My thoughts about GTD on Palm

As you know, GTD means Get Things Done.

First question: Why PDA?

I believe we all have the experience of keeping telling ourselves not to forget something very important, and because of that, that thought may interrupt you greatly even every 5 miniues. It certainly leads to low efficiency, because we cannot focus on the job we were doing. So we need one reliable system which can help us not miss everything we hope to do. Here, you may said, " Oh, yeah, I've had the system, Microsoft Outlook!" I admit that Outlook is a powerful tool, but because it runs on PC, you cannot take it with you. You cannot promise to be always in front of your computer. PDA is a little one that you can put it in your pocket. If you've got one PDA, it may seems that you've also got one personal secretary who is always with you. PDA is reliable then all you shall do is to record the messages on PDA, and when you shall turn to sth., it can notify you. So you will never have to keep reminding yourself of something nervously..so that you can greatly improve your job quality and efficiency.

Second question: How can we?

There are many software devoted to helping us Get our Things Done on Palm, such as Life Balance, Datebk5, ... I choose Lift Balance and Datebk5. Datebk5 can deal well with periodical events and other assignments related to your timetable. If I shall interview somebody this evening, I will open databk5 and choose the period 18:00-- 19:00 of today, and turn on alerting. And by default, when it is 17:55, my PDA will keep beeping to remind me of that. So it is not likely that I can miss the important assignment. If you encounter something not greatly related to your timetable, you can use the other tool: Lift Balance. The main advantage of this tool is that you are offered to define several "place", which can be open or close according to the defined open and close time. That means that you don't have to pay attention to the office stuffs when you are "home" after 21:00, because it can "close" them. For example, yesterday evening, your boss phoned you that you should make a call to Bill Gates when you were in office. To deal with this event, you opened Life Balance and chose the place: "Office", entered the message and then continued with your sleeping. This morning, when you were in office, you took out your PDA and wanted to know what you should do today, then you get told by PDA that you shall make a call to Bill.

Other tools?

Yes, if you are dealing with some big projects, so Bonsai, project@hand and somthing else can help you greatly. Maybe we can discuss them in the near future.