The JJW Blog

GTD update

Some of you have been wondering if I still do GTD.  I still do.  After getting an IPhone I modified my process a bit to take advantage of it’s ability to easily synch with gmail.  I evaluated some of the other gtd solutions for gmail such as Remember The Milk, Things, and some of the new task programs.  All of them allow you to easily enter tasks from my phone which is great but the issue comes with email.  Many of my tasks are generated from email and so I need a quick way to process email and mark them as actionable items that need followup later.   I have been using iGTD for this as it has a hotkey to add anything to your inbox.  However, this solution doesn’t work well with the iphone as I have no visibility to my tasks from the iphone.   Also I am finding that I like to process my email on the iphone itself and I want a quick way to mark something as actionable.

The solution, use a Gmail followup tag and a filter.  As I process emails on my iphone, I simply either delete them, which archives them in gmail, or move them to a gmail folder called followup, which marks them with a gmail followup tag.   I then treat gmail tags as my todo system.  I can access these todos anywhere, including my iphone, they are archived, searchable, and I can easily create a new todo by sending an email with the word task in it, which automatically goes to my followup inbox via a gmail filter I set up on the word “tasks”.  I might set up other filters as well.

This seems to be a simple solution, which is flexible enough for me and focuses me more on getting things done, than worrying about system.