My Productivity System Decision

So I’ve officially dumped all of the various productivity systems, to do list managers, etc out there and will be sticking with my own home grown, Excel base to do system. I tried out many diferent systems and several were very useful systems. All other systems started at a disadvantage though – they were built by someone else. I can take pride in my self-built system and can also constantly be tweaking the system which I enjoy. If my system doesn’t do something right, freezes up, or any other fun computer stuff, I have nobody to blame for myself (well, I may cuss Bill Gates on the occasional Excel/Windows problem ).

My investigation into the various tools has led to some improvements to my to do list manager (ToDo). I had been developing my ToDo for several years and it worked well for what it was. During my research I read a lot about David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) time management system. I have incorporated some GTD principles into ToDo and also into my daily work and task management.

OneNote versus Excel for Data Management

I’ve been using my OneNote based GTD system for a few days now. It does keep track of everything and the ability to redefine the note flags for next action, to do, etc is nice. Having everything somewhat organized and all in one application is the biggest selling point with me since before I hade everything in multiple Excel spreadsheets (money related, ToDo list, movie rating list, pets log, work out log, etc) and a Word document (my Journal) along with Outlook Calendar and Contacts.

However, I still miss some of the features of my old Excel based ToDo list. Like sorting. The way my ToDo workbook worked was I had separate worksheets for several categories like Home, Computer, Personal, etc. I entered tasks in the appropriate sheet along with a due date (if appropriate) and priority from 1 – 10. I had (still have) macros that would then sort all of the separate sheets and pick the 10 next due tasks from all of the separate category worksheets and put them on one worksheet and the 10 highest priority items from all of the categories and put them on another worksheet. Doing this would show me problems with my prioritization I’d picked and due dates I had selected. For example if I sorted and “do something nice for wife” came out above “change the oil in race car” it’s obvious I need to adjust my priorities. Same thing with the task due dates.

With OneNote I can do sort of the same thing with the note flags summary. Maybe it’s no more than getting more comfortable with OneNote since I was not using it at all before starting this GTD push about two weeks ago. I really like the idea of almost everything being in one application and I’ve been trying to find something like this for years. If OneNote could insert Exel spreadsheets (like Power Point) it would truly be my killer app and I’d move to it 100%. I’m still using my Word journal and my Excel financial spreadsheet which I’ve been working on much longer and have many more features than my Excel ToDo spreadsheet.

I think getting OneNote set up the way I really want it may take years. I’d like to have everything in it. My journal is an easy transition to OneNote. I can see having man, many things documented in OneNote.

Some examples:

• old addresses
• birthday list
• passwords (?)
• account numbers

Like I said it could take years to get all of that data into OneNote and I’m still not 100% sure I’ll be sticking with OneNote but I do plan on giving it a shot

Update on My Productivity System Decision

I spent a lot of time looking at various software tools to implement a Getting Things Done type productivity system. I don’t like the inflexibility of all-in-one or GTD specific packages. I also struggled with figuring out to use the Excel ToDo spreadsheet I developed several years ago. In the end I’ve decided to go with a M$ OneNote based system. I saw several posts here and here which talk about ways to Implement GTD in OneNote. I’ve developed my own sytsem which I think will work good for work related tasks but I’m not 100% sure it will work well for all of my home and non-work tasks and projects. My system is a hybrid between several GTD implemntations I’ve seen and read about and “Ready, Set, Do” which is a Mac based set of scripts that I read about here.

I’m using OneNote 2003. From what I understand OneNote 2007 has many improvements which make implementing a GTD system much better. I may consider getting OneNote 2007 at some point after I’m fully convinced that OneNote is working for me.

Google Calendar

I’ve been messing with Google Calendars some. I am wondering if it is possible to have “layers” of calendars. i.e. could I load up say Diamondbacks schedule, NHRA schedule, my work schedule, TV Guide, kids sports schedules, etc and be able to select which “layer” I want to view. I know I can have different calendars. Maybe this would work. Looking deeper at Google Calendars…