How I GTD with Evernote

I had been searching for what seemed like ages for a GTD system that worked for me. Notebooks were easily lost, sticky notes lost their stickiness, GTD programs were too restrictive, and my brain could never remember the many things I need to keep track of. About 2 months ago I came across a blog post by Darren Crawford [http://darrencrawford.com/2009/07/18/my-simple-gtd-evernote-combo/] detailing how he uses Evernote as his GTD software. I decided to create my own system based on Darren's and try it out for a while. It turns out that Evernote would be the perfect fit for my work style.

Here's my setup:

I have 4 different notebooks. INBOX is set as my default notebook. Every new piece of information is saved to my inbox as soon as it is received. NEXT ACTIONS contains every item that I need to act on. REFERENCE is my archive for everything that I think I need to keep. TICKLER is well, my tickler folder. You GTD junkies should know what I'm talking about.

All of my contexts, projects, reference tags, and tickler dates are set up as tags and organized into sub tags. It is less confusing than it sounds.

Process

When I receive an email that needs to be acted on, I automatically forward it to my secret Evernote email address to be inserted into my INBOX. Now the item will be waiting for me when I go through my daily review.

During my daily review, I add my context and reference tags to the item and move it over to NEXT ACTIONS where it will stay until I get around to the task.

After I complete a task and I want to keep the item, I simply delete the context tag and drag it to REFERENCE for safe keeping.

Thoughts

The real key to acheiving seamless integration with your life is using the secret email to make sure everything gets into your inbox. This really comes in handy when I collect all of my loose papers at the end of the week. I take them all down to the main office and scan them all to PDF. These get sent directly to my Evernote inbox.

I will be writing up my weekly review process later this week.

Please let me know how you GTD in the comments.