A little of everything professional. This site contains the largest online collection of electronic signature laws and research, my views on Time Management & GTD life hacks for improving productivity, and my After Thoughts on bad decisions and business improvements. Personal thoughts and casual comments are pushed to my SEO project, The World's Greatest Guy.
GTD with Google's New Calendar
See my Productivity & GTD page for other great ideas like a free Blackberry GTD solution!
Earlier today Lifehack posted a link to a list of 15 GTD applications. This motivated me to write about something that I have been putting off for a while.
1/1/8 Update - Google Mobile now has a Blackberry sync tool for your mobile Calendar!
As a huge fan of Gmail, I have been waiting for CL2 for what seems like years. While I have been using Yahoo Calendar (very lightly) I have mostly held off because I have not found the features I want.
Something else I have been looking into is hosting my own GTD web-app, but now that CL2 is here why not use it for everything? I may not be an expert but consolidation is a pretty important component of Getting Things Done.
So here is how I implement GTD into CL2 and end up with one web-based tool that handles most all of my needs.
- Create a series of New Calendars for each of my Task Projects (Work Tasks, Personal Tasks)
- Create a series of matching calendars (Work Events, Personal Events)
- Create one Calendar for completed tasks (Daily Journal)
- Create individual Tasks associated with each Project (unless aboslutely necessary I avoid placing times on Tasks. Time sensitive items are created as Events)
Once I have completed a task I move it to the completed calendar named Daily Journal. I named it Journal because I wanted a place to put all of my completed daily activites, even ones that I had not yet created.
One of the nicer benefits is that when you are in the Week/4Day view then all Tasks appear across the top while Events appear in the time area.
I can use Google's agenda view to see all tasks and the colors make it easy to see each item's status. If it is completed it has the red Daily Journal color.
My biggest issue with this trying to fit GTD into CL2 is that I do not have the advanced sort functions that other GTD software has built into them. The sort features I miss are in the Agenda view, which is the closest I can get to a To Do List. CL2 is sorted by date and for GTD I would like to sort by subject/location/status and so on like many of the dedicated GTD programs have included.
Date oriented GTD - Personally I like the commitment and organization of GTD by date at least on a weekly basis. I have also thought of using certain tasks in CL2 as a project. Say "work inside house" is the task's title. Then inside of the details box it lists what needs done. When I finish that task I would then move it to the daily journel calendar. I know this strays even further from the traditional GTD path but I really find that for most of "my tasks" I have a ball park idea of when they need done. Whether on a week or day basis. More on this in my comments.
Okay here is a fresh new thought (5/2/2006) for to-do lists in CL2. Matiaspelenur.com has a script that uses Greasemonkey in Mozilla Firefox to hack a list into CL2. The one draw back is the list is local to Firefox so it will not be accessible from another computer.
For those of you interested in sales and marketing have you considered using CL2 for marketing your business?
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Comments
Interesting application
You have come up with an interesting use of CL2. It looks pretty logical. I don't understand why 2 calendars for each (Work and Personal). Why not combine the Events and Tasks onto one calendar? Also, what type of 'advanced sort functions' are you looking for.
Thanks for the comment.
I separated Personal from work for several reasons.
1) I can share each Google calendar with a different group of people. (Work doesn't need to know about my shopping list)
2) In my personal CL2 (not the screenshot examples) I have several consulting roles that require their own GTD and I don't want them entwined with my office work
3) As the calendars fill up I can easily manage personal or work tasks by unchecking the particular calendars
The sort features I miss are in the Agenda view, which is the closest I can get to a To Do List. CL2 is sorted by date and for GTD I would like to sort by subject/location/status and so on like many of the dedicated GTD programs have included.
Thanks for your comment Michael and best of luck on your new site Black Belt Productivity!
Daily Journal - great idea
The daily journal calendar is a great idea. I was trying to think of a way to "clear tasks" off of my calendar and this is perfect. Moving them to the daily journal clears my calendar and gives me a better idea of what needs to get done during the week, but also keeps a backup of prior tasks.
UnDated NAs
Great post - I like the screenshots. Showed me that I can create more than one calendar. Doh, it's so obvious. I'm so stunned ;) Very nicely done. The only suggestion I would make would be to be careful with tying yourself to too many dated NAs. That's not the point of GTD after all. However, there is some work out there on using GMail itself with GTD - google "gtd whitepaper gmail" and you'll get some links that discuss that very topic.
Keep up the posting :)
love it! One more suggestion
I did the same thing! I like parts of what you did better though.
A suggestion too. My wife and I share a calendar called 'Bills&Income' that oultines when our paychecks come into our bank, and when our large bills go out. This helps to remind us of when our big budget items need attention... Not a huge suggestion, but it's nice to keep an eye on.
one more suggestion
maybe overkill, but you could definately use the calendaring system for keeping track of items to purchase... maybe by category of home/household/personal. It could get crazy huh! :-)
Crazy Crazy CL2
:) I actually have about 10.... wait I just checked 9 and counting. But that's what I love about CL2 I can HIDE calendars that I do not regularly use. Go to "Manage Calendars" and then hide the ones that are cluttering up the space.
I do like the idea about CL2 for bills/expenses (have one for sharing with my CEO and one for the wife already). And nice 90 second FF take over from Matt.
And good points from GTD Wanna Be about using Gmail for GTD tasks.
Missing one piece
One thing I'm not getting here, is how you would handle undated tasks, that you will get to as needed? Since every entry in the calendar must have a date, do you just pick any date for these?
