I’ve been spending precious time trying to lessen precious time spent on building a core Getting Things Done system that I could use. I’ve tried a whole bunch of software, web hosting, etc. There is one tool which I use every day for the better or worse, which I’ve felt should be the central point for my tasks and time management. That would be Outlook 2007. I don’t particularly care for Outlook; but the 2007 version offers enough customization to be able to build a basic GTD system. I’ve made the following changes based on this site’s suggestions:
1) I transformed my tasks menus and categories into a minimal set of Next Actions like @Computer, @Travel, @Personal. I’ve added agenda items for the folks that I interact with most often. I also added in a series of Projects that I tend to deal with everyday.
2) I changed and customized the views to reflect more of a Next Action philosophy.
3) I added in something which I had felt never was particularly good; namely categorized Notes.
The niceness of this system is that the core setup transfers to all the systems I use Outlook on with little additional work. Our company exchange server helps out quite a bit with this effort.
So what are the strengths and weaknesses? Well, a strength is that this system is much quicker and light weight to access and I see it everyday when I do mail. Its not another application which I have to click on. It seems to be be very responsive to additions and changes. On the negative side, its primarily Outlook. But, the real thing is that even if it is Outlook, it offers a consolidated picture for me of email, tasks, calendaring; and it moves to my windows mobile phone nicely.
Will I stick with GTD? Who knows. If it becomes more trouble to categorize, manage, deal with the system I may not. But my current GTD trusted system and workflow seems decent. The whole setup is easy to manage. I did notice that there is a GTD add-in for outlook which I may also try. I am waiting to hear how it works in an exchange 2007 environment.
Does this make me evil incarnate or somehow less when it comes to Linux? I doubt it. I just use the tool that works. So heap the blame on if you feel like it 
