Categories are a powerful tool for organizing any of the information you store in Entourage 2004—whether it’s email, contacts, appointments, or notes—but I think they really shine as a way to provide context for your task list. I use Categories almost synonymously with the idea of "contexts" that David Allen discusses in Getting Things Done—as a way to identify the location, conditions, tools, or focus needed to work on a given item. As I said the other day, I try to use my Categories to provide ready answers to the "How," "Where," and "When" of a given task as clearly and uniquely as is reasonable. You want to be analyzing and thinking about this stuff when you’re planning it, so you won’t have to process it again when it’s time to actually do it.

You know the drill--items that never or shouldn't find their way to a full post. Digital Chow Mein.

hipster pda Originally uploaded by leff. “Yeah, so I went to school for computers. I do live online. And yet I have never found a task management solution that works better than this stack of 3x5 cards.” More fun pix available at the Hipster PDA tag on Flickr.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a round of remainders—good stuff I've wanted to mention that never found their way into a full post. Here's a few to chew on over the weekend.

More of the neato little search shortcuts I like to use. Includes UPS/RSS

Mark's article gets to the core problems that cause people to get derailed, distracted, and perpetually off-target.

Handy way to "set it and forget it."

ELF adds the San Francisco Public Library to its system.

I’d like to start collecting links to tools, applications, scripts, and templates that people have created for implementing Getting Things Done, and that they would like to share with folks on the web. If there’s something you’d like to see added here, leave a comment with a link and some background information (status, license, platform, etc.), and I’ll check it out. As with our OS X inventory collection, I’ll add the most useful-, novel-, and promising-looking submissions.