DonationCoder.com Software > The Getting Organized Experiment of 2007

Lifehacker thread on GTD modificiations

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brotherS:
shanebotwin wrote as a comment:
The biggest flaw for most people I think is the admonishment not to use your In Box as a To Do list. Everyone has email. Everyone is on it most of the time. It's ubiquitous and available to you on the web, your mobile and your desktop in one way or another (I like IMAP). Why not use it? Why create another application to duplicate this?

I basically have an @action folder and an @archive folder. Things in my inbox either go to action, archive or get deleted. They stay in @action till they get done. If there is something that is time based, it goes on my Google Calendar which sends me an email reminder so it ends up in my in Box when I need it. My wife sends me .ics calendar invites which automatically end up on my Google Calendar for stuff she wants me to do since she has Lotus Notes at work (god help her) and it works for her to do this too.

I fail to see why complex systems are needed.

Email + Google Calendar + a paper to do list is all that I require.

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As a result of reading this comment I added an "action" label to GMail and will experiment with this.
-brotherS (March 29, 2009, 08:02 AM)
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I also added a "DONE" label. When I'm done with a task I added the action label to, I remove "action" and add "DONE". Really like it so far, especially since GMail made the use of labels easier in the recent past (just mark an email, press "l" and type the first few letters of a label of yours).
-brotherS (April 01, 2009, 03:47 AM)
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Just an update (in case anyone is interested, I'm surprised that this thread seems to be mostly ignored  8) ):

I'm still using this combination and like it a lot!

And I just saw that I'm already using several of app's GMail ideas too (see her post in https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=14728.0).

vadik_21:
You can also try using this <a href="http://www.baydin.com/boomerang/">Outlook email reminder</a>. It's a plugin that lets your right click on your email and choose when you want to get back to it or when to follow up.  Completely secure and incredibly easy to use in my opinion  :up:.

IainB:
Actually, I hadn't noticed this thread before either, and I am an avid "GTD" user.
For years I have looked for a tool or a combination of tools that would replace the DOS-based PIM (Personal Information Manager) Lotus Agenda, which provided me with a perfect GTD system since 1990. To make full use of the thing required you to have the capacity to be logical and able to think in terms of structured and complex cateqories, and it helped if you were a techo (familiar with computer technology), so it was not everybody's cup of tea.

Lotus Agenda's development ceased, and it was made progressively more obsolete by the newer Windows-based technology.
Which was why I actually became quite excited when I started to see the potential for Gmail + labels + filters to do some of the things that I had been accustomed to doing with Lotus Agenda. Some of those - but not all of them by any stretch - have been mentioned in the comments above.

A while back, I installed a Firefox add-on called "GTDInbox for Gmail". I found that by using this together with the add-on Better Gmail2, with the inbuilt categorisation tool "Folders for Gmail" (based on a Greasemonkey script) turned on, I was able to work towards roughly 60% of the power of Lotus Agenda - though it's a bit kludgy. You could experiment with these tools to assess how useful they could be for yourself. It requires setting up properly, in a structured manner, as did Lotus Agenda. I think the future for this Gmail-based approach to GTD is full of potential though.

I had one disappointment: I had been using an incredibly nifty and useful Greasemonkey script with Gmail called "Labellinks4gmail". It was a far more flexible categorisation tool than "Folders for Gmail"), but I had to use the latter because the "Labellinks4gmail" script was broken/defeated by the latest mods to Gmail.

Hope this makes sense and is of use to someone.

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