implement GTD

List of projects and list of next actions are one and the same. I annotate each project’s notes with the next action.

Work: IMAP. “Projects” folder.
Personal (online): Gmail. “Projects” tag.
Personal (offline): “Tasks” app on Treo.
Scheduled projects: “Calendar” app on Treo.

Someday/maybe list: You’re looking at it. :)

Ever since my laptop died, I’ve used Gmail for my primary e-mail client. It works really well with GTD. For one thing, it’s trivial to label an e-mail thread with “project” and “next action” tags. For another thing, I can read the e-mail anywhere I have a Web browser and an Internet connection.

Finally, there’s the filing system, or lack thereof. While I was using traditional mail clients, I grew frustrated with the use of folders to store e-mail. The problem with folders is that if you put something in one folder, it can’t be in another folder at the same time. But a folder is simply a relationship—the e-mail is not physically “inside” anything. Tags are a much better way to organize electronic data like e-mail, mainly because you can give something multiple tags.

At first when I was using Gmail, I was annoyed by the clunky implementation of tags. Creating a new tag is a rather cumbersome process in Gmail. However, when I moved over to using Gmail as my primary mail client, I realized that you don’t need a lot of tags in Gmail. Why? Because Google search on all your e-mail is so powerful that you don’t really need to manually “tag” anything. If I want to search for all of the e-mails from or to Rakesh, I just type “Rakesh” into the search window and there they are.

IMO, the best time for a weekly review at work is Monday morning. For some reason, I’m fantastically productive Monday morning. I can just knock down next actions like they’re bowling pins.

In fact, I might go so far as to advocate a review of personal projects during a Monday morning break, too.

I’ve been slacking.

Yes, I have implemented GTD, or at least my twisted version thereof. I reserve the right to put this back on my list without notice.

I’m curious to know if any other new parents are attempting to implement GTD. The natural interrupt cycle of a little baby (wouldn’t change it if I could) seems to be a little out of sync with “mind like water.” Mind like drool or spitup, perhaps.

That said, I’m managing to take baby steps (heh) and knock a task or two off my list every week. The things on my todo list just look so trivial compared to “change that diaper” or “feed child”. Odd.

I’ll report back in a few weeks. The specific quirk of my implementation is that I’m not keeping separate project, next action, and waiting for lists. Instead, everything’s in electronic form. I am annotating each project with the next action. I treat “waiting for” in the same way: it goes on the appropriate project as a note. I’m using Thunderbird Mail and the PalmOS todo list to store my lists.

I blogged about my implementation here.