Comments on: GTD Mastery 100: Step 5

By: Jonathan Woodruff

Jonathan Woodruff — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 03:36:29 +0000

Nice article! Thank you so much for the information!

By: Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Weekend Links: Don't Love Your Work, Gain Weight, and Stop Multi-Tasking...

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:19:46 +0000

[…] GTD Mastery 100: Step 5 | GearFire Chris over at GearFire explains his souped up Gmail configuration which he uses to run his GTD universe. As a strong believer in the “GTD in e-mail” school of productivity thought, I’m dutifully impressed. […]

By: DWarrior

DWarrior — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 20:02:06 +0000

I see, maybe I’ll give the Hold folder a try since my Someday list seems to be steadily growing.

Also, just an FYI regarding the “send email as”, the actual address line that gets sent is “Sent from you@gmail.com on behalf of you@otherplace.com”. Some clients hide the “sent…on behalf of” portion, but some don’t (Hotmail doesn’t hide it). Which kind of seems like a useless feature to me because the whole reason I’d use that feature is to send emails from a professional-sounding address when I don’t want my recipient to see my real address (ex: job applications).

By: Chris Y.

Chris Y. — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:38:42 +0000

Gina says, “for you GTDers, items in the Hold folder might correspond with items in the next few weeks in your tickler file.” She also uses it for Waiting For.

I’ve found it easier to separate the two using hold for support material only. This way I have a quick way to see a “delegated” list using the Waiting For label.

By: DWarrior

DWarrior — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 04:02:47 +0000

I was actually tweaking my Gmail today. I used to use Stars for my Action email, but I realized all that does is decentralize my Next Actions list. I think emails belong more appropriately as project support material, so now I have a slightly modified system. I still use !Read, !Someday, and !Waiting (!Hold seems redundant once you implement !Waiting and Project Support, but I may be wrong as I?m still a GTD newbie).

I recently implemented ?# ? labels to designate Project Support materials, so for example my textbook buyback price quotes are labeled ?# Sell Textbooks?. Labels with no prefixes are just general reference materials. There is a note on my project in Vitalist (the site I use to house my main GTD system) says ?Gmail for more info?

For people who want to implement similar hierarchy of systems, the following symbols get sorted before the rest of the alphabet:
_
!
@
#
There are others, but this gives you the ability to create 5 layers (one being no prefix), which should provide enough functionality for most people. Any more will probably become way too complicated.

Keep in mind, this is all beginning stages, so I can?t speak for its efficacy.