Hey, is that the Finder in the screen shot on this entry? What’s the drop stack shown there?

Howard: Close. That’s Path Finder an a-mazing Finder replacement that I swear by. Makes the regular Finder feel like an empty aluminum box. :)

I should probably write something up about it. I’m really surprised more folks don’t use it or even know about it.

pathfinder is cool. I bought it shortly after ‘switching’. but I never really got happy with it. I still pop it open occasionally - I like having the terminal drop down on it more than anything else.

DEFINITELY post on your use of pathfinder. I’m always interested to see how others use it, and to see if I can get myself [back] into it.

Ah, Pathfinder. I used it a while back and fell out of use for some reason. I should revisit it. However I find myself less in need of power tools now that I have a non-Mac day job.

I’m just getting started with GTD, and I’m also using flat text files to store my lists. Do you sync your lists to your Palm? If so, how do you do that? I guess it’s a little picky, but I’d rather use SubEthaEdit or BBEdit than Palm Desktop’s Notes function…

Mike: MacNoteTaker is free and practically bulletproof.

You just put your txt files in the proper location (it’s all in the documentation) and the conduit syncs everything up automagically. The functionality is pretty modest, but I think that’s part of the appeal.

My only wishlist items are 2 big ones:

1. ability to have a new line break or text markup always indicate a “checkable item”
2. Ability to “right-click” on an item to move it to another document.

It is very nicely done as it is, though. Let me know how it works for you.

I’m using a freebie outliner (keynote 1.6.5), with separate nodes for each of my “files”. This lets me move stuff from place to place as it goes from action to follow-up, etc. Working ok so far (I haven’t read the book yet, am working from various web pages and previous franklin/covey process).

I really miss an excellent freeware outliner (name since forgotten, not one of the usual suspects ACTA,MORE) I used on the Mac back in the 90s. The key feature being the ability to create a task with a reminder, date, priority, etc. as an outliner node. This made projects’ tasks automatically move themselves into an actions file (essentially) when they were needed.

one thing caught my eye in particular here. the “backed up to external drive.” i too was a strong supporter of this, until my powerbook was in the shop getting the lid fixed ( of course, i never send a drive with my data on it out into the world ) and my external drive started making a lot of beeping noises. i lost a lot of work, thankfully no baby pictures. if data is important, make more than one type of backup. external drive + dvd. dvd + backup server. whatever + whatever, as long as there is more than one copy in the world, even when one copy disappears suddenly. also, i use pgp disks to burn to dvd-r. that way even if you have my dvd, you have to crack 256-AES to get the info.

just another “total system” pointer. =) love the site!

So Merlin, how are you tracking your context-based next actions? All from the one @nextactions file?

Do you maintain any distinction of context apart from the categories you mention in the post? What about your calls, out & abouts, at home actions etc etc?

Bongoman: Good question. Yeah, I think that context’s an important distinction for folks to make. Maybe one of the most important.

Since I work at home so much of the time, I don’t break things out by “home” vs. “work.” Since I also have wireless and cell phone I tend not to break out “calls” vs. “online” and so on. My next actions are usually extremely specific—literally just the next thing I am committed to do.

The context distinctions that are meaningful to me are actually more mundane. For example, I break out “to buy” lists into multiple stores or collapse them into “neighborhood errands” when appropriate.

Like, I say, the most important thing for me is to have atomic-level control over knowing where all of my different work and non-work web projects stand. So, for example, I like to use big-ass heavy Kraft-paper clasp envelopes as “job jackets” into which I can gather all my hard copy notes and support materials. Ditto for “to read” and so on. They pack away neatly and allow me to stay focused on the task at hand.

I guess my biggest priority is to know that there’s a well-maintained silo for each of my major horizontal obligations. With my online tools, iCal and a tickler file, I usually do pretty well.

My biggest weak point right now is probably that “@tech” list, which is currrently like an unholy junk drawer. Still trying to figure out how to get that whipped into shape. :)

I find myself with available work time away from internet connections frequently (e.g. waiting outside my daughter’s violin lesson, eating lunch at Blimpie), so I need two contexts for work I can do on my PowerBook: @offline and @online.

I also use a list which could be a subset of your @tech: “@saw” (as in “sharpening the”… a holder over from my Covey days). I drop into it all my items which will make me better at whatever I’m doing or hope to do (example: Read 43 Folders!).

Something that I definitely saw a lot of with the lifehacks research is people smershing all of this - scratchpad, todo list, project info - into one big text file.

I think that’s strongly linked with having text editors that let you jump quickly around from section to section (which mostly means emacs or vim’s incremental search - not sure about BBEdit). Being able to zoom around one document can make it less intimidating than having a dozen different text files, but it can be easily the other way around. Speedy access, and ways of stopping yourself feeling overwhelmed seemed to be the key factors.

I think that’s also an interesting distinction, Danny. The CLI kids are racing around one file without thinking about it, but I fear I’d lose my mind (and my “horizontal” grip) if I tried to do it all in one place.

The GTD schtick is pretty adamant about making everything scannable and contextualized to however you work (and think), so I can see how a more elite grepper might get around quicker in a terminal. I think, though, for most of us UI-bound lugs, the multiple file system has a satisfying sense of compartmentalization.

I wonder whether—as with the emergence of OS X a few years ago—we might start seeing some interesting convergences in the tools that folks of varied skill levels use to keep their acts together. (Keeping a good thought for TextMate right now.)