Integration
A couple of things... First it is not a complete GTD system as undated task handling is difficult and I would recommend using GTD w/ Gmail. However, I find (most GTD'r will disagree but this is my opinion) that the majority of tasks are at 'least week specific' if not by the day also.
Sure there are things that I don't know when I will get to (like cores around the house) but I have a wife to remind of those! I personally like the commitment and organization of knowing what needs done when. CL2 is VERY EASY at moving events around so if something doesn't get done it is moved forward. I REALLY like being able to switch completed tasks to a Journal event so I can always look back and see what happened on a certain day.
Isaac
Integration - Ah Ha
Interesting way to look at things. It reminds me a bit of when I used to use Act! for contact management. It forced you to put a date on every task, so you would always be reminded of it at some point. I think the only thing you have to be careful of is to distinguish between real deadlines and rough target dates on the tasks. Of course you could probably highlight true deadlines using another Calendar color. Now if they could bring gmail labels into Gcal, we'd have even more interesting options:)
Cheers,
Greg
More info
Oh, and one other variation you could do on this is similar to what some people have done with resorting to text files to manage their tasks and putting their own tags within the text of the task for labels. So if you had a task related to starting a business, for example, you could include the text tag P:New Business with the "P:" denoting a project. Then when you want to find anything related to that project, just use the calendar search function to search on that text string. Not as elegant as gmail's labels but an effective alternative.
CL2 search.... mmm
I like that idea of "P:" for searching for projects like labels. How about T: for a tag of everything the task relates to... I love tags/labels. Really wish Google had allowed labels in CL2 like gmail.
I could see the benefit of specific colored calendar for hard deadlines. But then a hard deadline would possibly fit into my "work calendar" rather than the "work task". I think it all comes down to what each person fits into their style.
I have also thought of using certain tasks in CL2 as a project. Say "work inside house" is the task's title. Then inside of the details box it lists what needs done. I know this strays even further from the traditional GTD path but I really find that for most of "my tasks" I have a ball park idea of when they need done. Whether on a week or day basis.
CL2 and more
Yes, you could use lots of variations on the text tagging, but I agree, it would be far easier if google just carried over the tagging function from gmail. Also, I don't think there is anything wrong with what you suggested on using the details field to put some smaller tasks in. Especially if they can be knocked off quickly, it makes more sense doing that than creating lots of individual events. However, if they tend to be longer tasks, I would keep those separate.
Synch G-Calendar to my Palm Pilot
It all looks great but I am not going to use it until I can synch it to the calendar in my Treo... Any thoughts on when this might happen? I feel sure it will.
I looked everywhere....
but when I wrote this I could not find an all in one import/export to anything (palm/treo/etc). Which kind of seems silly really since
a) the whole point it to have you calendars sync'd and
b)google already has xml built-in (and I thought xml/ical was a universal info exchange?)
I agree that very soon this will happen. Perhaps you can find a calendar app that imports ical/xml and then will sync to Treo. Please let me know if you do.
quick add tasks
Great Idea about having the different calenders for each of the contexts but my only problem is that quick adding a task. It only wants to add them to my main calendar and I have not been able to add to any of the additional calendars. Isaac were you able to find a way to do this? Also helpful is this firefox extension allowing you to quick add from other web pages using ctl+; -- firefox extension
using 30boxes as a GTD tools
hello,
i am new to this GTD thing (and not from reading the book), and i was trying to find a way to use this method.
but from all i read so far, i think 30boxes service would be the best one;
http://30boxes.com/
it has a calender which support tagging of all events. so u can use this tags to symbol Context Projects and such. and it also has a Todo list, that enables you to create dateless items, which also support the same tagging system, and can be placed on the calander 2.
i am still trying to see if it is the best option, but i think it is. will b gr8 to hear what u think.
Task vs. Events
I am trying to organize a similar implementation of GTD. A quick question: what is the point of having separate calendars for "tasks" and "events?" I mean, gCalendar already separates timed events from tasks.
Also, for those unsure about what to do about untimed tasks: just dump them on the page anywhere (I do this on the monthly view). When you do your weekly review, you can reshuffle the tasks as you see fit. The point is that they are always there on the page, and moving with you week from week.
Since gCalendar lets you create multiple calendars, you can have separate grids for various projects and contexts. So far I have: university, home, and publications. Will add more soon (may be longTerm and leisure).
task related suggestions...
Interesting way to use GCal. I have been useing Outlook tasks & cal as per GTD, some suggestions -
To use the task like functionality,
1] Use all day events without reminder
2] Show yourself as free for duration
3] schedule it on last day of the month
4] reshedule at monthend and shift all unfinished tasks to next monthend
5]For Projects, create 1 task and use the description to split individual activities. Update next pending task in the subject line prefixed with the project name like "Projectname: next task"
thanks
Great comments! appreciate the feedback!
Great article. The labeling
Great article.
The labeling you guys talk about is definitely possible in Google Calendar, thanks to Google's search engine. Just put whatever tags you want into the description section of each calendar entry. I use intuitive tags enclosed in exclamation points. Ex. !Short! for short duration tasks that can be completed in <5 minutes. Then I just search for that with the search bar.
Your Continued use of Goggle Calendar for GTD
I have recently decided to go with the GTD method for getting organized. I was intrigued by your use of Google Calendar to implement the tracking process. I am curious ... are you still using Google Calendar for this purpose? I am about ready to implement the "processing" phase and plan to use your methodology.
Thanks!
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