Loading ...Now you got the system as I created it from the information in the Getting Things Done book in to a trusted system on the PDA or Mobile Phone. This system has been used by me for some time, and I think based on the hits I get on this blog by other people. I have been successful in using this system and I hope others have as well.
NOTE: Please Provide Comments if you like it or don’t like it so that I may modify the system accordingly. I am the kind of person that likes to improve on things and I think that others may have better ideas then me. So Please!!! let me know what you think.
Now on to how the system is used by me!
Assigning Categories
When using Outlook in a virtual machine I use the Categories in Outlook to select items and just create To-Do’s for my system. As the items get a primary category in Outlook or in other programs they get transfered to the PDA / Mobile Phone.
Once there I use the “My Views => GTD-Not-Categorized” view to quickly assign categories to my to-do items.
Daily Use
For Daily use I use the Views for GTD-Home and GTD-Work to actually accomplish items and to check on various things getting done in the @Waiting For category.
Inactive Use
When things can not get done immediately I put them in the # Inactive category so that they do not crowd my screen. Once a week during my review I move things out of the #inactive bucket by removing the #inactive category. Then they are able to be selected and used in the system.
Projects
This is going to take some explaining but not much. I use the Getting Things Done projects screen for working on projects. The Getting Things Done manual describes very well how to work with Projects.
The Modification that I make is the following. All things in Projects even if it is a category or other contains a “! Project” category this is so that I can easily create the view for projects and keep projects in there. It is also so that I can see where the projects are and assign them to the proper project.
For Categories in the projects only I also assign the “! Project Cat” category so that I can filter them out from the main view on my system, keeping the real estate as efficient as possible.
To explain further the main reason for the extra use of categories is to be able to remove the project hierarchies from my daily GTD tasks. this way when I assign the “! Project Cat” categorie it is always excluded from my views.
To give an example lets say I nave a project due for creating a new blog on widgets. (for those of you who do not know what a Widget is you must watch the movie Called “Back to School”)
To make it simple I will only have three (3) tasks for now.
- Install blog Server
- Create Categories
- Write Introduction
Initially I would go to my Project view and click on the new project link. I will call our project Widgets.
Then I would create three new tasks to be used as sub projects. These will be Hardware, Software, and Content. I will put them in the “! Projects” category bat also in the “! Projects-Cat” Category which will make them disappear from my daily tasks.
Underneath these Project Categories I will create the normal tasks above and just mark them as related to projects using the “! Projects” categories. So now I have a tree or hierarchical model for projects. I can keep on adding things to each of the sub-categories and if they can not be done at this time I will mark them as inactive. This lets me plan out mg projects bit only enable the tasks that are appropriate. In my daily morning review I might enable the inactive tasks that can now be done.
Also I do not bother adding the E-mails to the project as there are just to many of them instead I just track them in the waiting-for categories.
I hope that this example was helpful in explaining how the projects are handled in my system.
The End!
I think I described most of the things and how to use them, if you have feedback need further explanation please let me know. I will be glad to help and explain things further.
