I’m very keen to follow along with this series of posts. However, I’m awfully busy (probably because I’m so disorganised!) How necessary is having a copy of the book or even reading the whole thing going to be?

I think you’ll find plenty of good tips without reading the whole book. I would grab M Vance’s Outline to give you a high-level understanding.

Once they get into it, a lot of people find they want to immerse themselves in GTD completely for 2 or 3 days to get everything in order—a lot of folks say it pays back the time investment by a factor of many, FWIW.

Have you checked out Daylite, from MarketCircle? It’s primarily for sales management, but folks often discuss DTD on it’s email list.

I really look forward to the OS X-specific info. I’m a Mac guy who picked up GTD after seeing all the nerd cred it had online. But despite reading the book, I haven’t implemented it yet. I’d love to see what files you use, what lists you keep — even the lists themselves (or some bowdlerized version, since you’d understandably like to keep some things private). I’m just curious what level of detail you get down to in your lists.

Anyway, Merlin, I’ve been a fan of all your online work for a while now, and I really look forward to reading more in the coming weeks.

Cheers for this, don’t forget to polish M Vance’s outline as you go through. It’s a wiki. Yes, helping others is an actionable item. I’m hitting the stationary cupboard … er .. tomorrow.

Check out Life Balance (http://www.llamagraphics.com) for excellent GTD helper software for Mac OS X (and Window and Palm I think).

I’ve had the book for a few months now and I’m finally getting ready to implement. I’m thinking of using a wiki as my organizational tool. I work in a cross-platform environment so I frequently switch between Mac, Windows and even Linux. I think something web-based yet simple, like wiki, might be my best bet. But I’m interested in knowing if anyone else has ever implemented GTD with a wiki (I couldn’t find anything on the davidco forums.)

Lon:

I think a wiki is a terrific idea. I run both Instiki and VoodooPad on my local Mac as well as PHPWiki for “PantyWad.” Instiki would really be my hands down choice for a simple wiki except that many ISPs haven’t caught up to the version of Ruby needed to run it. :(

For you, depending on your needs and skills, I’d look at either Usemod or PHPWiki. I think the latter may be better for GTD because of the cool category stuff. But Instiki is so damned pretty and fun to use (plus it supports Markdown!). Usemod is pretty basic, but it just couldn’t be easier to set up.

Merlin,

Love your site, found you through Bradlands. I’m new to GTD and this is a great resource.

I hate your fixed center column width though. On my cinema display the side borders look positively silly. (Want a screenshot? :) ) Any way to talk you into making the center column a non-absolute width? I feel like I’m reading a very very long sidebar. :)

I would love to see the Advanced Workflow (PDF) but am unable to open it. Can you try to make it available? I need to get my team on the GTD plan.

I read GTD, then started to consider how to implement it.

My solution? Use email.

Mail.app with my imap server is proving to be a good fit for me. I can use mail.app offline to edit/queue messages, which syncs with the imap when I go online. I am not tied to a duct taped solution, infact, email is a rather elegant solution.

Next steps, getting a rim pager, to capture those fleeting thoughts and get them into the system.

Also setup a mailbot to reply with summary of what is in some mailboxes.

Why re-invent the wheel? :-)

Instiki is, in fact, the wiki system I’ve settled on. I’ve used phpWiki and MoinMoin on other projects but after using instiki I’m hooked on its elegant simplicity. I haven’t used Markdown—Textile seems more my style—but perhaps I should try it to see what all the fuss is about.

Todd, you need a smaller display, that’s your problem. ;-)

Good call. I like it better. Thanks.

(Now send me some schwag. I’ve been buying your goddamn computers for almost 20 years!)

So, you’re going to go into why using a wiki for personal use is a good idea? Because I’ve heard it from several sources, but I cannot seem to imagine it. Perhaps some sort of demo would be helpful :-)

Instiki is the way to go, at least as far as managing the many lists is concerned. What stumps me, though, is the management of the myriad project support files I sometimes need to link to list items (or calender items…grr, iCal).

