UPDATE: Bryan has compiled all his tips into a whitepaper…good stuff. Bryan is whipping up a multi-post series on integrating gmail with his GTD implementation. Should be good reading. Part one is here. Also, he turned me on to classicshaving.com,

GTD with Gmail Whitepaper

Getting things done with Gmail is here: GTD with Gmail Whitepaper

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“Bryan Murdaugh”:http://saw.themurdaughs.com/gtd-with-gmail-whitepaper/ hat ein Whitepaper verfasst, das zeigt, wie sich die Methode des “Getting Things Done” von “David Allen”:http://www.davidco.com in “GMail”:http://www.gmail.com umsetzen las…

Space-Age Wasteland has amalgamated their series of posts on Getting Things Done using Gmail, into a whitepaper, which can be downloaded as a PDF….

Check out a bunch of examples of how you can use Backpack to organize your information at http://backpackit.com/examples/

I can’t seem to find this ‘hack’ - despite ‘googling’ it :>)

If you’re a fan of GtD and Gmail, then you may be interested in this whitepaper.

Personally, I don’t use Gmail. My work email is stored in Maildirs on my FreeBSD box and is accessed through Courier IMAP using Thunderbird. My GtD methodology for pr…

[…]

GTD with Gmail Whitepaper - Bryan Murdaugh has published a PDF whitepaper on how to use Gmail to implement GTD, capturing thoughts and managing projects and next action lists with labels and emails to yourself. (via Lifehacker)…

I have been trying GTD for some time including outlook plugins, tadalist and some wiki-based ones, such as the recent Backpack and GTDTiddlyWiki. I was mainly using my Wikka wiki (leveraging its dynamic category feature) for work-related complex thin…

You also reference *’ing your projects, but the white paper does not show this in the examples. So do contexts replace projects?

Thanks and I appreciate your time putting this together!!

I use this as a quick tag to let me know that there’s no extended information in the body.

Many of my actions are project-less. So they only have a context for organization. Since the actions in a context are unrelated, there can be many “next actions” (indicated by the star).

(I also use my Hipster PDA for collection.)

Question 1:
One thing I find slightly disconcerting for processing is GMail’s display of messages inreverse time order, with the latest message on the top of the list. That makes sense for e-mail, but when brainstorming a list of actions, it would be nice to be able to juggle the order somehow. I know, GTD with GMail isn’t a project management utility but if GMail could display the messages alphabetically by subject, for example, it would be possible to number the actions - a), b), c), etc. Is this possible?

Question 2:
I use a different GMail address for GTD than for “normal” email. I TRY to keep 2 sessions open at once in 2 different FireFox tabbed windows. Often, I am composing a note to “me”, and when I push the “Send” button, GMail tells me I have been logged out for security reasons! Bummer. Is there any way of keeping two GMail account sessions open simultaneously without getting logged out?

- Jeff

2) Not that I’m aware of. For that exact reason, in fact, I use one Gmail account to rule them all. It forces me to handle every email as an item coming in. If it’s an action, create an action out of it (this often involves editing the subject). If it’s not, handle it accordingly. There may be ways to keep sessions open - if you find one, do tell.

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space-age wasteland � Blog Archive � GTD with Gmail Whitepaper The Tao of Sean - Art, Flow […]

1) Everyproject is an email. I write single steps of the project as items in the email message. I can always “edit” the message replying or forwarding it to me. So I usually delete completed steps and refilled the message as @Internet or @Phone depending on the next step.

2) I also set up 4 categories for my project, based on what I read in Goalsetting :
*Contrib
*Pro/biz/econ
*SelfDev
*Toys/rec

The last hack help me to give meaning to the projects. Why I want to do it. They can be contribution goals (*Contrib), career/business/economic goals (*Pro/biz/econ), personal development goals (*SelfDev) or toys/adventure goals (*Toys/rec).

So every project in my system has a meaning label and a context label (those beginning with @, like @Home, also !Someday/Maybe and !WaitingFor, and also my tickler file labels). And they have one and only one context label, and one and only one meaning label. It helps a lot with the weekly review, because you don’t see projects more than twice.

http://www.mindspires.co.uk/pr06.htm

Since I started a new job, I’ve had to use Outlook connected to an Exchange server for email and calendaring (distressing, I know), and it turns out that my inbox is one of my main collection buckets. So I’ve worked out a GTD system that …

Thanks for the awesome whitepaper, I’m implementing GTD using gmail but had a question about complete tasks - what do you do with theM?????

