Have been meaning to post about Nirvana on here for a while.
Like a lot of people, I have spent a fair amount of time in the past flitting back and forth between systems under the rouse that if I just found the perfect app, I'd be on easy Street with my GTD implementation. After spending more time on this than I'd care to admit, I finally realised that it was turning into something of a hobby, and I'd be better off picking something, accepting it's imperfections, and trying to make it the ideal second brain for me.
So, current setup looks like:
Braintoss/spiral notepads (pocket/A5/A4 size) for capturing. I use the Nirvana inbox infrequently and only consistently clear it out during the weekly review.
Outlook for email (3 different accounts on one screen!), Calendar and contacts (synced to Google contacts as I have an Android mobile).
Nirvana for lists (next actions, someday, projects, waiting for). The waiting for feature in Nirvana is a bit frustrating but it is sometimes handy to use the same contact tag for agendas and waiting for items so that I can see "at a glance" all of my pending work with an individual at the same time.
The other part of Nirvana which has been great has been the reference section. I basically use this for anything that fits neatly into a list without needing a lot of additional multimedia options. This was inspired by a connect webinar I saw of DA sharing his system. Some examples include: TV Shows to watch, gift ideas, weekly review checklist, restaurants in my city, wines I've liked and want to remember, passwords/info for my company accounts, government registration IDs etc.
All other reference info that doesn't fit neatly into Nirvana goes into Dropbox or Evernote (depending on the file type/content). All searchable by tag but filed in A-Z folders.
Crappy old plastic in-tray on the desk, 2-drawer filing cabinet, labeller, calculator etc means I've got everything I need to get things done at arms length.
What I've learned from using Nirvana is that as long as you have a suite of tools, be they low or high tech, which make it seamless to get things into your system with the minimal setup time/clicks/flicking around trying to find stuff, you can make it work. I could probably make a system of flat lists work in Google Keep, Todoist or Apple Notes just as well as long as I keep on top of the weekly review, but Nirvana has enough cool features (focus view, email to Nirvana, reference lists) and covers the GTD 5 step method elegantly enough that I can't see myself moving away from it any time soon.
If anyone's got any questions I'd be happy to answer 'em.