As you'll notice from the rather colourful photo, I colour coded the tasks on my schedule. I tried two main methods of colour coding during the trial.

The first method I tried was to colour code by category. This seemed like a logical idea at first, as I could see which projects were getting the most attention and which were being neglected. I soon realised that I would run out of colours if I used a different colour for each project! I modified the system slightly to use colours for more general categories, such as "computer projects", "business projects" and "personal projects".

After a few weeks of this system, I switched to colour coding by priority. I used the Covey Quadrant style categorisation for this method. If you're not familiar with Covey's four categories, they are:

Urgent and Important Tasks – Firefighting, pressing problems and deadline driven tasks fit here. Important and Not Urgent – Tasks that need to be done, but aren't particularly urgent. This is the area your should spend most of your time on. Not Important and Urgent – Things like some phone calls and meetings. Not Important and Not Urgent – You should look carefully to see if these activities are worth doing at all.

So far this method has worked the best, as it forces me to look at the bigger picture and to be more careful about where I spend my time. It might seem like a clash between the relatively priority free GTD system and the rigid quadrant based thinking, but really helps to keep a tight focus on what is important and what isn't.