Getting Things Done: Doin' GTD with PC, Mac or Time Manager

The other day, I held a seminar for a mixed group of people. There where a few developers from a software company there, a girl from a logistics provider, an HR Manager, a bank clerc and some others.

Interesting enough, these people had one thing in common – none of theme uses Outlook!

Microsoft Exchange holds about 60% of the total Market for Email Systems, with Outlook hoding a bit more. Usually, that is reflected in the groups I get. In this group, the Lady uses only her Time-Calendar for notes, the software guys a mix of iCal and Mozilla Thunderbird running on Mac, The HR Manager and logistics provider uses Lotus Notes and the rest only Webmail.

As a trainer, I usually go through the basics of GTD first – the why we need it and how it helps – and then move on to interactive sessions working together on implementing the methodology in the software we like to use. This time that obviously was a challenge.

So instead, I went through what the basics of the methodology wants us to achieve, pointing out how that would look like if you run a paper based system. For each step, I did a demo in Outlook and Lotus Notes, asking the Apple fraction in the room to try doing the same stuff on their Macs. Everyone cought on and understood the underlying prinziples, which was a homerun for me as a trainer :-)

The Lotus users could implement what I showed immediately, albeit with some differences to how things work in Outlook, the Lady will now expand her Calender for doing categorised tasks on separate notes and the Apple fraction…well, they were happy but somewhat frustrated due to the fact they couldn’t find a way to connects incoming Emails or Notes with Categories in their app’s.

So far I have not yet experienced any other application apart from outlook that allows you to implement GTD so smoothly, without any changes apart from tweaking your views and changing your behaviour.

Entourage (Outlook for Mac) can do Task and assign Categories to them and I've heard of is OmniFocus. I’m looking into this myself, but if we do have some Mac Users out there, I’d be grateful for feedback on what works for you with on the Mac.

Take care, keep it up and empty your head!

Cheers

Göran Askeljung