Simple GTD® with Apple’s Reminders App
If you aspire to get a little more organised in 2013 you are short of excuses since that does not necessarily involve buying, installing, learning and setting up a productivity black belt application such as OmniFocus. Technically all you really need is pen and paper. For the technical more savvy there is the Reminders stock app on your Mac and iOS devices that gets you what you need to start.
While Reminders is in general a rather simple task or list management application, it offers some features that a number of apps for which you would have to put money down lack:
- Synchronisation across all your Apple devices via iCloud
- Location-based reminders
- Sharing lists with others (like errands with your spouse) via iCloud
- Repeating tasks/reminders
Overall, managing your obligations and commitments in life is more than doable using Reminders.
Setting Reminders up for GTD®
This will take you less than 10 minutes. However, you should have spent a little more time earlier reading David Allen’s book. As said so many times by so many people: Reading the book is not optional if you want to make GTD® really work for you.
You need less than a dozen lists that you can each create with a single click, touch or press of a key (⌘L) in Reminders. The standard GTD® lists you’ll need to get started are:
- Inbox — A place to just dump stuff
- Projects/Desired Outcomes — A list of all your projects (in the GTD® definition: Everything that takes more than 2 physical actions to complete) or ‘Desired Outcomes’
- A Next Action list per context — This is where you capture the next, physical actions you need to complete to get closer to the respective Desired Outcome; The screenshot shows pretty much the standard contexts you can start with
- @Waiting For — I am singling out this specific (context) list since it is crucial for any task you delegated or anything you are waiting for (even that Amazon shipment)
- Someday/Maybe — The list where you keep actions or projects/outcomes you are either not 100% clear about or do not want to commit to yet
- Tickler — Not all GTD® practitioners consistently use this, but it is a helpful list on which you set reminders (using the “On Day” reminder function) for things a bit further out in the future
For many this setup is actually extremely effective. Through it’s iCloud sync it is ubiquitous. Whether you are at your Mac, using your iPhone or iPad or even at your work place Windows machine using iCloud.com in a browser: You can engage in all five workflow steps of Getting Things Done®.
If you exploit this simple setup and experience its limits you are likely ready for a more advanced solution such as OmniFocus. However, first try this and actually ‘hit the limits’ instead of ‘thinking you will hit the limits’ before taking the next step.
A few more recommendation
As many longterm users of GTD® will tell you reviewing is what keeps you and your system current and reliable. Take at least one full hour each week to look at your inboxes, lists, desired outcomes and calendars.
If you are new to GTD® or want to refresh your memory a bit, I can highly recommend listening to the last episodes of Merlin Mann’s and Dan Benjamin’s infamous podcast “Back to Work”. In episodes 95–99 Merlin, next to talking about his new favourite topic “comics”, dives into David Allen’s methodology at great length, with lot of insight and personal experience.
Finally, the Reminders application allows basic searching which in return enables you to filter by tasks which you have “tagged” before. For example if you chose your three Most Important Tasks for the day in a brief Morning Review, just add #mit or #today to them and you can later filter them out of all your actions accordingly.
The above works particular good if you select multiple lists in the Mac version of Reminders. Either with ⌘A to select all lists, or with ⇧-click or ⌘-click for each combination of lists.
Reminders can get you started with GTD®. Simple & now.
