About GTD Setup Guides 
The GTD methodology is software neutral. Some software will certainly work better than others, but it means that the apps you use for your GTD implementation are up to you. Over the past 15 years, we’ve built up a library of GTD setup guides for the most common software apps. Each guide goes through a rigorous vetting process by the David Allen Company team to ensure it will work well for a wide range of people. For us to write a guide, it also needs to be an app that has good traction in the GTD community, given the considerable investment of time, expense, and effort we put into each guide.
GTD & Outlook
The first GTD guide we ever created was Outlook® 2003 for Windows. We had some corporate clients using it and we needed to give them a good summary of our best practices for Outlook, so they could implement GTD throughout their organizations. By the way, that first guide was 10x the price we offer them these days, as we have streamlined how we produce the guides and can make them more affordable for more people. Since that first guide, we’ve created guides for Outlook 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. The 2013/2016 versions have minimal differences (mostly cosmetic), so those are a combined guide.
Throughout all of those versions of the Outlook guide, we have recommended setting up Tasks using the master category list. That’s been a good, reliable solution for sorting Tasks and Notes. Until now. A big hole in the Outlook space for users has been syncing to a mobile device. Some third-party apps tried to fill the gap, but there’s never been a native solution from Microsoft. That changed this summer with the release of Microsoft To-Do for iPhone, Android, and Windows mobile devices. Finally! However, we quickly learned that our method of using the master category list wouldn’t work anymore, because the To-Do app doesn’t support the master category list (nor does Outlook online/365).
We’re excited to announce a new GTD & Outlook Setup Guide for 2013/2016 that configures Tasks in a totally different way than our previous Outlook guides. Goodbye mastery category list. Hello Task folders. But it’s not just Tasks that changed, but also what we’re recommending for Notes, shortcut keys, and more. If you have any interest at all in seeing Tasks in Outlook online/365 or your mobile device through To-Do, the new guide is definitely worth getting.
GTD Guides for Other Software
Not an Outlook user? We also have GTD setup guides for Things 3®, OmniFocus®, Nirvana® (coming soon!), OmniFocus®, Outlook® for Mac, iPhone®/iPad®, Trello®, Wunderlist®, Todoist®, Evernote® for Mac, Evernote® for Windows, OneNote®, Google Apps® for Android, Google Apps for Desktop, IBM Lotus Notes®, and BlackBerry®. See all of the GTD setup guides here.
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