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.

I got a request on Twit­ter recently (hi, @girvo!) to update how I use GTD now that I’ve switched plat­forms. It’s pretty sim­ple, and if you’ve been read­ing my stuff recently, it should come as no sur­prise that I’m doing it almost entirely in Evernote.

I have every­thing in one big note­book now in Ever­note, using tags and saved searches to find things (à la Gmail). For things in my GTD sys­tem, I have two tags to use: “!GTD” (the intial bang sorts it at the top of the tag list and dis­tin­guishes it from the tag “gtd” which I use for notes about GTD) and “Con­text”. If I bring up notes with the !GTD tag, I see at least eight notes, some­times more:

.Projects

This is a list of projects, out­comes I want to achieve that con­sist of more than one action. For example:

Write Titanus first draft

Write Rev­e­la­tion first draft

Post to JeffKirvin.net at least once a week

Paint bath­room

.Someday/​Maybe

This is a list of things that have been on my mind, but I have no com­mit­ment to accom­plish them in the fore­see­able future:

Stream media from PC to TV

Use Wii Fit for workouts

.Wait­ing For

This is a list of things I have on hold until some­one else gets back to me. I con­sult this once a week to see if I need to ping people.

All of the lists that begin with an at sign are con­texts, and tagged as such so that I can have a saved search called “Task Lists” that shows only those notes.

@Computer

This is for next actions that require some kind of computer/​internet access, but no spe­cific resources (like my iTunes library on my home desk­top or the tick­et­ing sys­tem we use at work). Basi­cally this is stuff I can do with my iPhone if necessary.

@Home

Both house­clean­ing and com­put­ing tasks that require a com­puter at my house (iTunes and gam­ing stuff, mostly) go on this list.

@Work

This is for stuff I have to do at the office.

@Out

This is mostly for errands or things involv­ing my car.

@Phone

And lastly, a list for phone calls I have to make. This is usu­ally a pretty sparse list as I avoid voice calls as much as pos­si­ble, pre­fer­ring less intru­sive and time asyn­chro­nous SMS and email.

I cur­rently also have a cou­ple projects I’ve removed from the .Projects list so I can do “back of the enve­lope” plan­ning. For exam­ple, I have a note called “Fix Neon” con­sist­ing of:

Get engine diagnostic

Check heat issue

Replace wind­shield

Replace tail­lights

Fix dash­board short

Replace dri­ver door

Replace pas­sen­ger mirror

Replace steer­ing column

(yes, there’s a rea­son my friends refer to my car as the Mil­len­nium Falcon)

For things that are time-​sensitive, I sched­ule the next actions on my Google cal­en­dar. For things that have to be done at a spe­cific time, I put them at that time, but for most things that have to be done just on a cer­tain day, I sched­ule them as free, all-​day events.

For col­lec­tion, I can have any num­ber of notes, all tagged with “Inbox”. These can be pic­tures, voice notes, text notes, even clipped web pages. Every so often, I go through my Inbox saved search and process these, adding new projects or next actions to my core lists as necessary.

When I’m on the go and look­ing for some­thing to do, I’ll bring up my Task Lists saved search in Ever­note and open the appro­pri­ate con­text. When I’m done with a task, I sim­ply delete that row. Ever­note sup­ports adding check­boxes to notes, but doing so means I can’t edit those notes on my iPhone, some­thing that’s vital to my sys­tem. So I keep it sim­ple, my notes in Ever­note not all that dif­fer­ent from the paper note cards so many GTDers use.

To me, the real advan­tage of this sys­tem is that it will work any­where. Win­dows PC, Mac, Linux (through Evernote.com), iPhone, Black­berry, Win­dows Mobile or just about any­thing else that can use either the full or mobile ver­sions of the Ever­note web­site. As long as I have an inter­net con­nec­tion, I have GTD. And even when I don’t have an inter­net con­nec­tion, I have the cached ver­sions of my lists that I’ve marked as favorites on my iPhone, so I at least have older ver­sions to work with.

How are you using GTD?

Part of the prob­lem cre­ative types have with David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done method­ol­ogy is that we tend to be “big pic­ture” type peo­ple and GTD focuses on the lit­tle things. Even if we’re method­i­cal in set­ting up our GTD sys­tem, we’re never quite sure we’re focus­ing on the right lit­tle things. Remem­ber, the dif­fer­ence between effi­ciency and effec­tive­ness is that while effi­ciency is doing things right, effec­tive­ness is doing the right things.

This has become more and more appar­ent to me recently. I’m at some­thing of a cross­roads in my life, a reboot where I have the oppor­tu­nity to re-​invent myself and build my life the way I want it. But what do I want? This is where I’ve always run aground with GTD. I’ll do a “core dump”, writ­ing down all my open loops, but still have no idea if clos­ing all of those open loops will get me to where I want to go.

