From Doing to Done!
Why I’ve grown to love the “GTD” (Getting Things Done) Concept and Microsoft To-Do
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As in the writing world, the best way to capture some ideas is the attempt to transfer (or “dump”) as many details from a topic within your cranium to your paper or device. In my personal experience, I find this especially helps my future self when recalling back to where my past self left off with a specific task. Whenever I didn’t capture enough information while it was fresh in my head as I was leaving the office, I ended up paying for it the next day/week. With enough captured information, I can jump back into a particular idea/task almost instantly… but that could just be me too.
Enter the “GTD” (or Getting Things Done concept). Setting everything up as tasks with customizable attributes such as subtasks, recurrences (i.e. daily, weekly, monthly, etc.), files… you name it. At first, I started with Outlook tasks. It was great, especially in Outlook 2007 where I could have my handy task window on the bottom right of my mail view. That first moment where I learned to create a task from an email was an eye-opener. Marking a task as complete and watching it disappear from my window into the completion abyss… yeah, I’ll admit that released a few dopamine chemicals.
My first jump into GTD-specific software was into the great world of Nozbe:
With what flexibility I had in Outlook’s task module, the pool of potentiality was greatly deepened once I finished installing and setting up Nozbe. Cross-linking between Evernote allowed me to have a simple task linked to a very complex Note, where I could include extensive tree-views of sub-tasks along with various file attachments. Nozbe itself also allowed for really custom recurrences as well as various projects and lists for all of my tasks. The only cons/gripes I have with this platform is the lack of toast…
