My Macintosh is a G5 tower next to my home desk, and I do not have a laptop at this time. My workplace loans me a Windows XP laptop, but I "like" it so much that I leave it in a docking station on my work desk, where it connects to a larger LCD. So, for portability: fail fail. From the existence of the base question and the replies above, I have determined that I will stay with my current system until Apple makes a portable Macintosh that can be a "take everywhere" notebook. None of their current laptops is small enough for that, and the iPhone and iPod touch are not really Macintoshes (Apple has said so repeatedly by breaking the jailbreaking). If I could have something like OmniFocus on a hand-held, I'd jump for it.

So what is my current system? I have been using an Apple Newton Messagepad 2100 since around the time they started showing up on eBay. The HWR worked fine for me after only a week of training it. It is small enough to take to every meeting and keep in my man-purse at all times. I have the add-on external keyboard, but rarely use it (or even bring it along) unless I'm on a trip without a laptop, yet need to do more than "taking notes" text creation. The NewtonWorks application is a fine little-sibling to ClarisWorks, with word processing and a spreadsheet that basically do what needs to be done. Hey, tangent-man, get back to the GTD question! Oh, sorry.

I put appointments in the Calendar (duh!). I email those to anyone else who needs to know (such as my wife and myself on my home- or work-based email addresses). I have a default alarm for 70 minutes before, so I can hit snooze for 60 minutes of "finish what i'm doing and/or prep for the meeting" (or 30 minutes of each) and still have time to walk to the meeting room when the reminder goes off. For rare meetings (like dental appointments) I set the alarm for the previous evening.

I take notes in the Notepad for almost everything. I have a folder in the Notepad for a each class of at-work or at-home activity. In each of those I have a Checklist type of note (bookmarked with the JumpN extension) of to-do items. The checklist basically an Outline with checkboxes, so I can refine a task with sub-tasks. When lots of top-level items are checked off, I clone the note, delete the checked items, and move the JumpN bookmark to the new one. Anything that is needed elsewhere gets emailed to myself.

There are no subfolders for detailed organization of notes. When I need to look something up, I tap on Find and enter enough words to hopefully match a short list of relevant notes. It works fast enough that it would actually be a waste of time to have a hierarchical directory structure. Rather than having to make up filenames, I just have to put a context establishment sentence or phrase on every note. For repeating meetings, copy from the previous note. No worse than a hipster (or creating subdirectory names) on that count.

I tried the Calls application for tracking phone calls, but it really shows it's V1.0 (or V0.8) state. I don't make or receive many calls, so I stopped using it. I also rarely use the to-do feature of the calendar because lacks the subtask breakdown.

Would I recommend this to new users? Not really, because by the time you get into it like I have, something better will be out there in the market. Then again, I've told myself that every year in this millenium and it hasn't happened yet. Still, it still works for me well enough that nothing else anyone has shown for another system is worth the effort to change.