GTD: Keeping Things Accessible

Following on from my admission that I am a crack GTD addict, here is my second instalment of my getting-started-with-GTD experience.

I started purging my brain of all the clutter that I didn’t need to deal with at the time. My tasks, thoughts, events, information and the like always ended up in one of these locations:

Yes, I know I am a bit of a Google fan boy. I don’t care. They work. They are online. I don’t need to sync anything. Works for me :)

Tasks went straight into RTM, events I needed to be reminded of went straight into Calendar, interesting blog posts for further reading get starred in Reader, good links get saved and tagged in Delicious and any odd bits of knowledge and info went in to Notebook. This meant I was hitting them a lot – especially RTM.

So, I soon found that me needing to keep grabbing the mouse and clicking my shortcut on the Firefox toolbar soon became a bit of a chore (even though this appears like shortcut). Being a keyboard-ninja, I always have my hands on the keys. So I fired up Launchy and began setting up some shortcuts in the Weby plugin (which is included) and began setting up items for:

  • RTM
  • Google Calendar
  • Google Reader
  • Google Reader Search
  • Delicious
  • Delicious Search
  • Google Notebook

On top of this, I also installed the Google Notebook Firefox Plugin so I can add stuff to Notebook directly from the context menu.

Following this, I now have all of my major GTD tools at my fingertips, all accessible within 5 keystrokes (Win+Esc for Launchy, up to three keystrokes for a shortcut). This has REALLY helped me in becoming more productive with the tools, since it really is no longer a “hassle” getting to the items.

Think about what applications/services you use a lot to GTD and stay organised. How accessible are they to you? Does their level of accessibility inhibit you using them efficiently?

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