My list: 1 - physical paper 2 - "Task" part of Outlook on PocketPC (I turn off the InBox) 3 - Outlook on my desktop 4 - Attachment Save 4 - Notepad (shortcut in my tray closeby)

1. (physical paper) In principle, the cheapest tool is a small notebook, which does not expire after a trial period. I used one of those little moleskine books for a while, to keep my various lists. My minimal lists include: @next, @defer, @someday, still don't have a good concept for projects, but these are a good basic "state snapshot".

You "can't beat paper" in many cases. No batteries, you can write when the plane takes off/lands, the small (68-page?) Moleskine books are almost forgettably unobtrusive and flexible in your pocket.

1. (tasklist) Of course the real problem is that you can't sort or modify physical paper very well. I tried to compensate by using pencil, numbering the list items, periodicaly re-writing the lists. The one obvious advantage of computerized tools is analyticity, the ability to mince/sort, clone, etc your various lists.

I am a big fan of "using what you have". So for the moment, I "try" to use a pocketPC's task list (sync'd to Outlook), with about 120 items. This is not going to work much longer I fear though, cause I use a priority sort (with a self-imposed requirement that no more than 25 items get the "!" priority). As a result, I rarely look below # 25 (I actually DO try to review the whole thing once/week, in the GTD manner, but don't always do this effectively).

So, yes, you don't really find many people doing more than a superficial scratching of the surface of the standard electronic tools, and yet they continue searching for more gadgets that could have been easily done with Outlook, Word, Excel. But I am that way too, and I don't plan to break down and learn VBA (so far) to manage lists.

1. (Outlook) I must (by necessity) use Outlook, and I feel that it is really far more powerful than most people can cope with. My biggest technique is agressive Inbox management. Only thing is I get ~100 msgs/day (work alone), and I am away a lot from my desk. I habitually drag the Inbox contents to a special folder "000" several times a day. Later, I go through "000", which is like a "@next", and use a few GTD-like folders (@defer, @someday), and a whole LOT of personal folders (.pst), probably one dozen, each having trees of up to 100 or so subfolders. This is my essential reference system. I try to keep "000" to < 50 messages, although I am to 262 at this moment. This "000" thing is real nice, since you use it for the clutter and your real Inbox is only for the newest messages.

2. (attachment save) To cope with the huge attachments and the ~1Gb limit (it's actually 2Gb, but I panic at >750Mb), I use a free tool called "Attachment Save", which can strip all attachments out of your messages and place them in folders on your hard drive. Duplicates are easy to spot and delete (filenames are postpended with a "-#"), saving some space.

3. To me one of the life-saving tools is just plain old Notepad. I keep one file (mine is "ppt.txt", dont ask why I chose that name) in the tray, sync'd to my PocketPC. It is a sort of short-term cache. Notepad boots nearly instantly (I kind of hate to waste the energy and time to boot Word unless I am writing a technical paper or something worth the wear-and-tear). I divide my document into two sections. The first is free-form, to take down numbers, paste serial codes, whatever. The second is broken into a self-defined XML-ish alphabetic listing. I am not sure why I did this, but it is useful as a repository of lots of simple things I need on hand to lookup or cut and paste.

I have a couple of non-free things I use (ignoring the fact that Office and PDAs are not exactly free), but I have rambled on too much already.