Step 14 to GTD Mastery is: I have a tickler file or reminder system in place which is fun and fast to use.

My cell phone’s calendar has day and time-specific reminders. I use these for appointments, daily/weekly tasks, etc.

As I wrote about in my GTD implementation for students, I use Vitalist to create a tickler system for only my school assignments. There are a few reasons why I have two reminder systems.

1) I have Vitalist setup as my homepage. Whenever I open up the possible black hole of time that is the Internet, I’m greeted by my Vitalist dashboard with all the school work I should be doing. This shifts my brain into productivity mode until I see all of today’s actions completed.

2) It’s a lot easier to visualize my work using Vitalist’s dashboard which shows today’s, tomorrow’s, and upcoming actions for the week. My cell phone only has a daily view.

3) Vitalist’s SMS reminders only include the action’s description and its due date. I lose the action’s context, project, and notes which can be found in the Vitalist dashboard.