ExamineHealth

In the last article in my GTD and Evernote series, we'll explore the things that make the whole thing go smoothly week in and week out.  These are best practices that you can implement to juice your system and make it work for you.  By this time you should have a powerhouse GTD system that chugs along for you, driving you toward success in the things that you want to accomplish.  

We're going to focusing mostly on the Weekly Review.  This is the engine behind your ongoing care and feeding of your system.  It ensures that nothing slips through the cracks and that each and every item gets attention and thought.  When you are consistent with your weekly review, the rest falls into place.

We'll also talk a bit about physical space.  While this is a paperless system and one that exists completely "in the cloud", you've still got to interface with it somehow.  This can make a big impact on how effective it is for you.  

Establish Goals that Drive You Towards Your Ultimate Life

Now that you've got your GTD system set up, and your keeping track of everything in Evernote.  Nothing is slipping through the cracks.  You're getting all of your tasks done.  You're ready to move on to what makes this system really, truly, life changing.  After all, getting tasks done is all well and good, but how do you know that you're really getting somewhere?  How do you ensure that you aren't just spinning your wheels doing busy work?  How do you ensure that all of these tasks and projects are building up to something fruitful?  The system you have in place gives you the ability to move really fast, but you need to ensure that you're moving in the right direction, otherwise you're going to end up at the wrong place.

Now that you have your Evernote application configured for your GTD system, its time to begin talking about some of the more advanced options that you have to play with. I'm going to dedicate the next several articles to this topic, by the time we're finished, you'll have a high-powered GTD implementation that's as flexible as it is powerful.

In this article we're going to talk about using different Notebooks in Evernote, how to separate your personal life from your professional life in GTD, and how to integrate your email inbox into your new shiny GTD system.

For those of you who are not familiar with GTD, it's a popular time management and organizational system that stands for "Getting Things Done".  The system was originally developed by David Allen and described in his appropriately titled book "Getting Things Done".  If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it - it's a great book that clearly describes his system in an easy to understand manner that causes the book to go by quickly.  I'm going to touch on the basic concepts in this series of articles as I outline my implementation, however the book goes into much more detail on each aspect and provides a host of resources that will lead you through the process from start to finish. The basic idea is that we all have little things that we know we need to do that are floating around in our heads.  Our mind knows that it needs to remember to do these things and so relegates part of our brain's processing power to keeping a reminder tab floating just within consciousness.  When you add all those bits and reminders to yourself up, it ends up drawing a significant amount of your brain power.  Not to mention what it does to your stress levels. 

The idea behind GTD is to get all of those pesky little tidbits out of your head and into an organizational system that allows you to know, with confidence, that everything has been captured and will be presented to you when it's needed.  Once you are confident you've captured everything you need to do, and have organized all the bits and pieces that are floating around in your head constantly, then you can truly focus on what it is that you're working on at the time. 

It's a widely known fact that your productivity is related to your focus.  With less distractions you can get more done.  This is a system to reduce distractions, empty your head of the clutter, and focus on the things that matter.