December 10, 2005 - The Start

So, I've started to re-read David Allen's "Getting Things Done" , which is an outstanding book, but needs you to take the first action before you see any results. I wasn't successful at implementing anything the first time around, so what do I figure will make the difference this time?

Well, to start with, I want to do it. I often purchase a book to read when I have downtime at home, and "alonetime" - that precious commodity when I'm on my one, such as having lunch when I'm on the road, when I'm on a plane, or in a hotel room. I purchased GTD about 2 years ago, and have never followed through with the implementation. Wanting to do it is the key here.

The other part of this is that I've been using a Palm for about 9 months now, and love it. I had a Palm III back in the late 1990s. It met its final demize in about 2000, when it had a fatal collision in the overhead bin on a flight back to Vancouver. Having a new Palm Tungsten E is a dream - it is still simple, no connectivity to distract me (although the darn games available now do the trick...), and it just works.

I have been using Agendus for Palm OS and Agendus for Windows - Palm Desktop Edition (they also have an Outlook integrated edition) for the past several months, and have been happy with them. In fact, I cannot recommend the program highly enough, although there are the typical development errors that are getting patched over time. I'm in a bit of a quandry, though, as my corporate environment runs Outlook over Citrix, which is neat, but difficult to integrate to. (I've resolved to getting all my contacts into the Palm Desktop, then firing them to Citrix via a vCard file.) So I need to use two programs - one for tasks and scheduling, and one for e-mail. So, I will also be trying to integrate GTD with Agendus - something not many people seem to have tried.

Now that the GTD bug has bitten again, and harder this time, I have begun to set up my GTD system. I came into my office today (Saturday) and processed my 3 in baskets. I converted one of them to a "pending bucket", and logged anything that I wasn't going to do right then. I purged the purgeable. I did the less-than-two-minute tasks. I haven't categorized the tasks, or set up my Outlook mail folders, or anything else yet - it will all come in time. I hope to have the task list framework completed by tomorrow, in time to do my first "Weekly Review". I'm getting ahead of where I am in the book, but really does it matter - as long as you're being proactive about it, I don't think so.

Wish me luck! I'll update my progress every couple of days!