Voodoopad gets the file-management aspect right, because you can drag actual files into each wiki page, but I just don’t like the feel of Voodoopad.

I’d be interested to hear how others keep their files associated with list- and calendar items in OSX.

JP,

I’m just getting organized myself, but I’m leaning towards Circus Ponies NoteBook for electronic project files.

http://circusponies.com/

Download the eval and see what you think. I like the tabbed notebook view, and it seems very skinnable if you don’t like the default views. I don’t see any real to-do list management, so it’s probably only approvriate for support files, but it may work out.

I am very interested in all of this as I begin another semester of school. Would anyone care to elaborate Gordo’s query into using email to facillitate the organization principles of this system? I am jusy a little reluctant to stray too far from beloved email cockpit, especially after I have crashed and burned with the Franklin and Daytimer systems already. Thanks to all for the informative posts.

Merlin: can TypePad do Comment thread RSS feeds (like WordPress)? This would be a great one to track that way. I’ve never thought of them as that useful, but I think I’m starting to see the light.

This is perfect. I just stumbled onto this site (via del.icio.us) and wouldn’t you know it…I’ve been thinking about picking up a copy of “Getting Things Done” for the past few days.

I saw GTD while looking for an audio book (on iTunes) of “The Now Habit”, which I just read and loved. While I highly recommend “The Now Habit” to any procrastinators out there, I could still use some more tangible strategies for becoming more productive. Hopefully “Getting Things Done” will do the trick for me.

VoodooPad.

I’ve found it to be perfect not for large scale Life Balance-style organization, but for little stuff like remembering passwords, lists of jokes, copied text for web sites, simple to do lists, and so forth. I used to just have a big old directory of text files. Voodoopad is a good replacement for big old directories of text files. Don’t get too fancy with it and you’ll find it’s ideal for its scope.

(I also use it for writing. Compare it to dedicated creative writing applications like Ulysses. I’ve found that wikis, once you have a good workflow, are way more useful- you make an index page, a note page, etc.)

For implementing GTD, I’ve tried them all: DayLite, VoodooPad, OmniOutliner, LifeBalance. And I’ve now settled on Entourage 2004 as my main GTD tool. It syncs to the Palm nicely, I have all my Projects, tasks and hard landscape in one spot AND it rocks being able to have project-based email.

At the core of Entourage’s usefulness as far as GTD is concerned is of course the Project Center. I suspect that a more perfect solution could be developed in FileMaker Pro, but for something straight out of the box it works really well.

I never thought I’d be extolling the virtues of a Microsoft app but it is a pretty polished bit of software, especially when it comes to GTD.

Bongoman

I’m not convinced that software “process talk” is applicable to software development.. let alone real life. But, if you feel that you can refactor yourself, why not outsource yourself as well?

I’ve been using GTD for a couple of months — not a huge amount of time — and I’ve tried a ton of software solutions. For me, the best solution is turning out to be simplicity: text files and MacNoteTaker. I’m hoping that this site will help me simplify further and even get rid of my Palm as an organizational tool; I’d like to rely ultimately on printed lists and note cards.

I’m just not convinced that GTD is a method that a) requires a lot of tech and b) benefits from complicated tools. The goal of GTD is get things as much off your mind as possible, and software — even simple stuff like Instiki, which has quite a few clicks before any project to-dos are recorded — makes you think about the software. Before you know it, you’re spending time improving or rethinking your wiki, notebook, or outline. This is exactly not the point of GTD. I think this site has the right idea emphasizing tools like QuickSilver and its ‘append’ function: make things easy, transparent, and immediate if you can.

Here’s a good example: for a while the best solution I’d settled on was to use OmniOutliner on the desktop and a Palm with Shadowplan, a great PalmOS outliner. The advantage of SP was being able to see all of my projects at a glance, any time. But to record a new to-do, I inevitably ended up having to open SP, navigate to my project, zoom to the appropriate area of the outline, add the to-do, and shuffle around the items to achieve what seemed a sensible order. This not only took time — it made me think in a way I’d prefer not to.

