Review: Getting Things Done and Remember The Milk

After setting up Gmail to get things done, I spent some time with the book.  I may be late to the party, as everyone seems to know the essentials already.

The gist of the GTD philosophy is to always stay focused on the next action which can be done on any given project.  Projects are defined liberally to be anything which consists of a series of one or more actions.  For example, renewing my driver's license is a project with at least three steps:  find out what documents I need, gather the documents, and finally go to the DMV.  Since each step depends on those before, at any point in time only one action can be taken.  On the other hand, clearly some projects have many actions which can be taken in parallel.

The premise is that it doesn't make sense to keep all those non-actionable items on your mind.  They should be waiting in the wings until you can act on them.  Once you consider only the actions you can take now, you can stop worrying quite so much.

Getting Things Done with Gmail

I've shared this lifehacker post in my Reader shared items already, thanks to SdC, but it is life-changing.  Enable multiple inboxes and superstars in GMail and go through the steps and you can have a nicely organized inbox like this:

This rakes in a lot of positive shoulder-surfing comments, and it's productive.  I would also suggest enabling keyboard shortcuts.  The shortcut "s" will iterate through the superstars.  The inboxes on the right panel do not refresh immediately, but you can always force this with "gi".