If I’m going to use Ever­note for GTD because of how amaz­ing it is as an uni­ver­sal inbox, I need to develop a sys­tem that actu­ally exploits Evernote’s strengths, rather than sim­ply trans­lat­ing the paper note­book GTD work­flow to it. Ever­note is dig­i­tal, and that gives me a dif­fer­ent set of assump­tions than a paper note­book. Specif­i­cally, the paper time man­age­ment law of “touch each piece of paper only once” doesn’t apply in the dig­i­tal world.

My GTD sys­tem in Ever­note is decep­tively sim­ple. Every­thing takes place in my default folder, and I only have tags for con­texts. At the note level, there is no dif­fer­ence between a one-​off task and a project. This is not a vio­la­tion of the GTD method, just a dif­fer­ent way of imple­ment­ing it. Let’s walk through the process to see what I mean.

Col­lect

This is where Ever­note really shines. Every­thing in my life even­tu­ally finds its way into Ever­note. Inter­est­ing links from Google Reader or Twit­ter get emailed to my Ever­note account (I need to start just retweet­ing cool stuff from Twit­ter with a @myen tacked on the to the end, which does the same thing, but also shares with my tweeps). I take pic­tures on my iPhone, and then dump them into the iPhone Ever­note client (includ­ing any­thing I get on paper that I want to “file”). Files, emails and memos per­ti­nent to my job get clipped into the Win­dows Ever­note client on my lap­top. And of course ideas, tasks, ran­dom things I hear… any­thing inter­est­ing at all, it goes in the soup. Ever­note is the best “uni­ver­sal cap­ture” inbox I’ve ever seen, and why I keep com­ing back to it for my GTD process instead of ser­vices like Too­dledo or Nozbe.

Process/​Organize

I have a saved search in Ever­note called !Inbox. This search is defined as –tag:* in all note­books. This shows me every untagged note in my entire data­base. I go down the list, start­ing at the top, and ask, “What is this? Is it actionable?”

If it’s not, it gets tagged with !Ref­er­ence and I move on. I used to have dozens, maybe even hun­dreds of tags, but I finally real­ized that such gran­u­lar­ity was slow­ing me down. Evernote’s search is so good that I don’t have to define key­words. If the word I’m likely to search for isn’t in the note itself, it’s prob­a­bly not as rel­e­vant as I think it is.

If it is action­able, I do a lit­tle more thought on the mat­ter. Is it a project? What’s the next action? If it’s a larger project I might do a lit­tle “back of the enve­lope” plan­ning at the top of the note, push­ing down what I’d already clipped, sketch­ing out mile­stones. Then I deter­mine the next action, and make that the title of the note. I assign one or more @contexts as tags, and then move on to the next item on the list.

Review

I have saved searches for all of my con­texts, plus one for Someday/​Maybe. Whether I’m at my desk, at home or on the go, I fire up Ever­note on what­ever device is handy and check out the saved search for the con­text appro­pri­ate at the time. Cur­rently, my con­texts are:

• @Computer (things I can do any­where I have one of my com­put­ers, pretty much anywhere)
• @Home (things that require me to be in or around my house)
• @Internet (things that require an unfil­tered inter­net con­nec­tion, ie things I can’t do on the cor­po­rate net­work because of our strict con­tent fil­ter­ing like down­load­ing executables)
• @Office (things that require cor­po­rate resources)
• @Out (things I have to go to, rather than come to me)
• @Read/Review (read­ing mate­r­ial, by far the biggest list)
• @Shopping (things to buy, online or locally)

These are obvi­ously defined by loca­tion, or more gen­er­ally, resources avail­able. Given that some of these (@computer, @read/review, @shopping) can be done any­where I have my iPhone, which is pretty much every­where, I’m think­ing about adjust­ing my con­texts to be more about resources and energy avail­able. Like hav­ing a con­text for things that can be done in 5 min­utes, things that will take an hour, etc.

Do

Once I have the list up for the cur­rent con­text, I go down the list and do what­ever feels “right”. I bounce around, almost never going down the list in order. I also keep an eye out for things that repeat­edly get passed over, and try to fig­ure out if they’re really doable, if I’m skip­ping them because they have the wrong next action or if it’s some­thing I really have any inten­tion of doing at all. It’s okay to look at some projects and decide, “I’m just not going to do that. I accept the con­se­quences of it not being done.” These get re-​tagged with !Ref­er­ence and fall off the lists.

When I actu­ally do some­thing, I edit the note to change the title to the next action after what I just did, and if nec­es­sary change the con­text tag. I repeat as nec­es­sary so the project steams along until I run out of actions. Then it’s also tagged with !Ref­er­ence and fades into the search­able deep.

That’s it. If I’m look­ing for some­thing to do and noth­ing appeals to me, I can go into my Someday/​Maybe con­text and pro­mote a few things to active projects by putting them in con­texts titled by their next actions (although gen­er­ally, I’m more likely to take a nap). Once a week I sit down and do a brain dump, just typ­ing what­ever pops into my head sep­a­rated by CTRL-​N to put each in a new note. Then I process them as listed above.

