So this weekend I'm going to do the big initial push of getting myself working on the David Allen GTD system. I have to decide what the mechanics will be, will I use a paper system or a computer system or what? It has to be portable between home and work, and although my original impulse was to try to build myself a system in Ruby on Rails, I've decided that more practical would be to make myself a Hipster PDA, probably with the DIY Planner templates.

That might seem oddly low tech for a cyber-spasmo such as myself but I think it might just work for the best. It costs next to nothing, is completely flexible and reconfigurable, and requires very little overhead to get things rolling. Dan Conover was giving away something much like this at the Charleston Uplifter meeting for people to take notes and exchange bits of information, and it just seems like a neat idea. I already do my podcast prep on 3X5 cards, so it's nothing to have one card in my H-PDA be the card for the next show. By always having that in my pocket, I might actually do a better job of remembering what it is I want to talk about on the show.

I'm now excited about putting all this into motion. I always feel kind of overwhelmed and over my head, so I easily bought in to the belief in the goodness of this system. Capturing without fail the important tidbits from the sea of incoming information in a way that I don't have to remember them sounds like heaven to me. I already know most of the clutter in my life is actually physical manifestations of procrastination. I haven't figured out what to do with this thing, so in the pile it goes with the other bunch of crap I don't know what to do with. My hope is that once I am freed from the friction and ballast of my own disorganization, that my productivity in all aspects of life will skyrocket. A boy can dream, can't he?

Update: As JP points out in comments, someone has already done a Ruby on Rails implementation of the GTD system.