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Derek's GTD setup - Toodledo and Pocket Informant - Opinions?
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Derek-User1

Posted: Jan 07, 2011
Score: 0 Reference
Hi Everyone,

I have been spending the last few days reading and re-reading these forums and then referring back to David Allen's GTD book. I wanted to post my GTD setup with Toodledoo and Pocket Informant and hopefully get some feedback from others on what they think works and doesn't work. A second pair of eyes often works better.

As you may have read in some of my other posts I have made, I wanted a system that would sync between Toodledo, Android (Phone and Galaxy Tablet), and iOS devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad). To that end I settled upon Pocket Informant because it offered a consistent experience between all the above platforms. However, though Pocket Informant syncs with Toodledoo it does not support all it's features such as sub-tasks. So my solutions needed to work within the parameters supported by Pocket Informant.

Here is my setup ...

1. I do not use sub-tasks
2. Folders are for projects (i.e. "Finish Basement", "Develop Application XYZ", "Buy used plow truck")
3. Contexts (@home, @computer-home, @computer-work, @phone, @errands, etc ..)
4. Status (defines if a task is a "next action" or if I delegated it to someone (like my son for "clean basement"), or if it something I want to think about more.
5. Star (Indicates a task that I want to address today or ASAP)

All these fields sync with Pocket Informant and I can sort my task list within Pocket Informant based on these fields.

The one area that gave me the most problem was that of Status. I was not sure whether to use it or not. My first thought was that it was redundant to mark a task as "next action" as it would not be in my list if it was not something I wanted to act on. The "star" field helps me discriminate on what "next actions" I wanted to address today. In the end though I felt that having a status field allowed me to have tasks in my lists that may not be "next actions". Perhaps they were items I wanted to think about yet still have attached to a project. In the end I decided to keep the status field. However, it would be nice if Toodledo allowed one to change the values present in the Status field instead of having to choose from "pre-defined" values.

In summary ... I know there are many GTD solutions out there but I needed something that utilized Toodledo (because it is affordable ($15/year) .. unlike Nozbe ($10/month)) and synced across all platforms in a consistent manner, hence why I chose Pocket Informant.

Please feel free to make any suggestions or comments. I would love to find ways to tweak this to an even better state. Thank you.

P.S. I should add that one thing that made this solution work for me was the use of the Stylish plugin for Firefox. Using the "Toodleo convert tabs to plane list in right column" style lets me list Projects in a vertical fashion on the right side of the page. Much better than the horizontal tab based layout. Thanks to PeterW in the forums for showing me these. Here are links from Peter's post ....

Here is a page with links to Sylish for FireFox and Chrome:
http://userstyles.org/stylish

Here is a link to the various themes available for Toodledo:
http://userstyles.org/styles/browse/toodledo.com


This message was edited Jan 07, 2011.
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