I still have three different ways to store a running list: * big ass text file * wiki page * cheap pocket notebook

All are useful. The text file was fine when I carried my Zaurus or Palm around, but data-entry was slow & I switched to the notebook. I use it when I need to add something & am not at a computer.

I normally run SSH & can therefore often access the text file remotely. I don’t like the idea of keeping it on a USB keydrive, but some people do.

The wiki is there for things I might need some accountability for & commitments I make for others.

Now, more on the big text file…

I still sometimes use a pseudo-wiki markup, which gives it some kind of structure (with headings and such). I have a large space after the bottom organized line so I can easily drop unsorted stuff. Sometimes I just “echo ‘thing to remember’ >> big.txt. I also have a bash alias so I only have to type “b thing to remember’. This means I don’t have to open up vim. vim’s ‘dd’ makes it easy to cut a line & insert it elsewhere to cleanup the file a little bit.

Another handy organization technique in vim is to use code-folding on your sections/subsections.

If I need to find something, I will normally just use grep on the textfile. But vim’s search capabilities are also nice.

I don’t keep multiple revisions of this running textfile. Other things which need multiple revisions are in their own text files & this is why I use grep: I search through all text files in a directory & can use it recursively if I need to. subversion or other real version control software is really ideal for versioning the text.

I would think that maybe an HTML’d file with references at the beginning would be easy to navigate. like a link to #shoplist for you latest shopping list, and when you edit the file just ‘tag’ the place with #whatever.

I have been experimenting with Giles’s method recently — the tagging allows for some complex filtering and manipulation on the CLI that you just don’t get otherwise. However, one of the key points of this plaintext idea is that you can use whatever text tool you want, i.e. vim, TextWrangler, TextEdit, whatever.

This has fit in quite well with my effort lately to do what I’m calling Reducing Friction — smoothing the process of getting items into the todo queue, worked on, and into the done list as much as possible. This includes reducing distractions in the working environment, visual and otherwise.

I’ve written up an article here about it, expanding the thought. Thanks to Giles for the inspiration.

Funny that this should come up. Being an old Unix grouch, I started a prototype GTD system where I just have all of my next actions in a single file — one task per line with “[Context]” thrown on the end. I was pulling the relevant context using grep at the command line. Frex, if I wanted to look at my “Out of House]” context I typed:

grep -i “out of house” nextactions.txt

This looked promising as Hell, but in the end I decided to stick with OmniOutliner for the time being because I decided that I was shaving the proverbial yak. The urge to tinker with the system was overtaking me, and I made myself stop.

I’m just wondering if you can work with other people that way…I could imagine keeping all my information and work in one place, organized by time—after all, you can do only one thing at a time—but once you have to share anything with other people you’re burdening them with your entire system.

I’m having enough trouble keeping just one folder for each project (rather than a deeper hierarchy), and people I work with often have trouble finding what I’m working on (all our work is online).

Slightly off-topic, but: this reminds me of how MPW (the “Macintosh Programmers’ Workbench”) programmers would program much of the time, on Mac OS 9 and earlier versions, before the NeXT merger and Mac OS X. MPW kept a scrolling history that was a bit more “active” than normal terminal windows are. Instead of having shell script commands in a ~/bin directory, you’d have a part of your transcript that you could easily find, select and then hit Enter to execute it.

MPW was like a bizarro-world version of Unix. It worked in its own world, but everything seemed somehow inside-out to me.

I just started doing what Nikhil Mulani said, and writing up a big ole HTML file, complete with reference links at the top.

The plus side is that the document structure is farily simple (headers for headers, lists for lists). Unfortunately, the markup can add a lot to the file-size of the, essentially, plaintext file, plus, for any real meaning, you need a browser to view it. Not really a minus, but an extra requirement for viewing them.

I’ve been doing this for a while, using a single TODO.txt file. I personally find it very hard to use anything that requires more effort that opening a text file (tried InstiWiki and Notepads, doesn’t work for me), so I’ve made it work.

The top of the file is the TODO list, in descending order. After that is a calendar, which is a descending order list of dates/thing to do on it entries. After that is a log, where I jot daily (or fairly regular) notes about what I’m doing.

Currently at 100kb and climbing. Works well for me. I think it encourages judiciousness about what goes in to prevent excessive bloat, meaning what goes in is more likely to get done, and trivialities or distractions get pruned early.

Bigger ideas and things that require more detail get broken into their own files though.

On the computer, I use planner-mode (EmacsWiki) in emacs. Made up of flat text files that all live in one directory, searches are easy using grep. Cross-referencing and meta-information is all hyperlinked, so you can move around really easily.

I don’t use it for a todo-list anymore (3x5s are my favorite for that right now) but it does those very well.

There are actually people who have switched to emacs just to use this bit of software!

I have to second Bob’s comments. As I read Giles’ piece, I kept thinking “that reminds me of MPW”. I used to love MPW, and had highly organized, but very long, worksheets. Is there something like that around that combines: efficient handling of big-ass text, command-line execution anywhere, and scripting? And it has to run fast, fast, fast.

