First a confession, I am too disorganised for GTD, or at least for proper GTD. I have the book, but have only read the first half. I want to, plan to, finish the rest - but haven’t got around to doing it yet.

However despite this I have implemented features in Trunk Notes to aid people who have finished the book and use GTD to make them more effective.

The GTD in Trunk was inspired by a guy, Pierre Lemay, who wrote a great post on the forum. He advised me on how his system of using a personal wiki for GTD might work in Trunk Notes.

As I said above I don’t use GTD, or at least not properly; maybe someday, but not now. However I thought I would let you know how I use the features to be a little more organised.

In Trunk Notes I have lots of pages. Many of them concerning ideas for current or future iPhone apps and some for general life stuff such as paying bills.

Whenever I need to do something as part of a project I add an action to that project or ideas page. An action in Trunk Notes is just a keyword which appears at the start of a line. The encouraged convention is to prefix the action name with a @.

Here is some examples of ‘actions’:

@action 16/02/2010 Sister’s birthday - must buy present!
@action 23/02/2010 (1) Send engineering plan to CEO

These two actions have some additional information. The first one has a date, when my sister’s birthday is. The second has a date and a priority, with 1 meaning top priority.

For those of who do GTD properly you might decide to use the keywords as contexts - for example, @errand, @phone, @internet. That’s too complicated for me, I just use @action for most things.

These ‘actions’ can be scattered throughout your wiki. Now comes the clever part.

To get an overview of what actions I need to complete I add a little bit of dynamic content to my home page.

{{dueinnext 7, @action}}

What this does is scan my entire wiki and works out what actions I have to complete in the next 7 days. It also includes an actions which haven’t yet been completed.

I also have a page which lists all of my actions. On this page I just have

{{action @action}}

This lists all actions including those without a date or priority.

When I have completed an action I change the @action to @done. This allows me to have a ‘done’ page which uses {{action @done}} to display all the things I have completed.

One thing I have simplified in the above description is that actually I don’t have the {{dueinnext 7, @action}} on my home page. I have it in the page Special:Badge. The home page features the command {{include Special:Badge}}. Using Special:Badge updates the badge on Trunk Notes with how many actions I need to complete in the next week.

I hope you are now encouraged to become more organised and make use of Trunk Notes actions. If you want to do GTD properly read Pierre’s forum post. However even for those of us lacking the discipline needed to do things properly ‘actions’ in Trunk Notes can still be very helpful.