Hey!

I had trouble doing a 100% cut from disorganization to GTD organization. Difficulty is normal. But not, insurmountable. The one biggest help to getting on the GTD wagon for me, was getting my general reference filing system under control. Here is the process I advise new GTDers to follow:

Separate your office paper into three boxes:

Box 1: Projects: only live projects.
Box 2: General reference: might ever have a next action.
Box 3: Recycle

If this is too draconian, you can add a 4th box with "maybe" on the outside. Then, fill up the box and keep it in your garage until you realize you don't need it (put a 6 month appointment on your calendar to tickle you).

This will jettison 80% of the paper from your office. Now you have some room to work.

I'm a huge fan of Evernote.com for reference filing. Once you have a general reference box filled with paper, you need to scan the papers to PDF, and then enter the PDFs into Evernote where they will be OCRed and become full-text searchable. Now you have some room to work, and you can find stuff quickly and without frustration.

How to scan?

You can use your company copiers to scan to file, scan to email (every evernote account has an email address that you can send files to), or you can get a desktop scanner. I love my Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500 which scans both sides of the paper in 1 pass, has a 50 page input bin. I converted a 94,000 page file cabinet into Evernote in 1 week with this scanner. I scanned 17,500 pages in 4 days in December 2010.

Once you have your general reference file in Evernote, you will not have paper clutter in your office. Evernote's Web Clipper and Clearly browser add ins make capturing internet pages and snippets trivial. I have found that evernote is my GTD home base. A home system that is very forgiving to come back to, when I fall off the GTD wagon.

Hope this helps!

bill meade
restartgtd.com