Quote Originally Posted by lake View Post
Can you ,please, say where I can find this David Allan's recommendation?
It seems that I missed some part of GTD implementation.

And how you synchronize your projects (next actions) manager with your reference system?
Do you manually duplicate projects in todomanager and Evernote? Tags?

For me it is quite painful to open todomanager, chose next action, then to open Evernote and to try to find reference material, which I need in order to do chosen next action.
Thank you for seeing that you may have been a bit over the top.

The separation between reference and actionable is built into the five stages of workflow, but I've heard the recommendation to not blend reference and actions so many times I can't pinpoint a single place anymore.

My project support material is largely in three places: brief info needed for planning and doing goes into notes for projects and next actions, longer project reference information goes into SimpleNote/NValt, and project files are in dropbox. I use Evernote for reference, not project support. To give concrete examples, email gets clipped into next actions when I need to respond to an email, plans for a trip get collected into SimpleNote/NValt and things like manuscripts are filed in folders in Dropbox, organized by areas of focus and then projects. I use tags in Evernote, but not for much else. I don't have a problem finding stuff, but I am separating real project information from things I put in Evernote, like plays I have seen or an article I might use in a class. So in that sense I'm not following DA's recommendation for one filing system. On the other hand, DA is ok with specialized filing systems for things like finances or client files, and I see what I do as not much different.

One thing I do know about myself is that while I am attracted to tech-heavy tricks that aim to automate workflow, they distract me from my real work far more than they increase my productivity. So I keep trying to suppress my inner nerd. Simple and elegant is what I aim for, but I often fall short.