The Secret Weapon: A No BS Approach to Productivity
March 8 by Mike Vardy 14 Shares | Productivity, Uncategorized

I’ve always known the folks behind Brain Toniq were into getting things done, but I had no idea that they were going to build a secret weapon to create a “no BS” approach to do so. But they have, and it’s a pretty compelling system.
Here’s what The Secret Weapon is, as described by its creators:
The Secret Weapon is a free organizational methodology for both professional and personal aspects of life that re-organizes emails, ideas, and every to-do big and small into one system that stays synchronized across a person’s computers as well as their smart phones.
The power behind The Secret Weapon comes from the way it takes the best aspects of David Allen’s popular GTD methodology and bringing them together with what is perhaps the most popular productivity application in the world, Evernote.
It’s really quite brilliant because Evernote is one of the best tools for capturing ideas, notes and the like because of its ubiquity. It is available on virtually every platofrm, and syncs across all of them. That means you can be literally anywhere and Evernote can capture everything you throw at it, locking it down for you to access when you want – whether that is now, soon, or later on.
The Secret Weapon is a system that allows you to better sort out your tasks wherever you want within Evernote (largely based on notebook orientation and tags) and lets you focus your attention on the long-term aspects of your work and life in a much more visible way. And since all aspects of The Secret Weapon are free, the barrier to entry is much lower than other systems that profess to accomplish the same mandate.
Video walkthroughs are available on The Secret Weapon website that outline the approach and the front-end work you’ll need to do within Evernote to make The Secret Weapon take shape. And once you’ve fully implemented it, all of the ideas and tasks in your life await you in a better (and safer) organized manner — and are put into the proper contexts as well. You control The Secret Weapon, which allows you choose when and where you will focus on your ideas and tasks. With The Secret Weapon, the idea is that you’ll achieve that ever-elusive Inbox Zero as a result – and you’ll wind up reaching your long-term ambitions at a far more or efficient and effective way.
Well, I’m going to put that theory to the test.
I’ll be putting The Secret Weapon approach through the paces over the next 30 days, so watch for a follow-up on this in our “30 Days With” series at Lifehack sometime next month. Hopefully after reading that, you’ll know if this is a weapon worth having in your arsenal.
Photo credit: The Secret Weapon











And the real professionals, who require notifications and deadlines, will stick to NirvanaHQ.
What are these professionals doing when they need to work offline for any reason like tough luck?
TSW is still GTD. You need to use a calendar. Unfortunately there was only a one way integretion of calendared items from EN to GCal, not the other way around. IIRC it was Tusk Tools Calendar, but I’m not sure.
I agree with BionAlexHoward that saved searches will be your best friend when using TSW.
My gripe with TSW and other electronic systems as of now is that above mentioned tough luck hit me hard a few weeks back. The cellular coverage was bad. The nearest tower must have been off, because the connection was much worse than the other days I worked there. In addition the admins scheduled network maintenance for the local WiFi and LAN for the whole day. My smartphone doubling as a MiFi tried to reestablish connections the whole day eating through its battery. Even though I had an additional external battery my phone died at 5pm, 4 hours before my work was done for that day. :( I saw it coming early enough so there was no problem switching to a paper-based solution.
That experience opened my eyes. At the moment I’m hunting for a paper-based solution – but as it seems I don’t find one. I really miss the benefits of a electronic system.
You can integrate G-cal and exchange calendars with Evernote on IQTELL’s dedicated GTD Interface…it works both ways. Furthermore, on the app you receive notifications to every app you work with on IQTELL.
Hope this solves the issue :)
I love evernote for productivity but rob is correct that notifications and deadlines are needed for this to really catch on. A few tips for TSW: 1) saved searches are your friend, make one for inbox/waiting/contexts. 2) he suggests more of a reliance on priority (1-now, etc) but that the core of GTD organization is the idea of context, not priority…so try not to fall into the trap of ignoring “where” for “when”
All in all, TSW got me rolling but i had to tweak it as mentioned above.
when is the follow up to this? I’m curious to see your thoughts
Also curious to see the follow-up on this.
Also curious – have been waiting to see your follow-up on this.
Will there be a follow up??
still waiting on a following up to this
still waiting on a following up to this article