I first heard about Getting Things Done (called GTD by it’s fans) when Mark and Mike kept mentioning it in their podcasts on Manager Tools. I didn’t catch it the first couple of times (I thought they were talking about……

Anyway, I too use X1 and I’m responding to:

“Any and all items get filed as you would expect. If necessary, I write myself an email and file it, as appropriate. I don’t use Outlook Tasks as they aren’t searchable by X1 (this is why I didn’t use Allen’s Outlook plugin).”

You may have missed the fact that there is a new beta of X1 (version 5.5 Beta release 3 build 2650) that does a great job of indexing/searching tasks (and appointments!) It’s also much faster than previous versions.

Read about it and download here: http://forums.x1.com/viewforum.php?f=18

Don’t know if my little technique of carrying a notebook with me at all times, to jot notes, numbers, etc. down, and then retyping them into tasks, notes, to-dos. It provides 3 benefits – it provides a point of reference to review my day’s progress, it let’s me capture things faster as they happen – having a laptop handy isn’t always practical, and 3. it lets me have a backup copy of what’s happened, in case I’m out of touch with my laptop ( when driving, at a coffee bar, etc. )

Finally, I also recommend not to get hung up on the syncing of PC to BlackBerry to whatever. I do it periodically, and use my notebook for numbers if I haven’t synced yet.

Windows has a hierarchical file system, and so did Multics and several computer systems between these two. So, can use the file system hierarchy to store a ‘taxonomic hierarchy’ of ones work. Hierarchies aren’t the only way to organize data, but they are a surprisingly good start for the problem of organization for one person.

My hierarchy starts

Programs — Software
Data
Projects — Stuff I create
Topics — Stuff others created

This is just the top of the hierarchy — currently there are 2048 (nice round number) directories involved and 23,387 files otherwise. And I have about 100,000 files from an old computer I have yet to move over yet.

So, I have this hierarchy started. Of course, each hour of computer usage adds more files and directories in this hierarchy. Well, since I can’t be sure just what I may be doing in a month, how can I be sure that this hierarchy will continue to work? E.g., might I have to do some horrendous housecleaning and reorganization? Likely not! First, on my old computer, this hierarchy worked fine for over 10 years. Second, there’s a lot of versatility in such a hierarchy!

One weakness of a hierarchy is that, given a new piece of data, it may fit as a ‘leaf’ in more than one location of the existing hierarchy. Noticing this, some hierarchical file systems permit one file to be in several different directories in the hierarchy. So, if want to get to a recipe for a Chinese chicken dish, then could go to the directory for Chinese and then to the subdirectory for chicken or go to the directory for chicken and then to its subdirectory for Chinese. I’m new to the XP NTFS but do believe I did see that NTFS does support having one file in more than on directory in just this way, although I have not tried to use it yet and doubt that it is yet heavily used by XP users.

Supposedly one of the goals of Longhorn was to permit more ‘generic’ searching. So, looking for a file with both Chinese and chicken, the search engine could look in files of type PDF, DOC, TXT, TEX, DVI, CPP, HTML, etc. and have the data automatically converted to searchable text before the search engine gets the data. Good luck, Redmond!

While waiting on Redmond, for a single user a simpler approach is to do as much as possible with TXT files where searching is MUCH easier!

For e-mail, with the IETF SMTP and POP3 standards, the data is sent just as lines of text. If what is in the e-mail is just text or fairly simple HTML and not, say, PDF in base 64 and encrypted with PGP, then e-mail can be really easy to search.

On the Web, links are a really big deal, and the Web is not nearly the first writing to notice the importance of links. So, have to expect that links should be important in the work of an individual. E.g., for 10 years, my way to having a link to an e-mail message was just to have the date line of the message (from the SMTP header, visible in Outlook if click around long enough) and have a little search program look for that. I can fire off the search program with one keystroke. So far I don’t see how to get the simple SMTP lines of text extracted out of Outlook but fully intend to do so, use some other e-mail program, or just write my own e-mail software (on my old computer, used some simple e-mail software wrote myself — worked great for 10 years, and after using Outlook for a few months am really eager for something at least as good as my old e-mail software!).

A lot of data is just very difficult to search. E.g., pictures, music, video clips. So, in each directory I have a text file that describes the content of each file that is difficult to search. Then it is easy to search these text files with any simple search tool, e.g., FINDSTR.

It may be that the ‘dream’ system is just a big bunch of files with several appropriate software-established ‘views’. In a sense, and one level closer to the hardware than users usually go, a hierarchical file system is just this — a lot of files scattered around on a disk and entered as leaves in a big tree of ‘directories’. But, still more could be done. A special case of this is just to put all the files in a relational database and build everything else on top of the existing solid rich RDBMS functionality.

But, all such ‘dream’ ideas encounter some simple facts: (1) For anyone with skills writing thoughts in text, text is GREAT as a way to represent ‘knowledge’. (2) Humans find hierarchies really natural: E.g., go (a) upstairs, (b) to the master bedroom, (c) to the closet, (d) on the left side, (e) on the top shelf, (f) in the box from Land’s End, and (g) get a new blue and white silk tie. It works GREAT!

For me, for some decades now, hierarchical file systems have been one of my all-time favorite tools. So, there may be some excess enthusiasm here!

It may be that what I have described here is much the same as W. Gates described as “folder filing”. I got the impression that he wanted to sell people something else! Tough sell: Hierarchical file systems are TERRIFIC!

Oh, and I am very guilty of this myself. I actually modified GTD a fair bit when I first came on board. LOts of additional PDA software – outliners, list makers, etc. Now I am pretty much plain vanilla, though still use a PDA. I had the realisation that I was spending too much time working ON my productivity system, rather than IN it. Its a form of procrastination, in some respects.