some action
• $Sept/Oct/Nov – Not an action item now, but I need to remember in Sept/Oct/Nov (there’s a separate label for each)

Then sometimes it gets these labels too, just to remind myself what action I’m supposed to do with it:

• TODO/TOREPLY/TOTHINK

Anything that I want to read just gets automatically forwarded to my Evernote address!

ToDo list

Toodledo – I’ve used many different todo lists, including Remember the Milk (RTM) and Google’s own Task list, but for its cross-platform goodness, Toodledo is amazing (Desktop app, web app, outlook sync. email and twitter). I love its “Bulk add” option – a text box which processes each new line as a new item.

Most importantly, it allows multiple ways of sorting your list.

• Contexts – items are tagged with contexts. If you’re at home, there’s no point looking at the Office list and vice versa.
• Folders – items are also tagged with what project it’s associated with. e.g. Thesis, StartupCafe, Rugby
• Priorities – there are 5 levels available in Toodledo:

• 3 (Top) for items I have to do and bad things will happen if I don’t
• 2 (High) for items I should really do
• 1 (Medium) for items I should do, if I have time
• 0 (Low) for items I can do
• -1 (Negative) for my Someday/Maybe list

The majority of the list is set to 0; I go through the list and review assign the priorities according to that day. This is less time consuming than it seems, since you’re likely to only re-prioritise a few items on your list (unless you’re having a really, really bad day).

Storage/Reference

Evernote – Clips from webpages for information, stores any rough ideas/braindump, stores my “Places where I have put things list” (which is invaluable since I get stressed out trying to find the chequebook/usb stick/ oyster card).

Review

End of Day Review – I write myself a little “important to do” list and stick it on my desk. It reminds me what I need to do when I come in the next morning.

Weekly Review – Sunday mornings are my review days. My office is empty and I get to put away things without disturbing anyone. I schedule Resnooze.com to send me a reminder email on Sunday morning so when I get in, it reminds me what I have to do.

Monthly Review – 1st Sunday of every month I sit down for a good couple of hours and go through my 2-30,000 feet (GTD lingo for higher level goal setting). I start by review my targets for the past month and how I performed. Then a list of goals for the forthcoming month.