Good movie illustrating how Quicksilver, email, and Backpack can interact.

Again, this time with the chorus: it's about the work, not the meta-work.

Martin Ternouth's impressive system for managing his projects with paper.

Technorati Tags: GTD, lofi, paper, projectmanagement, workflow

Guest Check PDA: closed
Originally uploaded by atduskgreg.

This is a clever variation on the Hipster PDA that I picked up over on the HPDA wiki page. Use a cheapie, pocket-sized pad of restaurant “Guest Checks” to take notes. The hack is to use the kind with old-school carbon copies, so you’ll always have an archival copy of any notes you take.

Check out the full set on Flickr.

The main reason I stick with Entourage for all my calendar, TODO list, and—to a certain extent—archival email needs, comes down to one word: glue.

As annoying as Entourage is in so many ways, I love that I can basically associate anything with anything via the “Link” functionality. This provides a handy little landing pad for any task, note, event, email, or contact onto which you can drop any other Entourage object as well as virtually any item from the Finder (for some reason it doesn’t easily handle URLs, which seems kind of dumb: use .weblocs as a workaround). Entourage then perpetually remembers that association in both the linking and linked items. Got it? Group like with like, and then get to anything from anything (Steal this idea, Apple; use Spotlight).

So, I can associate an email message with a TODO, attach a text file to a calendar event (see my article in June’s MacWorld), and even, apparently, attach Applications and folder paths to any Entourage object. Why is this last one so freaking handy? Lemme show you.

As I’ve said before, items can sometimes linger on your TODO list a lot longer than you’d like, and it can be tricky to understand exactly why that is in each case. I’m convinced cringing is often a factor.

Now shipping from Amazon and on its way to subscribers' mailboxes.

We’re fortunate right now to see so many great tools emerging to help people get their act together.

Products like 37 Signals’ Backpack and TaDaList are beautifully constructed, entirely usable, and have an amazingly high sense of fit and finish. It doesn’t go without saying that these products are also very fun to use. At the same time, a clever little app like GTDTiddlyWiki comes along that’s lightweight, portable, and is also very fun to use. And, although I haven’t played with Trumba or Sproutliner much yet, I understand they’re both turning a lot of heads and are—you guessed it—very fun to use.

These are all Good Things, and I couldn’t be happier that the quality of tools we’re seeing is so consistently high. Kudos, tool persons. You have all done a good job.

Still, as attracted as all we users naturally are to adopting these new apps, I have a growing concern that I want to share. And while it’s not directly related to these particular products, I do think it goes to important attitudes we have about seeing tools as panaceas for our productivity and time-management problems.

I’m curious about how GTD fans handle their “waiting on” items. I’ve decided to try something a bit different in my own setup, and I’m wondering if others have done something similar with any success.