Getting Things Done: Tools

With the background out of the way, here are the tools I rely on to stay organized

Outlook

I am a heavy Outlook user. While it is tremendously bloated, having one tool to keep and categorize email, appointments, tasks, and lists — as well as the ability to fairly easily convert mail to appointments, tasks, or notes — is extremely handy. I use Outlook 2002 on my work machine, and Outlook 2007 on my personal tablet.

Palm Tungsten C & Key Suite

In my prior job, my PDA was my "brain", at least when it came to appointments and to-do lists, because while I worked in one physical office, I had a fairly heavy meeting schedule (as opposed to working in an email- and voicemail-heavy job today), and I needed something portable to help me remember where I was supposed to be when.

Nowadays, I use my Palm primarily as a tool to synchronize my two Outlooks, and secondarily as a place to capture ideas while away from my PC’s, and as an ebook reader.

Rather than using the built-in PDA apps on my Palm, I use Chapura’s KeySuite. One of the potential incompatibilities between GTD and Palms is Palm’s limitation of 15 categories for tasks and notes, and not attaching categories to calendar items. With KeySuite and other add-ons, that limitation doesn’t exist.

I settled on KeySuite rather than other third-party apps simply because it has many of the secondary fields Outlook uses, making it possible to sync that data across multiple machines. For example, I’m not familiar with other Palm apps that permit you to sync color-coding for appointments.

Newsgator

I am not connected to the net 24/7; in fact I do spend quite a bit of time in airports, on planes, or in public spaces where the net is unavailable unless you want to spend money on some wireless subscription or another, which I don’t.

However, being a recreational blogger, I do enjoy following blogs plus I get a lot of my mainstream media news through RSS feeds. Therefore, having a tool that integrates with Outlook and which can grab content beyond just the raw RSS stream comes in handy. I’m using Newsgator because it does all that, and is currently compatible with Outlook 2007.

Non-OL07 users have additional plugins that will work. And, OL07 is supposed to have RSS feed processing ability close to what I’m looking for (although the implementation fails miserably in public Beta 2). However, for now, Newsgator is what works for me.

Firefox

I use Firefox as my default web browser (plus Google Browser Sync, to keep bookmarks, passwords, and cookies synchronized between computers). My choice of browser isn’t relevant to GTD per sé, but it does affect the comments on my next tools.

OneNote & Google Notebook

I use these tools to collect a lot of "stuff" that just doesn’t naturally want to go into my inbox.

For example, interesting articles I encounter while web-surfing, I’ll clip them to OneNote or Google Notebook using the appropriate Firefox plug-ins (ON, GN).

Or, if I’m taking notes during a meeting/phone call, particularly one that will have "takeaways", I’ll generally do so in OneNote, sparing myself from having to review paper later on.

In theory, I could get away with just using OneNote. However ON is not part of the standard corporate install at work, and the clipping functionality works a heckuva lot better with Google Notebook than it does in OneNote. Also, I’m a little uncomfortable with synchronizing ON07 data between computers, for reasons beyond the scope of this write-up.

Windows Desktop Search

Various "desktop search" utilities including WDS and Google Desktop have become available, viable tools within the past couple of years.

This has been a godsend to me.

I’m a packrat, I don’t like deleting files, and I rarely have the patience to file stuff.

With the arrival of tools like WDS, I feel a lot less guilty about keeping-and-not filing material. Now, if I need to find something, it’s just a quick search away.

(I should point out, however, that as of this writing, there have been issues with the betas of WDS3, Outlook 2007, and OneNote 2007. "Just a quick search away" is easier said than done, currently, but that should also be resolved as these programs move from beta to production.)

…and that’s essentially it, for now. There are a couple of changes I’d like to make in the future, however, including:

• The idea of using both Google Notebook and OneNote just feels a bit redundant to me. I’d like to cut back to just using OneNote, but there are hurdles given my bi-computer setup.
   
• There is an add-on for Outlook called Tablet Enhancements for Outlook. TEO makes Outlook a bit more tablet friendly, plus integrates note-taking ability with Outlook Journal. There ought to be a way to use that, but I haven’t explored how to make it work for me yet.
   
• One of the big ideas within GTD is capturing "stuff" you don’t want to lose within your "trusted system". Arguably, that would suggest developing a habit of taking notes and periodically reviewing them. I haven’t gotten that far yet (although OneNote would seem to be the tool to use for that…)

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