Apologies for the broken link – it looks like my shortener domain has broken. I’ve updated that link so you can click through on it now.

There are some aspects of Mail Pilot that I think need working on – like you I prefer a calendar to hold anything that I want to do on a particular day, and I’d rather have everything in a single list, rather than one in my mail client and another in (in my case) Wunderlist. I’ve now got beta access Mail Pilot and I’ll post a review in the coming days.

I flag all my mail as “for follow up” when it comes in. I use a rule in outlook to do that automatically. My root inbox has a “view” applied. I only see mail that is flagged. It’s there, and I’ve unflagged it, I don’t see it. I go through my mail unflagging it. When I see an email that I want to follow up on, I hit a button called “create task”. This is only of those macro things. It creates a task in outlook. It attached the email that I’m currently processing automatically. All I do is assign a category. I treat categories in outlook as gtd contexts, so @home, @computer, @calls, are my categories.

What happens when I discover something that must be done on a certain date? I do like Allen suggests. I add it as an all day, non-blocking calendar entry. I do one more step, which is to attach an outlook item to that task. Usually the email that spurred me to create the task. I create few specific tasks assigned on dates. Rathe than deferring emails, I process them once…. But if I have something date specific, I use the above mentioned technique, but assign it to a future date, not today.

I do use a mix of paper folders and Evernote. Using Evernote is not bad because there’s not really a native outlook feature to equate to it. Integration with OneNote is about e same as Evernote.

It’s very much a case of ‘horses for courses’; I’m still trying to find my GTD nirvana – it’s become a mission now to the point of obsession. However, the system I’m currently using (a mixture of Mac Mail, BusyCal, Evernote and Wunderlist) works for me. It just niggles me that, with traditional mail client applications, one is forced into using idioms (highlighting items with a star, for instance) as this can be limiting. I’ve added the Mail Tags (http://acol.es/stMailTags) plugin into my mail client, which provides more subtlety / variety.

But, in my spare time, I’m still searching for Nirvana

Using the Priority Inbox view, I add a star to highlight a message for later follow-up, or Add to Tasks or Create event from the More menu. (In fact, Create event doesn’t currently appear to be working. Damn!) I forward reference material directly to my Evernote upload email address.

I did try Wunderlist and a number of other cross-platform GTD tools, but integration with Gmail turned out to be the killer. Gmail tasks is incredibly basic, but it works for me.