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For a change I know that I am not alone if I say that I keep arguing with my GTD and productivity setup. There are many blog pages and white papers filed with good advice and best practice setups and I may have read 90% of all those. And of course there is the fact that GTD and productivity isn’t about tools or setup and I have personally acknowledged this here and here. Still, something is complicated in this digital world with all those nice tools everyone tries to sell or even give to us for free – it messes up everything, really. Back in the days where you did not have much of a choice but had to go with those limited tools available and where not every day a RSS feed article or a Twitter message told you about the latest and greatest, things felt better or at least simpler, somehow.

What comes in goes strange places

Actually, when I recently engaged in reviewing my capturing behaviour and tool-set, I realised things go strange places. Some tools I use for purposes they aren’t designed for and generally my capturing did not have any structure to it. Does capturing require structure? When you are living a digital lifestyle I would tend to say ‘yes’.

First you should look at what you are capturing and in which context you are doing this. For me, I see the following capturing behaviours: Continue reading…

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I really like my @waiting list. It’s a great place for me to see who all these fellows are that still owe me. But one of the problems I have is that most requests I make are based on emails I sent. Taking the extra effort to add a task for each email to OmniFocus feels very much like defeating the purpose of personal productivity. So I started to track eMail Waiting Fors separately in Mail.app using MailTags and a Smart Mailbox. I simply tag each email with a request with my “@Waiting” tag and regularly review the related Smart Mailbox.

But during reviews it is actually quite hard to link back the waiting for emails from Mail.app with the individual projects in OmniFocus. Consequently I have looked for an alternative way to automatically get “Waiting For” emails tracked inside of OmniFocus and came up with this AppleScript that does the job nicely and automated. Continue reading…

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Flickr Find: GTD Workflow Map

Juni 16, 2009

There are lots and lots of images illustrating the GTD workflow. Most of them are either to simplistic or just look odd. I personally never had print-outs of desktop wallpapers with the workflow, mainly for the reason that when I needed it there weren’t any workflows that where eye pleasing and after 4 years of [...]

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The Digital Tickler File Problem

Juni 15, 2009
Thumbnail image for The Digital Tickler File Problem

For many the GTD idea of the 43 folders Tickler File is the best thing since sliced bread. I personally never got to it in now more than 4 years of GTD. The reason for it has been that I rarely had and have physical files to tickle. Most of my lifestyle is rather digital, [...]

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Making OmniFocus look good with themes

Juni 9, 2009

Omnifocus from the Omnigroup is known for being one of the most powerful GTD-like list managers. While simplicity oriented users have quite a challenge to reduce Omnifocus waste feature set for daily use, many, including pros, also struggle with the kind of old-fashion user interface. Other GTD apps such as Things or The Hit List [...]

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About GTD tools & list managers from the horses mouth

Juni 2, 2009

Yesterday the DavidCo GTD staff posted a pretty nice 23 minutes podcast featuring  Kelly Forrister, David Allen and DavidCO CTO Robert Peak (The-Mac-and-All-Purpose-Nerd) discussing list manager software. The podcasts starts out with some key requirements you should take into account when choosing your list manager (featured earlier on Kelly Forrister’s blog), including

It allows lists to be [...]

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