Quick GTD with Gmail Tip

Check out this beautiful little URL: fancy!

This brings me to my Next Action list.

Big deal, right? Well let’s rope in some other technology (that I’m already using) to sweeten the pot of gold:

  • I posted the aforementioned URL into del.icio.us (a social bookmark manager that you definitely should be using) so it can be accessed easily by me from anywhere.
  • Since my Firefox installations all have a live bookmark on the bookmark toolbar to the RSS feed of my del.icio.us “daily” tag, I tagged the Gmail Search for Starred messages URL as “daily.” Since I perform a Firefox “Open in Tabs” on my “daily del.icio.us” live bookmark at least once a day, I have an automatic actions review reminder.
  • Since I use Quicksilver to launch applications do all of my work for me, and I have the del.icio.us module installed, I can now type: “cmd+space, a, c, t” and have my action list in seconds.

Wow, I’m easily excited.

6 Responses to “Quick GTD with Gmail Tip”

  1. sean Says:

    I’m pretty new to Firefox. How do you “Open in Tabs” all the links within a del.icio.us tag?

  2. bryan Says:

    Sean,
    First, you need to ‘subscribe’ to the RSS feed of that tag (navigate to the del.icio.us page for your tag and click the orange RSS icon in the bottom of Firefox). It subscribes you to the feed as a bookmark, and you can even put it on the Bookmark Toolbar to have quick access. Once it populates the ‘Live Bookmark’ with your del.icio.us bookmarks, you’ll have the ability on the bookmark context menu (and in the bookmark menu itself) to Open all the bookmarks in tabs.

  3. sean Says:

    Thanks! Works great. How did I ever use IE for so long? Now if I could only get off this damn Windoze box. :)

  4. Heath Weaver Says:

    Maybe I am misunderstanding what you are doing, but if you want a really fast way to get to your starred items wouldn’t it be faster to put a keyword on the firefox bookmark? Then you just type ALT+D and type ‘todo’ (or whatever) then ENTER.

    For example to get to my gmail account I use the bookmark keyword ‘g’ so ALT + D, g gets me to gmail.

    I really love your pdf on gtd with gmail, I found it over the weekend and am using it, really fantastic.

  5. bryan Says:

    Heath,
    There are two things I’m doing here. The first is the habit I have to open all of my daily reads. Adding my action list to these daily sites forces another good habit (which is the review of my action list). The quicksilver trick gets my to my action list outside the context of Firefox. So if I’m typing up a document or managing my photos, I can hit the action list immediately.

  6. Steve Says:

    Hi Bryan,
    Wondering how the gmail changes have effected the method you currently use. Eg. Tasks, etc. Do you have or can you let me know what you are currently doing or changes since you wrote GTD WITH GMAIL in ‘06?

    Thanks

    Steve

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