GTD in Lotus Notes Take 2
In August I wrote an entry about implementing GTD with Lotus Notes. As anticipated after a few months of using the system, I’ve changed a few things that I want to pass on to you.
Back to ToDos
I now put two different types of entries into Lotus Note’s ToDos.
a: => for an action
wf: => waiting for some event
This is nice because the actions show up first followed by the “waiting for” items. I always work off of my local copy of email and keep the database indexed. This means that with a quick search I can see only my actions or only “waiting for” items. In my last post regarding GTD on Lotus notes, I was using an “fupDATE” prefix for items that I needed to follow up on. I picked up that idea from some Lotus Notes tool I saw online and in-retrospect it is stupid.
Context
In my previous post I claimed that context wasn’t as useful as it used to be for me because I always have most of my tools with me. Then reality set in. I have to pick things up at the office, talk with so-and-so at such-a-place, and of course you can make phone calls on the road. I use Lotus Note’s “categories” field to keep track of context (i.e. @phone or @agenda:JimSmith). Using the search function makes it easy to see individual contexts.
I also like to label items with high-level project names (more like areas of responsibility really) which is necessary because of the nature of my work. I put this in the “category” field as well so I can use a search like “@comp AND ProjectA”. I’m not sure exactly how Lotus Note’s search works but I always CamelCase phrases to keep things organized.
The search really is the key here. You can do a search like “a: AND @phone AND AwesomeProject” to narrow your view of actions. This even works well on a Blackberry where you can apply “filters” to your ToDo list.
A Little More Calendar Use
I’m using the calendar in Lotus Notes as a (get ready) calendar and also as a tickler. If there is an action that I know that I can’t start until tomorrow (not because I’m waiting on someone else’s action) then I put a “reminder” on the calendar for that item. I believe that this is more inline with the GTD philosophy that what I had posted before (stupid “fup”). Of course actions that need to be performed in a month also live in a calendar reminder.
Projects
Projects live in the Lotus Notes “Personal Journal” feature. I keep one list of projects and one list of someday/maybes. Again this works nicely with a blackberry as it will be synced over as “memos”.
Project support materials is sort of a jumble and in my opinion usually has to be unless you have some killer software program that I don’t know about. I use OneNote for notes and simple directory folders on my harddrive for files. When I’m feeling adventurous I link to the files in OneNote or copy them in. I file my email into a folder structure that I have based on high-level projects and use Lotus Note’s “follow-up” flags to flag important items that I need to reference often. In-use project support papers live in a set of folders within my computer bag. This area of the system could maybe use some tweaking but hasn’t caused me much grief as I usually know where an Excel doc is living (in a folder on my HD) and where notes from my last meeting are (in OneNote).