Working with GTD, I identified there are 4 types of tasks:
- Time sensitive
- Date specific
- To-dos
- Lists
And, I’ve always looked for the “One” app which would be an end in itself. But after surfing through productivity porn for almost an year, I discovered, there isn’t one such app and probably there’ll never be. Then what is the best way manage taks on an iPhone? Below is the system I’ve created:
I now have 4 different apps/buckets which handle these activities:
Time sensitive: If I want to be reminded of something on a specific time, I update the information in “DUE” app. This is an excellent reminders app which I’ve discussed on this blog previously. It parses natural language. That is, I can setup a reminder saying “call John at 6pm today” and it’ll setup the reminder for today 6pm. Its super fast to setup & easy to use.
Date Specific: I use iCal on my mac combined with ‘Fantastical’. At work, I use a windows PC. To maintain consistency, I sync my appointments through Google Calendar, and, use ‘Fantastical’ on the iPhone again to access appointments. Fantastical is similar to ‘Due’ in that it parses natural language to create appointments, it’s fast and super easy to create appointments on the go this way.
To-dos: I use ‘Things’ app to manage all my to-dos – meaningful physical next actions which need to get done as soon as I can get to them (but are not time specifice or day specific). In ‘Things’ you can organize your stuff into areas of responsibility, projects, and next actions, and view them in various focuses – Today, next, Scheduled, Someday/Maybe. Though best used in conjugation with the desktop app, this iPhone app can stand on its own. The sync among platforms is super fast. Though the app can use more work, its my favourite. Super sexy, easy to use, easy to understand, this app is always on my dock.
To see how I do GTD with Things, click here
Lists: Initially I used ‘Things’ for this stuff too with tags for store names (grocery, book store, hardware, etc..), but later I found it to be cumbersome and time consuming to just pull the list out when I’m at a store. So, I thought it would be better if i use a seperate bucket to store this. I’ve initially tried using ‘TaskPaper’, then ‘Reminders’, but, ‘Drafts’ app and ‘Evernote’ have replaced them in maintaining lists. Anything which needs to noted, but not necessarily stored, go into ‘drafts’ and all those ghat need to be stored go into a ‘lists’ notebook in Evernote.
I haven’t got to this set of apps on day one itself, I’ve been experimenting with different apps, and finally settled on these. It might take some experimenting and fiddling to figure out which apps work best for you.
Some other apps I tried: Listbook, Springpad, Clear, AwesomeNote, Omnifocus (its too complicated to my puny brain).
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