[…] Personal Productivity Of course, one of the coolest things I’ve done since moving is GTD (I was introduced to it at 43 Folders). There are PC tools for it too (see here if you want to use it in a business environment). Check out David Allen’s Outlook Plugin here, his site here, his blog here (though he’s no longer posting, as he explained: “One interesting thing that I didn’t expect was that many people were using my blog as their “intro” to our work. So, as my personal “between the lines” it was beginning to possibly misrepresent the value and nature of The David Allen Company.” - very interesting). Other great posts are here, here, and here. Using Omni Outliner Pro you can actually plug in Kinkless, which is what I’m currently using and it rocks. […]

Well, since your recent articles on GTD, I’ve been flinging e-mails back and forth with a couple of friends who are in the same boat (using GTD and reading your site). It’s true that your comments about not looking for The Perfect App were spot on - after a while, it gets counter-productive, because you spend more time fiddling with programs, worrying about exchanging data from one to another, and trying to make them fit your way of working, than you do actually being productive. And that’s the goal of all this, isn’t it - being productive?

So, my tip is simple: learn the tools you have first before looking for others. Whether you are using a word processor or text editor, whether you have a PIM or e-mail program, learn how to use them. Read the manuals; if there are no manuals, read the help files; if these suck, but books (and support computer book authors like me).

How many people actually know 1/10 of the features in a program like BBEdit; Microsoft Word; Entourage; or others? Learn your tools so you can avoid wasting time trying to find programs that do what you can already do.

I’ll add another suggestion for OS Xers - learn to use Terminal; you’ll get lots of extra mileage out of your work, and you’ll have a fast, flexible tool that is infinitely expandable. (I’ll hesitate about plugging my book on the command line in OS X; it’s neither open source nor free beer…)

Oh, heck, Kirk, I’d issue you a papal indulgence: you can pimp your book here. :)

I guess, in part, I just want to discourage the inevitable “astroturf” campaigns from people who’ve suddenly realized you can “monetize” your crap by posting comments on weblogs. Plus I want to acknowledge (and encourage) the hard work of people who are doing it primarily for the kids, you know? Thasall.

Gus Mueller’s[1] VoodooPad[2] has served my GTD needs quite well. I’m also evaluting a combination of Emacs[3], planner[4], rememberence agent[5] and emacswiki[6]. It requires some finger ballet, but it looks pretty darn good so far.

[1] http://gusmueller.com/blog/ [2] http://flyingmeat.com/voodoopad.html [3] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.html [4] http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/wiki/PlannerMode.php [5] http://sacha.free.net.ph/notebook/wiki/RememberEl.php [6] http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/EmacsWikiMode

Okay, Merlin.

The Mac OS X Command Line: Unix Under the Hood is a book on using the command line and Terminal in Mac OS X. No previous experience required - though users familiar with the command line will find stuff they didn’t know as well.

FWIW, learning to work with the command line not only saves time when performing certain types of operations, but also opens up a whole new world of text-only possibilities.

For more: http://www.mcelhearn.com/article.php?story=20040922121050755

Have you tried Tasks? There is a free version, and I would say that it has definetly helped me in the GTD arena. Since tasks are defined hierarchically, you can break them up into the 20 minute chunks that you crave :)

The commercial versions of Tasks aren’t free (as in beer), but they do include the source code, which makes them free-er than most.

In GTD, Allen talks about mind mapping. I’ve been using FreeMind which is free in every way. You can get it from SourceForge and it runs on every platform. It took about 20 minutes of messing to figure it out.

I agree 100% with your comments about DavidCo catering to some of the GTD niches. I have a suggestion- why don’t you do it yourself? Have you ever contacted Allen’s company directly with these suggestions/requests? Obviously you can write and have made a substantial investment in the GTD methods. If you can’t justify the effort it would take to turn your thoughts into a product, how can Allen?

Anyway- I’m looking forward to whatever you can come up with in ‘05. If you keep pointing out cool mac-only apps, I may have to bite the bullet and pick up and iBook…

Actually, Allen mentions mind-mapping, but then dismisses what is probably the best and most flexible program, Inspiration (www.inspiration.com). While I don’t use it for GTD, it is without doubt an essential tool for outlining - you can create visual mind-maps and standard text outlines. I use it to outline just about everything I write.

