Brad

Most of my tasks are undated next actions, so I had less of a problem with rewriting lists every day. I only put hard-landscape items on the calendar: the tasks that were time or date dependent.

But I did have a problem with pages where most of the items were crossed off, when one or two items remained undone for several days. I’d want to cross those remaining items off and put them on a fresh page. Some people find seeing a bunch of crossed-off tasks motivating. For me, it was just clutter. I love the ability to check a task and see it disappear.

BTW, The web-based task management tool I use is called Intervals.

To me, paper is just a different medium to implement the same methodology. I could do GTD on clay tablets — it’s just slower. No matter how agile I could possibly get with a paper planner, the speed of copying and pasting support material into note attachments is will always be faster than writing that information onto a page. I conduct my work primarily through a computer, so it’s inherently easier to extract information for transfer to a PIM. At any rate, I don’t believe in adjusting my process to a tool, but adopting a tool that facilitates my process.

As far as the Filofax pages, I always eliminated past calendar pages and To Do pages where all the items were crossed off. It’s was so much a case of leafing through pages being unbearable; it’s just that I was coming from a tool where the issue was nonexistent. It’s like the Seinfeld joke about admiring the Chinese for sticking with chopsticks even though they’ve seen the fork.

@Charlie: I think of mine as a dual system: paper for capturing, electronic for organizing and reviewing. The organizing is actually a hybrid as well, since I use file cabinets and have no plans to digitize my paperwork.

Hmm… I see what you mean, but is this really so? If the system is new, you can’t have practiced skills, so you must be slower than your optimal speed. At least, this is what my experience of practice across many fields tells me.

> “I was increasingly irritated with having to leaf through the pages of my Filofax to find items or make new entries.”

I understand your point, and I don’t have a solution, only a suggestion from the lean mindset: were all those pages actually required at that point in time in your Filofax?

Thanks for your blog.

I predict that we’re going to see a bunch of geeks in the next year abandoning their Day Runners and outing themselves as techies again.

What changed the workflow for me was the iPhone and taking on a different, location-based job. I’ll leave it at that teaser for now, but I’ll write about it before too long.