Thursday, August 24, 2006

GTD + GMail = Productivity

I'm something of a productivity nut. The best system I've found so far for organizing my life is GTD. Now someone is providing a Firefox add-in called GTDMail that leverages the power of GMail to create a free, web-based, googlicious GTD organizer. I love Gmail, but it's not currently where most of my mail lives. And I'm not a Firefox convert. Have nothing against Firefox, but for me IE gets the job done and as an IT professional I'm confident I can keep my system secure from whatever latest nasty has been written to take advantage of security holes in that browser. So... I'm not sure if I'm going to really use this tool, but I may give it a shot. I currently use Outlook at work as my "trusted source" for storing all my information. Problems with this model: "my work" can suddenly become "my old job". When I'm home, or travelling, access to my work Outlook is problematic. If I were to keep everything in Gmail it would always be available (well, if I had a computer and internet access, but pretty soon that will be ubiquitous anyway). Problems exist with this model, too. Can we really trust Google to "not be evil" with all my data? Can we trust DHS? Also, most of my input into my system comes from work, much of it as emails which I receive in Outlook at work. What to do? Write a rule that forwards everything to gmail. I'm sure some security policy at work would make that verboten. Forward individual items to gmail? An extra step. Finally, my homebrew system using Outlook email and tasks is working pretty well. But still, I like the idea of gtdmail.

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