A Community Contribution from Jason Verly

For anyone who uses a Mac and utilizes the GTD method, you may eventually look into what software you can use to help manage your project and next action lists. Currently on the Mac, the leading apps to help manage your lists are OmniFocus and Things. Each app covers four of the five steps of the GTD workflow: Collect, Process, Organize, and Review. (Sorry, but you still have to do ‘Do’ on you own.)   Here is a comparison of how each application handles these four steps.

Read more from Jason Verly’s article

Editors Note: Many of you know we are partners with OmniGroup. We wanted to provide this article to our GTD Times readers, as Jason has done a great job comparing these two popular applications.  It should give you some great information from a fellow GTDer, when choosing which one is best for you.

My system was working great for me. My lists were in Omnifocus on my MacBook Pro and iPhone.  I used web-based Gmail, and I would copy the URL for an email and paste its hyperlink into the note field of an item in Omnifocus. I used iCalendar that syncs to Google Calendar. I also used a David Allen Note Taker wallet for my ubiquitous capture tool.

Being hired by David Allen Company created significant problems to my tidy GTD ecosystem.  I would have to use Lotus Notes for company email and calendaring, with the eProductivity add-on being optional; LongJump for sales workflow (it is similar to SalesForce); and I would also have a BlackBerry. Starting a new job, with its learning curve, is challenging enough. Having one’s GTD system feel like it is about to blow up is downright stressful.

Fortunately, with the help of a couple of our coaches, I quickly got a rough plan on how to adapt my GTD system to a way that would be comfortable for me. My first priority was: I must keep my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and Omnifocus. The company supports Mac and PC users. I turned off eProductivity because I am going to keep my lists on Omnifocus – mainly because I want my lists on my iPhone, and I am comfortable with it.

Below is my current lists configuration (this is the result of a couple major renovations since I began the job). I separate personal from work. Within work I have different groups for projects:

• Inactive accounts – prospects and clients who do not have any activity for now but are on hold or on a trigger list for a future date
• Account development – prospects and clients with whom I am currently working, with each engagement being a project
• GTD community contributor – tracking projects such as writing this article
• DAC/GTD messaging – marketing-related projects for David Allen Company (“DAC”)
• Home office maintenance and operations – projects pertaining to my remote office
• Networking and relationships – non-sales relationships and projects
• DAC areas of focus and responsibility – higher altitude parts of my job
• DAC someday/maybe

When I get email from Notes that would take more than 2 minutes to act on it, I either move it to a folder in Lotus Notes called “Action Support” and create a Next Action in Omnifocus, or more often, I copy the content and paste it into the Next Action note and delete the email. So I do not use Notes to track anything: it is simply a conduit to me.

When I create an appointment, I do it in iCalendar. It syncs to Google Calendar and Lotus Notes Calendar, which then syncs to my iPhone and BlackBerry. However, when I respond to a call appointment sent to me via Lotus Notes, I need to manually duplicate it to iCalendar, because Notes does not replicate to my personal calendar system. Again, my personal calendar system is my “real” calendar but I need to use Lotus Notes for me job for the sake of others, so this works fine, if not perfectly elegantly.

When a prospective client calls me, I create a new project for her in “Account development.” In the project notes field, I paste her contact information from her email, and this is where I type all my notes, and paste relevant email excerpts. This is also where I transcribe any paper notes I have from meetings. Of course, I also create my Next Actions. But I still need to comply with company policy by using LongJump sales/CRM tool. So I create the record and maintain it as required, oftentimes pasting information from my project notes. So as Notes is a merely a conduit for me and Omnifocus is my trusted system, LongJump is a reference and reporting system for me and Omnifocus is where I actually manage my workflow.

When I am not at my desk, here is how I use my BlackBerry for email:  I scan incoming emails, delete the ones I can, respond to brief-response or time-sensitive emails, and File other emails to an Action Required folder. Then when I get to my computer, I process those emails into my system.

Obviously, I have a complex work set-up with many tools I must use, plus a few that I wish to use no matter what. While it certainly took some time to fine-tune and get familiar with, I have firm control over the situation. The key reason is that, no matter how many disparate systems and tools I have, I work from Omnifocus and everything else is merely either a conduit or a reference system, from my perspective. However, I am also complying with company requirements by using their systems properly: I manage work emails, maintain the work calendar, and maintain the sales/CRM system. I simply do not use any of those systems as my personal tracking system.

To some this seems complicated and redundant. However redundant some elements of it may be, the reality is that my thinking is not redundant: I have one trusted system and it is from there that I do most of my work.

Chip Joyce is a director of business development for the David Allen Company.  You might enjoy his other posts too. You can also reach him by email.

“If you’re just borrowing ideas from GTD here and there, like the idea of grouping your to-do lists by context, you’re missing almost everything GTD has to offer, which is a terrible shame.”

This article is worth a read on tapping into the full power of GTD + OmniFocus.  Read more…

• Where do you keep your lists? Your calendar?
• Do you sync to a handheld? If so, what is that?
• Your favorite collection tools?
• Killer desk supplies?
• Project planning, brainstorming and creative mapping tools?
• What else??

