Merlin:

Of course the benefit of all your twiddling has been you sharing your experiences with all these gadgets/processes/products on your blog. So your readers benefit from your generosity . .but maybe you don’t. Some twiddling is par for the course—but stopping and settling into the use of your best-it-can-be system (note I didn’t say perfect, you’ll never get there) has its own great rewards.

I stopped experimenting with my system and I’m much more productive. I use:

Life Balance, as Teri mentions above. Keeps all my calendar, next actions and projects (both pro and personal) in one place, and orders next actions by context (and with any level of priority that I choose to give them or their parent project, so I don’t have to continually make a call on the importance of each next action), but Life Balance also helps me track how every next action is getting me toward project completion and helps me to spend more time on the things that matter—which is really what organization is supposed to be about, right? LB also makes it easier to set up a GTD implementation with templates created by more experienced users…it’s a great piece of software, and the one I chose for GTD after trying other approaches, both computerized and strictly paper. I also liked Life Balance so much I upgraded to a Palm Tungsten T3 so I can take my LB lists with me on the go.

Tickler file. I got into the habit of opening each day’s file BEFORE checking email. Makes a big difference. Get it out from under your desk; it’s hidden there.

That’s it for organization. I keep detailed book writing notes in a Moleskine, create outlines in Inspiration, and write my books in Word. But I don’t count those as part of my GTD implementation—they are just additional tools, not really part of my GTD system of tracking next actions and projects. I have no desire to try out every new calendar/todo software any more, or to twiddle further with my system. Since I locked in on this system I’m getting way more done, and I think that any further experimentation would only make me less productive.