I use the calendar for everything, even personal stuff, which I tag appropriately. I create tasks for my to-do list, with due dates and reminders for short-term items, and no due dates for ongoing projects. I also use the tasks function to create reminders for regular things like the coffee shop closing early on Fridays.

And, it syncs fine with my cheap-y Palm Z22 for portability, so you may want your tech folks to look into why Outlook isn’t syncing with your Treo.

For non-work stuff, I use Remember the Milk to keep track of my review assignments. I like the time-management aspect and the RSS feed that allows me to post it to my blog sidebar.

But one other little handy tool I’ve found is called “stickies”. (for the pc–I know the Mac already does this).

It lets you create sticky notes on your desk top with those little niggling things you need to remember to do. What reminded me of it was your satisfaction marking things off with the pink highlighter. You can mark things off the sticky and delete it entirely when you’ve finished the task. You can organize the stickies and stack them up as well, so you can have different stickies for different categories (like books I need to buy, people I need to call), etc.

I find my iPhone calendar really helpful too, because I can set it up to ping me a day or a few hours ahead of a meeting or event to remind me, then I can forget about it until the phone reminds me.

Farfield, I’ll be interested to read your post on organizing paper, since that is my personal bugaboo!

I just wrote a post yesterday about organizing your paperwork on my own blog. Feel free to have a look :)

I use Outlook and use the GTD system and highly recommend the book Take Back Your Life. It combines GTD with Outlook. It’s become my bible!

But I only use Outlook for the calendar and contacts. The task list was too cumbersome to keep up with. I am a visual person.

So I plan everything in Outlook. Then I have a wall in front of me at work covered in post it notes for project managment. Each column is a project. Notes go down the wall with tasks, note, and dates. I also use a paper daily planner to take notes during the day and to write down ideas or project info that I need to transfer to my wall of post its.

It sounds like a lot but it’s really not. Good post!

There’s some irony to me talking about separating work and life, because I’m on call all the time (other than Derby Day tomorrow, when the library is actually closed). But I can remote into my work PC from my home PC or my laptop, so I don’t need every device to have all of my work info on it. And I prefer that they don’t.

I don’t want to know what’s going on in my work inbox when I’m not there. Nothing THAT important is communicated over email. I want as few reminders of work when I’m not in the office as possible. I get too many calls at home already. There need to be times where I can say “I can’t help you with that right this second. I’ll be home in a few hours and will take a look at it then.” Or “let me call my systems engineer to look into that.” But if you are connected to your work all the time, then the expectation is that you are available all the time. I can’t have that. Your mileage may vary.