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JT's GTD system
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jeff.templon

Posted: Nov 05, 2011
Score: 2 Reference
Hi *,

I decided to share my system, especially after just having spent quite a bit of time tuning it. I had a Toodledo "crisis" a few weeks back, went off and tried a few other systems, then came back here but with some new ideas stolen from the other systems.

I have the following folders:

Personal
Work
Checklists
Tickler
NY.Personal
NY.Work
SM.Personal
SM.Work

NY stands for "not yet", these are projects that I know I want to do, but have not really started them yet. SM is for someday maybe. I split it like this because it makes the reviews easier and manageable.

Contexts, I have the standard ones, plus one called Project. I have the pro account, projects are top-level tasks and actions associated with projects are subtasks; the "project" context allows me to easily generate a project list (just filter on context = project).

Status : I reserve the statii "planning" and "active" for projects, although I may stop doing so since I now have the "Project" context (this is a new addition).

When at work, I go to the "work" folder and then view next actions by context, sorted by due date or by start date. Due date tells me when something HAS to be done, start date tells me when I want to start working on something, and also when some task has been started but not finished for a long time.

When stuff is done in the "Personal" or "Work" folders, I go visit "NY" version to see what I want to work on next, those projects migrate into the non-NY versions.

I have an android phone with Ultimate Todo List, there I have "my views" set up with a view for Work folder Next Actions, sorted by star/start date/due date (star is a way of indicating what I really want to do each day) and another identical one for the Personal folder. I used to use due date for trying to get "order" in the task list, but then I wound up missing some real due dates because I no longer took due dates that seriously.

One other neat thing I copied from another system : periodic tasks used to clutter my to-do list, like cleaning the coffee maker once every 2 months. Now I use "start date" with no due date, repeat every 2 months from completion date, and I set up my normal views not to show "future tasks". So I never see that stupid coffee maker tasks in my working views, until it's time to do it.

Hope this helps someone!

JT

ps : the other systems I tried were Todoist, Checkvist, Org-mode Emacs, and GQueues. None of them had the feature set I needed except Toodledo. Something that was commonly missing was a way to do a mass import of tasks, or to do a csv export.

I may still use org-mode if I can get the toodledo sync to work, as the org-mode app is less than optimal.

m


This message was edited Nov 06, 2011.
thepaj

Posted: Nov 10, 2011
Score: 0 Reference
Thank you for posting this. I got a few pointers helping me to simplify my first enthusiastic design.
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