I'm new to GTD. But I've found myself consumed with thoughts of organization in the past few days. I'm about to start a PhD program (in the arts), and I know that organization is crucial. My organization in the past has gotten me by, but I'd like to work out a good filing system that I can stick with for notes and such.

That's why I was excited to see this thread and was happy to heard that I was not alone in my struggles to keep notes organized.

So I agree with everyone that says that you should keep an a-z file for non-academic stuff. I also like the idea of sorting notes on papers and books by the last name of the author (perhaps with a separate file for works in progress), and I too think that an index is crucial. But how to index? That sems to be an important question.

Some people have suggested Biblioscape or Endnote for such an index. I don't have experience with these programs. But I thought today of an indexing system with gmail, and I'd be interested to hear what people think.

How about for every book or article that you want to file away (perhaps done at the end of every day), sending an email to yourself with a "notes" tag (e.g., "+notes") and the last name of the author, the title, and--importantly--keywords that concoct all in the subject. Then in the body, you could put the full citation. In the case of notes that you've typed out (I can't seem to stick to typing out notes only or writing all out longhand, but can anybody? Seriously--does anybody manage to stick to one or the other?), I'd also put the notes into the body of the email. In the case of notes that I've written out, I'd just type out "See paper file". Then you could simply search subjects with the keywords when you want to find notes on certain subjects, and if you want to find particular notes, you can use more specific terms, such as words from the title.

The virtue of this system, so far as I can see, is: 1) easy online access to your files, so portability 2) I'm not crazy about the idea of being tied down to a program that might become defunct at some time or another. An email-based system could outlive gmail (it could work with any email, thoug you'd lose the "+notes" function). Gmail simply provides a good search function. 3) at least for me, I use gmail all the time. So easy access.

The down side seems to be that it takes work. But I'm not sure that it would take that much more work than other filing systems. All of these systems seem to take dedication.

If you use endnote for citations, you'd probably have to enter things both into your email and into endnote (or biblioscape), and so the fewer steps would be a reason to use those programs exclusively. But might this system I propose work similarly well? Stupid idea? Would you all recommend those programs for indexing?

Any thoughts on note-taking?

Dan