(This was orig­i­nally posted on the old ver­sion of JK.net with pic­tures, but this is all I could sal­vage out of the Google cache.)

I’ve been a fan of David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done time man­age­ment method­ol­ogy for years. And while I had it down to a sci­ence on my var­i­ous Palms and Treos, a really good GTD imple­men­ta­tion has eluded me on Win­dows Mobile until just recently. There are lots of dif­fer­ent ways to do it, of course, and a few ded­i­cated appli­ca­tions designed to guide you through the GTD work­flow on Win­dows Mobile.

The prob­lem I have with those is that they’re all too bulky. They either don’t sync with my Exchange server or they don’t do it well. It’s too much effort to set up the sys­tem, and too cum­ber­some to use it in the moment. One of the hall­marks of GTD on paper is that it’s fast. Fast enough to be usable. Fast enough to become a “I don’t even think about it any­more” habit. Every sec­ond, every frac­tion of a sec­ond, that you add to that process makes it less likely you’ll actu­ally stick with it.

“Make things as sim­ple as pos­si­ble, but no sim­pler.”
– Albert Einstein

So I set out to cre­ate a GTD imple­men­ta­tion that used as lit­tle out­side soft­ware or struc­ture as pos­si­ble. I wanted it to sync, mostly, via Exchange, which meant lim­it­ing myself to Con­tacts, Tasks and Cal­en­dar (with one excep­tion). I wanted it to be fast to use on the device, just as glance­able as the paper ver­sion, but with even less over­head due to the dig­i­tal nature of the data. It should be easy to col­lect, process, decide and do. And I think I pulled it off.

As you might expect, the sys­tem is based around tasks. Accord­ing to Allen, you should not pri­or­i­tize your task lists, and for the most part I agree. This freed me up to use the high/​normal/​low pri­or­ity sys­tem in Outlook/​Exchange for some­thing else: defin­ing your lists.

Three kinds of things go on task lists in GTD. Next Actions (things you can actu­ally do some­thing about), Projects (lists of Next Actions relat­ing to the same goal) and Someday/​Maybes (things you might do at some point but have no com­mit­ment towards). In my sys­tem, Next Actions are all set to High impor­tance, Projects are Nor­mal impor­tance and Someday/​Maybes are Low impor­tance. When sort­ing your task list by pri­or­ity, this shows all your Next Actions grouped at the top of the list, then your projects. Run­ning out of Next Actions is a good sign to look at your Projects and cre­ate more Next Actions to move things along.

In each Project (nor­mal impor­tance task), I use the note field to jot down poten­tial Next Actions. Allen cau­tions against doing too much or too detailed hier­ar­chi­cal plan­ning on the the­ory that it will almost cer­tainly change once you actu­ally get into it.

“No bat­tle plan sur­vives con­tact with the enemy.”
– Gen­eral George Patton

Allen instead rec­om­mends “back of the enve­lope” plan­ning, just jot­ting down a sim­ple list of things you know the project will require. This gives you the flex­i­bil­ity to do things in what­ever order makes sense in the moment and still be sure you hit the major points. When nec­es­sary I copy each line to a new Next Action (High Impor­tance task) so it shows up on the main list, and the next time I have the Project open I put an X in front of the ones I know I’ve done. When all of the actions are done and I can’t think of any more, the Project itself gets marked as complete.

When view­ing the list as a whole, I can either look at all my Next Actions or I can fil­ter the list by con­text. A curi­ous side-​effect I’ve noticed of using mobile tech­nol­ogy is that I tend to need far fewer con­texts than most peo­ple. I don’t need an “@phone” con­text, for exam­ple, since my smart­phone is always with me. Nor do I need @internet, etc. I only have four con­texts that are mean­ing­ful for me:

  • @Computer, for things that require a desk­top PC
  • @Home, for things to do inside or around my apartment
  • @Out, for things I can do pretty much any­where, or things to do on the go
  • @Work, for things to do at my office

That’s it. Indi­vid­ual tasks can be assigned to any or all of those cat­e­gories, and I can fil­ter the list to show just the Next Actions I can actu­ally do in any par­tic­u­lar con­text. This fil­ter­ing is a built in fea­ture of the Win­dows Mobile tasks appli­ca­tion, as is fil­ter­ing to show only Active Tasks (not com­plete, with a start date either null or before today). I assign Projects to the !Project con­text, so they don’t show up in my nor­mal con­text lists (Projects will usu­ally span mul­ti­ple con­texts any­way) and so I can catch things I for­got to cat­e­go­rize by using the built in “No Cat­e­gories” filter.

The nice thing about this sys­tem is that it’s all in Tasks (so far), which means it all syncs auto­mat­i­cally to Exchange and thus is all avail­able to me any­time, any­where, no mat­ter if I’m using Out­look at home, my smart­phone or Out­look Web Access at the office. But tasks will only take you so far. I still need to cap­ture ideas about stuff to do in the first place.

I talked about this recently. I have a sim­ple plain text file called Notebook.txt on my device set to sync to my desk­top, and I have short­cuts in my desk­top and hand­held Start Menus to open this file quickly and eas­ily. When a thought occurs to me, no mat­ter what it is, I open this file and jot it down. Every so often, usu­ally once a day, but some­times more fre­quently and some­times less, I open up that file and cut and paste from it into new tasks, appoint­ments, other doc­u­ments, what­ever is appro­pri­ate. Notice that I said cut. Once it’s processed, it’s gone from my note­book. I like to keep the note­book as clean as pos­si­ble. If I’m doing my job and pro­cess­ing new ideas reg­u­larly, that text file should be 0 bytes big more often than not. I use PHM Notepad for this just because open­ing the file is nearly instan­ta­neous, but Word Mobile works nearly as well if you don’t want to install extra soft­ware. It takes a sec­ond or two to open the file, but I’m look­ing for speed. (This is also why I keep my note­book in a plain text file instead of a Word doc­u­ment; I want it to open instantly on the phone and the desktop.)

And that’s the whole sys­tem. It’s quick, sim­ple and all but one text file syncs via Exchange. The only part that doesn’t sync doesn’t strictly have to, if you don’t mind hav­ing sep­a­rate “col­lec­tion buck­ets” on dif­fer­ent com­put­ers. And it catches the basics of GTD with­out unnec­es­sary over­head. Give it a try, and let me know how it works for you in the comments.