Lately, I’ve switched to flat text files and index cards. I carry my Palm for contacts and a calendar sometimes, but when I think of an idea I write it on an index card and leave it at that. I save all the thinking / processing for the “Processing” stage of GTD, and I separate “Collecting” from “Processing” as much as possible. You would be amazed how much this helps with keeping stress-free. In my experience, the single greatest insight in GTD is that collecting, processing, and doing all need to be separate parts of your day or week. A lot of software tools get you into collecting and processing, and sometimes even doing, at the same time — e.g. Entourage, where you’re writing emails while you’re looking at your Project lists while you’re recording new tasks.

Obviously, whatever works for you works for you: but I would encourage you, if you haven’t tried it, to try out radically separating collection, processing, and doing. This requires unplugging a bit from cool software (I love VP and OO, for example, and miss playing with them), but it means that you need less of a complicated, one-stop-shop application to get things done and can focus more on clearing your head.

I agree with Josh, that simplicity is best. The process should be transparent, low barrier to capturing ideas, otherwise you don’t do it.

I had a pager for work and before reading GTD, I was sending myself reminders by email. Then when I read GTD alot of things started to fall into place.

I setup snipsnap a wiki/weblog to capture some links and more rich info. Of course about the same time I changed positions and no longer had access to the RIM pager. I treid using my sell fone to send sms for reminders, but it was not as easy (for me) to enter in the text. So a used RIM is on the way from ebay.

As for my email layout, just followed the suggestions in GTD. Also added a small filing box (not a whole cabinet) for ‘real world’ paper.

The thing that occurred to me that would be a ‘neat toy’, would be a knoppix cd image that could scan an image into a pdf, bonus if it did OCR. That would bridge the gap from dead tree to digital world.

But, if you feel that you can refactor yourself, why not outsource yourself as well?

Good one. I would totally do that…if they dramatically improved their support quality.

Actually, it’s the system that gets refactored, not the person. I want to update the program, not the wetware that’s running it. :)

Like Todd, I’ve been using Circus Pony’s NoteBook. Each project gets (at least) a page. Actions and support info gets listed on the page. I can tag actions with a context keyword and a next action sticker (both could be keywords or both could be stickers). I can then use the super-find feature to get a context list.

This works because I mostly work at home. It would be harder if I needed to use my Palm for anything other than reference. Features that would make NoteBook better for GTD would be sortable super-find results, “smart pages” (which, like Tiger’s smart folders, would display a dynamically-updated super-find result), and Applescriptability, which would let me automate interactions between NoteBook and iCal, for example.

Not a user of GTD myself (though maybe I should be) but I thought I’d chime in with a software solution or two I’ve seen floating around. Eastgate’s Tinderbox seems to have a pretty big base of GTD users and seems like a neat solution. There’s some stuff in the support wiki including document templates. HandyShopper for palm also has some GTD templates, but I haven’t checked them out. And I think I’ve lost the url for the software. The user group is here.

I wanted to chime into this conversation as one of the co-creators of Circus Ponies NoteBook.

I was introduced to GTD back in 2001, not long before Jayson and I founded Circus Ponies, and it greatly influenced my input into our design of the product. I’m not a 100% GTD follower (I already had a pretty solid system of my own in place), but some of DA’s methods struck me as so brilliant I’ve long since replaced pieces of my own system with pieces from his. :-)

Many of the feature suggestions that are mentioned in this discussion have also been mentioned on our User Forums and we are working to incorporate them into the next major release of the product. While our intention is to make the product useful for anyone, we are particularly interested in hearing from GTD users. We find they are highly self-aware and make excellent constructive suggestions.

We also invite Mac users who would like to get organized to try NoteBook free for 30 days and to take advantage of our Discussion Forums which we read and respond to religiously.

Many thanks to DA for refining such a great system.

The in-tray of life is never empty.

You can spend forever trying to empty the tray or you can learn to transcend the tray.

Letting go of the tray is the true path.

There is no tray, Bob.