I'm a compulsive listmaker. If something isn't worth putting on a list, it's not worth doing – which is just as well, because if it's not on a list I wouldn't remember to do it in any case. I was half-heartedly taught concepts of time-management by my eccentric first boss Nick Hobbs, and as a result my life is ruled by sheets of scrap A4 paper which have been neatly torn into two scrap A5 bits of paper. They sit on a pile on my desk, and are used for endless drafts and redrafts of to-do lists. When a task is done, it gets struck through. When there's only a couple of things left on that bit of paper, it's rewritten on a fresh bit of scrap paper, along with the dregs from other bits of scrap paper, to form a lovely new to-do list.

I'm not telling you all this because I'm proud of my organisational tics – far from it – it's because I've spent today, once again, looking into software and web applications which might replace my arcane, olde worlde to-do-list system. And once again, I've come away thinking that none of them are as good. ( Read more... )

But what are your own time-management tricks? Do you use computer-based ones, or paper, or (god forbid) your brain? Do you subscribe wholeheartedly to the GTD ethos, or is Getting Things Done simply an avoidance technique for getting things done?