I have been using slightly twisted version of GTD for my everyday tasks as well as for my long term goals for last 8 months, and it has been a great ride. I want to share my overall setup of my GTD system and then the each piece of the setup in more details. In this post, I am going to explain my overall setup of the GTD system.

Before I dig in, let me put my requirements and use-cases so that one can understand why my setup exists:

  • I should be able to follow GTD not strictly but with modifications as per my needs.
  • I should be able to use just one system to track my daily tasks as well tasks for my long term goals.
  • I should be able to use the same system for my home and office tasks, but still be able to separate them so that * I don’t endup caring about the office-related tasks at home (for the most part). The tasks should be backed-up in cloud as well as on the client side.
  • I should also see my scheduled tasks in my iOS/OSX calendar.
  • All parts of the system are always in sync.
  • Lastly, I don’t mind to shell out some limited amount of dollars for the setup.

I know! A long and complex list of use-cases to begin with.

To get things done my way, I have tried a lot of apps and services that claims to do GTD. Most of them were good but either they won’t fit into my requirements or they were simply not following any version of GTD! I won’t name all the options that I tried as they as a lot of them and also does not serve the purpose of this post which to share my existing and working solution.

After trying out a number of options, I finally stick to these apps/services:

  • 2Do (iPhone and Mac app)
  • Toodledo (cloud backup/sync)
  • iOS/OSX Calendar

And this how I set them up to meet all my above requirements:

My GTD setup

I found 2Do allowed me to modify and use my own version of GTD as the app provides a lot of flexibility and options to tweak the process. I will go deeper into my tweaked GTD process using this app in a future post, but for now I will just post my complete system setup.

2Do does provide a lot of options to sync the tasks using multiple cloud services like DropBox, iCloud and Toodledo. I chose to go with Toodledo, as it fit nicely with 2Do and also allows me to get the tasks to show up in my Calendar apps.

So when I add tasks using 2Do on my iPhone and/or Mac, it gets synced with Toodledo. Then once you add Toodledo as ICS subscription to the Calendar/iCal, you can view all the scheduled tasks in your calendar as well. I use 2Do on my iPhone primarily for tracking my non-office tasks while the one on my Mac for my office tasks even though I keep both in sync and can see, add and edit them on either iPhone and Mac. But in order to separate myself from office work while at home, I have tweaked the system so that I don’t worry or even see most of my office tasks on my iPhone.

This setup has worked wonders for me, keeping me up to date of all my tasks no matter where and how I add them.

Let me know in comments if you have used similar setup and have suggestions on how to make it even better.