Tammy's GTD/Moleskine System

By Tammy Cravit

Those of you who have read my posts on the David Allen forum or other sites, or who have read my GTD with MemoLeaf tutorial, might be asking yourselves, why another system? (Those of you who have no idea what GTD is, please bear with me and I'll explain shortly.)

The answer comes down to two words: refactor mercilessly. In the lingo of Extreme Programming, refactoring is the process of taking a section of software code and removing unneeded complexity. I've done much the same with my GTD system, paring it down when I found it becoming too cumbersome, revisiting pieces when I found myself bogged down with unneeded work.

I started my GTD forays with a variety of Palm software - first ShadowPlan, then NoteStudio, and most recently MemoLeaf. All are excellent programs, and all work great for some people as Trusted Systems for GTD.  So, please don't think I'm disparaging these systems with this tutorial. Rather, I recognized a limitation in my own working style: A tendency to lose myself in the "ooh, shiny" and to use fiddling with my tools as a way to procrastinate doing real work. So, my system has to be as close to fiddle-proof as I can make it.

For that reason, in early 2007, I moved from a Palm-based GTD system to one based around the ideas and tools of the hipsterPDA crowd - namely, 3x5 inch index cards bound together with Levenger Circa rings. The solution was a good one, but I soon noticed another problem: I resisted putting stuff into my new system because of the overhead of punching the cards, and because I wasn't always at my desk where my Circa punch lives.

When Kathy Sierra's excellent article about a Moleskine-based GTD system came across my screen, I simplified again and moved my GTD system to one of the wonderful Moleskine notebooks. After a brief digression to define a few terms, I'll show you the result. Because my system draws heavily on Kathy's ideas and Michael's PigPog method, I'll refer you to them for much of the detail and simply show the results here.

What the heck are we talking about, anyway?

Before I explain my new system, I'm going to briefly explain what GTD is, and what a Moleskine is. If you already know the meaning of these terms, please feel free to skip to the next section.

Getting Things Done, or GTD, is a productivity process developed by organizational productivity expert David Allen.  David's book, Getting Things Done: The art of stress-free productivity, provides all you need to implement GTD in your life, but here's a 30-second summary.

In a nutshell, David identified several challenges that people face in today's fast-paced business climate. The two that are, to my mind, most important are:

  1. New inputs (calls, voice mails, e-mails, etc.) come into our universe constantly, and any one of those new inputs might have the power to radically change which work we should be focusing on. This, incidentally, is why David believes that prioritized daily to-do lists are ineffective; a single e-mail can move the item we tagged as "C-17" right to the top of our list, because our prioritization decisions aren't static.
  2. Knowledge workers - that is, basically everyone who's not in a job where you can "crank widgets" without thinking about what your work is - rarely have huge uninterrupted blocks of time. For that reason, we have to do our thinking about our work and deciding on next actions in advance, so that when we're presented with seventeen minutes in the waiting room at the dentist's, we can take action on one of more of our projects without having to spend any of those seventeen minutes deciding what we should be doing.

David's system revolves around a few key concepts:

This explanation is a gross  simplification; I strongly suggest reading David's book and the summary on his Web site for more information.

Moleskine notebookMoleskines are a type of notebook. I prefer the pocket size,  with pages just slightly larger than a 3x5 card. Moleskines feature hard but flexible covers (perfect for jotting in while holding the notebook), an elastic band that keeps the cover closed, a built-in bookmark ribbon, and high-quality cream colored paper. You can find them on Amazon.com and at Border's, among other places.

The notebook in which my GTD resides is actually a Moleskine clone that I found at Staples for $5 because I didn't have a blank Moleskine laying around and the nearest Border's is 60 miles away.  I plan to order some Moleskines online so I'll have one when this one is full.

Now that you've got a basic handle on what we're talking about, let's open up my notebook and talk about how my GTD system works.

Inside Tammy's Moleskine

When you first open my Moleskine, you'll find the following:

Inside front cover

On the left, glued to the inside of the cover, is a GTD workflow summary borrowed from Douglas Johnson's excellent DIYPlanner.com template set. On the right side, you'll find my name and address, as well as a legend for the several colored Post-It flags I use to mark the sections of the notebook. The sections I use are as follows:

The inside back cover contains extra tape flags and a summary of the Weekly Review process:

Inside back cover

Setting up the notebook

When I start a new notebook, there are a couple of things I do:

  1. Number the right-hand pages. Numbering every page is overly tedious and doesn't help me much in tracking down information. If I note that something is on page 92, I can easily check the front/back of that page. If I actually want to pin down the exact location, I'll refer to the back of page 92 as "92R".
  2. Draw margin lines on the page. This is an idea I borrowed from Michael's PigPog blog; essentially, you draw bottom and right margin lines on each page, like so:

    Blank page, showing margin lines

    I use the space to the right of the line primarily for checking off completed Next Actions, though brief notes and cross-references can go here. The space below the line contains the page number, and can also hold a paper-based hyperlink if a note continues to another page.