I’m ashamed right now because my single nextActions.txt file is missing since my hard drive totally crapped out on me. I feel utterly worthless until I get that sucker back.

This is also a little off-topic, but how does everyone keep everything sync’d up from machine to machine, pda to machine, etc. I’ve seen various cron + rsync strategies that sound good - but have yet to implement anything. Would love ideas.

I’m a very recent mac convert, so forgive me this noob question, but I would think the iDisk would be about a perfect place to put this stuff. However, I have yet to figure out how to make it work for me.

Any hints, anyone?

I try to get the best of both worlds. I keep notes in lots of separate text files. When I need to look at them as one big file, I use blosxom to string them together as html.

Let me go through that in a bit more detail. Blosxom is intended to turn text files into blogs. It slurps in a directory structure full of text files, and splurts it out in html, with all the standard blog navigation and view options. In other words, you can view your files by directory, by date, individually, or as one long file.

I use a blosxom plugin for Markdown, which lets me add readable formatting that gets converted into HTML.

The text editor I use is emacs. But I don’t think it matters much, as long as your editor saves files in text format, lets you flip easily between several dozen files, and doesn’t take up much screen space (you need room for a browser to view your stuff).

I use this system for most of my notes - academic course work, other projects, things to think about. My todo lists would be there, but I keep them on paper instead. Over the year I’ve been using the system, I’ve written about 200,000 words of notes, and it’s all easy to access.

The big advantage over a text file is that it can cope with you doing fairly large projects inside it, without getting in the way of everything else. Most of the preparatory work for my dissertation happened in emacs/blosxom, for example.

There’s an added bonus in that it’s all accessible over the web, which is good if you’re using lots of computers. I even kept a public version (now semi-defunct) for a while, with the personal stuff removed by shell scripts.

I did the one file thing for a while, but my programmer’s nature kicked in - it seems I am mentally tuned to ignoring large blocks of text as “finished” unless I force attention to them. My Next Action lists turned into a big block of “things to ignore” and I never mentally processed them even while I was reviewing them. Text, bulleted lists, code, book pages, my mind blanks them all out once I have processed them once.

I switched to full-analogue: one 3x5 card = one thought. Now processing a stack of cards forces me to focus on each item fully. It’s the only way I can cope.

I’m surprised there is generally so little mention of the connection between GTD and Archy:

http://rchi.raskincenter.org/aboutrchi/index.php

@Peppers: My thought with the single nextactions.txt was that I would just manage it with CVS on my FreeBSD co-lo box and check out a copy where I needed, but as I said before, I’m a Unix grouch. ;)

The spotlight search featire of Tiger OS effectively turns everything on my computer into one big file. I no longer bother to organize anything- it’s smart folders feature does it for me. If I want to assign categories to something I’m doing all I have to do is include the category name anywhere in the doc or file. Spotlight does a complete GTD Collect for you and organizes. Now if I could only have a version for the real world…

I’m surprised no one else has said that this sounds like a really bad idea. I guess you should work in whatever way you feel comfortable, but I don’t see how this could work for any length of time. First of all my programmer mind says (or should I say object oriented mind), keep dependencies to a minimum. This approach sounds like having your entire application in one big .cpp file. That was one of the first wow moments for me when I was learning C++, having small little classes with 2 or 3 functions in their own little 20 line file. It’s no accident that well written C++ applications have thousands of files. It is so much easier to modify a program when the one task (or several related tasks) you are working on is separated into one logical file. I’ve worked on projects where there was one huge file with 100,000 lines of code and functions that go on and on for pages. What a nightmare!

I don’t think the organization of your tasks and projects is that different from a well designed program. How can you stay organized when everything in your life is staring you in the face all day long? It must be so distracting to have your Work to do list right next to your Errand list, which you can’t do anything about at the moment. That’s one of the nice things about GTD contexts, you have the list of things you can work on in front of you, the other tasks are in their own file to be opened at the appropriate time.

Computers have no problem with everything being in one big file, it’s all just 1s and 0s, but the whole file and folder idiom was introduced to computers for a reason. The human mind does not work like a computer. It needs to have things organized and separated into it’s own little slots.

To everyone who experimented with using HTML for One Big File and abandoned it: did you try Markdown? Or Textile?

Both have the advantage that they are easily convertable to pretty HTML, and both are easily editable without contributing significantly to file size or complexity. For editing, use your favorite text editor. Then just run it through a Textile/Markdown -> HTML converter to view pretty versions of it. The best part is that the prettification is purely optional, although probably wicked useful if you’re using a lot of URLS.

@sam Yeah, I would use it, however my preferred editor(s) jEdit and VIM don’t have markdown support available (at least, as far as I know).

However, I have quickly constructed a nice HTML file.

