Merlin,

First, I've just got a Verison 700p at the beginning of June. For me its a great device. The phone, especially, has vastly improved reception over my previous phone. Verizon has the best coverage going for my area, but my apartment has always been poor. With my previous phone, I had a signal in my apartment about 3 percent of the time. With the Treo, it's at least 75 percent of the time. There are plenty of critiques about the 700p that can be found at treocentral.com.

Second, It's absolutely true -- the 15 category limit on palm tasks absolutely sucks. For anyone who has to have a lot more categories than 15, synching with a palmOS PDA is not going to work.

That said, based on my tests so far, I am very optomistic that kGTD / Treo will work for me. Here's what I'm doing to work around the biggest problems I've seen:

#1. Set MissingSync's conduit settings so that iCal overwrites the Tasks on the Treo. This eliminates all the problems with syncing, double entries, etc. I'm perfectly happy to cross off items directly in kGTD. Anyone using index cards has to do the same thing. (By the way, If you do persist and choose to synch in both directions, in the event that a synching problem does occur (resulting in double entires, huge numbers of unfiled actions, or whatever), the simplest fix is to do a one-time Hot Synch overriding the Palm. )

#2. Another problem with syncing to a palm device is that when they are synced to the Palm, action items become divorced from their project. So, for example, in kGTD I might have two projects named 'Smith' and 'Jones.' I'm very likely to have to discuss both with my boss. If I simply add actions 'Discuss with boss', then what I get on the Treo is two identical entries called 'Discuss with boss' and I have no way to tell which is for Smith and which is for Jone. My workaround for this problem is to adopt a protocol to write the action items for all Agenda Items like this: 'Boss discuss Smith.' & 'Boss discuss Jones'. Within kGTD adding the Project name is redundant, but it's necessary to get enough information out to the Treo. (I put 'Boss' first for Agenda items because I want to be able to sort them by person. )

#3. I also set MissingSync's preferences to sync only specific (and not all) categories. And I have exactly 15 categories checked. As other posters have noted, if you have action items in more than 15 categories, the excess will get dumped into the unfiled category, which creates a mess.

#4. I do have more than 15 context categories, it's just that I don't synch all of them. I choose the non-syncing categories to be the ones' I'd least likely need to think about when I'm cruising around with just my palm. So, for example, I do have a category 'Home' and a category 'Home Kitchen.' I synch the category 'Home' , but not 'Home Kitchen'.

#5. I also have a kGTD category 'Unfiled', which is in the MS preferences to sync with the Treo. This gives me a 16th category, which I use as a catchall. So if I have an action Item in the Kitchen context that I absolutely want to synch, I'll change it's category to unfiled. For example, perhaps it's bake an apple pie for Jim's birthday. Then my action item would read 'HomeKitchen Bake pie for Jim's birthday'. And I'd set the category to 'Unfiled'. 'HomeKitchen' gets added at the beginning so this item can be sorted out from other categories that also have to be put in the catch-all, say 'HomeWorkshop' and 'HomeGarage'.

#6. The above is hardly optimal, but it works well enough. Especially since as noted in Item 2, I've already developed the habit of coding my entries according to protocols already.

#7. I should also add that I'm totally new to kGTD, been using it for only 3 weeks, (and have only used the current version) so I am still very much in the experimentation phase. Any suggestions for improvements are definitely welcome.

- Arthur C.