In our Unstoppable course, we are reading Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. For me, this was revisiting a concept that the tech community has embraced for a very long time. While I was familiar with GTD, I hadn’t found one tool to really increase my productivity… until now. In our class, we were also given access to Nozbe, a GTD-based personal productivity tool.

Let’s look at how I used to do things versus where Nozbe may lead me.

Sarah’s Scattered Tracking

Before Nozbe, I was using multiple tools to keep track of things to do:

  • Outlook - for email communication and meetup/reminders
  • Trello - for planning large projects and even business tracking
  • OneNote - for grocery lists, packing lists, questions for doctors lists, and all other everyday lists; meeting notes; conference brainstorming
  • Post-Its - for disconnected planning

Having multiple tracking tools means multiple places to check to make sure that things are done. Sometimes, I was using the wrong tool to track something, for lack of a better tool - like using Trello to track curriculum progress when neither of us really logged into Trello to move the cards. Sometimes, I was spending more time searching to see where I had put something, which tool I had settled on for a particular task. I needed another tool in my productivity tool belt to stay focused and get things done.

Nozbe - Getting Things Done

This week, I started with Nozbe. I’ll be the first to admit that I briefly watched the videos and read the articles I was supposed to for this week. I was more focused on “ooh! new tool! gotta play!”. I’m one of those who hates reading documentation (which should sound familiar to some of you) - I learn best by doing things, playing around, and figuring things out on my own. After all, I am an engineer by trade - that Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Engineering & Technology (CSET) is sometimes used to stretch into the engineering realm.

So I started moving many of my to-dos into Nozbe.

While our assignment this week was to move the tasks, to me floating tasks are clutter, something I cannot deal with. So I figured out its projects functionality and added tasks to projects. This is part of what I worked on this week:

These are some of the things I like about Nozbe:

  • Checklists to be able to check things off as they are done
  • Grouping to-dos in related projects
  • Being able to share projects with people so that they can see what’s getting done and contribute
  • Having a responsive web site that works on a mobile application - otherwise, without this, I wouldn’t use it, as they don’t have a Windows Phone application, and the last thing I need is to be tied down to a desktop application.

Conclusion

Overall, having something that’s easily accessible by phone and lets me create lists and check things off means that there’s a better chance at me increasing productivity. I’m looking forward to seeing where I will go with Nozbe at my fingertips!