GTD in the cloud with Nozbe and Mindmeister [Pascal Venier 2.0]
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by a research assistant from the prestigious Manchester Business School involved in a research project on Getting Things Done. Reading through the transcript of this 90 minutes interview, which I was later sent for review, made me realise how many different softwares I had tried in the four years since I discovered Getting Things Done. This was an opportunity to reflect on this near compulsive and rather illusory search for the perfect GTD application. The advice dispensed Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani in a recent interview with Scott Berkun was very timely for me:
“The hack is simple: pick a system and stick with it. The irony of productivity media is that it gives you an excuse to put off actually doing the stuff on your to-do list by trying out a new way to keep track of your to-do list. [...] But the reality is that, like humans, every task manager, calendar, smartphone, or productivity tool is flawed.”
I have therefore taken a decision, which is to settle down for one solution and to stick to it. My choice is Nozbe, a very cool online application. One of the merit of this solution, is that it is platform agnostic and that I therefore have access to my projects and next actions both on my Mac laptop in my home office or in the various research libraries where I work, which are often connected to the internet, as well as on the Windows desktop computer in my office at the university. Being able to subscribe to Nozbe’s Next Actions in iCal also allows to me to synchronise with the calendar on my Palm TX, which is very convenient.
For tracking the different horizons of focus, I complement Nozbe with MindMeister, the excellent online mapping software. For this, I have simply uploaded in MindMeister and edited a copy of the MindManager template I had created a while back and this helps me to keep focus. A nice touch is the ability to create a link between each project node on the mind-map and the relevant page for the said project in Nozbe.
Both Nozbe and MindMeister offer free accounts which should allow you to explore further this implementation of GTD.
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GTD® is the popular shorthand for “Getting Things Done®“, the groundbreaking work-life management system and book by David Allen
Original post here: pascalvenier
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