Using Bonsai With Getting Things Done: Introduction and Assumptions
Posted on May 4, 2007 by LJ Earnest
Categories: Productivity,Software
Bonsai is the heart of my productivity system. I use it to track the essentials of my Getting Things Done hybrid system. It has even kept me going on the occasion of the failure of my PDA.
Over the next few days, I will publish a complete set of instructions for the setup and use of my Bonsai system.
Basic Setup
Assumptions
This system is based on a Bonsai implementation using both the desktop version and the PDA version. I will assume that you have both software installed. I am currently using Bonsai version 4.1.2.
I am also assuming that you have your contexts set up in your To Do list. By contexts, I mean those discrete areas where you do work. David Allen prefaces his contexts with “@”. I do not do this, since I find it distracts me. Some sample contexts might be “Phone”, “Computer”, “Home”, “Work”, or “Errands.”
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Comments (3)
Your e-book is the clearest exposition I have found of applying GTD using Bonsai. Thanks for making your thoughts available to all.
On the topic of contexts, and out of interest, how do you categorise things that needs to be done (1) at the computer; AND (2) at home? Or (1) on the phone; but only (2) at work? You can only apply a single category to an item, so there’s a problem there, isn’t there? Have you considered (and ruled out) using keywords to represent contexts?
Mike
Thank you very much for your kind words!!!
Part of the ease of contexts has to do with my tracking everything work related in a separate system, run off of Notestudio and not synced to my PDA.
This won’t work for everyone, but for my job as a contract software developer, it works very well to compartmentalize my tasks by client and project. If I have a work task, it will be in my work system, and will never touch the Bonsai system.
However, there may be personal phone calls or computer work I have to do during business hours. To make sure I don’t miss these, I set an alarm on my PDA to ring during my lunch break, so I may attend to it.
Also, after I push tasks over to my PDA, I will go in and sub-categorize them using icons (I use Agendus as an overlay to the built-ins). So all my things that have to be done at the home computer have the same icon, and things that can be done anywhere I have internet (home, work, out-and-about) have a different icon. I can quickly see, based on icon, groups of tasks that need to be performed while in sub-contexts, like email, internet, etc.
I did consider using keywords as contexts, but these don’t push to the PDA Task List, and that is where I do my checking-off of tasks. I also found, for me, that the fewer contexts I have, the better I do. I spent a lot of time thrashing about when I had separate contexts for @Internet, @Email and @Computer.
It’s not an optimal solution, but I have learned to work well with it.
Do you have any suggestions?
[...] are items that indicate a new project is about to be formed. Each of the items gets entered into my tracking system and a plastic folder made for it. These folders are then placed in my “in progress” [...]