Five tools to help you adopt the GTD method

Whether you like it or not, school is just around the corner. I must admit I liked this time of the year when I was a kid: buying new books and new stationery was exciting, and I looked forward to meeting school friends again after a few weeks without seeing them.

Now it’s a bit different: going back to work may not sound that thrilling, but hopefully having some time off in summer will have helped you gather all the energy you need for a fresh start. Also, there are a lot of tools that can help you stay organized all throughout the year, many of them based on the popular GTD (Getting Things Done) productivity method.

image by orcmic

So if you plan to start managing your projects and tasks in a more organized, productive way, here’s a bunch of apps that can lend you a hand:

ActiveInbox – A Firefox extension that enables you to apply the GTD method right into your Gmail account. ActiveInbox creates the appropriate labels to identify GTD actions, and a special box to check the list of current projects, references and other elements.

JelloDashboard – An Outlook plugin that organizes your emails in different lists according to the GTD principles. This enables you to focus on what is really important and work on all your tasks, one at a time, without wasting energy or resources.

Doit.im – More like a lighter version of GTD, Doit.im is a productivity tool based that enables you to deal with all pending tasks more effectively. It’s based on Adobe AIR, has support for online syncing, and lets you create tasks with notes, tags and alarm options.

GTD-Free – A basic, standalone app (no installation required) that helps you organize your tasks according to the principles of GTD very simply. Create queues of actions, schedule tasks, assign priorities, follow up projects… all of it in a neat interface.

ThinkingRock – A complete, feature-rich task organizer that faithfully follows the GTD principles. ThinkingRock helps you gather tasks, identify them and organize them into the appropriate list, according to whether they’re immediately actionable or not.