Getting Things Done - For the normal human

Feature: Practicing Simplified GTD: "Practicing Simplified GTD"

I can't remember the first time I picked up David Allen's "Getting Things Done" book, but it's been quite a while. **Actually, I lied... I looked in the book and found the receipt! ;-) I bought it on March 11, 2005. So, while I didn't lie about it being quite a while, I did in fact know the date.

Anyway, I read through the book and was pretty fascinated by a lot of what he had to say. A lot of it makes sense... but the process he uses seems WAY too complex for me. Because of how complex his process was, I fell in and out of trying to use it, and eventually boiled it down to pretty much only email, and I even purchased David Allen's GTD Outlook Plug-in. I honestly still use it, to some extent, and using it to file things based on project has come in handy from time to time... but quite honestly I review items so little, that the up front work to file each item takes WAY too long for the VERY minimal return I get from it, if ever. Because I came to this realization recently, I have been trying to think of a way to still use some of the methods and ideas, but make things even more simplistic and, above all, EASY and fast to deal with.

I had grabbed a copy of the above post from Lifehacker, and I may have started to read it but didn't have the time right then (probably why I grabbed it for later). I just read through the whole thing today because I am feeling VERY much out of control and disorganized and vowed I would do something today to try and regain some control. I wanted to share it because I think I am going to try this method and adapt it to my needs.

Now that I have my BlackBerry and have been relegated to only my work laptop as my only PC (my personal PC is no longer booting up and I haven't had time to figure out what it is... but I'm betting dollars to pesos that it's the motherboard), I wanted to start getting my life in sync between the two devices. I will figure out the easiest way to do that across those two devices and make sure it translates to my other potential devices. My key reason being that, I have to be able to add or subtract or see items on a to-do list at all times... and I'd rather not do that all from my BB only... though, that is a possibility if "Tasks" through Outlook is too cumbersome. Currently, I do not have a wireless sync between Exchange/Outlook and my BB... and I don't hook up my BB more than say twice a day (if I remember) to sync data between them. So "Tasks" so far has not been a great method for me. I may move to something like "Don't Forget The Milk" on the BB only, unless I can find something I like that allows me to do things in "the cloud"... but I'd rather find something that syncs in case my connection is limited.

I'll try and post back with what I figure out for myself. I'm always interested in what others do if you're interested in sharing.