Gareth Howell

I have been a follower of "Getting Things Done" for some time now; since I bought David Allen's excellent book of the same name a few years ago.

I am one of those people who accumulates and remembers facts easily but can't remember birthdays, anniversaries or things that I need to do. I have tried many different ways of reminding myself to do things, most of which involve writing something down. It's a problem rembering to do things, but a bigger problem was thinking of something that needed doing when I was unable to access whatever was my current reminder system. The biggest problem however, was remembering to look at the reminder system to remind me what to do!

Once I had found GTD, I knew that this was the process for me, and despite a few relapses I have stuck with it. If you want an overview of how GTD works, look here. However, there was still the issue of how to implement it. Being a geek, of course I wanted something that was electronic (I used Time Manager for years but got sick of having to continually re-write action lists). The obvious choice was Lotus Notes as it is the one constant in all of my business life and the one piece of software I am guaranteed to have open every work day. It also runs on both Windows and Mac and I can have it on all my machines. It's not so good for non-work stuff, but I'm working on that. I solved the issue of what to do when not near a computer by adopting a Hipster PDA as an alternative medium. A Hipster PDA is a collection of 3x5 or similar sized cards with a fold-over binding clip or elastic band holding them together. That's it.

I use the Hipster PDA to capture actions and projects that need to be done at the point that I think of them. I do this in preference to putting them directly into Notes for a couple of good psychological reasons: I am easily side-tracked, and it takes longer. Writing something down on a piece of card is dead easy and faster than creating a new action in any form of software if it isn't already open. Writing on paper is a closed process: once it is done there is nothing more to do. Creating a new action is a piece of software raises the temptation of "maybe I'll re-organise my actions while I'm in her", or "I really need to ensure I have closed off the actions that have been completed" and being one who is easily distracted, I will do one of those things rather than just capturing the action and getting back to what I was really doing.

Periodically, (can't be more specific than that. Could be an hour, a day, a week if I'm away) I'll take the stack of cards and create Actions in Lotus Notes.

Then, on a continuous basis, I use the Action list in Notes to direct what I should do next. I try and do the weekly review where I go through all the actions and projects to dump whatever failed to make it on to card and tidy things up. I don't always do that, but regret it when I don't.

I'll describe how I have modified Notes in another entry, but basically I have modified the Mail template to capture actions and projects. The next obvious stage is to be able to print actions categorised by context on to cards so that I can carry my current action list in my Hipster PDA, but I haven't got that far yet.