I’ve always liked the idea of the GTD system, but help me if I’ve ever actually take the time to go through the book and setup the system for myself. It turns out that I’ve been basically using the GSD instead. It’s a simplified, paper and pen-based system, and it works pretty well for me, at least for my personal life.

I still have a lot of places for my stuff, because I have a lot of contexts to keep up with:

• Notebook: personal to-do’s, other long-term lists (records to buy, long-term life plans, etc), general thought capture. I also use it for work-related “priority” lists, keeping me on track on what I’m supposed to be doing.
• Google Calendar: all of my scheduling, with SMS and email alerts too. Shared calendars make it work for stuff like band practice, the studio calendar, and keeping up w/ other’s schedules
• Quicksilver’s Append To File action: I use this for work-related thought capture, and it’s really awesome. I’ll be in the middle of something, and a thought pops into my head. Just hit shift-option-command-F and type my thought, URL, or whatever, and then I go straight back to work. No fumbling around for a pen, or going to a to-do app.

And that’s just the personal stuff. I have a lot of other projects I need to keep up with that require collaboration w/ other people, so a notebook is out:

• Work: our group at work is using a Wiki for keeping track of our current maintenance window tasks. There’s a ton of stuff to do, and we’re basically using it like we would RT, Bugzilla, Remedy, or any other task-management app. Basecamp would actually be a far better solution — it sucks to have to think about Wiki markup when you just want to check off a task as completed — but I don’t want YA application to think about right now.
• Record label: Katey and I are trying out Basecamp for our new record label. It’s pretty much perfect project management, at least for my brain.
• House: I’ve also been trying out Backpack for house-related projects Katey and I are working on. Again, really useful, without Basecamp’s extra features.
• Studio: currently, for to-do lists we have a Google Spreadsheet that no one ever looks at. This sucks, really. It suffers similar problems to using a Wiki: you have to think about the spreadsheet, not the task you’re completing. I would move us to a Basecamp site, but I don’t think I can rely on this group of folks to keep up with it any more than they do w/ the spreadsheet.

Wow. After typing all that out, my life seems like a total clusterfuck!