This is something I am, reluctantly, coming round to. I am reasonably comfortable with my work system. (Outlook for just about everything. Capture device A4 loose leaf pad) It?s the home stuff that?s been causing problems. I have a Palm T5 which I synch into Outlook and occasionally to the Mac at home. The problem is ? I never check the Palm at home. Everything has gone back into ?Psychic RAM?. This has been annoying me for sometime. Yesterday, I re-read Emory?s whitepaper. This sentence leapt out at me ?I have come to the conclusion that anyone that can use a PDA for GTD isn?t busy enough.? Time to try a lo-fi approach.

My wife isn?t happy at my using lots of 5x3 cards ?just for notes? so they were out. What we do use, for all sorts of things ? shopping lists, notes to each other and so on ? are A6 scraps of paper. These are mostly A4 printouts from our respective work, which have only been printed on one side. Tear into four and you have a nice size of note pad.

The other problem I?ve found with my home set-up is that the context lists are too full. Even if I did look at them at home, there was too much to do, so I did none of it! So, yesterday afternoon in a quiet moment at work, I did a mini-review and wrote up some ad-hoc context lists. These contained things which are fairly urgent or important and which I had a fighting chance of completing most of last evening. So far it?s working. I managed to get more done last night than for some time and feel rather better about the stuff which didn?t get done. Today I have bought a ?Snopake? A6 plastic folder to hold these notes (59p). I will see how it goes. I?ll still keep the ?master? lists on the Palm/Outlook combination, but I?ll be working off the paper.

Steve