The Tools We Use

OF user said:
I think you should all move to Russel and Hazel binders. :D Sorry John, couldn't resist.
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For fun I just looked at some Russell and Hazel binders. GTD coach Julie Ireland uses one of their binders for her next actions and projects lists. I used a binder for many years. Not Russell and Hazel, but Time/Design. Switched to digital when the Palm Pilot showed up. I switched from Palm Desktop to Lotus Notes in 1998, when I went to work for Actioneer. If I had better handwriting I would consider paper and a binder again.
 
John Forrister said:
Eric Mack, who developed eProductivity, has been working on productivity solutions with Microsoft tools for the last several years. He's going to be helping us with the transition. We're planning to record a couple of discussions about the hows and whys, and our eventual configuration. Stay tuned . . . you'll be hearing more.
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I was wondering if there was still any movement on this.

I'm very interested in hearing more about how others who have been doing GTD for a long time use Office 365 since that's where I have to work within also.

I remember Eric Mack talking about using OneNote, Planner, Teams, and Outlook together, and that was very intriguing.
 
Ryan Robinson said:
I was wondering if there was still any movement on this.

I'm very interested in hearing more about how others who have been doing GTD for a long time use Office 365 since that's where I have to work within also.

I remember Eric Mack talking about using OneNote, Planner, Teams, and Outlook together, and that was very intriguing.
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Hi Ryan,

Yes, it's still an active project. It's just taking longer than we anticipated. The company has been using Notes for about 24 years. In addition to email, we have many Notes applications (earlier versions of Notes called them databases) with thousands of documents about all aspects of the business.

My email, calendar, tasks, and reference are fully migrated into Microsoft 365. We've been fine-tuning the migration software and hope to migrate David and others this coming week.

Eric and I still plan to record one or more podcasts.
 
John Forrister said:
Hi Ryan,

Yes, it's still an active project. It's just taking longer than we anticipated. The company has been using Notes for about 24 years. In addition to email, we have many Notes applications (earlier versions of Notes called them databases) with thousands of documents about all aspects of the business.

My email, calendar, tasks, and reference are fully migrated into Microsoft 365. We've been fine-tuning the migration software and hope to migrate David and others this coming week.

Eric and I still plan to record one or more podcasts.
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Keep us in the loop, John! I'm interested as well :)

And looking forward to another podcast with Eric!

Thank you for all you do.
 
kelstarrising said:
I posted an article in Coaches' Connection that give a quick summary of some of the tools the DAC coaches use. I specifically asked them to share about:

  • List Manager
  • Calendar
  • Email
  • Digital Reference
  • Mobile Devices

I didn't list mine in the article, but they are:

List Manager:
Lotus Notes w/eProductivity for work, Evernote for personal

Calendar:
Lotus Notes for work, iCal for personal

Email:
Lotus Notes for work, iCloud for personal

Digital Reference:
Lotus Notes, DropBox, Documents for work and Evernote and Documents for personal

Mobile Devices:
Nothing for work, iPhone and iPad for personal

Read here--> https://secure.davidco.com/connect/coaches_connection.php

What are yours?
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List Manager: Nirvana it has all my projects. Slice of paper for planning hard stuff.
Calendar: Google Calendar is the engine, but I use apple calendar synced on Mac and iPhone.
Email: Google gmail and Apple Mail
Digital Reference: Google drive and Evernote for personnal stuff
Mobile Devices: iPhone XR

Analog
Rhodia goalbook it contains notes about projects and a Daily log for seeing what happened day by day and notes.
 
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John Forrister said:
Keep joking! I need the laughs on a project of this size.

The Microsoft suite of tools is will replace our current use of Notes, Zoom, Dropbox, and Sametime (Notes chat). We think we'll have a more unified environment.

Despite some recent development efforts, Notes seems out of date. People often say things like, "You're still on that?!" Or, "Is that still around?"

In the early days, Notes stood out as a program that allowed for quick development and deployment of data stores that could easily have workflow and collaboration built into them. Nowadays that's common.

We'll save money by not maintaining the servers we currently have. Back in the mid 90s a company needed its own server(s). Today I could set up G Suite or Office 365 for a group of our size in under an hour and not have to think about a server. I will miss that part a bit, because I like playing at the hardware and operating system level.

Eric Mack, who developed eProductivity, has been working on productivity solutions with Microsoft tools for the last several years. He's going to be helping us with the transition. We're planning to record a couple of discussions about the hows and whys, and our eventual configuration. Stay tuned . . . you'll be hearing more.
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This is really interesting. I have, over the past 2 years, slowly wandered into the O365 space; now using their tools almost exclusively. The one exception being Todoist for my list manager (oddly my employer's firewall prevents using MS to do even though we are an 0365 shop).
My most recent migration was from Evernote into OneNote for my digital reference. I've been blown away by OneNote's balance of flexibility and structure to create extremely functional reference files.
 
