Technology ramblings from a dilettante of all things digital

7 months later and I feel a lot more in control of my life, thanks to GTD and a little motivation.  I just finished David Allen's follow up GTD book, Making it all work.  I have to say that I highly recommend this book, even to those that have read Getting Things Done.  He doesn't modify the process at all, it's not about that.  Maybe I didn't pay enough attention when I first read (and by 'read' I mean I listened to the audiobooks 17 minutes at a pop during my commute), but this new book seemed to put it all into a better perspective.  The 6 horizons of focus (the name might seem a little froo-frooey, but they are very important) finally sunk in, from runway to 50,000 feet.  Although not a true GTD tool, I have adapted Remember The Milk (aka RTM) to the engine behind my GTD system.  I looked at the GTD contenders and have played around with most of them.

• Outlook I have to use for work and I believe it could be a great GTDish tool, but I don't really use it as such, so I just use the mail and calendar out of necessity for my job.  Don't get me wrong, I don't mind using it.  I use the Plaxo toolbar to sync all my outlook calendar items to my google calendar.
• Thinking Rock looks very cool and one of the new complete GTD systems, but it doesn't quite fit my lifestyle as it is a desktop app and I use multiple computers during the day, not to mention when I am on the go.
• Omnifocus looks cool.  It seems to also follow GTD very well from what I am told and has an iphone app, so its mobile, but the desktop app is for Mac and there's no web interface, so that one's out.
• Pen and Paper works, but I am too gadgety for that, although I do keep a pocketmod in my wallet in case of a planetwide EMP or zombie apocolypse (you never know).
• As I just mentioned above, Remember the Milk is how I roll for personal task management.  I was using todoist.com for projects.  I liked how you could reorder stuff easily, and then I would copy and paste from todoist over to RTM, but then I realized how crazy that was.  So just recently I took a commenter's suggestion and used RTM properly.  I have a few main lists:
  @action
  @blog (i may not keep this, I'm not sure yet)
  @someday
  @waitingFor
  Then each project becomes a list and tags are used for contexts.  I only have 3 contexts right now, because it should be as simple as possible:
  @home (i need to be home for this)
  @lunch (something I've deemed that I can knock out quickly over my lunch break and may require to be done during business hours (ie. doctor's appointment))
  @driving (something I have to drive to)
  @katieshouse (girlfriend honeydo list   )
  I made smartlists for @home and @lunch contexts since I use those all the time.
• For work, I use something called Abstractspoon Todolist for a couple of reasons:
  very fast with no lag time since its a simple desktop app
  easy note annotation with each task.
  each task can instantly turn into a project and get subtasks.  Sometimes I like to break down development efforts like this, so I can separate the planning and the doing.
  I can copy and paste a range from it into outlook, so I can do my weekly status reports with zero effort.
  it has tons of properties and filtering and sorting.  My big thing right now is at the end of the day, I categorize tasks as @today, so I can line up what I expect to accomplish the following day.  I find this is very helpful in staying organized and motivated me to get those tasks done by COB.  I've read that there's some mental commitment that happens when we put an item on a list and flag it with a due date, even if its self imposed.  There's a greater feeling of accomplishment when it gets done and a feeling of being jipped(sp?) when we don't get it done on time.  For my personal tasks, I only set deadline when something absolutely HAS TO get done by that date.  I've missed due dates for quite a while in RTM before I realized I set too many.  So now I just have my @action list filled and everything tagged by context.  Whenever I have some free time, I just go to the appropriate context and attack.  That way, I can be productive wherever I am and I never (reads: "rarely ever") feel jipped.

That's all I've got for now.  I feel pretty comfortable in my GTD setup.  I may streamline it a little over time.  Now I just need to get a little bit more motivated find some people to actually read my blog.