Tasks looks interesting, but I don’t trust anything that requires Internet access all the time. I’m checking out the demo; I don’t know if you can use the Mac OS X built-in web server, but it’s pretty useless if you need the web to use it.

I used Tasks for quite a while, in its earlier incarnation. I ran it locally on my Mac OS X computer — no need for Internet access at all. I currently use Tinderbox instead, but Tasks is definitley worth checking out.

Back in the early days of 43folders, I posted a comment asking for a way to sync action lists from OS X flat text files to the Palm, and the suggestion Merlin gave was to try MacNoteTaker. It’s fantastic, and I’ve become an evangelizer for it. The package is a Palm text viewer/editor bundled with a conduit that will keep a folder full of text files on the Mac synchronized with the Palm. Allows for hierarchical file/folder structures, bypasses the inherent limitations of the Palm Memo program (as far as file size), and allows you to use whatever Mac-based text editor you like (personally, I’m a big fan of SubEthaEdit).

Oh, and it’s free. Excellent.

I experimented with a variety of apps to implement GTD and the most limiting thing for me was the fact that I use two computers, as I”m in school. Most of my work is on my desktop G5, but when I go to school I sync files up on my powerbook 12” and head out. A lot of the software I really liked (StickyBrain, DevonThink, etc) did not like this arrangement very well.

So in tinkering, I finally decided to implement a Wiki for GTD. That enables me to access it from any computer to take notes during class, update lists, etc. I put TikiWiki on my OSX server (which runs all my websites) and I’ve been pretty satisfied with it. I keep all my project notes (things done/todo) on it, my class notes, my todo lists and any other piece of text.

Its not as integrated with OSX as StickyBrain or DevonThink, but its extremely portable. The other nice thing is that I can have the people I collaborate with login and edit certain pages with their notes.

So for those that have two or three computers, I’d recommenda Wiki :)

Life Balance has been a great deal of help in implementing the lessons in GTD. Task management, smart todo list compilation and some nice pie charts to get a sense of how I’m spending my time.

I’m getting very fond of Life Balance too, but much like Ethan work with more than one computer and keep slamming into the limitations of the app’s design. It uses a proprietary format, and is designed only for integrating with Palm or Entourage—neither of which is any use to me.

Also, getting effective prioritization from LB’s neural net requires that you make appropriate settings to each task’s importance, location, and difficulty. So it’s a PITA that these settings must be configured in different panels, and there isn’t even a summary view to check a task’s full settings at a glance. The UI fragmentation gets in the way of exploiting the tool’s best feature. Hopefully the developers will resolve this soon.

This set of paper templates was recently mentioned on the GtD_Palm group:

http://www.douglasjohnston.net/weblog/index.php/archives/2004/12/22/diy-planner-v1/

er, I meant Outlook, not Entourage…

Those templates mentioned above are interesting. I was just thinking yesterday that paper might be a better way to go. I toyed with the spiral notebook idea mentioned elsewhere in this series of articles, but that doesn’t work for me. So I then thought of creating my own paper documents and printing them.

The advantage to such as approach is that it is easy, and that you can fully customize what you want the documents to contain.

Great idea, but respectful request that you make the distinction between Mac programs and the “other” OS. I find it ironic after years of being a Mac person and being disappointed upon learning a software package was “PC only” that in reading your blog I’m finding myself, a PC person, running down interesting program links only to discover they’re “MAC only!” So anyway, would be nice to understand PC or MAC before charging off all excited over a tool. Thanks.

My list: 1 - physical paper 2 - “Task” part of Outlook on PocketPC (I turn off the InBox) 3 - Outlook on my desktop 4 - Attachment Save 4 - Notepad (shortcut in my tray closeby)

1. (physical paper) In principle, the cheapest tool is a small notebook, which does not expire after a trial period. I used one of those little moleskine books for a while, to keep my various lists. My minimal lists include: @next, @defer, @someday, still don’t have a good concept for projects, but these are a good basic “state snapshot”.

