The next port of call was my organisational methods. I’m pretty good at what I do, I’ve just spend quite a long time doing it without having to factor anyone else into the equation. I needed to re-equip myself with the tools and methodology to slot into a fairly well organised and established company.

So I started digging into GTD, or Getting Things Done, a productivity paradigm formulated by Dave Allen to help manage a hectic daily workload. In brief, it’s based around task lists and actioning those the tasks on them at the appropriate time (if you need to buy toilet roll there is no point being reminded to pick some up when you are in the middle of a meeting). The principles are simple and the explanation by Dave Allen in his book are clear and concise, I’m now well on the way to getting all my ‘stuff’ in order.

Enter The Technology

In the home-office I work on PC, it’s a lifestyle choice that I know not every designer agrees with, but it’s my life, my choice if anyone calls me out I can fill any number of posts explaining why it’s my prefered option.

At work the studio desktops are Mac only, that’s their choice and I need to live with that – which I would be totally happy to do if there were a decent email client for the Mac. Entourage is just ‘designered up’ enough to be a nightmare for an Outlook user, and Mac Mail is simply dreadful, dreadful in all the nasty spiky teeth ways you can imagine.

I really did try to live with Entourage, but after two months I gave up and bought a Tosh laptop. To keep the studio happy the Tosh sits, just slightly ajar, at the back of my desk and I RDC into Windows 7 (2) from the Mac to use Outlook (and the other Office apps which I much prefer to the Mac offerings).

To round things off nicely I have an iPhone 3G, almost the perfect SmartPhone. If you could mush together all the good of the iPhone and all the good of the N95 (my previous phone) I truly believe you would have the ultimate SmartPhone.

So I have all this cross-platform kit I now need to get syncing with each other. Email is easy now I’m on an exchange server, I can log in from the Home PC, the Tosh laptop and for a couple of extra quid a month from the iPhone as well. On the laptop I have the POP3 email account for work deliver into the Exchange Inbox automatically every hour (1). My inbox, contacts, calendars, tasks and folders are the same regardless of which machine I logon to and they contain all the mail that is relevant for day-to-day functioning, it’s my digital ‘Inbox’.

Going Mobile

Exchange and the iPhone play nice with each other so I have my email, calendar and contacts synced with the iPhone. However, the fly in the ointment is tasks, they aren’t synced at all.

This is where Toodledo steps in to save the day. Using the Toodledo web site, their iPhone application and the 3rd party Toodledo to Outlook sync tool (3) I get my tasks synced across to the mobile. That’s the full GTD experience on the iPhone, the home PC, the Tosh Lappy and the work Mac.

Bring on Live Mesh to close the Circle

Last but not least Live Mesh brings it all together enabling me to sync my reference folders with every machine (bar the iPhone at the moment, but maybe soon). I have word and excel templates, OneNote folders, research and reference ‘stuff’’ in these folders. I was totally blown away by how useful it is to have all this available, on the desktop of any machine I’m logged onto.

1. Work email received into Exchange Inbox
2. RDC into Windows 7 from the Mac
3. Toodledo to Outlook sync tool

And Finally…

I’ll say it again – if you regularly use more than one PC/Mac and there is any way you can afford it, get a hosted Exchange account, it will change your life! Live Mesh is free as is the Toodledo to Outlook sync tool. For the full Toodledo service there is a small cost ($30/year) and RDC for the Mac is Free.