Everyone who is implementing GTD (Getting Things Done) no matter on their BlackBerry or “offline” (like on paper, notebooks, whatever) knows what contexts and next actions are. It is actually pretty easy to use any kind of task application on a BlackBerry to do so but most of them including the original BlackBerry Tasks app are very cumbersome to use. So it is not really productive to do so but productivity and being more productive is a major goal for personal self-improvement.
Besides the fact that you want to be productive you might also want to synchronize your tasks with your desktop system like Microsoft Outlook. We have already wrote a complete howto on how to set this up with Windows PC’s as well as with Mac OS X computers. However, the majority of BlackBerry users are business users like you and me. So you might have got your BlackBerry from your employer and you are not allowed to sync’ it with your desktop. But the device came by default with wireless synchronization of your emails, tasks, calendar items, contacts and so on. So if your tasks are synchronized with your let’s say Microsoft Exchange account you will also get the same tasks onto your desktop Outlook client as you have on your BlackBerry. This applies to your contexts too which appear as categories in Outlook. However, if you are using NextAction! on your BlackBerry you might also projects.
Projects in the field of GTD
A project is defined in wikipedia like this:
Projects — Every open loop in one’s life or work which requires more than one physical action to achieve becomes a project. These projects are tracked and periodically reviewed to make sure that every project has a next action associated with it, and thus can be moved forward.
In NextAction! projects and context are internally handled quite similar. Their information is stored in the usual category field. While a context is a normal name / string; a project’s category carries a prefix (default: “p:”). This makes projects appear in your Outlook as categories as well but it will look like this:
p:Company Setup
However, the cool thing is: those project settings are carried over to Outlook as well. Though they appear as normal categories the data is not lost during any kind of synchronization. No matter the sync’ is being done in a wireless or the old school way.
So once the synchronization via BES (BlackBerry Enterprise Server) is running - it should have been set up by your BlackBerry admin - you do not need to set up anything else. This is pretty awesome and very convenient.
As I wrote in previous posts I am using NextAction! to implement GTD with my BlackBerry. It works pretty well with all current BlackBerry models and even comes with a 30 day demo version. The new version 3.0 also features a someday/maybe list which is very useful for many GTD pros. I just use it from time to time … you could say: someday/maybe …
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