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Getting things done with your iPod Nano

I’ve been an on-again off-again user of Dav­id Allen’s Get­ting Things Done (GTD) sys­tem for a few years now. If you fol­low the GTD sys­tem, you’ll be aware that one of the things to do is cre­ate a sys­tem that is easy and always avail­able. This has been my down­fall on more than one occasion.…

I’ve been an on-again off-again user of Dav­id Allen’s Get­ting Things Done (GTD) sys­tem for a few years now. If you fol­low the GTD sys­tem, you’ll be aware that one of the things to do is cre­ate a sys­tem that is easy and always avail­able. This has been my down­fall on more than one occasion.

Cur­rently, I’m using my iPod Nano as my action­able stor­age con­tain­er. It’s smal­ler than my Palm TX, always with me, and able to store notes, appoint­ments, con­tact inform­a­tion, and almost any­thing else you’d need to take advant­age of those con­text-sens­it­ive opportunities.

The down­side is that it’s more dif­fi­cult to add or edit data in the unit when you’re away from your desktop.

Here’s a few of the things pos­sible with the iPod/GTD:

  • Listen to GTD Audio books to review con­cepts and processes
  • Timeshift — listen to your pod­casts (espe­cially For Imme­di­ate Release) while driv­ing, using an FM Trans­mit­ter. There’s a long story and a whole oth­er post on this topic.
  • Cal­en­dar — sync your appoint­ments and todos with Out­look and oth­er desktop cal­en­dar­ing programs.
  • Notes — Use it as a read-only PDA. Store phone num­bers, addresses and oth­er information.
  • Clock/Alarm — Built into the Nano. Great for keep­ing you on task and on time.

I’m sure there are more ideas, but my Nano is beep­ing at me telling me I’ve spent enough time cre­at­ing this blog post. Time to move on to my next task.

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2 responses to “Getting things done with your iPod Nano”

  1. chris Avatar
    chris

    As a GTD new­bie who also owns a Nano (and an older 40G reg­u­lar iPod), I know what you’re talk­ing bout here, Brad.

    While I’m still feel­ing my way around, so far I’m using a super high tech Mole­skine for my next actions/other GTD lists, and it’s also basic­ally act­ing as a port­able col­lec­tion buck­et, too. I don’t use a PDA, and while I do sync my iPods with my home com­puter­’s contacts/ calendars/ pod­casts it’s really not part of my GTD sys­tem, oth­er than the Dav­id Allen audiobook that’s on it 😉

    There may be some PC soft­ware that helps hook the two togeth­er — I know that on the Mac side there’s this: http://www.kaboomerang.com/blog/category/ipod/

    Worth search­ing for any­way, if there is indeed a PC pro­gram that will take care of auto­mat­ic­ally syncing all your GTD lists, etc. with the Notes func­tion on the iPod for you.

    Reply
  2. Brad Grier Avatar
    Brad Grier

    Thanks for the note Chris.

    I’ve tried the free tri­al for iPod­Sync (http://www.ipod-sync.com/), but haven’t totally com­mit­ted to it yet. I will have to hook it up to my laptop at work to give it a thor­ough runthrough 🙂

    Reply

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