Combine personal and profession life

[JmyJon]

One of my biggest struggles is combing my personal and professional life into one GTD system. I've always tried to keep them seperate...I never wanted to work to intrude upon my personal life. Unfortunately, my job is forcing itself into my personal time. Any tips on integrating the two seperate lives? Any tips on combining my two lives? At work I use Outlook and a BlackBerry for email, calendar, and GTD. At home I use my BlackBerry and my Evernote on my iPhone. I've tried keeping Gmail calendar up-to-date for my wife's sake, but it's such a hassle adding calendar entries to my work calendar and Gmail calendar.

[PaulK]

I use a common list manager (Toodledo + Android Ultimate To Do List), but have separate 'folders' for work and personal.

Mostly use Context view in UTD to manage doing within both personal and work contexts.

I 'invite' myself to appointments from personal to work to ensure any out of work appointments are on the list. My work day is basically business hours, so I don't usually do the reverse unless there is an unusual work engagement.

[friemanw]

For me, integration has been essential. I use MS Outlook (calendar and tasks) on my iphone and on my laptop for all GTD lists, including my 40,000-foot view. Having only one system and one folder is much simpler. There is a trust factor in keeping personal tasks and appointments on a system at work, but the simplicity of one application took such a load off my shoulders, that I don't even think about it anymore. Also, the two sides of my life have been intertwined for many years. This quote from Lawrence Pearsall Jacks sums it up for me: "The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both."

[Oogiem]

Any tips on integrating the two seperate lives? Any tips on combining my two lives? At work I use Outlook and a BlackBerry for email, calendar, and GTD. At home I use my BlackBerry and my Evernote on my iPhone.

For me I can't imagine trying to separate work and personal. Now I do live where I work so that plays a part in it.

OTOH to me I see 3 separate systems in the above list and you have no way of knowing which one is the "current" one nor which one to put something in. The only reason I can see for such multiple GTD systems is if one or more is a secured classified system due to sensitive government work and needs to live in a SCIF for some reason.

My opinion is to pick the system that is working the best for you and also that you feel comfortable holding all of your data and use exclusively that for everything. For me that would be in a machine I totally control and of your choices I'd pick an iPhone

If you did that you can use different contexts so that you are not overwhelmed by work stuff at home and vice versa. You will probably end up with more contexts than "average" but that is ok. FWIW right now I am running with 20 contexts and that number will go up once summer is here.

[PeterW]

I agree that it's "one life" and have everything in one system - Appigo's Todo (iPhone, Mac & Web). I use two tags (Business and Personal) to separate tasks into these two areas of focus and then filter as needed. Some days when I feel OK seeing both types of tasks in the same list, then I turn off the filter.

[mattsykes]

The above responses are great. To cherry pick one or two of your questions:
- I use Google calendar sync. This synchronises my Outlook calendar with my gmail calendar, and my gmail calendar I share with my wife. I don't actually 'use' my gmail calendar for anything - it is purely a repository for (a) making sure my wife can be across what I have on, and (b) back-share so I can jump into my gmail calendar and see what my wife has on
- I would definitely advocate maintaining just one system. Personally, I've put together a spreadsheet to suit my way of deploying the GTD methodology, and I use SugarSync so that I can access it at home, at work, online, etc. I have my tags (areas of focus) set up to allow me to keep track of what relates to what part of my life - eg "w-itt" (work - info tech and telecoms), "s-dev" (self -development), etc etc