Your mileage may vary, but be consistent, and don’t throw anything away that you may need. Also, don’t worry about things getting lost; you have the power of google’s search technology behind you.

I’m a little confused, however. On page two, you say you create two labels for each open project - ‘Next’ and ‘Reference’. But, on page three, all of the tasks related to the bathroom project have ‘Bathroom:Actions’ as labels. Shouldn’t it be ‘*Bathroom:Next’?

Confusing me even more is that on page four, you mention a search - “is:starred label:*BecomeBillionaire:Next”.

Are you using ‘Next’ and ‘Actions’ interchangeably?

Other than that, I think I get it. I’m a bit worried about ending up with 10,000 labels, though. I think I remember reading that you delete the old ones or something like that.

Thanks!

And yes, old project lables get deleted, even if the items remain as reference material. I’ve found that the power of Google’s search in my archives compensates for not having old project labels lying around for access to the references.

Time sensitive actions get added to my Calendar and may (exceptionally) have an action tied to them as well on my action list. Since a review of all actions happens many times a day, all loops get closed.

Thanks for this, you inspired me to find a way to get GTD working with Gmail for myself. I found that using Greasemonkey within Firefox gave me a lot of extra functionality that brought GTD closer to reality for me.

In case you (or anyone else) is interested, I’ve explained what I did on my blog:
http://falkayn.blogspot.com/2006/03/gtd-with-gmail-and-greasemonkey.html

Cheers,
Angus

Cheers,

Brandon

Hey, my friend - thanks for the system! It works AWESOMELY! Being a bit A.D.D I find it hard to get organised, but this system, with its:
- ability to attach any info to the various to-do items
- ability to file under multiple categories eg. the particular project AND the context to do it in
- the powerful search
- and the fact that you can actually get ENJOYMENT from emptying your inbox and (in my case) your context folder for each particular context as you go through it (eg. “9-5 calls”)
has really helped me start getting things done.
______________________________________________________
2. INSIGHT

For awhile I actually stopped using the GTD, because I felt that just organising things by context didn’t really take enough account of PRIORITY. I was getting alot done, but not necessarily the IMPORTANT things. So I returned to an attempted priority-based system. But with YOUR particular system, you really can combine the best of both worlds.

You can see things in their CONTEXT baskets (ie. labels), but they also have their little green PROJECT label next to them. This means that when I go to particular context (eg. “online” or “6-9 calls” or “errands”) I can quickly see which items are also part of a project - and for me, these are usually the most important ones.

So I realised that if you do it right, you CAN get the priority things done using the context-based system, and in fact, its better than priority-only systems, because as David Allen points out, in those systems you can get overwhelmed with items that ARE top priority, but CAN’T be done at that time anyway. At the very LEAST, the context system minimises the number of things you have to consider at any one time.

Also, I’ve found that being able to instantly access
- contact details
- other relevant info
- and various thoughts and ideas
associated with any to-do item
is a real help for starting work on a particular thing.
(How often are we slowed or even stopped/distracted (esp. ADDers!) by having to root around trying to find relevant materials!?)
__________________________________________________________
3. SUGGESTION: forward your other emails to your GTD account

This might already be obvious to some, but I’ve found you can use GMAIL’s free FORWARDING feature to automatically forward your emails from your other gmail accounts to you “to-do” account. You can set it so it will forward them, and either delete them or archive them from the original account.

I have several accounts for friends, trusted people and companies, and unknown people companies. I now get all the email from the first two accounts forwarded to my “to do” account. This makes it easier to instantly know what’s going on, plus, quite frankly, makes it more stimulating to actually GO to my “to do” account to get some stuff done! I haven’t decided yet whether I will respond to emails by:
- responding straight from my “to do” account (a bit of a worry cos I don’t want any chance of spam”
- logging out and going to the original account
- or the current front-runner, writing the reply and forwarding it to my personal account to be sent en masse at the end of the day
We’ll have to see how we go on this one but it makes it much more interesting and seems to make it more efficient!

Thanks again for the EXCELLENT system!

[Another thing marked off the list!]

I actually only have one main gmail account. Which is my main email address. Every incoming email is INDEED an action. Great point though, thanks for reading. Come back soon!

Allow me to add myself to the chorus of praise. Nice work.

