Chris Wright has written a 2 parts articles on describing his GTD setup in Yahoo’s calendar. I thought his article is pretty good, as there are not much GTD users who have implementations on online services. In the first part, he mentions couple of important aspects in the system including calendar, tickler file, notepad, and addresses book. In the second part, he talks about the actual step by step setup on Yahoo! Calendar. I think tickler file system is probably harder to manage online, but I really like his idea on it:
… I’m an advocate of moving things away from paper-based systems, and the tickler file is one area of GTD that looked like it might be a hassle to maintain and check every single day. What happens if you want to add a tickler for something that could only be actioned upon at a specific location? Would you maintain a separate tickler file, one for home and one for work? If you were on a paper-based system then you’d definitely need a tickler file at home as you cannot check a work filing system on weekends. It seemed like quite an inconvenience, so I integrated the tickler into my Yahoo! calendar by adding tickler entries as all day events and prefixing the title of the entry with ‘Tickler: ‘. If I wanted to create a tickler entry to remind me to look into investigating destinations for a holiday, I would simply add an all day event in my calendar entitled ‘Tickler: Think about holiday destinations’. Easy…
Hi Leon, thanks for linking the articles. You might be surprised how easy it is to integrate your tickler with your normal calendar, regardless of whether you use Yahoo or not.
I usually pay my bills as soon as I open them, so in that aspect I wouldn’t use a tickler file to mail myself in the future. Beyond that I don’t deal with a lot of paper, and many of the tickler items I create could be actioned at work or home. That’s where the issue of supporting multiple tickler systems come in, and why I think it’s easy to just store them with your calendar.
I suspect if you do get a lot of paper thrown your way then making your tickler in digital form would be a hassle. One thing that I’m curious about with David Allen’s book though – if he’s on the road a lot, how does he update and check his tickler file every day?
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