It’s been many months since I posted Getting Organised, parts 1 and 2. I have since abandoned the paper based system and embraced the GTD philosophy with my own tweaks. This has resulted in a major change to my behaviour and a significant drop in stress. This post outlines what I do now and some thoughts for the future. It is not about GTD.

The simplest things to implement in GTD are the various categorisations of information and lists. I have the following:

Mail folders for Actions, Waiting For and Someday / Maybe. My Inbox remains empty, and I work on the principle that when an e-mail arrives, if I can answer it in 2 minutes I do it, otherwise it gets filed somewhere else. Apple Mail includes the concept of Smart Folders, which allows me to group and find things automatically. This is a great aid to efficient working.

GTD groups things into Projects. A Project is anything which takes more than one Next Action. For business Projects that require us to work together, we use Basecamp, 37Signals cheap but remarkable web based collaboration tool. Todos listed on Basecamp are assigned to one or both of us. It’s then up to us individually to manage them once assigned. Indeed, a Todo in Basecamp might be a Project in GTD terms.

I manage Next Actions in a variety of ways, according to the Project I’m working on. Generally, I use Backpack, which is a 37Signals web tool that provides a way of organising and managing personal tasks and information. Specific Projects get their own page in Backpack and I can put Next Actions there. This means I don’t clutter up Basecamp with stuff that Mark or our clients don’t need to know about.

Maintaining a Tickler Folder is the most tricky part of GTD. I used to have physical folders, but I kept forgetting to review them at the start of each day. Instead I use Backpack. Each day has it’s own page, and I’ve written a PHP script to automatically do the updating, create new day pages, and move stuff between days. There is rudimentary support for recurring events in my PHP script, and I have iCal e-mail other events to Backpack which the script handles. The script also rolls over incomplete Todos. This script is my homepage in Firefox, and it redirects to today.

This all leaves two things: what do I do today, and what happens to new things?

The place I look is on the current day page of my Backpack account. Then there’s the specific Project pages. This gives me a list of all the things I can do today, but not necessarily what I’ve decided to do.

For this I use a 3” x 3” piece of paper – the kind you get on jotter pads. I have these everywhere in my house, together with pens, so I’m never at a loss for writing down an idea or thought. The 3by3 (as I call it) technique involves writing down what I want to do. If I run out of space, then tough.. nothing else gets done. Furthermore, I partition the 3by3 into working hours.

New things can appear in lots of places, but they are mostly handled the same way. They can become Actions or Someday / Maybe in Mail, or entries in a Backpack day page, or a Basecamp or Backpack Project. Sometimes I just need to note it down and deal with it later. In such cases I keep them in a LBB (a Moleskine 3” x 5” Plain Pocket Notebook) – which is also great when visiting clients.