First, I became quite fond of Zoho Planner. It worked well, but once I learned about Getting Things Done (GTD) I felt I had to move on. I then fell in love with Tracks. I enjoyed the relationship for several months, but (fickle guy that I am) soon transferred my affections to Vitalist.
I write about my organizational struggles frequently. Here are some from last year:
- Going back to (mostly) paper
- Another run at Task Management – Wallnote
- Task and Note Management – and a glance at Zoho Planner
- More Task Management
- Task Management – Part III
I cringe everytime I review those old articles. I see my excitement in finding a new tool… but with the benefit of hindsight, I know the happiness has never really lasted.
I’m mostly over the web-based stuff. Sure, ease of use of some of the apps and simple to access from multiple machines are huge pluses. But I’m not always online and sometimes between the time I’ve had a thought and the time the site loads… well, I’ve lost the thought.
I wonder if I should be looking for something that’ll run off a USB key?
For the past couple months, I’ve been back to paper. I kept getting all these 7×5″ hard covered notebooks with little pen holders, so I started using those to capture my thoughts, quick notes and tasks. Yep, good ol’ paper again.
Larger projects still get their own 8 1/2 x 11 notebook as described in my “Productivity Stack” article.
So really, what’s changed since that article? Not much, just that I’m paper for everything now.
I have some stuff in Google Notebook that I often use when doing support at WordPress (which has been less often lately — busy!). I have a lot of work stuff in OneNote shared between my desktop and laptop. Build sheets, long term documentation, stuff that should more properly be in the wiki… but for now, this is easier.
GTD Wannabe is starting a new quest to find a GTD friendly app. I’ll be watching, maybe I’ll see something new/exciting/interesting. But for now, I need to spend less time trying to re-organize around some spiffy tool and more time just getting stuff done. In hindsight, I’ve wasted a lot of time this past year moving from one app to another. That’s gotta stop!
Possibly Related posts:
Thanks for the breadth of material here. I will send my readers to review your findings.
I’ve gone almost all analog of late. I still use google calendars for scheduling. Too hard to keep 13 stores staffs scheduled without it, but all my todos etc are all moleskine and the cheap spiral bound notebook managed now and it just plain works. Even on an airplane.
I was interested in your post here about GTD/Task Lists. I’ve never found an online tool I’ve liked. I’ve tried to get behind some online tools, and I often get asked about task and contact syncing for OggSync, when’s it going to happen… etc. The normal reply is when Google has those features opened up.
Your comment about Google Notebook did interest me, how did you use that for tasks/GTD?
Hey guys, thanks for dropping by.
@Elwyn – thank you for the kind words.
@Rich – I thought you’d been drifting back to the Palm? No?
Someday I’ll graduate to moleskine, but first I have all these nice “hard” cover freebies to use up.
@Shawn – My main use for Google Notebook, in GTD’ish context, has been as a place to capture “someday/maybe” type items. In particular, articles or links that I want to read and possible blog topics (or a combo of both). With the FF extension it’s always just a click away and makes a nice clipping service.
You are so right about the time you can waste looking for a new tool. In the end I don’t really think it matters what you use, it’s much more important how you use it – stick solidly with the 5 stage GTD workflow and you’ll get things done irrespective of the tool you choose
Hi rob, thanks for dropping by. I see you have a series of articles describing your usage of OneNote that I’ll want to be reading soon.
[...] article and it caused me to do some thinking. No matter how many time I proudly proclaim I’m going back to paper, it never sticks. One to two months later I’m back to being chaotic and confused and [...]