I actually happen to be an academic myself. Ready-Set-Do! was an attempt for me to appropriate GTD into my academic workflow. I do think somebody needs to write a book on GTD in academia in large part because most academics are used to working with one-step actionables like "Write a rough draft", "Read this book", "Finish this article", etc. The difficulty with most of the 'stuff' in academia has to do with the fact that you have to read 30 pages to really answer that first question "What is it?" or that many of the elements are what David Allen calls "Look into?" projects.

It sounds to me like the one thing that is working the best for you is the Newton-centricness of your workflow. You pretty much have only one bucket and space in which you work, which greatly simplifies things for you. And given my own experience with the Newton I can definitely relate to the simplicity that provides. I've even thought of going all-newton for my calendar because of the constant pain of trying to keep up with syncing and new operating systems.

I think the key, at least what I've been discovering, is that many projects in academia begin as look into projects. And the goal is to create some first action steps that eventually give the project some 'teeth' or 'hooks' that sort of pull the mind into the project because its contours are becoming more concrete. Not every actionable item needs a full-blown purpose, standards, vision, etc.; and even if the action may consist of 2-3 actions and is 'technically' a project in the GTD sense, I still treat these as one-step actionables and keep them on my action list, and when I complete the first step I just redefine the next action, and so on. So there is a kind of balancing-act between 'high' vs. 'low' degrees of specificity on more-than-one-step actionables (i.e. projects). I think it's better to keep low-degree of specificity projects (i.e. 2-3 steps to complete) with one-step actionables, and to keep high-degree of specificity projects with Projects where one defines all elements -- Purpose, Standards, Vision, Mission-Critical, Key Milestones, Deliverables. Some GTDers may get a bit too legalistic about the grain-sized boundaries by keeping everything on the other side of either one-step or more-than-one-step lists. Eventually one just has to acquire the intuition for which projects need high degrees of specificity and which do not. To give a sample of an academic project, I've attached a text file generated from one of the projects I completed using Ready-Set-Do! last February. It's a really good example of how a "Look into?" project began as "find a topic" and then acquired greater specificity over time into "present the paper at this regional conference." Some of the actions-steps are now missing because as I complete actions towards the goal - e.g. read this chapter in so-and-so, fix this section of the paper, rework section 4, etc. -- I delete them along the way. So the only ones left are the few I had to complete towards the end (e.g. cull paper down to 15 pages, present the paper, etc.)

Thanks for giving the scripts a trial run and good luck with the Newton. It makes perfect sense to me that it would be your tool of choice.