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I have been using both Omnifocus and Things before but for different reasons they are not yet good enough for my needs.

I have been using RTM on and off for a year but lately found a setup that makes RTM amazingly useful for me and it is now my trusted GTD system.

I have seen several different setups before, but frankly I found them quite cluttered and a bit too complicated.

Here is how I have set mine up:

Inbox, is used as it should, for dumping stuff that I need to process into.

Lists, I have a list for each area of focus such as "work", "finance", "health" ect.

Tags, I have tags for context such as @home, @computer @office ect. I have two tags, __someday and __scheduled. On top of that I have a tag for each project I have "vacation_italy" "buy_car".

I have some smartlists set up as well.
One for each context, that excludes the tags "__someday" and "__scheduled". Then I have one called "- >" for scheduled and one called "?" for someday.

As a result I only have to look at a screen that shows my areas, my someday and scheduled lists as well as my contexts that only contain my available actions.

During my weekly review I make sure to look at each project and the context tags with all actions in them, but during the day I don´t have to look at them if they are not available.

On top of that I use priorities for level of energi, so the actions that require a lot of energy will be !1

That means that a normal action would look like this:
"Take out trash" lives in the "home" list, is a !2 and is tagged with @home.

Example of a scheduled action

"Order tickets for Sherlock Holmes" lives in the "shopping" list, is a !2, is due at December 25. and is tagged with @online and __scheduled.

That way it will not bother me until then but will show up on my today list on the 25. when the tickets are available.

There are a few reasons why I love this setup compared to using Things or Omnifocus.
One is that it syncs brilliantly. I use an iPhone and a couple of macs and I can handle my lists everywhere and they sync instantly.
With something like GTD you should really feel that that you can trust your system. With Things I constantly have to worry if I closed the mac client for dropbox to work, and it keeps forgetting my tags. Omnifocus has OTA sync but it is unreliable and often takes about 2 minutes for me which basically makes it useless.

When I get a mail about some I need to do, I can just forward it to my RTM mail adress with a title that tells RTM what list I want it in, how it should be tagged ect.

Even if there is no mac client I have a very good solution with a flud app and Quicksilver for quickly dumping stuff into RTM.

It is so flexible I can keep on improving this system if I feel like it.

Happy to hear any questions and comments :)

Posted at 10:49am on November 13, 2009