Well, I just returned from Affiliate Summit West ‘08 in Las Vegas. Vegas is a 10 hour flight from the UK and we had a 5 hour drive to the airport so you could say that it was a long trip so my expectations were high, but is is Vegas after all.

Anyway, had a great time at the conference. Was a pleasure to meet people such as John Chow, Zac Johnson, and Justine Ezarik. I was gone from home for 5 nights and even though I was away, my tasks and work were not.

My current GTD system of choice is centered around OmniFocus from OmniGroup. I use Moleskine’s as my task capture device, and wherever you find me, the Moleskine is not far behind. This works for me as I can collect and hold numerous tasks on my Moleskine, and then enter them into my OmniFocus application when processing, and time permits.

I own a 17″ MacBook pro, and even though I love it. I really wanted something more portable to take to Vegas with me and the Asus EeePC had really taken my eye. All I need is web, email, and Skype to call back home at 1p a minute rather than the exorbitant rate of 55p per minute with my cell phone. The EeePC ticked all the right boxes so I bought one a couple of weeks ago and it is a fantastic little computer. It isn’t a Mac, so cannot run OmniFocus and I did not want to start looking at Linux based GTD apps, if there are any!

My mobile phone of choice is the Apple iPhone, and as the SDK for the iPhone apps is not yet out, I needed a way to leave my current system at home and still be able to record my tasks.

Sure, I could collect everything into my Moleskine’s but I do like to feel more organised than that and I was looking for some way to integrate with my OmniFocus whilst away.

I had seen an option in the OmniFocus Preferences about emailing actions to OmniFocus so I thought I would read up on the feature and how it can be used.

This is implemented as a Mailbox Rule within Mail.app on the Mac as you can see from looking at the rule below.

I set the OmniFocus application to Create the Mail Rule, archive processed messages and also to process messages where the subject line starts with “–”. Cool, now let’s see a real world example of how I use this every day in my GTD system.

I configured and tested this before I set off to Vegas on my trip. So, from my iPhone I can now email myself, on one of the registered email addresses and all I have to do is start the subject line with “–”, which is something I never see at the start of a subject line and therefore unique. Now, I always carry my Moleskine, but when sat in a conference, or anywhere else where you have WiFi or EDGE connectivity I can quickly send myself this email and it adds it straight to my inbox on OmniFocus as soon as I get back to the UK and power on my Mac.

In the week I was in Vegas I sent myself around 100 tasks. I find this method a great way as I did not have to update OmniFocus with my notes from my Moleskine like I normally do. They were copied directly into the inbox waiting to be processed into the correct context and have dates assigned to them.

Now, I just use this system in its simplest form in that I just get the task added to OmniFocus. As well as this, you have the ability to add various tags to the email to automatically move it to the correct context and set various other items such as the due date etc..

These are as follows:

The first line, and any other lines starting with — (double-hyphens), become new actions. Other lines become notes for the preceding action.

To specify a project, use > (greater-than sign) or :: (double-colons), followed by a project name or abbreviation.

To specify a context, use @ (at sign), followed by a context name or abbreviation.

To enter start or due dates, use # (number sign), followed by some date expression.

To enter a time estimate, use $ (dollar sign—time is money) followed by some duration expression (like 5m, 1h, and so on);

You can also add a note on the same line as an action title by separating them with // (double-slashes). Anything after the double-slashes becomes a note, but double-slashes in a URL like http://omnigroup.com don’t count.

Some examples are as follows:

– Call My Boss

– Paint the Garage Door > Household @ DIY

– Action 3 > Project 1 @ Context 1 // These are notes

– Action 4 #friday // Due Friday, because I only entered one date

– Action 5 #monday #friday // Starts Monday; due Friday.

– Action 6 #monday # // Starts Monday; no due date.

– Action 7 :: Project 3 // Written on my iPhone; colons work in place of greater-than sign.

–Action8>p2@c2#2d$5m//no spaces needed, nor full names

Myself, I would rather just get the task collected and process it later on my Mac using OmniFocus and my full size keyboard.

This is a great way to use the iPhone as part of your GTD solution. That is until OmniGroup release a native iPhone version of OmniFocus after the Apple iPhone SDK release.

Hope you have enjoyed this post and as always, I would love to hear your comments.

Hope you are all having a productive day!

One of the major improvements in my life since starting following the Getting Things Done Methodology, is the reduction of Open Loops. As we all know, Open Loops are those tasks floating around in the ether, that we should be doing, but we do not actively record.

An Open Loop is anything pulling at your attention that doesn’t belong where it is, the way it is.

Anybody who has read the Getting Things Done methodology will understand what I am talking about and if you haven’t, you don’t know what you are missing to get this area of your life under control.

You could say I am a busy guy. I am actively involved with 5 of my own companies. I have four children, a wife, and an active social life. Now, I have a LOT to get done! I also had a lot of Open Loops before I made the decision to get my life my organized. If you are anything like me. Numerous times in the day, you would remember that you had some task to do. This could be related to your business, home life, or other. It could be any random task that either just comes to you, or something you are doing jogs your memory and bang, there it is. You are at that moment presented with a task, and one that needs collecting.

Now, I have a pretty good memory and I used to try to remember these tasks in my head. Big mistake, and the start of an Open Loop. Then, the next day, or whenever, something would again jog my memory and I would be left with the same task entering my mind that needs completing. Some of these were important tasks that really did need to be collected and I, as I am sure you all, sometimes forgot things that were important.

Removing these Open Loops from your life is one major step towards getting organized and it is no surprise that a lot of the first chapter of the Getting Things Done book covers the importance of closing these Open Loops.

