As I close in on a year of using Getting Things Done, I feel the need to impart some unsolicited wisdom. GTD does not require one to use any sort of electronic gewgaw, however, I decided to put the tools I had available to work. In my case, these tools are Outlook and a Treo. There is a free PDF available at davidco.com that describes how David Allen uses his Palm organizer. My use of the Treo mimics this. However, most of my organizational time is spent in Outlook, so I have refined my methods and setup over time.
As a rule, I generally try not to customize things too much. I just try to learn how to live with it the way it is. This makes it much easier to deal with the inevitable upgrade or new computer. Outlook, in its default configuration, needs a few tweaks to make it more effective though. In addition to these minor configuration changes, I highly, highly recommend learning a few shortcut keys for Outlook. The three I use most are CTRL + D to delete, ALT + S to save & close or send (email) and CTRL + K to open a new task from anywhere in Outlook. Print the list of shortcut keys from Outlook’s help file and keep them close at hand for a while. Learning a few of these will save a lot of time by keeping your fingers off the mouse.
Since these posts tend to be somewhat long, I’ll post them separately as I write them:
Good Luck!