... into the rigid structures of a clusterfumble of computers, PDAs, and mobile phones.  But it was futile.  I yearned to scribble in the margins, draw big circles around things, dash off arrows to connect related thoughts.

Oh sure, I had tried out the Hipster PDA (verdict: too hipster), read up on the Moleskine notebooks (verdict: too much pressure to be Hemingway, Picasso, or Chatwin), and even thought about Getting Things Done, but I just wasn’t up to the task.

It was all so ... involved.

And then, one fateful day in early 2005, a random trip to a stationery store changed my entire perspective.  No longer was I going to be hamstrung by electronica, for I was going full-on analog, with a nice thick black grid-ruled Miquelrius notebook.  And a pen.

So for the next few months, I slowly evolved my own style for personal organization, using just the notebook.  It was brutally simple, didn’t require much forethought or planning, and kept me focused on the tasks at hand rather than on organizing.  And it worked.

But it wasn’t until a fateful encounter with Dave Gray and a few others in San Francisco several months later that I realized that I may actually have a system here.

So with a bit of goading, I wrote up what I’ve been doing, and gave it a name: Getting Sh-t Done, or the GSD system.  It’s quick, it’s dirty, and it doesn’t require a lot of preparation, special materials, or rigorous thinking.

So enough intro babble.  How does this system actually work?  Read on...