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Despite strong indications of an imminent second generation 3G iPhone, the recent £100 price drop on the 8GB iPhone proved too tempting. I had hesitated because the iPhone failed to meet my minimum requirements for basic PDA functionality. With 1Password mostly overcoming the secure data exchange obstacle, the remaining challenge was to find a network-independent way of managing and synchronising tasks ("to do" items). I've also been wading through David Allen's book Getting Things Done in a search for ways to improve my personal productivity. Could I cherry-pick the key principles of the GTD religion and apply them on the iPhone using only the built-in apps?

The essence of GTD

The OmniFocus Basics Video does a good job of distilling the core ideas in the GTD method. It outlines three concepts:

1. Actions are something you can physically do in a single step;
2. Projects are activities that require more than one physical action to complete;
3. Contexts are physical requirements for carrying out actions (e.g. being at work, at home, connected to the Internet, etc.)

The video also summarizes three workflow steps to getting things done:

1. Capture all outstanding individual ("atomic") actions;
2. Organize those actions by grouping them into projects and/ or context;
3. Do the outstanding actions.

Let's put that graphically (adding horizontal reorganization as part of ongoing review):

I'm not being strict about contexts being a physical place, person or thing: in my world a context can be a frame of mind, or an area of mental focus—whatever makes sense for grouping related actions.

The wrong tool for the job?

The iPhone is most certainly not ready for GTD out-of-the-box, and not everyone is comfortable relying on network access for Web apps solutions. This situation will soon be relieved as both OmniFocus and Things—fine-looking desktop GTD apps—are promising iPhone-native companion apps in due course. Apple is typically silent on whether or not iCal/ Mail tasks will ever sync to iPhone without third party involvement.

Prior to iPhone I had been using a Palm to manage my contacts, events, tasks, and notes (paired with the ever unreliable Missing Sync). Unfortunately here's where Apple's usually seamless integration falls down—two Apple products, Mac and iPhone, are less communicative that Mac plus Palm:

The Notes app on iPhone is useless with no desktop synch, although third party solutions do exist. Otherwise moving bidirectional data between Mac and iPhone (while avoiding "online" web or mail server connectivity) means relying on either iCal or Address Book for data entry on the Mac side.

Luckily both events and contacts on iPhone have notes fields, and these can be used to sync with data entered via iCal or Address Book on your Mac. On the Palm attached notes were helpfully identified with a little yellow icon. Such identification is lacking in iCal and in iPhone's calendar, so attached notes could easily be overlooked. Thus whenever I enter something into the notes field I make use of this tip I shared 3 years ago to "unhide" that fact that there are notes attached. It also happens to be in keeping with the iPhone interface ;-)

There is a limit as to how much text notes fields can contain; long lists entered on your Mac may be truncated on iPhone.

Separation anxiety

There are broadly three types of activities to keep track of in any attempt to "get organized". There are things that need doing (e.g. "Wash the car"), things that need doing on a specific date (e.g. "Pick up dry cleaning"), and things that need doing at a specific time (e.g. keeping an appointment). I was in the habit of using both events and tasks in iCal to track actions with a due date. The fact that I can't actually describe the process by which I assigned an action to an all-day event in iCal's calendar, or alternatively to a "due date" task in iCal's to do list, is quite telling in itself.

A change in my practice is therefore the clear separation between undated tasks and those that fall due on a specific day. We can then apply some simple rules:

• Anything that must occur on a particular day at a particular time becomes a calendar appointment;
• Anything that must occur on a particular day becomes an all-day calendar event;
• Anything that must occur but is unscheduled becomes a task list action.

Colour coding calendars in iCal to represent contexts is useful on the Mac; Palm preserved these as categories. Sadly all synched calendars are merged on iPhone so schedules are impossible to differentiate. Palm also indicated repeating events and connected multi-day events in month view: iPhone doesn't.

Faking it

Both appointments and all-day events sync both ways between iCal on the Mac and Calendar on iPhone just fine. As we all know, tasks are a different story. The system I am currently employing uses Address Book to bring tasks to the Phone app on iPhone (or Contacts on the iPod Touch) based on a few simple rules:

• A Group in Address Book operates like a list in Phone;
• A list is prefixed with # (e.g. projects) unless it is a context, when @ is used;
• The Contact field for Company Name is used as the title of an action;
• The Contact field for notes is used for notes relating to an action;
• An uncompleted action is prefixed with * (not unlike a list item bullet);
• A completed action is prefixed with - to indicate readiness for deletion;
• An action with associated notes is suffixed with > to aid identification;
• Smart Groups in Address Book are used to help collate actions.

