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Best approach I've seen to task/life management I've been trying for years to "get organized". I've tried elaborate to do list scenarios on my Palm organizer; I even had a consultant in many years ago as part of my professional development to help me work through and prioritize endless stacks of e-mail and things to do. Before the company spam filter was put in place, it was almost all I could do to get through my spam and delete it every day. One of the problems is that I don't really like being organized. I naturally prefer to work through issues as they arise and follow new leads that look promising. While this approach works fairly well given my job (I research new technologies) it can be a problem when things pile up as I'm off exploring new venues. Recently I ran into this book by David Allen. It has by far the most comprehensive and common-sense system for managing day-to-day tasks that I've seen. His basic premise is that the brain is a lousy place to try and keep track of all the things you have to do. After all, we can only keep seven or eight things in short-term memory. Add to that the fact that the brain will constantly remind us of those things we need to do in situations when we can do nothing about them, and you have a recipe for stress. Allen's suggestion is to track everything we need to do in a simple system, whether it be paper-based or electronic. The key to a stress free mind is to make sure that everything that needs doing is tracked in the system. You accomplish this through a simple process of reviewing items as they come into your various inboxes (e-mail, paper mail, phone mail, hallway conversations, etc) and deciding what to do with them. If a task takes less than two minutes to accomplish, do it immediately. If you can delegate it, do so. If the item is reference material, file it. Otherwise, make an entry for it in your system, being careful to identify next actions for each item. Then you can be confident that everything you need to do is in your system leaving your mind stress free and enabling you to quickly find what needs doing next. There's more to it which I won't belabor here, but it's basically a simple system. The book contains many examples and refinements that make it well worth reading. Allen also teaches day long management seminar courses. As for technology, Allen uses the Palm to-do list. I've been using software called Life Balance which also has a desktop and a Palm interface.