Further, Todoodlist is a fun way of writing a list, and working off of it. And it’s surprisingly logical.

I had to break up my monster comment into several comments because bigger ones were “discarded”!

Kind of. But the routines really simplify it. You gotta do stuff in the morning and evening anyway… might as well be effective stuff!

I use acronyms for writing these routines and standard subtasks out anyway, so it hardly takes anytime at all.

You damn right.

Unlike Franklin, I don’t choose 13 subjects in advance and rotate them 4 times a year. I figure what I want to work on will change, so I just pick a “self motivator” each week. If I wanted to, I could work with one for more than a week, but a week of concentration usually works wonders and the idea will often come to mind when needed in the future.

He had a personal development plan where he would focus on 1 and only 1 area of his life a week. That’s what I just started doing and it’s been wonderful.

Every week in my weekly review I choose a “self motivator” as W. Clement Stone called it, and I work on it for 10 minutes a day: 5 minutes with my morning routine and 5 minutes with my evening routine. Basically, it’s an “affirmation”. I say it 50x in the morning finding myself getting more excited at the end than at the beginning. And I write it down 15x (at the end of the day)… which is what Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, did.

It’s a lot simpler and quicker than it sounds. I find this type of list is faster to write than a flat list because I just put the stuff wherever, then draw connecting lines and circle only the next action per task/routine.

For my Project list, I DON’T list an outcome. In other words, instead of trying to write the perfect goal statement for it, I’ll just list the project name like “Car”, “Earnings per Hour” (with the assumption I want them as high as possible!), and “Toastmasters”. I also keep the canonical Waiting For, Someday/Maybe lists, and generally review them once a week.

For lists, I use Todoodlist. It’s awesome. Paper and pen/pencil. It’s a non-linear visual way of mind mapping tasks. Super quick to write and “context” is taken care of by writing dotted lines across the page connecting tasks in this way. Otherwise, it’s squares, circles, and lines. You really should google it and check it out if you’re curious. Otherwise, go with what you’re doing now. There’s nothing wrong with a proper list.

David Allen started the search for info on how to get my life in order and I’m thrilled with it. More and more these habits have become automatic.

Basically, I do GTD, but I’ve tweaked parts of it. Since I’m quite a linear thinker and tend to bite off more than I can chew, getting overwhelmed and disappointing myself, these other elements added to the system have made a big improvement.

I use GTD in the sense that I have an “Outcome” list: basically, the broad strategic directions for my life… things like “Be financially independent” “Help other people”, “Have rewarding friendships”, as well as other elements like health, fitness. Often I don’t even have a project under these, many are handled with daily routines.

I agree with Zen Habits that GTD is lacking a lot of structure, which can be helpful to people. It’s been said that the first hour is the rudder of the day. So I have a morning routine, which takes an hour long and is mostly health/fitness/personal development. It’s a fabulous start to the day and puts me a long way toward achieving many of my outcomes.