I actually have started this, before even reading GTD, truthfully. Now that I have read it, I see what a powerful tool it is. I’ve archived every article (not just links), every email, and it’s instantly accessible via the search. That takes care of the file system.

Items that need action are labled as such.

Gmail and GTD seem to go hand in hand. Now if they just had an integrated calendar, I’d be set.

I write about my attempts to do GTD on Gmail here: http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/2004/04/managing_interr.html

It’s particularly useful to use the “Starred” items as the tag for “@action”, since those can be done very quickly from the UI (faster than say assigning an arbitrary label).

I just got Gmail this week so I’m just setting it up. I have redirected all the mail that I get from a mailing list and put it onto gmail and auto label it. This keeps it off my machine and ‘out of my head’. Still getting used to the gmail thing and how to use it to it’s full potential.

BTW I’m also trying Notebook (http://circusponies.com/). So far I like it and it’s helping to GTD.

Jim, do you have any comments on using NoteBook with GTD? I’ve had the program for quite some time, but have dl-ed LifeBalance (again!) to see how it might work with GTD.

Warning - only started reading GTD yesterday…ie biigg newbie.

I haven’t tried using Mail.app in Tiger to see if the Spotlight features are enabled. I’ll let you know…

Based on a previous entry on 43Folders, I started using gmail for GTD. Basically, I created a label called “todo” which I use to label… guess what. Whenever I finish a task, I remove the “todo” label. I also created a label called “reply would be nice” for messages (usually from friends) that don’t merit an immediate response, but a reply would be nice.

Since I still have messages arriving in Thunderbird for my work mail, I created a folder called Todo, and a subfolder called Todo-gmailed. I put anything that needs action in the todo folder, and then periodically I use gmailloader to shuttle those messages to gmail. It’s redundant, I realize. After I’ve loaded my messages into gmail, then I move them into the subfolder todo-gmailed.

I’d love to hear further suggestions for optimizing email management with gmail.

If anyone has a spare GMail invite they could let me have, let me know so I can try this. ;-)

You can actually implement this in Outlook as well using note flags and search folders.

If you still need a gmail, Rob, please e-mail me at davehurley@NOSPAMgmail.com (remove the obvious first)

Note to all: I have 6 to give out right now, but will be leaving for the day at about 7:30 am pacific.

If anyone wants one, e-mail me. If you don’t hear from me, they’re all gone.

—Dave

I also have several gmail invites to give away. Please email me if you want one.

I now have a gmail account, thank you Eric. I’m robmyers1 . Every other variant has gone already… :-)

I’ve been mulling over GMail as a GTD command post also. The fact that one can tag a single email with multiple tags has, in itself, terrific GTD implications.

GMail also supports the use of “+”, as in, if you’re “foo@gmail.com”, you can mail something to “foo+barproject@gmail.com” and it’ll get to your account. Add a filter to auto-snag email sent to “foo+barproject@gmail.com” and now you’re cooking with gas.

The large amount of storage means it’s trivial to use GMail as a parking place for actual work files, like Word documents, spreadsheets, etc. And it makes an excellent orbital platform for those of us who (for instance) use Macs at home and PCs at work.

Steve-

You can actually implement this in Outlook as well using note flags and search folders.

Please explain further, bonus points for Thunderbird explanation.

I have a small handful of GMail invites, if there are still a few of you who want one.

They’re harder to give away to friends than one might initially think.

Tony, the LifeBalance forums have several threads about GTD. You can search the boards for “getting things done” http://www.llamagraphics.com/dc/dcboard.php

Thanks for that Lisa - I’ve been digging around in those boards trying to get the ‘gist’ of LifeBalance (I tried it on my Mac a long time ago, didn’t understand it at the time and binned it).

I’m torn between trying to do GTD with LifeBalance (a guy called ‘rantz’) has made some excellent PDF documents available on setting up LB to work with GTD and letting my inner geek follow Merlin with his scheme for integrating GTD with all the goodness of OS-X (iCal, shell, wikis etc). The latter is very shiny, the former is almost there already.

I really ought to step back and look at all this without a computer, and see how the GTD mindset will settle upon me…

Thanks for your advice!

Doh! - his name is ratz, but here’s the site with LB templates and those great PDFs I was talking about…

http://www.actionable.org/files/

I’ve got a few Gmail invites available here for those interested.

Man, I’ve spent the last hour playing with Thunderbird and I’m pretty impressed. I don’t know if I’d consider giving up Mail.app (and its great integration) until after I see Tiger, but I have to award big points for how TB is evolving.

There’s a lot of tweakable features, plus it has labels by which messages can be sorted and some pretty neat filtering capabilities.

Definitely worth grabbing to check out, esp. if you have an IMAP account. Nothing to lose.

I like the + idea. I am going to sign up for site memberships that I think will spam me at email+spam@gmail.com and set up a filter to be sure that all my spam is pulled from my inbox.

Via BoingBoing, there’s a cool tool out there that’s distributing Gmail invites. You might have to refresh the site if there aren’t any invites available when you first load the page. I got mine after a couple of tries. The site is: http://isnoop.net/gmailomatic.php .

This connects nicely with GMailFS, a hack that allows to treat a GMail storage space as a folder on your filesystem. If you like to implement lists as text files, this is a great way to distribute it along many computers and make them accessible from a web browser.

I think that for the moment it’s only available for linux yet, but I also seem to remember that I have seen similar tools for other OSes. Just google for them…

Tried GMail for GTD, dropped it for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s painful to shuttle an action between categories (labels). You have to label it, then drop the old label. This is one situation where folders beat labels.

2. You can’t modify the text of an action i.e. GMail won’t let you edit emails. You can only append to them with replies.

So back to Palm Desktop for me - works great.