Simpler Evernote GTD
New, Simpler Evernote GTD System, Part 2: Revised Structure and “Next” Notebook
For a few weeks now, I’ve been using Evernote as the main tool in my Getting Things Done system. Since my last post, I’ve simplified my system even further, so much so that I think I’ve got a final notebook arrangement. We’ll see by part 3.
The new notebook structure:
- Inbox – incoming items
- Next – Today, context lists, agendas
- Projects: Active - only those I’m truly working on right now
- Projects: Someday – maybe’s, too.
- Lists – checklists, ideas, etc.
- Horizons – goals, vision, etc.
- Motivation – personal inspiration
- Public – notes I’m sharing with everybody
- Reference – archived notes
If you compare this with the last arrangement, you can see that I’ve combined a few notebooks. Routines, Lists, and Ideas are all under Lists. The Next notebook holds my agenda for the day, plans for the week/month/year, context lists, and Agendas/Waiting for lists (named for individual people).
So far this is working great. With fewer notebooks to review, my scanning is more thorough and I have much less redundancy. I’m optimistic that this is an arrangement I can live with for a while.
In Part 3, I will give you a closer look at each of my notebooks and I how use them.
Nice notebook setup. Where do you save contact notes, bookmarks, template notes, and so on?
If something is project related, it will go in the project note either in Next or Someday. Everything eventually will go into Reference or thrown out.
As for bookmarks, they’re saved along with my synced Google account via Chrome. This really saved me loads of time when setting up a new computer and it keeps bookmarks where I would be regularly using them.
That being said, if the bookmark is project related, it’ll probably be saved in the project note.
How about you? What’s your notebook structure like?
My notebook setup:
*Inbox (everything goes here first)
00-Todos (all my todos tagged by tickler day/month, context, person, personal/work)
01-Lists (checklists, ideas, and so on)
02-Templates (personal/work related templates)
03-Contacts (personal/work related contacts)
Archive Personal (scanned personal documents)
Archive Work (finished todos, work related infos)
Reference Articles (interesting articles i’ve found in the www)
Reference Bookmarks (sites i want to remember)
Reference Files (interesting pdfs/images/…)
Reference Videos (links to videos i want to remember)
Not the best setup, but sufficient for me at the moment. Any tips for finetuning this system?
“In Part 3, I will give you a closer look at each of my notebooks and I how use them”: work in progress?
I’ve been experimenting quite a bit with a radically different approach lately so I don’t have any suggestions at the moment. Might be within a week or so of posting my new ideas so we’ll see!