I just ran across an interesting new service called Nudgemail. Nudgemail is a tool that allows you to send yourself an email at a later time and date. It is great for sending yourself reminders that will show up when you need them rather than sit in your email box or get forgotten. It works well with the Getting Things Done method of task management. Nudgemail can operate as your “tickler file”. You can send yourself specific instructions or you can simply forward an email that you received but aren’t ready to act on yet.

The way that you use Nudgemail is simple. In fact, it is so simple that people get confused because they expect something more complicated. You just send the email from your account to Nudgemail, using the date and time you want to receive the email as the address before the @ sign. The best way to demonstrate this is by example.

noon@nudgemail.com will send you an email at noon that day (or the next day if it is already past noon in your time zone.)

January15@nudgemail.com will send you an email on the fifteen of January.

15days@nudgemail.com will send you an email in fifteen days.

The body of the email you get is exactly what you sent. Whether you send instructions, a reminder, or forward an email you received, that is what you’ll get when the time comes. It’s a great reminder service, and completely free. I recommend that you try it.

GTDagenda.com is a paid membership site that provides people the online tools to organize their tasks and track their progress. It is modeled after the advice given in the popular book, Getting Things Done by David Allen. I first started using it back in January, and I have been using it to track my tasks ever since.

My big goal for the year has been to get more organized. It isn’t an easy goal. Life is complicated and every time you think you have things under control, it throws something new at you. For me it was a lingering illness that struck me on the second day of the year and didn’t let up until March. I wasn’t quite so sick that I couldn’t do my job (most days) but it took almost all of the energy I had just to get through a work day. Consequently, my efforts at organizing my work life have been far more effective than my efforts at organizing my personal life, but I keep plugging away.

I begin most of my days at work by reviewing my task list and spending a few minutes brainstorming. I actually think about the best ways to accomplish my tasks before I start doing them. I try to figure out what the roadblocks are and how I can get through them or around them. I make a plan and on my best days I stick to that plan. Not every day is my best day, but there is no doubt that I have been more productive, even when my body wasn’t at its best.

As a tool for helping me accomplish my organizational goals, GTDagenda.com has been very useful. GTDagenda.com allows me to keep a list of my projects, tasks, and next actions. I start off with my goals. I identify the outcome that I want to accomplish. I then make a list of projects that will help me achieve that goal, and I divide the projects up into tasks and next actions. It is very good at doing this, although the interface could be more intuitive. It took me a while to learn the fastest way to do this, and even that method isn’t quite as automatic as I would like. I would love to have a page that allowed me to fill out all of these things without jumping around. As it is I tend to load about four pages for even the most basic project. As David Allen explains in his book, the longer it takes to track something, the more likely you are to not track it.

The other two things I would like to see added to GTDagenda.com are a search feature and a more robust note-taking system. There is no way for me to do a quick search for a particular task. Instead I have to scan the entire list or try to narrow it down by selecting a category. I have about 50 tasks on my list right now, and at one point it was closer to 75. Scanning through every task every time you want to change something can slow you up. Note taking is just a great idea all around. I often have information I want to attach to my tasks, and the only note feature is a single line field that isn’t suitable for more than about 50 characters. It will do in a pinch, but I often have more to say than that.

These are minor complaints though. GTDagenda.com is definitely a useful too for tracking projects and it does follow the Getting Things Done process well. It also has some very useful features, such as the daily task email. Every day I get my list of outstanding tasks in my in box. They also have a mobile phone version of the site that gives me the basic functionality I need to access a task. These two items make it easy to stay on top of my tasks even when I only have my Blackberry.

If you are looking to get organized, I recommend that you read Getting Things Done, and if you think it is the system for you, give GTDagenda.com a try.

Disclosure Note: I was given free access to this site in order to review it. Links are affiliate links.

My adventures in organization have had a few rough days as I have been battling both a cold and a ruthlessly time-consuming new project at work. After performing the big purge on my home office, I have had to be content with small moments dedicated to the overall task pf putting everything in its place, especially all of the unfulfilled mental loops that come from 40+ years of living on this planet. There are many things I want to do, many things I need to do, and many things I need to decide I am never going to do. This is all part of the organizational process. You cannot get a handle on all the tasks that lie before you until you make an accurate list of them and decide what you are going to do about them.

Because I am using the Getting Things Done organizational system, I am obliged to make a complete and accessible collection of these unfinished projets. At minimum I need to list each project, the desired outcome, and the next action step towards achieving that outcome. Projects may be as minor as transferring data from my wife’s old notebook computer or as major as publishing a book of poetry or taking a trip to New Zealand. Once this information is collected, I need to track my progress on each item. This is no small task, but it is certainly achievable.

My first major hurdle was to decide what system to use to track these projects. Getting Things Done proposes several systems, but none of them suited me particularly well. Paper files were exactly what I didn’t want. The idea behind getting organized was to free up both my mental and physical space. I want to dispose of every piece of paper I can possibly be rid of, so having a file cabinet full of them was not a pleasant thought. I tried it, but I just had no enthusiasm for the idea. If I have too many papers to keep in an inbox, it is time to purge.

The alternative to paper was electronic organizers, but the problem with most of them is convenience. I want to be able to access my tasks from anywhere, but I don’t want them tied to a particular device because then I am out of luck if something happens to it. I needed something that I could access from my Blackberry, my iTouch, my personal computer and my work computer. In fact, the best solution would be something that I could use even if I didn’t have access to any of these. I thought about using some of the Google tools or some other online package, but I wasn’t sure I could have access to them from work. An organizational system would do me no good if I couldn’t use it in the main place that I needed it.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the answer was right in front of my face. What I needed was a blog! I’m a blogger. I know WordPress better than almost any other tool at my disposal, and it is perfect for capturing individual items that require notes and updates. I can write as much as I want about each task and even attach files if I need to. The list is searchable and can be filtered using both categories and tags. More importantly, I can access the blog from every one of my key devices or from any open computer. I know enough about WordPress and file protection to keep the new site secure and invisible so that nobody needs to see it but me. I can even use the scheduling feature to move items into future cues so I see them on certain dates and not before. In essence, WordPress is my new organizational tool and it meets every one of my needs. Blogging has scored another brownie point in my life,

Of course, there is theory and then there is practice. I am still imputing all of my loops, but I’ll keep you updated on how things go and at some point I’ll give the details behind setting an organizational blog up for yourself.