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How to implement GTD for university students

Hello all,

This weekend I took out seven HUGE trash bags out of my office after cleaning everything hidden in every corner. I had boxes that had never been unpacked from four moves ago that are GONE! What a liberating feeling!

I don't have my tickler file set up, but have my someday/maybe and my "next actions" set up. The entire office is set up like a GTD Central Command. I had been using the Hipster last semester before life took a weird turn.

Anyways.... the reason for my question is this...

I'm a doctoral student, and as such I have weekly assignments for classes, papers for the semester, and some independent projects that I"m working on like grant proposals, etc.

I keep wondering what the best way of keeping track of everything, and I can't come up with anything concrete, so I thought I'd consult with the experts on this board.

Thanks!

tychoish's picture

For basic GTD organization, I...

For basic GTD organization, I use a homegrown system that I've mocked up in my Primary Voodoopad document. It's mostly just me, and my copy and paste buttons, but I like that it's in the same document that I for nearly everything, so there's no stress, I don't loose things. The downside is that I have to transport everything myself, and I don't get nifty dynamic lists. Perhaps someone else will develop some sort of VP solution that I could partake of, but I like my system pretty much.

For articles and documents, I've thought about using some sort of database/citation, and I've tried a number that are pretty nice, but that don't seem to quite make it work. I keep folders based on both courses I've had and on general interests/themes that I tend to find articles for. This means that if I'm looking for an article I can generally find it based on whatever context it came to me in. If this were paper, it would be a crappy system, but as it is, between Spotlight and Quicksilver, I can find anything with great speed, and the filing is irrelevant. The key thing is to put enough useful information in the spotlight comments for articles from sources like Jstor where the text is actually an image. I've also started putting some things thatd I use more frequently, or that are more project specific, in my voodoopad, but again, spotlight and quicksilver can get at those files, so it doesn't matter as much. Some sort of automatic or dynamic citation management would be awesome, but you can't get everything.

Cheers,
sam

 
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