08/17/2010 – We now have a GTD & BlackBerry Setup Guide! Visit the David Allen Company store to get your copy. It’s loaded with tips, tricks and expert coaching advice of applying GTD to your BlackBerry.

A pretty common question we get from BlackBerry users is how to integrate Outlook Tasks with their BlackBerry.  For the most part, there is a good one-to-one sync between Outlook Tasks and a BlackBerry device–if your service and server allows it (check with your carrier and/or IT dept. to find out if this is or can be enabled for you.)

If you setup Outlook like our GTD & Outlook Setup Guide describes, you should be able to have that carry over to Tasks on the BlackBerry.  The trick for seeing your Task categories is to “Filter” them.

Several of our staff use BlackBerry devices, including presenter + coach Wayne Pepper.  Listen to Wayne’s podcast on how he uses a BlackBerry for GTD (16 min). He also wrote about an app he uses on his BlackBerry for quick capture.

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David Allen shares a  tip in the category of what he calls “dumb-dorky-things-to-do-that-work.”  Rubber band your charged ones

I’ve been slightly bugged for years in places like hotel rooms, looking the next morning at my unpacked stuff, wondering which batteries I had run down and which ones were still charged. I finally found a solution that works for me.

If you travel with extra batteries for phones or computers, put a rubber band around the ones that are charged. When they are depleted, they don’t have one.   If they don’t have a rubber band, they’re dry. If they do, they’re charged.

(Extra tip: You need to make sure that you have and use a little pocket somewhere in your travel gear to hold the rubber bands when you take them off when you install the charged batteries.)

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Thanks for this community contribution from Pete Tambroni. Here’s how he has setup his GTD organization on the iPhone…

In the original Getting Things Done, much of the focus was on paper systems with an electronic complement. These days much of our world is the opposite.

I try to have as much as possible in electronic form with a paper complement. Having things on a computer or PDA allows it to be searchable and easily changed from one category to another. But just because we can search for something doesn’t mean we should. Why not just know where it is? [Read more →]

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What’s out there for Lotus Notes users who want to sync To Do’s to their iPhone? Nothing.  As far as I know.  Believe me, I’ve searched for nearly a year. As a Notes user who was enchanted with an iPhone, I thought surely a To Do synching solution could not be far behind.  Nope. Nothing. You can sync Calendar and Email, but not To Do’s. It’s not a complete mobile GTD solution for me without To Do’s.

Because the iPhone was built without a Tasks application it means building not only a secure syncing solution, but a corresponding App on the iPhone. I thought Lotus would be doing that, but not from any releases I’ve seen so far.

A guy wrote to me this morning to ask what solutions are out there for this, as he’s about to roll out iPhones to their entire workforce. They use Lotus Notes and he’s been unable to find anything that will sync Notes To Do’s to the iPhone.  He asked if we are building it (no plans to.)

Has anyone heard of anything coming or available that will sync Lotus Notes To Do’s to the iPhone?  We’d love to hear about it.

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We GTDers sure do like showing off our workspaces. And, naturally, we show them off when they are looking their best: inboxes in a near-pristine state and folders lined up tidily with their labels gleaming in the sunlight. Honestly, I love it. Like many other GTD geeks, I get a perverse pleasure from looking at other people’s workstations. I get  inspired and sometimes even pick up an idea for a new way of doing something (like my new Tickler file – LOVE IT!).

But, I also think it’s important to acknowledge that GTD isn’t about always being tidy. In fact, the moments when GTD is most valuable are the messiest and ugliest moments. Take this recent snapshot of my desk, for example.

This is what it looks like after a week that included four speaking gigs, two road trips (to get to some of the aforementioned speaking gigs), an all-day conference, and two birthdays (my husband’s 40th and my son’s first). Oh, and that’s in addition to my full-time job [Read more →]

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This week, in our ongoing series giving you a look inside other people’s GTD setups, Andy Reed sent along some photos for our GTD Times readers.

On his desk, Andy uses Inbox, Pending and Read/Review trays.

[Read more →]

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Living in an apartment in Manhattan I have very limited space, and I cannot possibly keep the amount of file cabinets that I otherwise might. Unfortunately I have been the opposite of a pack rat: I routinely discarded material, and later regretted it. Having been a horrible organizer all my life, despite full court press attempts every couple years, I basically had a box of everything “important” that I added to, and once in a while retrieved from. Then I would cull the box occasionally, and there was no space–literally–for sentimentality. [Read more →]

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Still wrestling with really mastering GTD? The weekly review still a conceptual mystery? Still looking for the keys for getting started and making it stick? We just announced a new package, called the GTD System, that includes a wealth of resources for newbies to GTD experts.  It includes a comprehensive set of tools and learning resources for setting up your GTD system, knowing the critical success factors and getting it to stick–once and for all. You’ll get 6 CD’s with David and his senior coaching staff, plus the GTD book, GTD System Guides, 30-day GTD Connect membership and 25% discount on a public GTD seminar.  And, it’s an unbelievable value for what’s included. Really.  Check it out.

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A couple of weeks ago (during an In Conversation that will be posted later this summer on GTDConnect), David Allen asked me if I practice GTD with my kids. In response, I laughed and said, “No.” After all, my daughter is three years old and my son is just nine months. They can hardly do GTD, can they?!

But, in the weeks since we talked, I paid more attention to how GTD factors into our family life and realized that — though they are quite young — there are elements of GTD that I am already teaching my kids.

Of the five levels of control in GTD (capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting, and engaging), most of what my kids are learning right now has to do with capturing, clarifying and organizing. [Read more →]

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One of the tools David Allen uses on his PC is ActiveWords, a tool often described as “solving a problem you didn’t know you had.”  It essentially streamlines the navigation and common tasks we do all day long; send emails, go to web sites, create new tasks, insert text, open files and more.  Recently, David recorded a podcast with Buzz Bruggeman, the developer of ActiveWords, to explore this tool in more detail for our GTD Toolbox series.

LISTEN NOW>>>

For those of you on Mac, you have a similar function through QuickSilver.  If you want to reach Buzz about ActiveWords or any of the other products he mentions, you can reach him at buzz@activewords.com.

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