My GTD Setup, April 2022

I’ve been rethinking how I organise my life of the last few months. While I’m a lot better at it than I used to be, I still have periods where stuff gets backlogged for one reason or another, or I forget something.

One major change has been to move my calendars from Fastmail to iCloud. While Apple’s Calendar and Reminders apps work fine with Fastmail, there are some features that are only available when you’re connected to iCloud.

The other major change has been to use DEVONthink where it’s most useful — automatically filing and converting things for me — and stop using it solely as another place to dump stuff.

I have MailMate set up on the Mac to send things like receipts and invoices directly to DEVONthink, as well as anything that I send to the Archive folder. Those emails are then deleted, as I only need the archived copy.

I don’t send emails to any other app, instead I will manually create either a calendar event or a reminder for whatever needs to be done.

(I’ve also started to use iCloud Mail again, and thus far I’ve not had any problems with it other than the hiccups I documented previously around setting up iCloud+ custom email domains.)

I’ve now added the Notes app back into my GTD mix. In the past I’ve avoided it, partly because I was using other apps and partly because it seemed rather limited. But now that it has matured, I’m willing to give it another look. For now it’s restricted to collecting links to stuff I want to refer back to, and we’ll see how things develop from there.

So my GTD setup now looks like this:

iPhone

• Mail
• Calendar
• Reminders
• Notes

Mac

• MailMate
• Calendar
• Reminders
• Notes
• DEVONthink
• Hazel (for routing files into DEVONthink as and when required)

I’m pretty certain that I’m probably missing a few tricks with regard to Apple’s stock apps, so some reading of the relevant Take Control books will be required.