So in addi­tion to all that “in the trenches” stuff, I decided to see if I could deter­mine what my goals (mas­ter projects) should be by doing what I do best: telling a story.

My “reboot” con­cept will take a lit­tle under two years, after which both myself and my par­ents will be finan­cially secure and inde­pen­dent. So I decided to visu­al­ize a nor­mal, typ­i­cal day for myself two years in the future. If I get to where I want to be, what would that look like?

Here’s the start of that day.

The alarm on my Palm Pre goes off, wak­ing me up. Shoo­ing the cats off the futon, I sit up and glance around my Spar­tan bed­room. The walls have framed posters from favorite movies, and there’s a TV stand in the cor­ner with my 24″ tube TV and a small DVD player. I get up, pull my Pre off the Touch­stone induc­tive charger, pick up my clothes from the night before and walk into the liv­ing room.

The liv­ing room is also a wide open space with lit­tle in it. There’s a large cat tree in the far right cor­ner, a futon imme­di­ately to my right, against the wall the bor­ders the bed­room, and a large flatscreen TV mounted to the oppo­site wall. Under the TV is a metal strip run­ning to the car­pet, which both holds three glass shelves and con­ceals the cables from the shelf con­tents. The first shelf holds my Nin­tendo Wii and var­i­ous con­trollers, the sec­ond holds my Xbox 360 and the third my com­bi­na­tion DVD player/​VCR. On the car­pet at the bot­tom is my Wii Fit bal­ance board.

I walk past the liv­ing room and make a right into the laun­dry room. Imme­di­ately to my left is the auto­mated cat box, which doesn’t need chang­ing yet. I drop yesterday’s clothes into the stain­less steel wash­ing machine, which also isn’t full enough to run a load yet, and ignore the boxes of CDs and other media stored in the corner.

As I walk back to the liv­ing room I go past the kitchen and look into the “din­ing room”. I have a L-​shaped glass and steel com­puter desk in the cor­ner, hold­ing my home server/​gaming PC, a mul­ti­func­tion inkjet and paper fil­ing sys­tem. I then walk into the kitchen, start a batch of rice steam­ing and pour myself some hot tea from the timed cof­fee maker.

It’s hardly a riv­et­ing best­seller, but there’s a lot of use­ful infor­ma­tion there. Going back over that sec­tion, I can pull out fac­tual, declar­a­tive state­ments that have to be true for this vision of my future to be true.

• I have my own apartment.
• I have a Palm Pre and a Touch­stone charger.
• I have a futon for the bedroom.
• I have a futon for the liv­ing room.
• I have a large cat tree.
• I have a flatscreen TV with a wallmount.
• I have a wall mounted, glass shelf enter­tain­ment system.
• I have a Nin­tendo Wii and a Wii Fit.
• I have an Xbox 360.
• I have a stain­less steel washer/​dryer set.
• I have all my CDs and DVDs ripped to a home server (since the media is in storage).
• I have a home server.
• I have an L-​shaped glass and steel com­puter desk.
• I have a mul­ti­func­tion inkjet printer.
• I have a paper GTD system.

Now, admit­tedly a lot of this is going to turn out to be shop­ping list. But as I go on writ­ing about my day, it turns out I use the Wii Fit every morn­ing for aer­o­bics, strength train­ing, yoga and med­i­ta­tion. I stream all my TV through my Xbox 360. So I go over my list of state­ments and see some obvi­ous group­ings, which in turn imply other goals. All the shop­ping list stuff goes under “My apart­ment is fur­nished to my tastes.” but that implies “I can afford to fur­nish my apart­ment to my tastes.” The bit about the paper GTD sys­tem ended up mor­ph­ing to using a scan­ner to scan all my paper data into OneNote, where it can be man­aged by Out­look. The home server/​media cen­ter thing even­tu­ally led to plan­ning on buy­ing a few 1TB USB dri­ves to hold video content.

When I’m done with this con­sol­i­da­tion, I have the fol­low­ing top-​level goals for two years from now.

• I’m as close to 100% dig­i­tal as possible.
• My liv­ing space is clean and organized.
• I take good care of myself.
• I have my own apartment.

Under each of these I have sub-​goals (both “I drive a Honda Civic hybrid” and “I play LOTRO with my friends reg­u­larly” go under “I take good care of myself”) and each of those in turn has projects and next actions under it. But in the process of doing this lit­tle exer­cise, I’m con­vinced I have the “big rocks” cov­ered and I’m on track to achieve the impor­tant things in my life.

(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.