Simple GTD in Lotus Notes
10/2/2008 UPDATE: This post is great, but I wrote a follow-up with ideas that I prefer over some of what I posted below.
Nothing Fancy
Once you’ve got your GTD (Getting Things Done) groove on and have all your little tools in place it can be very frustrating when those tools are taken away. I needed to revamp my GTD system to work with Lotus Notes.
There are some prevalent GTD Lotus Notes resources available. David Allen has an e-book available on the subject, there is a Yahoo! Group revolving around a template for Lotus Notes and finally there is some guy pushing his software on a site with an ounce of information for every gallon of sales hype. I can’t attest to any of these but in my case the latter two are out because I don’t want to risk installing a new template and I want to keep all on info on a server rather than local.
To Don’ts
Notes’ ToDos leave a lot to be desired. For my todos I use a system of prefixes for different Types of ToDos.
- a: for an action
- fupMMDDYY: for a action I need to follow up on soon.
- wf-some event: Waiting for some event before completing a task
This way when organizing ToDos by subject they are neatly organized with all of the “next actions” first.
Contexts
Strangely I find myself using the concept of contexts less and less as I almost always have access to a phone, laptop and Internet connection. However I believe contexts could be implemented well using the Lotus Notes “category” field and the classic “@” syntax.
Projects
Projects also lend themselves to the category field when it comes to classifying actions. Use the “By Category” view to then view your actions and other ToDos by project.
Tickler
I’ve implemented the tickler file with Lotus Notes’ “reminders” which can be placed on the calendar. Put in a reminder and set notifications for items that are far in the future.
These are the pieces that I’ve found most relavent to my system. Of course this post is begging for a follow-up as I spend more times with Lotus Notes. Does anyone else have simple GTD tips when using Lotus Notes without new databases and templates?