My GTD setup

Getting Things Done is a system I have been using for over nine months now. For this blog, I assume that you know GTD. If not, please visit the Wikipedia page for a good starting point. To start things off, I’ll be explaining my basic GTD setup. I’ll be building on that basis with tips and experiences to get your life organized, to declutter and simplify your life, and personal productivity tools in general.

I’ve grown into two separate GTD setups, although this contradicts with the original concept of David Allen. I have a setup for work and a personal setup now, and I’ve separated them for a couple of reasons:

They’re in different geographical locations, creating the need for duplicate tickler files and duplicate reference archives.
They require different sets of topics and contexts
Personally I don’t like mixing the activities, and practically there’s no need

The elements of my setup:

A notebook

I carry around a hardcover notebook, basically it’s a dummy (a book with only blank pages). I use this notebook to take notes on meetings, write down actions, write down thoughts, write down decisions and write down, well all other relevant stuff. Whenever I’m at my computer, I process my notebook as an inbox.

Thinking Rock software

I’ve evaluated a couple of software tools to manage my to-do’s and my projects. Outlook and Lotus Notes just cannot do the job properly. I ended up with Thinking Rock software, which has the best GTD implementation I have seen so far. I love how you start with the GTD workflow! They have a small but active userbase, that exchanges a lot of experiences with the setup of topics and contexts. Currently they have released Version 2 Gamma. It’s java-based and will be open source once v2 is fully released.

E-mail client (Outlook and Lotus Notes)

I use my regular e-mail clients for my mail management. For a short while I used to take actions from e-mails to Thinking Rock (TR) and process them, but that was too inefficient for me. I use a GTD-like folder structure now. Every now and then an e-mail needs to be copied into TR to create a project, but the majority of my mail gets either archived or deleted instantly, the rest needs a response or needs a 10-30 minute action.

Google Calender

Where work and personal activities can be separated relatively easy for me, my time is just my time. I use GCal to synchronize my working commitments and my private commitments in a central place.

Inboxes, tickler files and archives

Have one of each for work and for home. The archives work best at home, the tickler file works best at work (although its use can be vastly improved). My inbox at work is always empty, at home it empties more or less batchwise.

I’m tweaking my setup regularly, and I keep an eye out for solutions that help me make GTD easier to use. Suggestions are welcome in the comments.

I follow a couple of blogs about personal productivity: