I’ve read the rules, and so I’m being very careful about this. Recently I had an epiphany about handling my projects and their next actions as they relate to research studies, cataloged on my blog here. It’s mac and palm oriented. You can also check out the GTD category on that blog, most of which is very related to science and/or my research.

Overall, GTD has done two things for me as a scientist: 1) Helped me get my projects under control and allowed me to manage them well and 2) made it abundantly clear that I needed to cut commitments.

He’s got a few next actions that look like projects in there…

I’m a university scientist, and I’ve been using GTD since September 2004. I don’t think there is too much that is unique about what I do… I seem to have the same issues as other folks in getting GTD to work: Gotta do those weekly reviews, gotta empty those paper and email in-boxes, etc.

I struggle with balancing real deadlines (grant proposals), flexible deadlines (reviewing manuscripts), and non-deadline but important stuff (publishing my own papers).

I struggle with some of the same stuff that IT/web folks deal with (almost everything is @computer), plus finding blocks of time needed to get big projects done.

I use outlook for email and lifebalance for tracking projects and next actions. I like lifebalance because it gives me deadline, non-deadline, calendar and recurring tasks. It also syncs with the palm version nicely.

Thanks, I love seeing job focused GTD methods. What I’d really like to see is how someone in a Design and QA Engineering role uses GTD. I cannot seem to get his working with constant tasks, projects, assignments, and hot issues landing in my lap. Of course they are all due yesterday and next week and require lots of hand holding when you delegate tasks.

Oh, crap am I managing projects?

Hi there! Well, I guess I fit that double category, being a scientist and a GTDer. The nature of the former puts particular stresses on the latter, that I don’t often see around the web, mainly because of the gazillion inbox hogs: sources of data (I happen to be one of those inter-disciplinary guys dipping in a relatively wide variety of specialities), of intellectual input (meetings, conferences, scientific literature, younameit), of nagging emails, mailing lists (mainly in the form of lists of publications, I’d say 2-300 a week), of student management, and so on. As I try to have a life outside of work, I have come to be involved in another set of activities that strangely seem to require similar sets of tricks as those for research, as well as having a liking for IT geekyness (how else would I have hear of GTD?!). The baskets: 1- A Moleskine notebook divided in (i) an Inbox, where ToDos are written down in the format what @context >project #startdate — enddate :commentary; (ii) Notes, where I take, well, notes, and use as an on-the road brain-dump. The Moleskine lives with a…. oh yes… a Space-Pen! 2- On my Mac, Metadata, or tags if you prefer, with apps like Yep for the pdfs of scientific papers, and Quicksilver/Punakea/DefaultFolderX for everything else simply because nested folders are too one-dimensional. DEVONthink Pro for the processing (DT’s AI is my second brain). MailTags and Mail Act-on rules for processing emails (same set of tags as the rest). The Tags I use include, but are not restricted to, GTD Contexts and Projects, plus one called “Current” for which I have a Smart-Folder in the Dock for all the stuff that requires my attention during-this-week. I’m sticking to the @ prefix, not &, for consistency between tagging apps. 3- Kinkless, which receives input from the Moleskine (input via Quicksilver SendToKinkless advanced script), Mail (input via a MailToKGTD script), etc. My contexts: Lab (wet lab, data generation), Mac (everythink that gets done on the laptop including emails), Office (basically at non-lab), Home, Errands, Someday, and a crucial one, Thinking (this is where the digested brain-dump gets slowly distilled into Study Designs and Work Plans, and then gets moved on to the Lab context). 4 Output. this is 99% in the form of writing. For complex writing I start in Scrivener (allows me to have pdfs, graphs of the data I generated, etc.), with the help of DEVONthink Pro and Bookends for referencing. When I no longer require having pdfs and figures for writing and when I’m fairly happy with the structure of the paper I export the manuscript to Mellel. For collaboration writing, I anyway use a ‘dirty copy’ that I hand out, because people always tend to screw up my formatting, auto titles, reference fields, etc. Always. So to avoid beating people over the head with their own bloody limbs, I always keep the ‘master document’ out of reach of their grubby little fingers.

Writing it out feels like it makes me loose more time than I gain, but in the long run I have become so much more relaxed about the day-today grind and pressure for getting as many things done as I can… Minimal levels of stress is a good enough outcome for me, and the wife likes me more for it ;-) Does GTD reduce divorce rates and cardiovascular complications?!

I am a PhD student in Surgery and have recently started implementing GTD with the “Thinking Rock” platform (no affiliation, but I am pretty happy with this multiplatform product).

I keep my PhD as a multiple cascade of little projects that range in scope from “the big Mama’ (the whole thing) to individual experiments and grant applications etc. It is only early for me, but I find GTD helps me to work on those thigns you know you have to (grant applications that your boss likes but you don’t really believe in…) and those that keep you motivated (wet lab work, results updates etc.)

I am also a medical professional (surgical trainee) by training, and I can see GTD will have a completely different implementation in that life. GTD has been great for me in this life as I am awful at choosing to do tasks that can be put off. In my other life, tasks are a lot more squeaky wheel and difficult to ignore. I am looking forward to figuring out the different implementation.

[…] It’s also worth checking out the post at 43folders - several researchers reply in the comments and they have some interesting things to say about GTD and the research lifestyle which may be very relevant to readers of this site. […]

GTD is def the way to go. that dude doesnt know what hes talking about

I’ve been using GTD in biomedical science and academics for about a year. Though it’s not particularly science-specific, some might be interested in a description of my approach, using Mori, at http://jhh.med.virginia.edu/main/MoriGTD.

There are two issues in GTD that current software isn’t addressing well and that are relevant for implementations of GTD in science and academics:

1. If you implement GTD with any sort of comprehensiveness, you will have a large number of projects—as David Allen points out in his book. I have more than 30 major projects and that’s because I’ve slipped a bit recently. Over 50 wouldn’t be unreasonable. It’s impossible to review all of these projects in detail every day, and, in fact, many don’t need it—but some do (a wide variety of different types of projects with differing requirements is common in academics). Projects need varying levels of attention, depending on their nature and where they are in their own lifecycles. Software needs to address this, with the ability to set project review schedules that slip the projects into your daily list as needed. These schedules should also be easily modifiable during project review so that review frequency can track actual project activity. Software should also catch projects that are being overlooked and fail to show activity within a set period of time, sort of like how NetNewsWire catches RSS feeds that are not being modified.

2. GTD apps should be a nerve center for projects, but should not necessarily try to store all project-related documents internally. In addition to “multidimensional to-do lists” GTD apps should also manage dynamic data about projects (notes), links to documents and annotations of documents. There are a large number of document types in science and academics, including text of various types, several forms of markup, word processing, PDF, spreadsheets, etc. In my experience it’s not particularly useful to pull all of those document types into a database in a GTD app. Rather, they should be managed externally with links to locations in the file system or the web and excellent features for link management. As above, locally-stored data should include the most dynamic data about projects (notes, to-tos and annotations of linked documents), links and possibly indexes of the content of linked documents.

I’m a math prof at a small liberal arts college. I’ve been using GDT since last summer, with varying degrees of success. Rather than go into it here, just go to my blog and follow the story:

http://www.castingoutnines.net/category/gtd/