The newest piece of my on-again-off-again, two-steps-forward-one-step-back dance with GTD is another attempting at getting the appropriate parts of my life into a calendar. In the past I've had a couple of false starts, where I did a reasonable job for a week or two, then slowly stopped checking my calendar regularly, completely eliminating the usefulness of having things there at all. Part of the problem was that I spent a lot of time at work, where I was using a different calendar system (I was on iCal at home), and looking at two calendars all the time was a pain. Plus, syncing back and forth from work to home was a mess when I was constantly switching computers and reinstalling the entire OS. (On top of which, syncing to development versions of an OS is not for the faint of heart; data loss in an environment where you know it could happen and plan accordingly is one thing, but automatically syncing that back to your home machine is another thing altogether.)
This time around I thought I should check out that whole Google Calendar thing, and it's really quite nice (and no, I'm not required to say that). It's a web interface, which means it's not quite iCal in some respects, but it's without a doubt very usable. On the other hand, it's a web interface, so it isn't iCal in some other respects too: access, both read and write, from anywhere internet-enabled (which is where I spend most of my time) being a big one. Perhaps even bigger is the very flexible inter-user calendar sharing system, which means that Laura and I can have a shared calendar that we can both write to (she has argued that we have one of those already, hanging in the kitchen, but as I can't get to it easily from my desk at home or at work, that's not terribly useful to me). So instead of Laura telling me things and hoping I remember to put them on the calendar, or me putting things on my calendar and hoping I remember to tell Laura, we'll only do the work once, and we'll both get the information reliably. I'm pretty confident that those two things will make the difference and keep me from falling off the wagon yet again.
On the other hand I'm often pretty confident when I start a new GTD piece, so we'll see how that goes. I can but try after all.
My hope is to slowly and steadily pick up GTD habits that I keep for more than a few weeks at a time; I've managed to get a couple to stick, and just those pieces have definitely made me at least a little less disorganized. Hopefully over time I can sidle up sideways to the eventual goal of stress-free productivity.
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