As many of you know, I’m a productivity junkie (I happily drink the GTD Kool-Aid) and love to tweak and improve my personal productivity system. In the course of doing this, I’ve settled on a few great tools that assist me with ubiquitous capture. This allows me to capture and retain ideas, actions, and concepts that I want to act on later but don’t have time to process in the moment. These are some of the tools that I have found useful.

Things. I’ve gone through a number of todo list apps, including Nozbe and OmniFocus, but Things is the nicest one I’ve found yet. It’s a Mac app (Sorry, Windows folks) and it’s clean, fast, and flexible. It allows me to sync up tasks with my iPhone and gives me quick keyboard shortcuts for capturing items. When I’m at my computer, Things is my capture mechanism.

Hipster PDA. If I’m not at my computer but at my office or at home, I can easily grab my hipster PDA made up of notecards and a clip. Cheap, easy to use, and effective. Then, I can drop my notecards into my inbox for later processing. It also makes me feel like the guy in Chaos Theory, which is awesome

Jott. If I’m out and about and have no hipster PDA available, Jott comes to the rescue. It’s a great application that costs $4/month and allows me to speak notes into my cell phone which are then transcribed and emailed to me for later processing.

After trying many of the tools and methods out there in the GTD community, I’ve found that I can successfully capture everything that comes to mind with one of these three tools so that I can process ideas and actions later without getting distracted in the moment.

What are your ubiquitous capture methods? I’d love to hear about them here.