Have you been through different 'Trusted Systems' iterations ?
Not that many, I had spent a lot of time in previous jobs being trained in Franklin Covey systems.
I combined Covey with some stuff from Sidetracked Home Executives and used a paper planner for years. Initially a DayTimer planner then one of my own design. As long as I was working that seemed to work well.
I moved to a Palm based system in 1996 and I still miss some of the wonderful scheduling stuff for repeating tasks that no one has duplicated. I used the original Palm Pilot and also had a Treo.
I know I'd heard a bit about GTD off and on for a while but didn't get serious until 2008. I'd been reading a lot of articles/blog posts about GTD and finally I got the book Getting Things Done on my kindle back in June 2008. I was motivated because the massive numbers of things I wanted to do or finish on the farm was getting overwhelming. I'd been using text files of potential projects and management of those was not easy. I was also lacking the "next action" mindset that it was going to take to really get them done.
I joined GTD Connect at about the same time and really started to understand what I was missing. First post on the Connect Forum was 5 June 2008.
My first GTD implementation was on paper. That lasted maybe a week or less. Was just too much hassle to edit, update and use.
Second was in LifeBalance because I liked the idea of keeping a balance between my various roles. Plus they had a Palm version which was critical at that time. I first implemented it just after I'd finished the book.
I got the book Ready for Anything on kindle in July 2008 and really liked it as well.
Got Making it all Work January 2009
My LifeBalance implementation fell apart sometime early in March 2009. At that point I again went to paper while I reviewed possible choices. Palm was being killed and I looked very seriously at the iPhone but ATT service in our area was so poor that I could not switch. However I decided that being Mac based I'd go ahead and go with Omnifocus. I was syncing Omnifocus with Apple Calendar & ToDo's and then syncing that with my Palm via Missing Sync. Kludgey but it did work. It was very hard to update on the Palm though so I did all my update and review on the Mac and only used the Palm for doing. Missing Sync was increasingly causing me problems, buggy, crashes and generally making me spend a huge amount of time making sure I was properly backed up.
Late 2009 I started looking at a replacement for my Palm phone. Reviewed iPhone again with same results, poor ATT service made it impossible. I also considered android phones but the SW for GTD was lacking and in particular since I loved Omnifocus I didn't want to change that system at all. Finally decided that I could switch most everything over to an iPod Touch and so I did that in January 2010. I still used the standard Mac calendar and e-mail apps. Other than a major glitch when I made the mistake of upgrading to iOS 4.0 and had to jailbreak my iPod back down a level to get stuff working again worked very well. I did have to carry 2 devices, iPod touch and my Sprint dumb flip phone but it all worked.
I finally got an iPhone 4S in October 2011 when iPhone’s finally came out on Sprint. I consolidated all my iPod apps onto my phone and got down to a single device to carry which was great.
I upgraded to an iPhone 5s in December 2013 and also upgraded the iOS devices to Omnifocus 2.
For quite a while I still ran rev 1 OF and 2 in parallel on my main desktop Mac. The Mac version of 2 was a downgrade as far as I’m concerned and I was faster at editing and updating my projects on the older version. I finally made the switch over to completely in OF2 in late 2016.
I won some coaching via the GTD Connect weekly review challenges in February 2016. I used that in 2 parts to make a bunch of changes to my GTD system. I worked with Meg Edwards and she really helped me streamline several processes and start a project to clean up my whole electronic filing system.
Spent about 6 months working on a major reconfiguration of all my electronic files and devices. I got most of the current stuff reorganized but still had a lot of backlog. Every time I get more done on that project the maintenance becomes easier and I’m finding stuff faster with less friction. I started with a backlog of around 35,000 files. In 6 months I managed to clean up and sort through about 22,000 of them. The remaining backlog is taking forever to really sort.
I need to keep track of stuff to feel like I am making progress, especially since farm projects can take decades or even longer to complete so I tend to keep a lot of data about how I am doing. Omnifocus makes that easy. It’s also powerful enough that as my needs change I can still adapt it to work my system and that means I don’t have to waste time learning a totally new tool.
In January 2017 I looked at getting more coaching because my backlog clearing projects had stalled but the cost was beyond what I could budget for that project. Instead I spent more time in the GTD Connect archives and tried to pull out coaching from previous forum postings and other David Co. Resources.
Late 2017 I got an iPhone 8.
I spent most of 2018 getting things running smoothly with a lot more automation of routine tasks and filing. I also moved to a more paperless system for reference while still avoiding any cloud services.
In late 2018 I began doing a major review. Lots of things changed in my life. We needed to reduce the sheep flock considerably. Since that had been a focus of my entire life for over 20 years it's very hard to scale back and give up some of the dreams/plans that I had originally thought I could do.
In 2018 I restructured Omnifocus into folders for current active projects, recurring project that happened weekly, ones that happen monthly and then a folder for projects that happen or start in each quarter. My contexts expanded to be more granular and I kept all someday/maybe and project support material in DEVONThink.
In 2019 I added a MacBook Air laptop as an additional development machine. I kept all my real data on my main 2013 iMac.
In 2021 I upgraded to an iPhone 13 Pro 512GB.
I've tried and used several different structures. For most of the time I had my system in a combination of Omnifocus and DEVONThink. Omnifocus projects were organized by Area of Focus and I used DEVONThink for project support and also my someday/maybe projects.
That worked ok but many of my projects cover multiple AOF's so I changed to a structure in Omnifocus with folders for current active projects, recurring projects that happened weekly, ones that happen monthly and then 4 folders for projects that happen or start in each quarter. My contexts expanded to be more granular. I still kept all someday/maybe and project support material in DEVONThink.