More on GTD

+ Interesting post I've come across a second time on using Gmail like a journal. This guy set up a whole separate account, which I don't think I want to do, and I'm already doing some of these type things with my GTD with Gmail implementation. But I may want to do more.

+ I've tweaked my labels and filters in some ways I really like, and some ways that need more work.

Priorities get a '!' label out front and appear at the top of the list. Currently '!Christine' is the only priority label. This label also has a filter that automagically labels any email that Christine sends to me. I could just do a 'fr:Christine' search, but I like having the label in my list. Also, if I want a copy, say if I'm waiting to hear back from Christine on something, I can send it to myself and then label it with '!Christine' and '*waiting', then archive it. This category may pick up a '!spiritual' label, or something like that, and maybe '!twins'.

My next, one-label-only category is @home. This works for me since I only basically have two contexts. The other big one is work and my GTD stuff doesn't cross over much with that right now (or I simply email my work email address). DA is a big fan of contexts, so you might profitably have more of these.

My next category of labels I think of as GTD type labels - maybe fitting in somewhere in the workflow chart. With some minor personal indiosyncrasies I've basically got *deferred (this could also be *next action or *todo, in my mind), *maybe, *reference, and *waiting. Since they have the asterisk prefix, they all come next, grouped together, in my list of labels.

Next I've got my project labels, which I prefix with '>'. So far I've only got '>health' and one other one I'm not posting here (but you can email me if you want to know ;-)

Finally, I have three non-prefixed labels from before my implementation that I haven't decided what to do with yet. They're not hurting anything, so I'll leave them there for now.

Bryan's original, excellent white paper on this topic advocated a 'reference' and 'actions' label for each project. So, for example, 'health:actions' and 'health:reference'. But Gmail can pull up two labels at the same time in a search, like 'label:health label:reference'. The more elegant solution, no? ;-)

Don't want to type in that search repeatedly to get that view? That's why we have persistent searches, my friend. I've been thinking about installing this greasemonkey script for awhile and took the plunge last night. Very cool. Minor downside is that it'll only work on our home computer, but that's where I'll do most of my procesing anyway. You can easily save any common searches, including multiple labels.