Could do with some help setting up my GTD

[SmokingKipper 0]

Hi all

To give you a it of background, I am a content developer for a support site. I create articles and do a bit of design work for the site.

I have read the GTD book.

I began my GTD system last night, but I am having some issues fitting things in.

I have the usual !!Today and !Next. Everything actionable goes in !Next, and in the mornings I bring a few of the tasks into !!Today, and work from there. I have a !Tickler with the subject a date, that allow me to sort via time to action.

That is all well and good, but I am having some trouble deciding how to go about managing my projects.

The way I am working at the moment is I am going to create a few websites from scratch, and remark on my experiences doing so, techniques picked up etc. as I go.

What would you suggest as a good way of organising this?

Throughout the day I generally screen capture something that interests me (Such an interesting use of a gradient or colour combination - or maybe a stand out tutorial for a certain technique). Should I include all this information in a separate workbook dedicated to "Web Design Reference", and have sub tags for "Tutorials", "Blog Posts", "Interesting Techniques". Or should I keep to the one notebook and just have a parent tag "Web Design Reference" with child tags for the below categories?

Or should I just have 1 Web Design Reference tag and shove everything in these, and rely on keyword searches to find what I need?

Thanks!

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

i am not really into rhe gtd system. here are some links to people who are (see links at the bottom)

http://www.princeton.edu/~cmayo/evernotelinks.html

my own inclination would be to rely on good naming and tags.

http://www.princeton.edu/~cmayo/evernoteresearch.html

specifically, what i would do if i were clipping this page for reference later (maybe i like the color scheme) would be to title it 120211clipping evernote forum color

i probably wouldn't bother with a tag. later, if i wanted to see all pages i clipped for their color schemes i might do this search: "intitle:color"

why? the less time and effort spent organizing, the more spent doing,the gtd folks, generally prefer more complex systems. whatever you do, consistency helps.

[Joshua Zerkel 7]

@SmokingKipper, the method you described for keeping your reference information with a notebook and tags seems reasonable to me. I probably wouldn't bother with the child tags unless you have more than 20 or 30 items in there. Personally, I prefer using sub-notebooks rather than tags to nest information, but that's just me.

You may also want to check out the other GTD-related post at

[Johnny McClung 10]

@SmokingKipper, I'm working on a completely different setup, but in regards to your question, I agree with Joshua. I would create a notebook called "Web Design Reference" and put all clipped items in there. If it gets to a point where you can not find (or it take a long time) the information you need then you can think about sub-notebooks or tags.

[jbenson2 2,147]

Many of the heavy Evernote users on this forum have avoided using large number of notebooks.

Search and Tags can usually do the job.

[Chris R. Smith 1]

Try this link. I recently used it to get my GTD system up and running, and then did just a little bit of customizing from there. Hope this helps...

www.thesecretweapon.org

[GHall 12]

Try this link. I recently used it to get my GTD system up and running, and then did just a little bit of customizing from there. Hope this helps...

www.thesecretweapon.org

Dito on "The Secret Weapon" as their information is very clear and in video format where they show you how, not tell you.

[Roué 8]

one more vote for thesecretweapong.org

[gieglas 0]

What would you suggest as a good way of organising this?

Think of what are your retrieval requirements. i.e what will you be searching for in the future. And remember you can add as many tags as you like so try to think organizing your content into several dimensions. I agree with @jbenson2, search and tags do the job.

Here's my way of organizing my content http://gieglas.com/382-getting-organized-with-evernote-gtd-methodology/

[Karol_1978 8]

Hi Evernote and GTD lovers,

I'm Karol, the CEO of OneMln, the developer of www.everdo.it And I hope I can help you setting up your GTD system in Evernote.

EverDo.it is an app that allows you to create tasks / events out of notes or part of them. It also allows you to put an event / task to your calendar. The iPad version will be available this month. So to sum it up - EverDo.it adds the GTD experience to Evernote :-)

You're all invited to comment on our GTD app for Evernote lovers

Would really appreciate your feedback!

Regards,

Karol

[Les Dossey 2]

Congratulations SmokingKipper,

You made a great decision by integrating EN and GTD into your life and profession.

Among the 3 things I do day in and day out, Wordpress, Thesis web development and design is 1 of them.

I've been using EN since 2009 and have compiled mounds of great information about web design and development. Since this is an active on-going project in my world I have a single stack dedicated to the cool and interesting web development related things I find while surfing the web, moderating various forums and so on.

I call that stack: !Web Development. I added the ! so that the stack positions at the top

Inside the stack I have a few notebooks.

Skins - various skins that I've created for WP Thesis use

Styling Snippets - things like box shadows, css3 buttons, div's, etc.

Custom PHP - includes things like social share bars, post author boxes, etc.

Opt Ins - includes various custom aweber based opt in forms I've developed

etc.

Then I assign tags based on a few simple criteria

html

php

css

j-query

etc.

While conducting research or having one of those wow that's really cool moments I use several apps to send directly into EN.

EN web clipper mostly for articles or snippets of an article, like a chuck of code

EN web clipper to capture url's of sites I think I will frequent

Clearly which removes site navigation, sidebar, and other annoying distractions so that an article or post can be read without the distraction.

Skitch for almost all screen captures. The mark up, tagging and notation flexibility is da bomb

The key is to keep it minimal. because remember EN scans almost everything within a note and with the ability to use what EN calls operators, I call them identifiers you can narrow your search in all kinds of super cool ways.

If you'd like to follow my writings on the topic of "EGGND" Evernote, GTD, Google Apps, Nozbe and Drop Box here is a link to my post index.

Only the Best,

Les

[deverill 54]

I also would recommend against so much categorizing. You mentioned one possibility of "Tutorials", "Blog Posts", "Interesting Techniques". I always get myself in trouble like that because I end up saving an interesting technique in a tutorial that is in a blog post . The question I always ask myself is "is this level of detail necessary when I'm looking for a way to do X?" It helps me keep it somewhat generic and to let Evernote search do the work.