A Trifle Absurd

GTD at the Desk

This has become a veritable series: first I posted about GTD media I’ve tried, then about the mobile version of my current setup. Now it’s time to look at what’s on the computer itself.

At one point that just meant OmniOutliner for my lists and iCal for my calendar. But now that I work outside the house, it’s much more convenient to have all that data in Web apps so I can edit it from anywhere. So I moved my lists to Gmail and my calendar to Google Calendar.

Gmail isn’t an ideal list manager, but I’ve come up with a decent workflow. For each GTD list, I set up a label and a filter that redirects mail sent to “myusername+label@gmail.com”. Then, for convenience, I add that email address to my contacts, and give it a short name of just “label”. That puts address autocompletion on my side. Now I can just email that address to add something to the list, and reply to an existing list item to update it or add information.

This would be overkill for a frequently updated list such as next actions, but I keep that on paper. The only lists in Gmail are current-projects, someday-maybe, and waiting-for. So far, those seem to have the right granularity to make this setup work.

And that’s my current GTD system. No doubt it will be different again in six months, but I’m fine with that. Changing things up helps keep it interesting, as long as I don’t focus on the system at the expense of the stuff. I just need to remember that the point is not to get things organized, but to get things done.