    Hyperlinks take the form of arrows referencing a page number; for example, a note that began on page 12 and continues on page 63 would contain the hyperlinks

    <-12        ->63

    to allow me to follow multiple threads through my notebook.
  3. Decide how big you want each section to be, and place the Post-It flag dividers accordingly.

Once you've completed these setup tasks, you're ready to get started.

Managing Next Action lists

My Next Action lists go one context per page, like so:

Next Action lists

Borrowing a tip from Kathy Sierra's article, I divide the list into two-line blocks for each NA, to give me enough room to write what I'm doing. When a given context page gets full, I will make a hyperlink (as described above) to a new page and continue the list. I use the ribbon to mark where the current set of NA lists starts. (In other words, as all of the items on the NA pages are completed, the ribbon will move forward to more-or-less follow the current set of lists.)

Managing Projects and Someday/Maybe lists

As I mentioned above, the first part of my Projects section contains a list of projects, which looks like this (sensitive information blurred):

Project List page

The individual pages behind this section are used in a more-or-less freeform way as needed for my projects. For example, I have a list of article topics for a newspaper I write for, a mindmap outlining the major steps in another project, and so forth.

I've separated the project list from the individual project pages using a simple hack: one of the two blue tabs in my notebook is cut at an angle, like so:

Tape flags hack

The angled tab marks the start of my project list, and the unadulterated tab marks the start of the  pages for individual projects. Since all my tabs are stacked on top of one another, rather than being offset, I can put my finger on the top of the blue tabs and open to the project pages. Or, if I put a finger on the bottom of the pair of tabs, I'll catch the project list tab and the book opens there.

My Someday/Maybe lists, tucked away behind the green tab, are formatted in like fashion.

What about Hard Landscape items?

At present, my Hard Landscape items live in my Palm Treo 700p, but I'm planning to migrate them to a small pocket calendar, either one of the Moleskines or another of similar form factor. The Treo has the advantage of beeping to remind me of appointments, but I've honestly found this to be a disadvantage as well. By knowing that I have to keep track of the time, I actually find myself both more "present" in meetings and more willing to keep things moving along during those meetings.

What does a weekly review look like?

Given that David Allen has said that the Weekly Review is the tool that separates GTD from not-GTD, it's instructive to look at what my weekly review process looks like. Here, in a nutshell, is what I do:

  1. I process my inbox and the Notes section of my Moleskine, looking for Next Actions, projects, and so forth. Generally, I note these on a separate sheet of paper, and transfer them into my Next Action lists later in the process.
  2. I review my calendar for the current week and (usually) one week on either side of it. Next Actions, projects, etc. are added to my running list.
  3. I make a note on the running list of new projects, actions, etc. that are swimming around in my head.
  4. I review my project lists, and make a note of potential next actions. Because I review my NA lists several times each day, I usually have a pretty good idea what's on them. As a result, I usually have little duplication at this stage of the process. I also decide if any projects need to get moved to the Someday/Maybe list and note them so I can transfer them during the next step.
  5. I review my Someday/Maybe list and enter any items I decided need to be moved from the projects list, as well as items I identified during the calendar/inbox/mindsweep processing steps.. I also look for Someday/Maybe items I'd like to move on, and flip back to the projects list to enter them.
  6. Finally, I review my Next Action lists. I cross off completed items that I've not yet checked, add new items identified during the preceeding steps, and so forth.

Typically, this process takes me less than an hour in any given week. I do mini-reviews daily, which helps keep the volume of unprocessed stuff relatively low.

How's it working so far?

Now that I've gotten my stuff moved over into the new notebook and I'm working with it, I have to say things are going very well. I've solved the problem I set out to solve, and created a system that is:

I don't claim that this system is for everyone. In particular, if you like a strongly-bound link between NAs and the projects they go with, I don't think you'll be happy with this way of working. But if you work well with a simple, almost minimalist approach that forces you to stay on-track and discourages spending time fiddling, a Moleskine notebook and pencil might be just the right solution for you.

Further reading

Here are some further resources for Moleskine-based GTD systems:

Tammy Cravit is a freelance writer and computer consultant, living and working on California's Central Coast. She'd love to hear your comments on this document, which can be sent to tammy@tammycravit.com.