Keep in mind that what I describe here is only part of the GTD workflow.

Here's how it all looks put together in Address Book:

Click thumbnail to enlarge image

Actions as faux Contacts grouped in Address Book

This group-based structure is mirrored on iPhone:

It's best to show how this works by looking at some examples.

Collecting/ capturing actions

The group #Collect acts as a container for capturing new actions as they are "brain dumped". Via the + button in either Address Book (Mac) or Phone (iPhone) a new action can be created within this group (with the * prefix in the Company field):

Organizing actions

The idea is to move actions out of the #Collect list and into project or context lists where appropriate. GTD purists will likely tell you to keep your inbox empty (and here #Collect is fulfilling the inbox function). But I fail to see the point of moving actions into a new container just to keep another empty, so my #Collect serves as both inbox and "catch-all" for actions that don't fit elsewhere.

Some actions are not for doing here and now; I used to keep these on what I called a "rainy day" list; in GTD-speak they get grouped under the #Someday list:

Most actions, however, will have a clear context or be part of a multi-step project. Project lists and context lists are not mutually exclusive: actions can appear under either, both, or neither. For example, sanding the dinning table and chairs is part of the #Restore dining set project, but also falls under the broader context of things to do at home, @Home:

Some future actions have current dependencies. Years ago working as house surgeon I kept a daily "Chase list" in the back of a pocket notebook in my coat; things I had to do before continuing (or often formulating) a subsequent plan. For example, I might be waiting for Mrs A's chest x-ray report before deciding whether to write her up for take-home antibiotics and completing her discharge summary. I couldn't do the latter until I was no longer waiting for the former. The GTD equivalent of my chase list is #Waiting—not things I'm personally doing, but that I have an interest in nevertheless:

Slight dilemma: Should everything I'm waiting on have a due by date? If so, perhaps it should be scheduled in the calendar instead of on an undated task list e.g. "Loaned DVD to B" Have I got it back by end April?

As a Palm/ iCal to do user I sometimes used priority to indicate those things which needed doing sooner than others (1-5, high through low). Priority has its uses, but it's not always that helpful in deciding where to start. If an action belongs to a project I will add 01, 02, 03 etc. after the * prefix. This identifies the sequence of actions needed to progress a project, giving me a clear beginning (the lack of which is often an obstacle to undertaking something amorphous):

Smart Groups don't make it over to the iPhone, and it's too unreliable to manually add every action to both a context and #All actions group/ list. So I use a Smart Group in Address Book to collect them, and from there drag to the #All actions group—which is there only for the sake of collating actions on the iPhone:

All actions can't be next simultaneously, not even when undertaken by multitasking die-hards. Hence I created a Smart Group to collate all project actions that are "01" in the completion sequence as #Next actions. This gives me a quick way to see what I ought to be getting on with when reviewing my progress on the Mac:

Doing actions

Some actions might be deleted immediately as they are completed, but at times it can be useful to keep reminders around for a little longer (until completion of an entire project, say). In this case I change * to - when an action is completed:

Is it worthwhile?

This won't be for everyone. For some people a piece of paper with a half-dozen items on a single list will be all they genuinely need. Other folk have their fingers in many pies and it can be more challenging to honour every commitment, to follow up every loose end, and to make inroads into a tangle of multi-step projects competing for your limited attention. Personally I'm not convinced I need this—at least not now. But when I start on a PhD later this year and as other concurrent projects come to fruition, things could get ugly. Now seems like the right time to learn a highly structured system while under less pressure so that using it becomes a subconscious effort when the pressure is being applied. In the more immediate term I hope that by being forced to itemise project actions and order them into meaningful sequences, I hope to procrastinate less and see my projects for what they are: doable, in bite-sized chunks.

I do hope (and expect) a more streamlined solution will emerge with Firmware 2.0 post-SDK. But that's still at least couple of months away, and meantime I've got things to get done.