You “can’t beat paper” in many cases. No batteries, you can write when the plane takes off/lands, the small (68-page?) Moleskine books are almost forgettably unobtrusive and flexible in your pocket.

1. (tasklist) Of course the real problem is that you can’t sort or modify physical paper very well. I tried to compensate by using pencil, numbering the list items, periodicaly re-writing the lists. The one obvious advantage of computerized tools is analyticity, the ability to mince/sort, clone, etc your various lists.

I am a big fan of “using what you have”. So for the moment, I “try” to use a pocketPC’s task list (sync’d to Outlook), with about 120 items. This is not going to work much longer I fear though, cause I use a priority sort (with a self-imposed requirement that no more than 25 items get the “!” priority). As a result, I rarely look below # 25 (I actually DO try to review the whole thing once/week, in the GTD manner, but don’t always do this effectively).

So, yes, you don’t really find many people doing more than a superficial scratching of the surface of the standard electronic tools, and yet they continue searching for more gadgets that could have been easily done with Outlook, Word, Excel. But I am that way too, and I don’t plan to break down and learn VBA (so far) to manage lists.

1. (Outlook) I must (by necessity) use Outlook, and I feel that it is really far more powerful than most people can cope with. My biggest technique is agressive Inbox management. Only thing is I get ~100 msgs/day (work alone), and I am away a lot from my desk. I habitually drag the Inbox contents to a special folder “000” several times a day. Later, I go through “000”, which is like a “@next”, and use a few GTD-like folders (@defer, @someday), and a whole LOT of personal folders (.pst), probably one dozen, each having trees of up to 100 or so subfolders. This is my essential reference system. I try to keep “000” to < 50 messages, although I am to 262 at this moment. This “000” thing is real nice, since you use it for the clutter and your real Inbox is only for the newest messages.

2. (attachment save) To cope with the huge attachments and the ~1Gb limit (it’s actually 2Gb, but I panic at >750Mb), I use a free tool called “Attachment Save”, which can strip all attachments out of your messages and place them in folders on your hard drive. Duplicates are easy to spot and delete (filenames are postpended with a “-#”), saving some space.

3. To me one of the life-saving tools is just plain old Notepad. I keep one file (mine is “ppt.txt”, dont ask why I chose that name) in the tray, sync’d to my PocketPC. It is a sort of short-term cache. Notepad boots nearly instantly (I kind of hate to waste the energy and time to boot Word unless I am writing a technical paper or something worth the wear-and-tear). I divide my document into two sections. The first is free-form, to take down numbers, paste serial codes, whatever. The second is broken into a self-defined XML-ish alphabetic listing. I am not sure why I did this, but it is useful as a repository of lots of simple things I need on hand to lookup or cut and paste.

I have a couple of non-free things I use (ignoring the fact that Office and PDAs are not exactly free), but I have rambled on too much already.

In defense of Life Balance and the effort involved in setup, there are templates available for download to implement GTD using Life Balance, with preset values for setting, location, importance, etc., on common Next Actions so you can get going more easily. I found them a huge value in moving to LB (I had tried LB once before, and not stuck with it). There are some problems in the LB interface as Carina notes, but I think the strengths easily outnumber the weaknesses of this program. But read the LB manual—it will make life easier (and it is well-written, too.)

The templates got me going enough so modifying the settings for my particular needs was much less of a hassle. If you go to

http://www.llamagraphics.com/resources/exchange%20files/index.html

you can see downloadable templates for a variety of uses. The starter template file by “ratz” (a longtime LB user) includes GTD templates. There is also a lot of discussion re implementing GTD on the LB user forums.

And LB works on Windows, Macs, and Palm OS, to address Gary’s concern.

I just stumbled upon this by chance: Doing Things Properly, a To-Do application written in Ruby on Rails with GTD in mind (features here). Still in beta, I think, released under a GNU GPL license.

Yeah, BSAG’s Ruby app and Douglas Johnston’s planner templates were two that I definitely had in mind.

