I jumped on the GTD bandwagon a few months ago and have found it an invaluable tool in managing my day to day activities. I carry around a moleskin diary which contains most of my daily task processing, it has an inbox, next action, projects and someday section all nicely arranged and tabbed. I have hacked the purist GTD system a little and included relationships and dependencies for my tasks which allow the capture of a cascade of tasks that need to happen in a certain order almost like a mini gant chart.
For my electronic processing I use thunderbird (version 2+). I gave Outlook 2007 a go but it was really too unwieldy for me. Outlook wants me to do things its way, send mails the way it likes with no support for CSS layout anymore since the changing of the rendering engine from internet explorer to word. You also cannot send .exe files or any other suspicious file types which, though understandable, is a little annoying considering I am often emailing software and updates to colleagues. The cataloguing in Outlook 2007 is an improvement over 2003 but is still quite 2-dimensional and Thunderbird leaves it with grit in its mouth since version 2.
So here is a little look at my thunderbird:
I use a wonderful thunderbird plugin called GMailUI which gives me all my favourite Gmail hotkeys including the ‘y’ key for archiving (see the archive folder).
The folders under inbox are all search folders and are blisteringly fast. The search folders can be programmed to look in various physical locations and obey a very nice selection of rules. Once a task is tagged complete for example, it falls out of the action view and into the complete view. I also like to have 3 priority categories for my action tag which allows me to sift through actions in order of precedence.
Combined with my moleskin, thunderbird has eliminated all the stress that comes with managing hundreds of todos.
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