Cpu_Modern said:
These were really neat. Very GTDesque in some ways. IdeaBank, I love that name for a general reference.


You can train that. It's not an unshakable destiny. Take a calligraphy class and you'll love writing with a pen just for the fun of it!
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Good suggestion! If I go back to paper I would go to the effort of training myself to write well enough to like my own writing.

Yes, Time/Design was very GTD-esque. David Allen knew the US distributor, and if I recall he had some influence over the design of the forms. For example, the projects page could fold out to the left of the binder, so you could view -- from left to right -- projects, actions, and calendar on three pages all at once. Good quality paper too, so it felt good to write on it.
 
I’m late to the game, but here’s my list (I’m enjoying all of the responses):

List Manager:
Evernote
Nirvana HQ

Calendar:
iCal for personal

Email:
Outlook for work, Yahoo for personal

Digital Reference:
Evernote
Dropbox (mostly backup)

Mobile Devices:
iPhone and iPad
 
kelstarrising said:
I posted an article in Coaches' Connection that give a quick summary of some of the tools the DAC coaches use. I specifically asked them to share about:

  • List Manager
  • Calendar
  • Email
  • Digital Reference
  • Mobile Devices

I didn't list mine in the article, but they are:

List Manager:
Lotus Notes w/eProductivity for work, Evernote for personal

Calendar:
Lotus Notes for work, iCal for personal

Email:
Lotus Notes for work, iCloud for personal

Digital Reference:
Lotus Notes, DropBox, Documents for work and Evernote and Documents for personal

Mobile Devices:
Nothing for work, iPhone and iPad for personal

Read here--> https://secure.davidco.com/connect/coaches_connection.php

What are yours?
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Mine

Business and personal mixed.

List manager: Omnifocus on Mac (and previously Facilethings, Nirvana HQ, Zendone, ToDoist)
Calendar: Outlook O365 as client, connected to Exchange for work, gmail for personal
Email: Mail app from MacOs
Digital Reference: Dropbox for work, Googledrive for personal, and Obsidian as "second brain"
Mobile Devices: iPad, iPhone, iWatch
 
John Forrister said:
More progress — we've migrated all but one of our team, and we'll migrate her by early next week. I learned enough (read that as: made lots of mistakes) on my own migration so that the others have gone smoothly.
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What all does it look like in terms of how you’re using the Microsoft 365 platform?

I’m guessing

Email - Outlook/Exchange?
Database/Journal - OneNote
Calendar - Exchange?
Tasks - Microsoft To Do

Curious what you have learned in the migration process and what features you’re ignoring or re-framing for GTD use. :)
 
Josh Mitchell said:
What all does it look like in terms of how you’re using the Microsoft 365 platform?

I’m guessing

Email - Outlook/Exchange?
Database/Journal - OneNote
Calendar - Exchange?
Tasks - Microsoft To Do

Curious what you have learned in the migration process and what features you’re ignoring or re-framing for GTD use. :)
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Now all users are migrated.

Mostly yes to your guesses. Two of our users were on OmniFocus for tasks, and the still are.

In the next couple of days I will be migrating the Notes reference and journal databases (applications) to OneNote notebooks.
Database > notebook
Category > section
Document > page
Response document > subpage

It's mostly automated, although I need to do some fairly simple coding in Notes to prepare the databases.

Stay tuned for more news about features we are ignoring or reframing.
 
John Forrister said:
Now all users are migrated.

Mostly yes to your guesses. Two of our users were on OmniFocus for tasks, and the still are.

In the next couple of days I will be migrating the Notes reference and journal databases (applications) to OneNote notebooks.
Database > notebook
Category > section
Document > page
Response document > subpage

It's mostly automated, although I need to do some fairly simple coding in Notes to prepare the databases.

Stay tuned for more news about features we are ignoring or reframing.
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John, Tasks in Tasks or Todo?
 
I started using technology to help me with GTD back in the Palm Treo days. I've used many different apps over the years, too many to list. More recently and for quite a number of years I had an all Apple platform at work and home, so I was using Omnifocus (Mac, iPhone, iPad). Nice system.

However my work changed platforms to Windows a few years ago and I eventually replaced my home MacBook with a Surface Laptop, so I decided to switch to Notebooks App which has versions for Mac, Windows and iOS and it handles notes as well as tasks so it was an all-in-one solution. It's a great app for notes and files but lacks a little in terms of task management, and the developer seems to have stopped working on the Windows version the past few years, so I recently pulled the plug on that and switched over to Microsoft Todo.

I have to say that I am finding Microsoft Todo really good - great user interface and although it seems clean and simple at first glance, it is actually quite deep and powerful. I am really pleased with it both on the desktop and iOS.
 
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