“On my command” is a great customizable contextual menu plugin. You can come up with all sorts of crazy unix-y stuff to do from a ctrl-or-right click.

The main reason I use it is for an equivalent to the Windows power toy “shell here”; I right click in the Finder and have a terminal window open in that folder. I have found that being able to quickly get into the terminal from any spot obviates the need for Pathfinder.

Since you’ve gone this far, how ‘bout going a little further and showing us one of your text files with actual “next actions” in it. In particular, I’m wondering how do you link your NAs with your projects, if at all?

Honestly, I’ve pretty much stuck witht he default categories. I removed @computer_web because I’m very unlikely to be on a machine wihtout web access. I use @office for the work related stuff, and @computer for my home computer stuff. I tried once setting up a seperate projects category for my work-related projects, but found a great a-ha moment in just shoving all of those projects into my regular projects list.

Clint: If people feel like that would be helpful I could fake something together, but it’s pretty much what you’d expect: short declarative sentences with a physical component

• Call Alice to re-schedule kickoff meeting
• Mockup Look 3 with Bob’s changes
• Drop off laundry

I don’t attach next actions to specific projects since, by definition, there can only be one for a project at a time, right? :)

Anything beyond what David calls “back of the envelope planning” I do in a separate file that I think he’d call “project support files.” I also use Basecamp as a client-facing PM program.

MacNoteTaker is awesome! Wow. Thank you, Merlin.

I’m currently trying to set up a GTD system using as few files as possible, and relying a bit more on search — as Danny hinted at. (I don’t want the intimidation factor of “too many buckets” to keep me from using the system.) One idea I have is, rather than creating physical lists, to begin each line with the name of a “virtual list”. For example, “@calls call grandma” or “@groceries buy milk”. That way, I can either look at the whole thing — or do a “grep @calls” or “grep @groc” and have my calls and groceries items listed individually.

The mention of the all-in-one-text-file idea triggered my recollection of setext, a structured text format from way back when (early 90’s), and how it could easily accomodate GTD list structures. Does anybody remember it? I think setext got short shrift. Setext stuctured text documents in a way that rendered it hierarchical and emminently navegable in setext readers yet allowed for easy reading/editing in a plain text editor. Tidbits was (still is?) distributed in setext format. The Mac setext viewer was called Easy View written by Akif Eyler.

Speaking of organizational tools…may be not an org tool per se, but I love VoodooPad (oh, and I don’t know how to post the link, but here it goes: www.flyingmeat.com) I dump everything into one document and navigate within…quotes, interesting stuff, things-to-do, etc.

Ari: That sounds like a brilliant approach. It’s very similar to something I do for collaborative note taking and project management that I’ll be sharing soon. Thanks for that.

Miguel: I totally remember the day when I got a “reader” that turned my Tidbits emails into a little Outlook-like program I could scroll through. (In 1995 or so) it actually seemed miraculous. :)

Musti: Love voodoo pad (esp. for the iPod sync) although I’ve been recommended the .91 of Instiki to people. It’s really pretty terriffic and the developer’s a bit of a genius.

Kevin LaCoste of ZenVilla has developed a new setex viewer, XBit, using Cocoa. I haven’t tried it myself, but Adam Engst briefly mentioned it on the Tidbits blog.

Wow! I can’t believe how many people have posted comments since I posted yesterday afternoon! The site has really taken off!

Merlin, thanks for the tip about MacNoteTaker — EXACTLY what I was looking for!

Merlin, how do you drop an item from your electronic inbox file into an electronic tickler? I suppose you could just post it to that day in iCal…

My response is at my weblog.

Has anyone tried using a Wiki for GTD implementation? I have two computers (a G5 and a 12 inch Powerbook) and am in school, so half my week I’m at school on wireless. I’ve been trying to find an ideal solution for both life-hacking and knowledge management/dumping. Previously I used a big Drupal blog, but it was too strict with taxonomies. Lately I switched to evaluating Tinderbox, but it is cumbersome to maintain synchronicity across two computers.

So now I’m trying a Wiki using MediaWiki (what runs Wikipedia) and was wondering if anyone else has tried this?

I think it’s potentially a fascinating idea, Ethan. MediaWiki is a bit much firepower for me, but Instiki, PHPWiki, or even Usemod are all great for parking ideas, capturing information and “thinking on paper” so to speak.

The only major issue I can think of right now would be access—I think there’s something to be said for “touching” stuff as little as possible. Were you thinking of running this on your local box or in some kind of hosted network setting?

I started out using a wiki for GTD, but moved on to using planner.el in combination with emacs-wiki as described by genehack a few posts up.

A wiki is nice, because you can make your information easily accessible from anywhere. There are some features that a wiki (at least the ones I have investigated) lack, e.g. no link between project pages and the main task page (supplied automatically by planner.el), and no possibility to tick off items with one click (you need to delete a row).

I’m running it on my webserver which is in my apartment’s datacenter (literally our coat closet). You can check it out at http://www.ethankaplan.com/wiki/index.php

I haven’t moved everything over from TinderBox yet, but I’m getting close. My old drupal site is at http://old.ethankaplan.com

Most of my classes take place in a room with Internet access, which is why this made the most sense to me. We shall see I guess. I hate this great hunt for a knowledge management solution, and really wish The Brain was made for the Mac, as it was my favorite tool when I used PC’s.