I’ve been a practitioner of “Getting Things Done“, or GTD, for several years now. Friend and GTD guru Michael Hyatt first introduced me. By the way, Michael has some great posts on GTD on his site, www.michaelhyatt.com. The basic principal of GTD is get it out of your mind and into a trusted system. I can say without a doubt “Getting Things Done” has had the single greatest impact on my overall productivity and organization. In fact, it’s been required reading for people on my team for sometime now.
One of the things I really appreciate about GTD is it’s flexibility. It doesn’t require a specific system or specific piece of software. You can use notecards or a notebook computer, it really doesn’t care. Over the years I’ve tried a few different approaches but here’s how I’m using GTD today across multiple computers, without duplicating effort.
Tasks & Projects
The core of my system is Things on a Mac and iPhone. It’s simple and elegant and allows me to keep up with tasks and projects. Since it syncs with my iPhone, I’m never without the “next thing”.
Calendar
I’m using Apple iCal to sync both my personal and work calenders–my personal calender via moble.me and our office-wide project management software, Workamajig via exchange and CalDAV. These are both pushed to my iPhone so I always have my personal and business schedules at hand.
Contacts
I use Apple’s Address Book and sync via MobileMe across all my computers and pushed to the iPhone.
I use Apple Mail on both my office and home computers. On my office computer I have a single business email account. At home I have multiple email accounts that I maintain. Apple Mail is simple, elegant and searching is soooo fast. Again my iPhone has both my personal and corporate email accounts.
Documents
I use Dropbox to keep shared documents available and in sync across multiple computers.
1Password
I have a lot of passwords, identifies, log-ins to keep up with, for these I use 1Password. (Dropbox.com keeps 1Password in sync across all my computers.)
Bookmarks
I use MobileMe to keep my Safari bookmarks in sync across all my computers and the iPhone.
Back Up
By virtue of keeping multiple computers in sync, much of my critical data resides in more than one location. But in addition to that, I also do at least 1 back-up for each machine, 2 or 3 times a week. I use SuperDuper, which creates an incremental, bootable back up. These means that if one of my machines go down, I’m never without my data. At home I also have a couple of automated back up solutions including Apple’s Time Machine and an off-site back up to Mozy.
I love GTD and I really enjoy the flexibility and ease of use of my current system. It’s simple and flexible while allowing me to access the same information across multiple machines.
So that’s what I’m using. Do you use GTD? If so, how are you implementing it?
