At the close of my sixth week of an empty inbox (barring a few spikes following a hard-drive crash), I don’t feel too irresponsible responding to Brad’s request to share my GTD setup with the world. I’d say at this point it’s working tolerably well but not at weapons grade, so I’d welcome any suggested tweaks.

Let me start off by noting that the primary constraints around which I have to work are an office email system that’s on Exchange, with Outlook on pc as the supported platform and mail client. Exchange has the benefit of pushing to the supported blackberries too, but that particular combination comes with some unique issues, particularly if you have a limit on server space and have to push archives offline (as I do).

So, in outlook, I’m using the GTD Outlook plugin from Netcentrics. It’s $70, but well worth it imho, and they’ve let me upgrade and had decent support on a couple of re-installs, so I’m happy. (There’s a free trial offer if you want to see for yourself.) Sorry, Mac people, it’s PC only - but I don’t think you really need it anyway.

In GTD, every action has a “context” = where/when you might do it. Every action can also be part of a project. The idea is, at any given time, you can look at a project and see what needs to be done, or look at a context (e.g., “@ office”) and see what your top to-do’s are that you can actually do when in that location. The outlook plug-in uses Outlook’s native task categories to denote context, and its primary benefit is handling: it does things like let you send an email and delegate it to an @Waiting For category at the same time. It also lets you easily add both context and project to a single item (something not easily accomplished in native outlook, and my primary issue with it). Finally, it lets you associate an action with an email and then store them in separate places, which is very helpful except when you lose them.

For me, simplicity is the key to the actions / contexts setup. You need your to-do list to be a dashboard you can really take in at a glance during your day, without sorting through 15 categories of things you should be considering doing. The first time I implemented this (over a year and a half ago), I had way too many contexts, and I spent just as much time looking over all my contexts for the relevant ones as I saved by having them be so precise. Now, my key action contexts are @Yahoo office, @Yahoo calls, @Calls on the Go, @Home, @Waiting For, @Agendas, @Errands, @Lists, and @Someday. That’s it.

I try really hard to park any to-do in one of those areas - and I also try really hard not to let any given category stack up with more than a dozen or two items at the outside. You can’t really have that many priority items anyway, so everything else is something you should try to do, delete, or dump into low priority bins. For a handful of absolutely-must-do-TODAY items, I use the high-priority flag. Once in a while, I add a new context, but only if I’ve thought it through.

If you’re new to GTD, the power of the @Waiting For category is not to be underestimated, and it works really well in this setup. If you’re working out of your inbox as your todo list, there are probably dozens of emails you can’t really do anything about that are just sitting there until you can. Maybe an invitation to a conference you don’t know if you’ll be able to go to yet - simple, park it in @Waiting For and title the action something appropriate (”conference budget approval”). Or park it in your calendar as something you’ll decide after a fixed time. Either way, it’s gone from the inbox and the list of things you scan all day long when you’re looking for actionable items. I have a lot of stuff in that list, and it’s much easier to review it a couple of times a week than to look at constantly.

The other power of @Waiting For is you remember to follow up on stuff. I can’t tell you how many times a week I shoot an email off to someone at Yahoo! and wait to hear a response. This is particularly true when it’s one of those situations where you’re helping someone from outside the company get intro’d internally. It’s very easy to trust karma, delete the original email, and forget all about it - but if you park it in @Waiting For and, on review, notice it’s still there, you can follow up. People are amazed sometimes when I chase down little items like that repeatedly, and you win a lot of credibility taking care of things you’ve been entrusted to in this really simple way.

So those contexts form the basis of my todo list, and since tasks sync to blackberry and you can filter task display on the handheld by category, i can pull up a list of “Calls on the Go” when I’m in my car or “Errands” when I’m at the grocery store. On the input side, I can easily add a new task I think of when I’m on the move or in a meeting - i usually just leave it uncategorized and file whatever’s new the next time I check in from the PC. I also sometimes use downtime to scan @Waiting For to delete items that are no longer open. (If I’m not surfing m.twitter.com.)

The @Agendas category is also powerful. You create an item for each standing meeting you have or each key person on your team, and in the notes field for that item list keep a running list of things you need to remember to talk to someone about but for which you don’t need or want to send a one-off email.  And, of course, it’s all right there in your handheld when you’re having a meeting.
I do take the time to group some tasks into projects, but only certain kinds. For example, Hiring. By doing this, I can pull up the project Hiring and see all the open (and closed) items having to do with candidates in one view. I don’t currently bother categorizing calendar meetings this way, but I think you could.

Filing reference emails is also key - I have a handful of folders that I keep in an outlook .pst file that’s local (not live on the server), and I drop most stuff post-handling into those. They mostly correspond with particular areas of my work responsibility and the major projects within them. Again, the fewer the better, because I frequently have to dig into them to find stuff. I have on general one for “chron”, where I put one-off stuff I want to keep, two general ones for admin (one for sysadmin stuff like password emails) and one for G&A/HR-type office stuff. I also keep a folder called @shortref in my server-synced files so that I can drop, say, the itinerary of my upcoming trip into there and view it from desktop or palmtop. One downside of this is that I can’t access the archives from palmtop or from another computer, and I have to make sure they’re frequently backed up. But since .pst files were not meant to be accessed over LAN/WAN and have a tendency to hang or corrupt when you try, it’s the best I’ve come up with in the absence of an admin assistant.