It’s interesting, because what I was thinking about when I wrote the post—and probably phrased badly—was that I wanted to focus on stuff, like the two mentioned here, that had been developed especially with GTD in mind. Not so much the apps you can use for GTD as ones that were being built specifically for that purpose.

Seeing people’s links and thinking about it a bit more, though, I wonder if a broader list is what’s needed.

I was just pissing and moaning yesterday about wanting to see more direction on how to choose a system (and by extension an app), so maybe that’s a good conversation to have here. Might be helpful to list lots of apps and try to provide guidance on who each might be right for….

/thinking out loud

Chandler looks like one to keep an eye on.

Another happy VoodooPad user. Since the cell phone runs PalmOS (Samsung i500), I use an AppleScript to export VoodooPad pages to it as Palm Memo entries (one per page). They’re synched one-way to the phone. The Palm Todo and Voice Memo apps are my inboxes while I’m out and about, processed into VoodooPad when I’m back.

[Having the cell phone be a PDA is crucial; it’s always, always with me. Standalone PDAs have stayed in the desk drawer.]

Improvements to make: * VoodooPad supports remote-wiki editing; a web-accessible wiki is an obvious upgrade. Instiki looks nice, and/or the GTD Ruby webapp if I ever get a chance to try it. * The Palm should be running a Wiki, not dumb text. Need to find one that the Mac is happy synching to. * Sciral Consistency is the Super Bionic Tickler File program, and I need to start using it. A calendar is a lousy substitute when you really need a tickler file, and I’m done learning that lesson.

Other than that, it’s Mail.app + IMAP for email; iCal (+ WebDAV publishing) for calendar and alarms; Address Book for contacts. So simple. So Apple-happy-user-interface-magic.

I noticed this system was working when I stopped wasting countless hours in search of the next One True GTD App. Good luck in that quest, Merlin!

For GTD folks who are also programmers, I’ve been very happy with Subversion for revision control (repos are easily converted from CVS), and Trac for bug-tracking (it has Subversion integration and its own Wiki). Basecamp is an interesting web-based service for managing projects and clients, and not just for programmers.

I go back and forth on whether a GTD-specific app makes any sense; certainly at first I wanted one, or to write one. But now I’m glad to have it implemented using “normal,” general-purpose tools (Wiki, Mail, Calendar…). Not exactly sure why. General-purpose tools are familiar (zero learning curve); allow slack (users don’t use rigid software for long); tend to interoperate pretty easily; are modular (so you can use the brand-new amazing calendar you just downloaded without throwing away the perfectly good wiki you use). That said, I’m sure I’ll come across a GTD-specific app someday that I can’t live without; but from here, I can’t imagine what features it would have to make it so good.

I see Merlin is getting 5-stars on VersionTracker ;-)

pyGTD from Keith Martin is a text-based approach to multiple context lists. Written in Python, it runs on anything that runs Python.

It manages priorities nicely, and fits well with my always-on laptop style of work.

I was really hoping Haystack would be further along, as it looks like the ideal organisational/GTD solution to me.

I have a few comments on it in a recent blog entry if you’re interested, but in a nutshell: great idea, immature implementation, uncertain future.

I sympathise with Merlin’s feeling about apps which aren’t specifically designed for GTD. While they can work quite well, there’s sometimes a bit of an itchy feeling because they don’t fit quite right. That’s why I decided to build my own GTD application in the end. ;-)

Whatever the application, using a database to store the info seems like quite a good idea, because you can then present the information however you prefer, so it’s very flexible. The downside — and this applies to my app too — is that installing isn’t exactly a drag and drop process. The plus side is that it is cross-platform and also accessible from any internet connected point if you install on a server. I have a feeling that there’s a trade-off between cross-platform capabilities and ease of install and use, so it’s horses for courses: what’s more important for your usage pattern?

By the way, I’ve been working hard on my app over Christmas, and I’m hoping to release an update in the next few days. There are quite a few new features like an RSS feed, password protection and so on, as well as a lot of bugs squashed. And many more introduced, no doubt. :-)