How I Get Things Done

Getting Things Done (GTD) has always been important to me. I’m busy and I forget things, so over the years, I have tried various methods to keep up with my tasks using everything from my old Newton 2100 to a Moleskine journal. I never really found anything to meet my three and a half basic requirements:

  • 1. Be portable (and easy to use on the go)
  • 2. Be able to filter tasks under different categories
  • 3. Be simple 

When Leopard was announced, I was looking forward to Notes on Leopard syncing with Notes on the iPhone, but alas, Apple pulled that feature before the final release of 10.5.

Shoot.

After puttering around with Notes on the iPhone, OmniFocus, Evernote and a few more, I just gave up… until a friend showed me Remember The Milk (RTM), an on-line task management system that is easy to use, and has an iPhone-friendly web version (for a fee).

The problem was the iPhone version wasn’t so good. Clunky and slow (even on 3G) made it violate my first requirement of any GTD system.

Shoot x2.

Then, I read about a iPhone app called (simply) Todo, by a company named Appigo. (Here’s the iTunes link.) It’s a simple, powerful GTD application that syncs with RTM.

After some heavy usage today, I’m impressed with Todo. It syncs back to RTM very quickly, and lets me add things on the go, or copy and paste large chunks into my GTD world via the RTM website from any Mac or PC. I can categorize things by list and/or tags, or leave them in the “Inbox” for later.

I think I’m becoming more productive.