New PDA

After several years of failing to maintain a time management system with digital tools, I decided to return to the medium in which I was last successful. The paper and pen approach with, you guessed it, a Moleskine. Some background is required. I was indoctrinated with the Franklin (before Covey) system in my first job during the mid-1990's. This method used a physical daytimer as it was before most digital implementations (gasp). I was quite diligent in maintaining the daily prioritized task list and writing notes in the daytimer. When I got my first Palm PDA I quickly bought the Franklin software to go along with it. I found that I was using the desktop software much more than the PDA itself (it was such a pain to write things out on the Palm rather than quickly type them with the desktop app). I continued to faithfully use the desktop software until I changed jobs and my employer's IT policy prohibited non-sactioned software installations. What followed was a few years of lax time management and makeshift "to do" lists on post-it notes. The idea of returning to the hardcopy system seemed like a step backward.

Most recently, I've been trying to adopt David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) system on my laptop. There are several free implementations of the GTD system for both Macs and Windows. I was working with an implementation of GTD on DevonThink, but it was a bit clumsy. I tried iGTD, which is an excellent application, but it just never took off for me. Despite my past success with using the computer-based software for time management, I just wasn't clicking with any of the recent applications.

While reveling in the newfound glory of Moleskine notebooks, I stumbled across an implementation of GTD with Moleskines. Partly inspired by Merlin Mann's Hipster PDA, there are a handful of these GTD Moleskine Hacks, as they're called, but I quickly decided to give the hyalineskies GTD System a try. At $10 for the Moleskine Pocket Ruled Notebook, it was worth the investment even if it ultimately fails.

So, here's a picture of my new PDA. I'll keep you posted on how it works out. For you GTD users out there, the tabs are Inbox/Next Actions, Projects, and Lists (including Someday/Maybe).