One problematic element of being in a high-email-volume environment is threaded conversations and ilists. Again, I try to delete or file these quickly once I’ve extracted any actionable elements from them. If i get a long email I’d like to read, I drop it into an @Computer task and mark it low priority.

Finally, I use the Plaxo outlook plugin, which syncs all of my contacts (thus far seamlessly) between my home and work pc’s. You can configure which things you want to sync, and I also sync my tasks and calendar to the web. I’m going to experiment with installing a 2nd copy of the GTD plug-in on my home pc Outlook client (buying the license gives you up to 2 pc’s) and see if that will work too. But web has been fine so far.

Oh, one more thing. I actually lied about having an empty inbox. There’s one email that’s been in there for a month now. It’s red-flagged and marked urgent, and it’s from me to me. The subject line is “GET OUT OF YOUR INBOX”. It’s the only one that I don’t mind seeing repeatedly when I’m in there.

I had an interesting experience yesterday when my company laptop bricked up on the way into the office. I went immediately to blackberry not just to scan my email (which I usually do when I’m not at a desk), but also for everything else. And by “everything else” I mean scheduling meetings, viewing and commenting on powerpoints, looking things up on the web,and (now) even writing this blog post.

while I missed the pc for a few things that are more efficient with that form factor (multiwindow activities, typing fast, mousing) and I have a few mail server folders to optimize for getting stuff out of my inbox once processed a la GTD, overall I’m pretty pleased by how well synced up the RIM curve let’s me be.

Wow, enough’s been written about widgets in the last week to fill a year’s worth of predictions. Fred is for them (subject to user happiness); Nick is apparently against them; and the New York Times just got around to discovering them.

Clearly they’re already the focus of some investor thinking and attention (Yahoo! corp dev folks are even talking about them publicly), and Newsweek has called 2007 the Year of the Widget, so it would be superfluous to call this a prediction from here. But I do think this ties into a broader trend that’s of interest, and that the market may resolve itself in unexpected ways.

This trend is about data visualization, presentation, syndication, and control. After all, publisher widgets are basically just websites - really small websites. And desktop widgets are client apps with small windows. (Though I don’t think client web apps are the future, given that there’s already a very effective client app called a “browser” on most pc’s today that do everything a widget client could do.)

What we’re seeing in the explosion of activity around widgets and embedded apps on MySpace is really the convergence of several trends that I think will all be (or continue to be) important this year: The portability of data streams, and the corresponding ability to aggregate them from around the web, apply rules to them, and ultimately control them at the consumer level. This broad trend leads to:

• New ways of visualizing data streams, especially as led by widgets right now. I’m also including “widgety” experienes like Netvibes here - but this is just a small part of a much bigger trend, as are Ambient devices and RSS-enabled rabbits. To build on the above comment about really small web pages, widget carriages are ultimately just like blog templates - rich presentation layers into which you pump your choice of content. People have lots of data available and will need lots of ways to view it.
• Social transparency and syndication. I can choose what content I expose in “publishery” applications, and I am almost automatically “publishery” in my social applications and digital self-expression because my friends can consume and subscribe to my stuff in reader-like ways. I have increasing ability to apply degree-based rules to this publication (let my friends but not my contacts see data, etc.).
• Data and content pushing upstream into communications. Aren’t IM windows and “you’ve got mail” pop-ups just desktop widgets? I can already subscribe to RSS alerts in IM and integrate messaging at the user & data level into my Yahoo! email in a way that provides a rich, seamless experience. I already consume my RSS feeds into my Outlook client (via Newsgator). There will be much more of this.
• On a related note, presence. That tv commercial where the guy’s watching a show on his laptop, big screen, and mobile window will happen for internet apps and presence-based communications first.
• Information control and data productivity. New apps and platforms are emerging to let users apply these trends to each other. Wesabe lets users do something interesting and valuable by combining a feed of their personal financial data and a social pool of user-generated content about merchants and transaction types, with a high level of security and control. Touchstone is about creating a high degree of control and intelligent automation over how communication and presence data are presented and consumed. These are platforms that allow user data mashups, and you don’t have to be a developer to leverage their power.
• I will probably post at greater length about the specific problem of productivity and Getting Things Done, but the kernel of the idea is, more and more of our communications are digital, more and more of our “to do’s” live in emails and IMs, and more and more important actions and decisions in our lives can be driven off of open-standards-based data and content (like digital wallets. . . or automatic mortgage re-fis). Managing personal and business productivity against all this data is thus more and more of a challenge - and a huge business opportunity. We’ll see how far Microsoft moves the ball forward with Vista - my bet is I still won’t be able to get my RSS, email, calendar, and to-do list to play perfectly with each other even in the same application, let alone across windows.
• That also touches on the issue of synchronization. Much has been said lately about web-based apps vs. client apps. It’s kind of a no-brainer to me that we need the power of the real-time web in all of our business applications now; lightning-fast access to our document data; access to our data via all our windows, even when we’re offline; automatic synching of docs modified offline; and always-safe, always-secure automatic backup of our precious data to the co-lo of our choice, be that an internet cloud or an expensive box in the basement. What’s so hard about that?
• Smart systems. By the way, I really don’t want to have to spend weekends at a time reorganizing my digital photo collection and figuring out 1,001 Lifehacker iTunes hacks.
• Oh, did I mention search? Hehehe.