[Small request:   If you are commenting about an app, please disclose if you are the developer and/or involved with it in some way. Thanks.]

As a GTD evangelist myself, last March I was fortunate to attend the GTD Summit in San Francisco. This was a first-ever event hosted by David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, and his company, David Allen Company. It was a networking event which brought together all of the best and brightest GTD practicers from literally around the world. It was at the GTD Summit that I met Ken Case – the President of the Omni Group.  Being a Technology Director at a school district in Maine and a GTD evangelist, I encouraged him to consider donating OmniFocus to the MLTI program as a first step in exposing the educational community within Maine to the benefits of the GTD system.  Read more–>

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

He also uses a Tickler File system for hard copy items, and OmniFocus on the Mac for action list management.

To learn more about how David Allen has his space setup, grab the free article Organizing your Workspace. If you have GTD photos you’d like to share, please send them along to us at editor@gtdtimes.com.

Ken Case: The big thing that we tried to do as we were designing the application is really think about the parts of the GTD workflow that we could address, and automate those, and then maybe not try to touch the parts that didn’t make as much sense. For example, we don’t do calendaring; we leave that to whatever calendaring system you already have. I use the calendar app that’s built-in to the iPhone, but you can use a paper calendar or whatever works for you for that part of the system. We do focus on the GTD collecting and processing–capturing stuff out of your head and getting it into your inbox. We tried to make that really easy with a keystroke…

LISTEN NOW>>

Grab a list of all of the OmniFocus speed keys.

I’ve also written a few articles on my experience of GTD & iPhone over on my blog:

• GTD & iPhone – Part I – My criteria for choosing
  
• GTD & iPhone – Part II – My system evolves
  
• GTD & iPhone – Part III – Still looking for Lotus Notes sync
  
• GTD & iPhone – Final – Update on Chapura (it’s no longer an option)

Stay tuned to GTD Times for more on Getting Things Done with the iPhone.

One of our Coaches was recently working with someone on OmniFocus and passed along a great summary of all of the OmniFocus keyboard shortcuts. We also have these posted for Windows & Outlook.

She recently did a great write up on her experience of GTD on a Mac:

My System

When I started implementing GTD about four years ago, I was working on a company PC. I configured Outlook (as outlined in the GTD and Outlook whitepaper) and everything hummed right along. Three years ago, I left that job and transitioned to a Mac. Suddenly, I was adrift without a system and I ended up falling into a trap that I think a lot of GTD practitioners (and geeks) fall into: I started over-analyzing my needs and evaluating software to the point that my system stopped working very well. I tried Backpack, Remember the Milk, OmniFocus and a score of others.  Finally, I decided the best approach would be to figure out a way to bend the applications I already use all day, every day to my will.   Read more>>>

By the way, David’s In Conversation series on Connect has featured some of the biggest GTD fans out there, including…

• The writers of the Simpsons
• Musician Evan Taubenfeld
• Arianna Huffington
• The CLO for General Mills

…and dozens more.   If you are not a GTD Connect member, you can check out the two-week free trial to listen to these interviews.

(Yes, we know many of you like “Things” by Cultured Code too!)

Oliver Starr Note:  Erratum.  This article had a number of errors that have been corrected from the original version.

Applebriefs‘ Jeff Kabbe has done a spectacular job authoring a very detailed review of the GTD task management application Omnifocus. Mac owners have probably seen other applications developed by Omni Group, particuarly OmniOutliner which comes preinstalled on many machines from Apple.  The company has also developed  OmniGraffle,  OmniPlan and roughly half a dozen other useful applications.    His review is so comprehensive that it makes no sense for me to do anything except refer you to his blog where you can read it for yourself.

Meanwhile, the guys folks at Omni Group have made a splash of their own by giving folks a preview of their soon to be released iPhone application. In addition to supporting live sync – supposedly even capable of background syncing tasks to Apple’s new MobileMe service and being FREE to registered users of the desktop version of Omnifocus, the iPhone version is also location aware and thus can automatically identify various contexts and provide you with task details that are contextually appropriate.

As you might imagine there’s quite a lot of excitement about this forthcoming application.  Omni Group says that it will be released about the same time as the new 3G iPhone goes on sale.  You can learn about more about the soon-to-be-released application in the comments on the Omni Group blog

Lastly, there’s a small bit of news for GTDtimes..   Evan Carmichael maintains a list of the 50 top Productivity Blogs.  When the updated list was released recently I was dismayed to see that GTDtimes was not listed.  I suspected that this might be due to the fact that we only launched in March of this year and that with so many good productivity resources Evan might not have even come across GTDtimes yet.

I figured that I had nothing to lose by writing him a note to introduce ourselves and Evan surprised me by adding GTDtimes to his list as a special mention just below the top eight sites listed in the GTD Category.  I thought it was incredibly cool of Evan to take the time to do this – most folks running popular sites probably wouldn’t have been so readily accommodating.

Incidentally, Evan’s Top 50 list is a rich productivity resource and his site is packed with useful content for entrepreneurs, GTD’ers, and really anyone that wants to be more productive, more successful and more balanced in their approach to work and life.  I highly recommend you check it out  (and mention that GTDtimes sent you).