GTD and Evernote ,Advanced Topics.

Written by Ben Anderson.

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.

Notebooks.

So you may have noticed, as you were setting up your GTD system in Evernote, that you have the ability to set up multiple notebooks within your account. You probably also noticed that I didn't mention them in my setup. That is primarily because I don't use them in my configuration. I started out using them, thinking that I would keep my GTD stuff in one notebook, and my reference materials in another notebook, and even had a third special-use notebook. However, in the end I found that these notebooks cause more trouble than they were worth. You had to constantly ensure you were focused on the right notebook when performing searches, and that your newly created notes were going into the right place.

The thing about the notebooks is that they have a hard division, meaning that a note in a particular notebook cannot exist in any other notebook. This is in contrast to the tags, which can span across multiple notebooks. This can create blocks in an otherwise open system. I have found, that with a fully fleshed out tagging system, the notebooks are irrelevant.

Now, if you wanted to try to run two separate GTD systems, you could theoretically configure your saved searches to look in one notebook or the other. However, to me, that doesn't gain you anything as you are still going to be leveraging those searches or tags to find your information. The notebooks in themselves are not helpful organizational tools. They don't help you to find information on their own. Your notebooks will quickly grow too large to simply browse, you will be reliant on your tagging system - and since tags ignore notebook boundaries, they won't help.

In different systems, the notebooks might very well have a place, and I'm glad that the option to use them is available, I just think that in this particular configuration, they are redundant and do more harm than good. If any of you can come up with a viable use for having multiple notebooks in your GTD system, please note them in the comments.

Personal/Professional.

In a related topic, I wanted to talk a bit about separating your personal GTD from your professional GTD. This is a highly individualized topic and can be sliced and diced several different ways. Personally I have two completely separate GTD systems for personal and professional. I have quite a lot of moving parts going on in each one, and I prefer them to not become cross-linked. When I am at work, I am focused on work and need to have all of those open loops and actions clear and concise. When I'm not working, everything else should be separated. To me it's fairly simple to bounce back and forth between the two. Each gets it's own weekly review and it's own dedicated attention and upkeep.

A different approach to this that I've seen is to integrate Stephen Covey's Roles concepts. Basically the idea is to have a GTD system for each of the major roles that you have in your life: parent, friend, manager, artist, volunteer. Each of these functions of who you are, holding a separate system, it allows you to focus on each one separately. You could also implement this idea with much less hard lines by keeping them all together in the same GTD system, but simply using different notebooks in Evernote to separate out the various sets of information.

With the same flexible framework as a base, it's possible to customize your system to meet your specific needs. How are you using a variation of this system to your unique situation?

Integration With Your Email.

If you're like me, and a lot of people, you use your inbox for driving your actions as well. You have requests for you do to something that come into your email, you've got emails that you need to respond to, and you get tons of information that you want to review at some point. So you're asking yourself, how does this fit into the Evernote/GTD implementation? Well there are a couple of ways to approach this topic.

The first and most basic thing you can do is apply the GTD principles to your email. This means processing your inbox on a predetermined interval and making a decision about each piece of mail. Is it actionable? If not, trash it, or file it. If it is actionable, do it, delegate it, or defer it. In order to facilitate that process, I recommend creating a @Waiting and @Action folder in your inbox. This will allow you to drop anything that you've delegated and are waiting for (including receipts for things that are being shipped for you, responses from customer service departments, etc.) into this folder. Likewise, if it's something that you are going to do, but later, drop it into the @Action folder. I also recommend creating a folder for any projects that you get a lot of email correspondence on, this way you have a place to drop reference materials for those projects. This will allow you to get your inbox to zero. This is a pleasant place to be.

Now here's where you have several options. Depending on the size of your system and the amount of threads you have going on, this may be enough. You may just want to keep an eye on your @Action and @Waiting folders on a regular basis to make sure that you're working any tasks that are included in those folders. This works well for small implementations and low-stress type systems.

However, you may find that you would rather have all of your stuff in once place (i.e. Evernote). In this case you have several options. You can email those actionable messages straight to your Evernote address, this will create a new note out of them and dump them into your Evernote inbox for processing. Then you can assign the appropriate context tags, add a check box, and work them like any other task. You could even add another tag to identify the note as originating in email, if you wanted a marker to determine source. This works especially well when the task that you have to carry out doesn't necessarily happen in email. However, if the action is to simply respond to the email, I find it redundant to move it into a note in Evernote just to move back to email to respond.

For this reason, you may prefer to leave these items in email. I even took my email tags a little bit farther and created a @Read/Review folder in my email. This works great for me because I get a lot of things into my email that I want to read about. This allows me to set it off to the side and get right at it whenever I prefer. The downside being that you now have to check two places when you want to get caught up on your Read/Review items. Still, two places is not that bad.

A third option is to simply leave the emails in your email folders, and create a new note in Evernote for each actionable email or waiting email. This can be done quickly and provides you with a quick way to keep track of those items in email, without duplicating all of the information unnecessarily. Ultimately the system that you choose to adopt will be based on your comfort levels with the various tools and the inherent complexity of your system. You may want to mix and match, or might come up with another idea altogether. If you do, let us know in the comments.