Quadrant IV

Over Easter, I caught up with my reading and managed to finish the David Allen that had been sitting on my bookshelf for ages.  As a result, I regained my enthusiasm for productivity and organisation and have rebooted my GTD system.

What I now use:

• Toodledo - the current staple of my system, it manages my work and personal tasks and allows me to track by context, goal or time I have available.  I especially like the ‘schedule’ option which asks me my context and how much time I have, and allocates a task for me based on the priority I have assigned.
• Outlook – I just can’t escape it.  My email account at work is delivered to my Outlook inbox and most of my work tasks arrive there.  Add to that, I have a WinMo phone and it backs up to Outlook on a periodic basis.  Outlook isn’t my email client of choice for home, but it still has to be accounted for.
• Franklin Covey Planner: I have a beautiful Franklin Covey planner that I use at home for notes, task lists and other reference material.  I don’t store my current task list in the planner, but use it more for notes and reference materials.  I also don’t currently use my planner at work, it is purely personal.
• WinMo Phone: This is the lynch pin of the entire system.  My personal email is delivered to my phone as well as muy gmail account, and it goes with me everywhere.  At the moment I can’t keep up with my Toodledo task list on my phone, as the Toodledo mobile site doesn’t work that well with my phone, but I have everything else at hand.

Things I’d like to add/use:

• Evernote.  I have played with Evernote in the past, but just can’t get the hang of it.  I’d really like to though.
• Remember the Milk: I have a RTM account that I use for some lists, but due to a rather painful input UI, I just don’t use it as much as I should.  Which is why I moved to Toodledo.
• Delicious.  Like Evernote, I’ve never really managed to get the hang of Delicious.  One day perhaps.

At this stage, my system is still far from perfect.  I think I still have too many variables where something can go wrong and things can get lost in the system, but I’m slowly minimalising everything down to a few trusted collection buckets.

I’m spending the Easter long weekend finally catching up with my reading.  Among an array of books currently sitting on my shelf waiting for attention, I have the newest David Allen GTD book.  I bought this ages ago, but haven’t had a chance to really give it the time it deserves.  So now as I’m trying to reboot my GTD system and put my life in some sort of order, I thought it was about time.

Want to read it too?  Grab it from Amazon, or Fishpond if you are in Australia.

Some months ago (actually, more months than I care to think about), I thought it would be a great idea to trial a bunch of task management applications and services.  The general idea was to find the one true task manager that would suit my needs and keep my life on track.

I did actually trial a fair few of the applications I said I would.  I installed things on my phone; I got online accounts.  But at the end of the day I realised that while each of the applications I tried would manage my tasks, it really came down to how I organised them in the first place, not where I put them.

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