Now, one of the most important aspects of removing these Open Loops is to record the action/task as soon as it comes into your mind, without exception. It is the procrastination of not writing these down that make them into Open Loops. I much prefer Closed Loops!, Tasks and Actions that are recorded into a system that I trust. This is all part of the very simple GTD methodology.

The very simple way that I have embraced this, is to very simply write things down as they come to me. Now, you need some tools to do this, a pen and paper.

I had read about the Moleskine Notebooks on various sites such as 43Folders.com and thought they looked pretty cool so I went ahead and bought one from eBay. Well, I wrote a post about my thoughts on Moleskines, and must admit that I love them to bits. There is something about the quality that makes you take pride in writing, and collecting your notes into them.

I own the small pocket Moleskine notebook, as well as the large Moleskine notebook. Both of these are hardback books. Now these books are fantastic for taking into business meetings and I must admit the larger one has had a lot of use. The small notebook normally goes away on trips with me, both personal and pleasure. The problem I find with these Moleskine’s is that I cannot easily take them everywhere with me.

So, there were still times when an action came to me that needed recording and left me scrambling for a pen and paper to write it down. I have played with PagePacker, which is a pretty Cool Mac Application that allows you to print mini books full of Calendars, Lists, and also the GTD Flowchart. Luckily, I noticed that Moleskine did a range of products called “Cahier”. The Moleskine Cahier is small pocket sized book with a softback. It is slim enough, with only 64 pages, to fit into the back pocket of your trousers.

The new Moleskine Cahier [kaa yáy] Notebook Series are each offered as a set of 3 notebooks, featuring a flexible soft cover, acid-free paper and visible side stitching on the spine. The last 16 sheets of each notebook are detachable, by means of a micro-perforated edge, perfect for exchanging loose notes. Inside the back page there is a spacious pocket for notes or clippings.

Now, since buying a pack of three of these for a very reasonable £5 from eBay, I have tried to carry one with me everywhere to enable me to record my thoughts as and when they spring into my head, to remove all Open Loops from my life.

So, now I have the paper sorted out, next is the pen!

I have quite a few nice pens. Some I have bought myself and some bought for me as presents. I really like and own a few Mont Blanc pens, but the idea of carrying a £200 pen around with me doesn’t fill me with warm feelings, especially when I tell you about my Space Pen experiences!

After reading various blog posts about Fisher Space Pens, I decided to go ahead and buy one. It cost me around £20 for the Space Pen Bullet. This is a little pen that is the normal size when the cap is attached in writing mode and half size when the cap is closed. Quite cool. These use pressurized cartridges so they can write upside down, underwater, and in space, hence the name. Now I believe in GTD, but not enough to take my pen with me swimming or the next time I go on a Lunar Mission!, so that did not really bother me but one great side effect of this technology is the fact that due to the fact they are pressurized, it makes them so the ink does not leak out all over your trousers. I used to keep the Space Pen in the little coin pocket of my left jeans pocket. many a time I would reach into my pocket and pull out my shiny space pen, stand on my head and collect my thoughts into my nice Moleskine Cahier notebook!

Only problem was, after losing three pens, and having one washed in the washing machine (I blame my wife for not checking the pockets:) it became a rather expensive obsession!

So, loathed to spend another £20 on these pens, I was forced to look for an alternative, to strive to find the perfect solution for recording my thoughts, and keeping those pesky Open Loops, well and truly closed!

Do you know what?, I think I may have found the answer!

I am a golfer. I play, or try to play as much as I can. I have played since the ages of 8 and I am pretty good at it. What does Golf have to do with GTD I hear you ask?, well, I remember using some Golf Pencils when I was younger that used to clip to the golf scorecard. So, after 2 mins searching on good old eBay, I managed to find some using the search term of “golf pencil”.

I bought 100 of these pencils for around £3.50, that is around $7. So, they work out at 7 cents per pencil. In other words, I can buy 571 of these pencils for the price of one Fisher Space Pen. These pencils come with a clip on them

Because the Moleskine Cahier has only 64 pages, the clip will either clip inside the front cover of the notebook or right up to the middle of the notebook to save your page. I clip the pencil to the notebook as you can see in the image below. This then goes in my back pocket and has been there for the past two weeks.

I have travelled over a thousand miles in the car with this in my pocket and the pencil holds up just fine. You can sit on it, twist it, throw it, bend it, shake it!, and at the end of the day if you do break or lose it, you are not going to lose sleep over 7 cents!

This little bit of simple help has changed the way that I am able to record my tasks, as the enter my head. I am no longer scrambling around trying to find a pencil, as I always have one to hand, in my back pocket, nicely attached to my pocket notebook.

Closing my Open Loops has been the largest change that implementing GTD has brought to me. If I could say one thing to you about the Getting Things Done methodology, it would be to carry a notebook, write down the thoughts as they enter your head. It is simple, yet revolutionary. You have t get into the habit of carrying the notebook with you everywhere, pretty much as you have to wear shoes, you also have to carry your notebook,. I feel naked without mine now and it has just become a part of my daily life to carry it.

Phew, ranting over. Hope you have enhoyed this post, if you have, I would love to have a comment and please add anything you can and agree or totally disagree with my thoughts.

Keep having that productive day!

Time for a bit of reader participation.

I have nearly 800 subscribed readers to this blog so I know you are out there!I am interested in hearing from you all what system you use to implement GTD?

How many of you use apps like Nozbe, iGTD, NextAction, and OmniFocus? How many of you own and use a Moleskine?

Comment on this post and let me know you are there!Thanks, in anticipation of course..