This guide is derived from what I learned about GTD, a helpful set of links, and doing what works on the job.  If you are part of the modern workforce, you most likely spend your day jumping between a myriad of tasks: replying to emails; preparing presentations; creating financial models in Excel; designing the layout for a new feature; and the occasional quasi-human contact by picking up the phone.

I used to keep a physical record of what I needed to do, but it ended up becoming laborious and more often then not, I ended up missing out on important items.

I now use Microsoft OneNote to keep track of my work life.  I spend most of my time on multiple projects that are in different stages and have many moving pieces. I am always taking notes and action items come up.

I needed a way to create a to-do list on the fly, and OneNote did the trick.  By using its tagging feature, you can tag work items right in your notes and have them aggregated automatically:

This system allows me to be efficient by categorizing the kinds of work that I need to do.  Here is what a larger list looks like:

To give this kind of task management a shot, all you need is Microsoft OneNote 2007 and 15 minutes of free time.  I will walk you through setting up tagging.

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It most likely will kill personal blogging. More and more people are shifting their time away from their Blogger and Wordpress accounts and investing it in Twitter writing their thoughts, posting sites they find, and sharing tweets they enjoy. If anything is going away, it is people expressing a thought in more than 140 characters.

If you add sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Tumblr into the mix, you start to notice that there is no need to post your “Family Vacation” or a quote you like to your personal blog.  You use one of these services. For more detailed expression by passionate people or subject matter experts, blogs will still prevail.  For current events and formal reporting a mix of blogging and online article publishing will still exist.

Twitter has become a mechanism to get to articles and blog posts. In some ways it is more effective than RSS Readers because it is a constant stream of short text bites that are easy to process and it does not have an “inbox” feeling. Twitter allows publishers to tweet links to articles they write, posts they find on the web, and also their personal thoughts. It is a great consumption experience.

What really is happening is that Twitter isn’t killing Newspapers.  Blogs aren’t killing them either. Media publishers will have to recognize which tool is right for the job if they want to succeed. Articles for more formal publications. Blog Posts for more personal, opinion editorials. Then they have syndication options. They should be providing options for users to subscribe via RSS and Twitter.

Twitter pushes content faster and more direct than RSS does.  And RSS delivers content directly better than traditional sites.