Handy-Dandy-Note-Book

erm

http://www.degruchy.org/projects/note-book/handy-dandy-note-book.html

I use one text file per project. Every morning, I put in a date header after the last completed item. When I get new tasks, I add them near the bottom of the file. When I complete tasks, I mark them completed (change a ‘-’ to a ‘+’).

I wrote a little utility that lets me search a project file for combinations of strings within a date. So I can ask for all the tasks from a day “when I talked to ‘Bobo’ about the ‘ShutdownUtilDelegate’”.

Nice one, DeGruchy! I was at first thinking of a no frills, just text and links setup, but that sure does look nice. You seem to have found a nice balance in design there. Too much color takes away from the content.

Wowzers; I didn’t realise my humble weblog post would spark such a lot of discussion. It’s great to see there are some other all-in-one-file folks out there too.

To answer some of your questions, Merlin:

• As far as moving around the file goes, I depend on good old Command+Option+F in BBEdit, which brings up the quick search window. I search my way to what I need. When I first started, I did a lot of scrolling, in the mistaken belief that scrolling would be quicker. It’s not.

• I decide where new stuff goes according to a simple scheme of logical headings (at least, they’re logical to me). Posts for my O’Reilly blog go under *orablog, posts for my weather blog go under *weather, posts for my personal site go under *gilest. Articles in progress go under *ora for O’Reilly, *bbc for the BBC, *icol for my internet column, and so on.

Within each section, items are separated by a simple ‘..’ with a clear line above and below: quick to type and visually sufficient for me to see what’s where.

• Versioning is something I rarely need. My todo.txt is the place where I develop works in progress; once they’re done, they get archived into a file of their own (this is more to help me when it comes to paying my taxes than for any other reason). For the vast majority of my work, it is sufficient for me to overwrite old versions with new ones. In the rare instance when I might need to keep several versions to hand, I’ll put one after the other in my file. Do people really keep versioned drafts of blog posts? I don’t see the point, myself.

• I don’t think about my work much differently, though I have noticed that using one file suits my scatterbrained, disorganised mind. While I’m writing about X, I’ll often think about something related to Y; it’s very simple to jump down to Y, make a note, then return to what I was doing. In split view, it’s even easier.

A few other things:

• I write loads of stuff in Markdown, in preparation for converting to HTML and pasting into some CMS somewhere.

• I should repeat, just to make clear, that I use my file for everything that’s ongoing. Stuff that’s finished with is removed and archived. I don’t use the file for any kind of logging or journaling.

• But I also use it for essential information that I always need to hand, such as my addresses.

• I only keep stuff in the file that needs to stay there. Web stuff (pages I want to read, for example) are better in my del.icio.us account than in my file.

• I keep having to remind myself not to worry about adding more stuff. A 2000 word article might sound like a lot to add to the file, but it’s not much in comparison to the size of the whole thing.

• Actual things I really need to do (you could call them ‘Next Actions’ but that would be making them sound a lot grander than they really are) go right at the top.

Reflecting on all this, and on the comments others have made, I think this system works for me mainly because my life - and therefore my requirements - are pretty simple. I work part-time, have a small list of clients and mostly only need to work with plain text (as text or HTML). I rarely have to share stuff with others (except when filing completed copy), never need to synch calendars or todos with other people, and don’t have any other devices, aside from my two computers, which need access to the data.

I keep a work diary in one big giant text file. I keep my GTD info in four big ass lists, plus some smaller project specific lists.

My work diary is five years running, and has at least an entry every week, if not daily. I use emacs outline mode to hide large portions of the file, and to navigate around. Works for my much smaller GTD lists too.

A tool you all might be interested in is txt2tags, which can take a plain, properly formatted text file and convert it into html.

http://txt2tags.sourceforge.net/

I picked up this habit from a coworker almost ten years ago. I have a plain text file called “notes”, and edit it with vim. Nothing fancy. I keep a copy of it on a USB key, and when I need an address or something to take with me (shipping packages, etc) I write it down in my Moleskine.

MAKRDOWN IN VIM http://plasticboy.com/dox/mkd.vim Credits to PlasticBoy

I started using VoodooPad about 6 months ago. It’s pretty much a cross between one bigass text file, and a wiki (in that it uses different pages, but all in the one file). My life is now completely in that file, it’s really good. If I had an ipod it would synch up to that, but as it is I have a script which automatically runs everyday that exports my voodoopad to a web page (secure) so I can access my life from any copmuter, at any time. And I’ve lost could of how many time’s that’s saved me a lot of messing around.

I used to keep a ToDo in it as well, but now I use iCal for my todo’s (using custom priority levels + the ‘3 things I WILL do today method), and find that better, as it synch’s up to my phone.

I use Hog Bay Notebook on OS X. It isn’t a single big text file, but it’s pretty close as you can search the whole thing whenever you like immediately and set bookmarks down in one of the drawers.

Not being a programming type, this works almost like a single text file for me. There are about four core text files that I use everday adding information to.

Simplicity is key.