When I was using Lotus Notes years ago and far away, I made these notes to myself of how I was implementing GTD (or at least task management) using Lotus Notes. We'd been forcibly removed from Outlook, which was familiar, to Notes, which was stark and unfriendly.
Anyway, here are the notes so I can find them again later:
1. Here's a post I wrote years ago on the DavidCo board: http://www.davidco.com/forum/showpost.php?p=16631&postcount=8
2. Here are notes I wrote up a little while after the above post:
Herewith, some stray notes on how I’m working with GTD at my job using a variety of tools. I’m more fortunate than most, in that I have only 1 project to occupy me full-time, though many are the one-off tasks my manager assigns me. (My contract is ending in a few weeks, and the work winding down, so I have a little more free time on my hands to scribble these notes.) Apologies in advance for the length.
LOTUS NOTES -- I hate it, but what can you do? Rather like David’s method of ‘dumbing down’ Outlook, I’ve done the same with Notes. I only use a fraction of its power because 1) I don’t want to be a Notes guru and 2) the IT honchos have locked down the templates so they can’t be updated.
I discovered I prefer living in the email view over any of the other views, so it’s my home base. I’ve found that I prefer a two-dimensional approach to managing my mails; this translates into a single level of folders. However, I use folder names to provide an index, which let me scan quickly for the items I need. A typical folder name will be “P: 8bit: comms plan approvals”. Translation: P=project, 8bit=the overall project name, and then the specific sub-project. When the sub-project is all done, I move those mails into the “P: 8bit” folder, which holds ALL the mails for the 8bit project. It’s much simpler for me to know that all the project mails are in one place; makes them easier to search, and so on. I have as many P: folders as I need and delete/archive as needed.
I write up meeting notes for the various sub-teams we meet with (yes, putting my college degree to work). I keep a separate folder called “P: 8bit: Meeting notes” to hold that data. Useful to troll through during the weekly review for undone next actions, who-said-what-when issues, a record of ongoing work, and so on.
I also have a series of Reference: folders for corporate spam, personal stuff, anything NOT a project. I try to avoid having lots of folders as I find that, in my cleverness to categorize precisely, I’ll put one item in this folder, forget that I created that folder, and then create a new worded-slightly-differently folder tomorrow. What a mess. So I follow the precept ‘do the simplest thing that could possibly work,’ hence a few large buckets for emails.
I find I use the Drafts folder a lot. If I’m interrupted in the middle of a mail, I save it to Draft. If I’m framing out an article or a big email to go out to lots of folks, I’ll work on it and save it to Draft. So it holds in-progress work that I can pick up again later.
To a limited degree, I do use the Copy to Calendar and Copy to To-do List functions, the former more than the latter. When I had to track the vacation schedules of the folks on our team, I’d copy their mails to a to-do list category I’d created called “Team Schedules”, with their vacation dates in the subject line. This let me quickly scan who was in or out. When they came back, I deleted the to-do. It was a handy list. But I tend to use paper for my GTD lists.
