The ‘perfect hack’, whether mind or software, has always been my downfall. Even before adopting GTD as a system (with my own customizations and others gleaned gleefully from here), I ran into the same problem.

The woe of the link-surfer is me.

Moleskine, index cards, and Life Balance is what I’ve settled upon. The first is good for impromptu idea capture, brainmapping and even outlining. The 2nd I’ve found to be the most versatile way of drawing up quicky action lists away from the computer in places where it may seem ‘rude’ to pull out my Clié and Slap it into Life Balance.

I’ve taken the ‘weekly review’ idea a tad further towards the inbox sort by parsing all of the projects and actions i wrote down on index cards yet haven’t done them yet (because they’re either context sensitive or just don’t need to be done now) and drop them into LB.

LB is best for keeping it ‘all together’, but, especially on a palm-based platform, it’s rather time-consuming to get it in there, in the right place, with the right priorities, etc. Having it there to ‘check off’ items and reorder lists as necessary is a definite plus. It unburdens some of the rebalancing that’s needed to decide what’s most appropriate to do Next.

But god help me, I still check out that spiffy and shiny new app, that project management tool, that outliner, text editor … any time I see a new one. Sometimes it’s best just to unplug (or turn off the airport) and just Do.

Procrastination is always more challenging when you can’t IM or link-surf.