Getting Things Done Digitally

By Gaz under Personal Growth, Technology

Before I jump in and alienate half of you with another long post full of GTD jargon, feel free to mosey on over to Wikipedia for a brief introduction of the ideas behind GTD, along with some useful links to get your feet wet. It’s easy enough to get a grasp of the concepts by following several rather excellent GTD themed blogs and sites, but once you’re attention is hooked there’s really no substitute for David Allen’s book:

I recently wrote about the analogue two-thirds of the Azazil GTD system, which may have left you wondering what the other third of the system is? Skip down a few paragraphs if you want to get to the details, or if you stick around I’ll first explain why neither a fully digital, nor fully analogue system works in practice — unless you spend all of your time in front of your computer. Or none of your time in front of your computer for that matter.

As a self-confessed geek, I obviously wanted to have a completely digital system when I first started to implement GTD in my life. I wasted a lot of time trying to find or fine tune the perfect system, but was continually frustrated at not being able to add something to my digital inbox when away from my laptop; or needing access to my calendar to figure out when the next free night for a few beers with my buddies would be. It really didn’t matter how cool and streamlined my digital system would ever be, there are always going to be times when access to my laptop just isn’t available.

I was still messing around with gadgets, and constantly synchronising calendar, contact and context information between my laptop, iPod and smartphone, and hadn’t quite reached a fully formed idea that ditching all the tech would be easier in the long run when I started stumbling upon increasing evidence of the Back To Paper revolution. While I developed the Azazil twist on hacking a Moleskine, I tried to force everything through the analogue system, which was great for a while — being able to flip open the Moleskine at the bookmark pen and scribble whatever was on my mind onto the Inbox Page was certainly liberating.

But, I really do have to be at my laptop when processing email and when I’m working, so why waste time writing in my Moleskine that I need to reply to a certain email, for example. Later on I’ll need to dig through my archive to find said email to compose the reply. So, it turns out that there is a perfectly good opportunity to use my laptop to track the computer bound contexts of my system… I’ve been careful, however, to only let the contexts that have no analogue component be managed inside the computer. Here are a few things that seem at first like perfect examples of computer bound activities, along with reasons why in fact they are not:

• Contact Details: Email addresses? Sure. You might need a phone number for a friend at the airport after your phone battery has gone flat, and haven’t brought your computer. Or need a business contact to address an envelope at the post office when the computer is still at home.
• Blog Ideas: Always at my computer when I write them, but I often have a flash of inspiration in the back of a taxi, or in the shower when the computer isn’t easily accessible.

The reverse can be true also, and there are even contexts that need to be manually moved back and forth between the analogue and digital part of the overall system:

• Finance: Way easier to run your finances on the computer, but you’ll want to collect receipts in your Moleskine while out shopping, and maybe keep a log of day-to-day spending if you keep track of how much money went on groceries/taxes etc.

The Digital Third

I do all my personal computing on Apple Mac’s nowadays, so the applications I’m describing are Apple biased — but it is not difficult to set up equivalent Linux or Windows software with the same principles. That said, the digital third of Azazil GTD comprises two applications: Apple Mail and my favourite digital junk drawer application, Journler. I should point out that, due in the main to mailing list subscriptions for Free Software I’m involved with, I get around 1200 emails every day, not counting spam. The system I’m describing here is great for coping with that sort of volume, but is almost certainly overkill if you receive a more sensible number of emails. The two things I want to deal with exclusively at my computer then are email, and programming projects.

Email

To track my email in a GTD stylee, I (seriously under-)use the excellent Mailtags and MailActOn plugins. Among the many features of MailTags is a keyword field that I use to mark some emails as one of:

• Reference: Emails that I want to keep for future use. Say, emailed receipts, or project materials.
• Waiting For: Emails I’ve sent, or replied to, that I will need to chase later if I don’t get a reply in due course.
• @Mail: The only context I need in email Emails that I will need to respond to, but which will take more than 2 minutes are marked with this keyword.

Another nice feature of MailTags is the Due Date field, which I use to mark tickler items with the date at which I should next pay attention to them — I often put a due date of one week prior to the departure date on receipt emails for airline tickets to remind me to confirm the flights.

As you can see down the left side of the screenshot, there are smart folders set up to collect together emails with the keywords described above no matter which physical mail folder they reside in. For example, if I decide to reply to some emails I can click on the @Mail smartfolder to see all of the emails I need to respond to. The Due Today and Due This Week folders show me any emails with a tickler date set to todays date, or in the coming week respectively. The last smartfolder is for emails that required an action previously, but that I’ve now finished — not necessary at all really, except to give me a sense of satisfaction when I can look inside to see all the work I’ve accomplished

Each morning I check the Due Today smartfolder for things that need to be tackled right now, and Due This Week for actions that are coming over the horizon. Also, in true GTD fashion, I have an Inbox smartfolder that collects all of my unread email together, irrespective of the account or folder it arrived in, and this is where I process my incoming mail (rather than having to look through the many accounts and folders my incoming mail might arrive in). As I look at each email, I’ll respond to it right away if I can do so in less than 2 minutes (sometimes adding a Waiting For keyword if I want to chase it later), or else mark it as @Mail if I want to reply at length later on. Alternatively, tickler items have their Due Date set, and some are marked for future Reference.

You probably also noticed the transparent bezel in the earlier screenshot, that is the interface to another of Indev’s marvellous Mail plugins, MailActOn: By tweaking Apple Mail’s rules, this plugin enables assigning all of the actions I’ve described above to single action keys, in the screen shot below pressing d for example, sets the Due Date tomorrow. As such when I look in the Due Today smartfolder tomorrow, it will show up. The c action key removes any due date or keywords, but marks the email as Completed.

Apple Mail smartfolders with these two plugins installed and configured allow me to plough through my email Inbox in about half-an-hour at the start of the day and free my time to do real work (which probably includes working through my @Mail smartfolder) until later in the afternoon when I’ll make another sweep through newly arrive email.

A bonus feature of this system is with all my email being stored remotely (on various IMAP servers), MailTags keeps the keywords and due dates with the emails on the server, so I can access all the metadata from any computer that is running MailTags.

Project Work

I’m sure I could come up with a system of emailing documents and other important electronic stuff to myself to get it into the system above. But that feels weird to me, so I’ve set up Journler with a similar smartfolder setup, and use Journler’s own keywords field analogously to the Mail keywords I described above.

Any web-clippings, project todos, documents, pictures etc are thrown into Journler’s Inbox and processed with the GTD 2-minute rule, usually twice a day. I have a few more folders than I described above for Apple Mail:

• Next Actions: This smartfolder collects all of the next action items form any projects that I’m managing inside Journler.
• Projects: Journler smartfolders nest. That is, for an item to show up in a smartfolder inside a smartfolder, it must satisfy the rules of both. The projects smartfolder picks up all the items I put in the Projects category, and also contains one child smartfolder for each active project that I’m working on.
• @Online: I tag actions that I can only do online with the @Online keyword.
• @Read/Review: Project research material often ends up here. Interesting documents, emails and/or web pages that I should read to move a project forward, but will take more than 2 minutes to process.
• @Calls: Phonecalls I can only make when I have the project material filed in Journler right in front of me. I also have a @Calls context in my Moleskine, but that is for calls I could make without my laptop.

This article, and last one describe me entire GTD system. Can you see anywhere I could improve things?

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