In Search of Good Pen and Paper GTD Tools
After four months of holidays and parental leave, it’s been nice to be back at work these last three weeks. But with the return I’ve come up against a familiar dilemma—how to successfully incorporate a GTD setup for both a work and personal life.
Ideally, I’d like both to exist in the same tool, Things by Cultured Code. Unfortunately, I have two barriers preventing me from using Things at work: 1. My employer is Windows only and 2. My wife enjoys a few blogs and the general handiness of the Internet, meaning she prefers the Macbook stay at home (and I’m not crazy about using my personal machine at work anyways).
For the first two weeks of my return, things at work were fairly slow, so it was a good time to really think this issue through. I reviewed many familiar tools, but kept coming back to a simple idea. Why not keep everything in Things at home and work off pen and paper during the day? After all, that’s how I prefer to work anyways. Could I keep a master electronic list of all my projects and areas of responsibility and work the day to day details on paper and keep the two in sync? To do that, good documentation was key.
Inspiration
Fortunately, while I was mulling these things through, Skellie put together a great post on Freelance Switch that included a great collection of links of all things Moleskine—a veritable cornucopia of Moleskine hacks, tips and all around productivity pr0n. Some of these I had seen before, and others not. And there, amidst it all, was the best use of pen and paper I have seen to date. From the mind of Bill Westerman comes GSD—his own take on personal productivity, laid out in four simple steps.
While I still use and believe in most of the concepts of GTD, I think Bill has an elegant solution here. Especially with the way he uses his notebook to set up his daily tasks (be sure to check out this example on Flickr). Here was something I could incorporate into my workflow. Bill uses a master list, in the back of his notebook. Mine is simply kept in Things. But I could see how his idea of including personal and work related tasks on the same page, as well as a timeline when things break down, could really work for me.
After a week, I’m enjoying this setup. There is something to be said for nice ink on clean paper—it’s soothing. Using this method has reduced the stress of trying to find a good web application or GTD tool for Windows. I can keep everything in one spot.
And this will soon get even better—with the opening of the App store came Things’ little brother, Things Touch. Although it debuted without the ability to sync with the desktop version, the gang at Cultured Code are hard at work to get this feature included. It will then be possible to have a copy of my master list at home on the Macbook and with me on the iPod Touch. Keeping the master list will be even easier.
One last mention here. In his daily task list, Bill draws checkboxes and uses various symbols to indicate the status of each task. I like this setup, but also wanted to make mention of Patrick Rhone’s dash/plus system. I’ve used this in the past and really liked it as well. It would also fit in great with Bill’s layout.
Being productive is such a personal thing—one person works so differently than the next. But if nothing else, check out some the resources here. Inspiration and ideas can be extremely helpful when attempting to improve your own work habits. Enjoy.
