I'm busy. My hours are from can till can't, and with a wife, three babies and a teen, a small business, remodeling projects, and friends my life was quickly becoming a big ball of crazy. One way I've been ironing out that big ball of crazy into a more manageable train wreck is by trying to implement some of the theories in David Allen's Getting Things Done Fast seminar.

Of course I'm trying to tackle a fair amount of this with technology, and here's what I'm doing.

1. Using the iphone to synchronize the calendars on it with Google Calendars, then setting up my work outlook to push calendar events to Google calendars. This allows my wife to see everything on my calendar, and lets me see everything on hers, and we clobber each other a lot less. We can update the calendar from our phones on the go. This was a nonstop source of stress before, because she would put stuff on her calendar at the house, but I would never check it since I didn't keep my calendar there. I'm too busy to transfer everything from her calendar to my calendar daily.

Here is the article on how to sync your phone with Google: http://www.google.com/mobile/products/sync.html
Choose your phone from the drop down, and follow the instructions. With the iPhone you will have to use the exchange connector, which has the benefit of also letting you get push email, but the downside is that the iPhone will only let you use the Microsoft connector to connect to 1 provider. So if you have a work exchange server you are syncing with then you will be forced to choose.

The way my wife and I synchronize our calendars to our phones is that she uses her own email account on her iphone, but she has her calendar set up to synchronize with mine. That works as seamlessly as I could hope for.

2. Use google tasks.
Google tasks has some bad limitations foremost not being able to go offline in an application that you sync to. It also doesn't let you have nested tasks, so you can't have a category called say "big project", then have categories underneath it like "planning", "implementations", "testing", then put your actual tasks underneath that drill down. That seems petty, but when you empty your life into a planning application you will be surprised how handy that would be to have.

The good thing is that Google tasks also integrates with the web Google calendar application nicely. Here is a howto on setting that up: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/05/google-calendar-adds-tasks.html

You can also make google tasks into a standalone icon on the iphone if you are interested in doing so. I prefer to have it right on my front page. First download the Google application for the iphone, then open up your tasks. Then click the + button at the bottom, and choose [Add to Home Screen].

Please note that the tasks won't show up on your calendar in the iphone, it will only show up on the google calendar in your browser if you set it up to. This is horribly aggravating, and I wish they would fix it. In my opinion it needs to just be treated as an all day task if Google isn't' going to add a time picker to the tasks webapp.

3. You can try out the OmniFocus application if you have an iPhone which is pretty highly reviewed, and looks great to me, but the deal breaker to me is that it won't sync with my calendar, and it's corny on how you have to set up a webdav server to synchronize to just so it is backed up.