I wanted to share an email I sent today to someone who was asking how to use Get It Done for their particular case. Many of you might find it useful:

Mike,

I need help in determining how to best use the app. I have numerous tasks and projects. From the Allen book, I was thinking about the follow categories: Two broad categories for Professional and Personal. Within these two domains, structure the following areas…Computer work; Telephone Calls; Errands; Office; Someday; Reference; Delegated; Waiting For

I have numerous complex projects for which I am responsible, including dissertations, research projects, manuscripts, and other administrative responsibilities. I am trying to organize my emails in the same fashion that I will set up my system in Getitdone. Help!

In your case I would do the following, I will start with the most broad category and then move down from there:

Create 2 ‘Areas of Responsibility’. Areas are the broadest category and when you are in a particular Area you will only see tasks and projects pertaining to the particular Area.

http://getitdoneapp.com/blog/areas-of-responsibility/

1. Professional (or Work)
2. Personal (or Home)

Within each Area you can further separate your tasks into projects. Projects are a group of tasks that need to get done to accomplish a particular goal:

http://getitdoneapp.com/blog/how-to-manage-projects/

Some projects in ‘Work’ Area might be:

• Telephone Calls
• Office
• Computer Work
• A particular research project or manuscript or dissertation (each individual one will be it’s own project)

Some projects in ‘Home’ Area might be:

• Errands
• Shopping list

Projects are set up so that each individual Project will have its own Inbox, Today, Next, and Someday folders. This is done automatically. To learn about these focuses:

http://getitdoneapp.com/blog/how-to-use-get-it-done-to-get-organized/

If you are ‘Waiting for’ or ‘Delegating’ tasks to someone else you should set up different People. I set up People with the following names:

http://getitdoneapp.com/blog/sharing-tasks-with-people/

• Waiting For (a general waiting for bucket)
• Reference
• John
• Bob
• Ania

If that particular person has a Get It Done account they will see the task in their Inbox, if they do not have an account it is a general bucket for your own records. If you enter an email address they will be sent a message asking to join Get It Done.

Tags are an even finer way you can organize your tasks. A few ways you might use tags:

• In any project you might have tags such as ‘Urgent’ to filter tasks that need to get done soon
• In Shopping list you might tag task as ‘Supermarket’ or ‘Clothes Store’ so you can quickly filter the list
• In a particular ‘Manuscript’ project you might tag tasks as ‘Chapter 1′ or ‘Introduction’ to see what tasks need to get done for a particular section
• Some people simply use tags such as ‘High’, ‘Low’ to set a priority.

Tags are very flexible and might be different for each project.

I think this is a good starting point for you. The system is very easy to use once you dive into it. You should probably start setting up the app in a fashion similar to this and if you have any questions let me know.

Filed under: Getting Things Done by Mike