A couple questions:

1) How do you handle using your context lists offline? For example, if you have an “errands” context with a bunch of messages (actions) in it, how do you keep this list in sync with an offline list so you can use it to run errands? GMail doesn’t seem to have a good way to print a list of messages.

2) What do you do with projects that have ended? I have quite a few projects that have a life of only a couple months, and I don’t want the left nav to fill up with tons of “Action” and “Reference” items that I don’t care about anymore. I just want my list of active projects. I thought of prefixing the labels with “DEAD:” or something. Just curious about what you might suggest.

Best,
Michael

Thanks - and a couple good questions.

1) I find that one of the best things you can do in a review is to manually sync your offline actions with something physical. For instance, my errand actions get placed onto green index cards that I keep in the back of my Hipster PDA.

2) I delete labels for projects that haven’t ended. Even if I’ve orphaned messages that related to a project, gmail makes it easy to go find them again. The point of the labels is quick access to projects you’re working on currently, or to the context you’re currently in. When the project is complete, you can always go find that content again with full-text search.

Thanks again.

To still keep labels for older projects you might consider using zzzProjectName. So, just add “zzz”. It will make sure you can still search within the label at later times. It also puts these labels at the end of the list out of your view (alpabetically sorted).

Best,
Michael

This might be me not reading carefully, but where is the “tickler” in your Gmail? Or have you just opted to go with “Someday/Maybe”?

Thanks for visiting!

Thanks for the article!

However, I have not been able to figure out why you use two project labels
per project (”*MyProject:Actions” and “*MyProject:Reference”) instead of just
one project label (”*MyProject”), which you combine with either a context label
(”!Home”) or a reference label (”R:Reference”). Can you please explain that?

Regards,

Mikko
Stockholm, Sweden

Ex: “Meet the boss…” implies I’ve got some notes about the meeting inside the message.

Good work on the white paper!
Doug

In your white paper, you show an empty inbox and tantalize us that this is something we’ll see frequently. But when I set me GMail GTD system up as you describe, I’m finding that when I apply labels to items, they still appear in the Inbox. So, as long as I have any open (incomplete) projects they, and any associated actions, will still be in the inbox. Is there a setting I’m missing, or a filter of some sort, that will make them disappear from the inbox once I’ve applied a label (processed them)? Or, am I missing something else altogether.

Thanks again for a brilliant GTD solution using GMail!

-steve

I am still not clear as to how you are getting the NA(’s) to cluster together
in a conversation along with the Project entry (which starts with a *, to
differentiate it). At first I thought they clustered together because the
Subject line was the same, but it isn’t (by definition). I just want to
understand, and I think others reading the white paper may reach the same point of confusion.

I’m moving forward with it myself, for the time being using a twist on
the method - I’m just creating a custom label for each project - so
the name of the project is a label. The I attach that label to all NA’s
queued for that project. I can click on any project’s label on the left
of Gmail, to see all the associated NA’s (from one to many). Next NA
can still be marked with a star; but I prefer to use the Star to denote
today’s “Punch list” (most urgent and/or important ToDo’s) across
projects. So I use the Star’s to plan and queue up tomorrow’s work.
Once I fully figure out how you’re doing it, I will probably revert to
your undoubtably, more elegant solution, which then in turn are entered
into your Inbox.

Thanks for getting me down this path - I’ve had 4 or 5 different GTD
solutions since starting it in Feb 2002, including programing my own
custom Excel VBA worksheet (distributed via freeware for a while);
attending David Allen’s seminars, going through their coaching; implementing with MS-Outlook, Treo apps, Blackberry apps, Mac+Entourage, Merlin Mann’s (personally autographed:) Hipster PDA, Yellow pad and pencil, etc. And Gmail-based GTD is the best so far, the best way to do gtd for me. I love the fact that it integrates your email and data from all other collection points (new brain input, ideas, paper, etc) right into one electronic inbox.

BTW, you say you’re using two inboxes… a Hipster and GMail’s inbox.
Actually, using a Hipster (or a Moleskin, pen and paper, etc) isn’t really
an Inbox, as in a place where you do your processing. It’s just (one of many possible) collection devices.

I have two Inbox’s now - a physical inbox for paper,
the GMail inbox, and my Blackberry. I’m running GMail/Mobile for BB
so I can input directly into the Gmail input box from my 8800 BB.

-steve

Thanks.

Thanks for reading!