This is the sim­plest way of imple­ment­ing GTD in Ever­note I can think of, but no sim­pler. I hits all the major points, but also is stream­lined enough that I’ll actu­ally do it. Every­thing else I’ve tried has had too many steps involved to main­tain the sys­tem, mean­ing I’ll inevitably get tired and wan­der off. This sys­tem looks like it’s easy enough to stick with, but if you have any sug­ges­tions on how to improve it, be sure to let me know in the comments.

Warn­ing: This con­tains spoil­ers for the first 28 episodes of the TV series Lost, orig­i­nally aired on ABC in 2004 – 2005. If you haven’t seen these episodes already and do not wish to know about them, you have been warned.

Ini­tially, I’d avoided Lost. I knew from past expe­ri­ence that JJ Abrams, the cre­ator and exec­u­tive pro­ducer on the show, was only good for about a sea­son and half before he jumps the shark. But over time, so many of my friends kept telling me this show was dif­fer­ent, that weird stuff was sup­posed to hap­pen on the island, that it was worth it. So when the first four sea­sons showed up on Net­flix to watch online, I decided to give it a shot.

Three episodes into sea­son two, I stopped. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed the first sea­son very much, and it sparked some inter­est­ing insights on writ­ing, par­tic­u­larly in dri­ving home that every one of your char­ac­ters is the pro­tag­o­nist of his or her own story, that they should all have bag­gage in the back­ground. But I stopped watch­ing because of another obser­va­tion about the show and how it has been writ­ten. It became obvi­ous to me that the writ­ers couldn’t pay their debts.

Every time you pose a story ques­tion in fic­tion, you incur a debt to the reader. Even­tu­ally, you have to pay that off by answer­ing it in a sat­is­fac­tory way or the reader, jus­ti­fi­ably, feels cheated. The prob­lem I had with Lost as it started up the sec­ond sea­son, is that I didn’t like the answers I was get­ting, didn’t think they paid off all the teas­ing suspense.

Con­sider:

Q: Who are “The Oth­ers” Rousseau was so scared of?

A: A bunch of thugs on the other side of the island. This fell well short of the almost mag­i­cal, invis­i­ble, whis­per­ing specters we were led to expect.

Q: What is the giant, unseen crea­ture that killed the pilot?

A: A plume of black smoke accom­pa­nied by a mechan­i­cal, clock­work chat­ter­ing. This is, again, very dis­ap­point­ing com­pared to the T-​Rex we were all imag­in­ing. Hell, even the crit­ter from Abrams’s “Clover­field” would have been better.

Q: What was under the hatch?

A: A long shaft into an apartment/​lab hous­ing an ath­lete Jack just hap­pened to meet years ear­lier. This is our intro­duc­tion to the Dharma Ini­tia­tive, a group founded 35 years before by a bunch of hip­pies to do soci­o­log­i­cal exper­i­ments. It’s not only unim­pres­sive, but doesn’t really even have a hint of sinister.

Now, I know from friends that there are a lot more twists and turns in store and that not every­thing is what it seems. But in a sense, that’s the problem.

Ser­ial sto­ry­telling has changed dra­mat­i­cally in the last 20 years. For a long time, TV, comics and other seri­als were episodic in nature. Episodes were largely self-​contained, and it didn’t mat­ter much what order you saw them in. This is because each episode looped back to end where it began. The episode started with a dis­rup­tion to the sta­tus quo, the char­ac­ters worked to resolve the issue, and the episode — or rare two-​parter — ended when the sta­tus quo was restored.

In the past two decades here in the US, the trend has been to “nov­els for tele­vi­sion” where we don’t restore the sta­tus quo at the end of each episode, but rather fol­low a longer story arc across an entire sea­son. In some cases, like Baby­lon 5, the story arc may even span the entire series.

In a lot of cases, this model works just as well. For exam­ple, each sea­son of Buffy The Vam­pire Slayer has a dis­tinc­tive fla­vor and tone all its own as each sea­son has a dif­fer­ent vil­lain whose ulti­mate defeat awaits in the sea­son finale. But the catch is this only works if you know where you’re going when you set out.

Lost doesn’t have that. It bor­rows what lit­tle struc­ture it has from a much older form of tele­vi­sion: the soap opera. In soaps, pro­duced daily often 52 weeks a year, there isn’t time for the writ­ers to give a lot of thought to how they’re going to pay things off. Instead, they go for what­ever plot twists they can get away with to keep peo­ple com­ing back. The lengths the writ­ers inevitably have to go to in order to explain such dras­tic shifts in the plot while main­tain­ing con­ti­nu­ity with the past has become a run­ning gag.

And ulti­mately, I can see that’s where Lost is headed. Early into its sec­ond sea­son, I was already see­ing con­nec­tions between the char­ac­ters and between the char­ac­ters and their envi­ron­ment that stretched the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief to the break­ing point. It was get­ting out of hand because the writ­ers clearly had no end in sight. They were just writ­ing them­selves deeper and deeper into cor­ners they could never pos­si­bly find a log­i­cal, sat­is­fy­ing way out of. Every time they raise the bar yet higher and posit another plot twist, they are writ­ing a check their story can’t cash.