My System: Outlook/Add-In/Toodledo/Evernote
thehawk9;83313 said:
I'm thinking of buying the Iphone 4, but I currently use MS Outlook with the GTD addin. I've read quite a few of the posts here on this subject as well as elsewhere. It seems like Exchange is the favoured way to go. I'm on Exchange, but find when I access it through my web browser, it has limited functionality e.g. no Categories with the Tasks. Can anyone speak to this re their experience with Iphone? What about Calendar, Notes, Contacts? Thanks for any possible help.
After experimenting with Outlook/iPhone combinations for over a year, the past few months I've settled on a solution that has been reliable and quite effective for me. I've never had an issue with losing tasks or creating duplicates, and I've even successfully restored all my tasks a few times as a clean-up process.
I'm in an Outlook environment using Exchange. For tasks, I use the Chromatic Dragon app to sync tasks with the Toodledo service. I have both the ToDo app and the Toodledo app on my iPhone set up to sync with Toodledo. Both have worked fine, so which you choose comes down to personal preference. (I use the Toodledo one.)
I use Outlook with the GTD add-in at work (but the way I use it, I sacrifice much of the functionality, so it's not necessary for this setup to be effective). I still use the "action" drop down to assign contexts to items created from within Outlook, and I like the "Send and Waiting For" options, etc. However, when I'm on my phone or on the Toodledo website, I add the task to a folder (which syncs to an Outlook category), but it doesn't sync back to the GTD add-in Action field. For that reason, I've modified my views to sort tasks by category, and not by the "Action" field.
As for calendar, contacts, and email, the iPhone works with Exchange directly, and does so quite well.
I keep all my notes in Evernote. They have multiple mobile platforms, mac and windows desktop clients, a web site, and an excellent Chrome browser extension. All of these combined allow you create, search for, and edit notes from anywhere.
With this setup, all my notes, contacts, calendar items, and lists are synced without needing to go through iTunes.
-Matt