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Mail.app and Getting Things Done

munch_screamThere’s no greater challenge or spur to your own producivity practices than reading concrete details about how other people have organized themselves.

Patrick Rhone has written an excellent account of his own system for Getting Things Done.

He documents the entire process from capturing things in his Moleskin to processing it with Backpack, OmniOutliner Pro and a note-taking database called Notional Velocity to maintaining the larger vision in the midst of it all.

Using a series of mailfolders in his IMAP account, he is able to employ Mail.app as an efficient tool for processing his tasks.

It’s hard to come away from reading it without thinking, “Yeah, I should be doing this or that”.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Apple Mail, Productivity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Mail.app and Getting Things Done”

  1. Ted Pavlic says:
    14 May 2006, 1:15 am at 1:15 am

    This isn’t very Mail.app related, but heck… neither are Space Pens!

    I’ve just posted a comment on the post that is the subject of this post… And I’m going to duplicate that here, because GTD TiddlyWiki is something that I really believe in. (I’ll even link the links here — something I neglected to do there)

    Nice work!

    I know talks about GTD methods can get a little religious, so I don’t mean to start anything, but I just wanted to point something out… just because I don’t think a lot of people know about it.

    There are TiddlyWiki solutions that may be able to replace your Backpack and probably your OmniOutliner too.

    Take a look at MonkeyGTD and d3 (”d cubed”) for an example of this. You can find them at:

    http://www.dcubed.ca/
    http://simonbaird.com/monkeygtd/

    You may also want to see a version of “d cubed” that looks more like the original GTDTW.

    http://www.dcubed.ca/gtd-fusion.html

    There are descriptions of these things at (among other places) the 43folders Wiki:

    http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/D3
    http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Monkey_GTD

    It may be a good idea to take a look at the special note for Mozilla users on those pages. Sometimes (with TiddlyWiki) you have to adjust your “dom.max_script_run_time” in your “about:config” configuration.

    Something else I want to add is that if you have a web server available to you, you can install the UploadPlugin, which is available from:

    http://tiddlywiki.bidix.info/#UploadPlugin

    This plugin allows you to store these wikis on-line. (otherwise you can carry one on your USB drive — you can even store a “portable” version of Firefox on that drive too!)

  2. Tim says:
    14 May 2006, 11:20 am at 11:20 am

    Thanks, Ted. No worries about Mail.app-relatedness. The blog would have ground to a halt months ago if that was all that got posted here!

    Thanks for the links too.

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