NoteBook Community - Your best GTD-uses of Notebook

Your best GTD-uses of Notebook

by hliljegren - 02:38AM, Apr 25, 2008

Hi all!

I'm currently using Notebook as my GTD-app. I have tried several others but as I use Notebook for a lot of other things I thought it would be convenient to use it as a GTD-app also, and for some other reasons like super-find, etc.

My question is: How's your setup/use for your GTD-Notebook?

This is my current setup:

I use keyword for my review-settings (daily, weekly etc) and stickers for my "context" (home, computer, phone etc). I've tried the opposite but found that it was easier to find good stickers for context than for times. The simple reason for using both stickers and keywords is that you can see them both at the same time, and the current version of NB only allows you to show one sticker and one keyword. The reason for using stickers for the location instead of using "headers" as the to do from the starting point suggests is that I want to sort my things based on projects.

I've set up my NB so that I have my Inbox as a to do-page with clipping service. I moved the index pages for to do items, sticker item, and keyword to separate tabs named todo, where? and review.

After these pages I have index pages for projects, areas and archive (with clipping service).

I also have the contents card up almost all the time. This makes it much easier to move items from my inbox to the different project pages.

If there's enough interest I can translate the NB (as it's now in swedish) and make it public available (drop a line in this forum). But my question is about your best NB GTD practices. What's your setup, best practices etc?

Regards,

:-Håkan

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ptram

Member

02:41PM, Apr 25, 2008

I created different sections for different contexts (I use contexts ina differetn way than David Allen, sicne I don't find his scheme useful to me):

- the names of the most important clients
- other companies
- ideas for future jobs/tasks
- artistic works
- various
- payments/taxes

Inside each section I could have a different page for each client / type of artistic task (writing, music...) / type of payment (city tax, national tax, car tax, water, phone...). One or more pages could also be reserved for older, expired tasks or duties, to leave active pages cleaner.

I create a new top level folder in each page for each product I'm working on. Going down in the folder's hyerarchy, there is the product version, the type of duty (manuals, planning, spec writing...); down still, and there is each daily activity (translate chapter 1, call engineers for confirmation, clean your desktop...). I use a Gantt planner (like Merlin) for help in this phase.

- Product A
-- [PA abv.] Version 1.0
--- [PA abv.-v1] Manual
---- [PA abv.-v1] Manual - Check names (call engineers)
---- [PA abv.-v1] Manual - Contact translators
---- [PA abv.-v1] Manual - Prepare chapter 1 for translation

NoteBook's fexibility allows me to use different ways of ordering my pages for each type of activities. The section devoted to arts have a different type of art (music, movie, writing...) as the topmost folder, instead of product names. Single activities, in this case, are often written inside the work file itself, instead of in NoteBook.

- Music
-- Write string quartet
--- [Str. quart.] Prepare raw data
--- [Str. quart.] Write down thema
--- [Str. quart.] Meet cello player for bow techniques
--- [Str. quart.] Contact Kronos Quartet for proposal

Each of my activities have due dates. I use keywords for current status (waiting, current, delayed...). A set of round stickers indicates the time/effort needed (green for 2-minute, light yellow for moderate effort, orange for heavy task extending over some days, red for very difficult task, requiring several days or weeks). I use priorities very much, being careful to remove the mark after an activity has expired, to leave that (alarming) column as clean as possible.

I check my activities in the Super-Find page, since I want to see everything as a flat list of activities. Non need to contextualize here, since the GTD core is to be able to only think to a single actitivy at a time.

Paolo