At this moment I feel that wave of appreciation again (an almost daily experience), so I decided to share how I use DTPO. It has quickly become my major command center because it does exactly what I need it to do without limiting me in any way.
My group structure looks like this …
+Inbox
+Journal
…Archive
+Next Actions
…@Agenda
…@Mac
…@Mail
…@Office
…@Phone
+Projects
…“Project A”
…&ProjectA (this is a RTF file not a group)
…Actions
…Reference Material
…“B”
… etc.
+Waiting
Reference Material
… (many groups categorizing my field of interests and projects/work)
…Communication
…Email
…Skype
…Snail
…VoiceRecordings
As you can easily see I use a GTD approach. I guess I do not need to explain what that is or how it works. The way I integrated it is simple:
+Inbox
Holds all incoming stuff (emails, scans, voice recordings, skype logs etc.)
+Journal
One RTF for each day. With the Shift+Cmd+D and Shift+Cmd+E keys it is really easy to keep a log of what is going on. Also: Wiki-Links rock! Simply by using the exact Subject or an email or the title of a skype log the link is automagically created.
Every morning I move the RTF file of the previous day into the Archive subgroup.
+Next Actions
Every action is a RTF file. A replica from the +Projects|Actions group it belongs to. Of course “Show state” is active, so it can be checked off once done.
+Waiting
Holds a the “Actions” of the “@Waiting For” context. I simply promoted it to the top level for convenience. This is all about personal taste and has no good reason.
+Projects
A project consists of an RTF file starting with “&” and the same name as the group. It has two subgroups: “Actions” and “Reference Material”.
When processing my +Inbox I update the project files with important information, links and of course a list of actions.
An action can then be selected and “Make Link …” followed by a click opens a new RTF file. Per template it already holds date, time and the action. I fill in the “&Project” and “@Context” and Wiki-Links does the rest.
The newly created action goes into the action subgroup and gets a replicate in the corresponding context group. The subgroup “Reference Material” holds replicas of documents related to this project and otherwise filed in the extensive structure of the main “Reference Materials” group.
I am aware that another DTPO user created nice GTD-related AppleScripts and I will probably spend one or two weekends to bend them into my personal workflow. Although I do not really feel the pain to automate. The clever sub-menus, keystrokes and wiki-links leave very little manual action.
The thing that fascinates me about DTPO is, that I could finally realize the workflow I wanted, in one application with almost no effort and I can retrieve every single detail of it whenever I want almost instantaneously.
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