Standard GTD File Format, Anyone?

BlackBerry - Research in Motion - Technology - Smartphones - Cell Phones - New York Times

An article in yesterday's New York Times suggests that the upshot of last week's BlackBerry outage may be about more than just an annoying communication outage -- for some, it was a flop-sweat-inducing night of cold turkey.

“It’s random reinforcement,” Mr. Katz said. The fact that you don’t know when important news will come, he said, “means you will quickly engage in obsessive compulsive behavior.”

These social needs and yearnings may drive the use. But at some point, that use becomes an end unto itself — a physical ritual that can take on some of the qualities of actual addiction, said Dr. John Ratey, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard, where he specializes in neuropsychiatry.

Several years ago, Mr. Ratey began using the term “acquired attention deficit disorder” to describe the condition of people who are accustomed to a constant stream of digital stimulation and feel bored in the absence of it. Regardless of whether the stimulation is from the Internet, TV or a cellphone, the brain, he said, is hijacked.

Sure, I kid the BlackBerry addicts, but I do sympathize. Left to my own devices, I'd check email a hundred times a day and can still half-ruin a vacation with the constant need to "just check in." Electronic fiddling is a lot like tobacco addiction and a lot easier to get away with nowadays.

A model for GTD in iCal

I have squirrely phases that repeat like clockwork. An abortive pass at creative drawing, an oddly devoted infatuation with the early ELO, and the sudden yen to play with my old Palm V—each reappears every 7 or 8 months, and each, in its fashion, passes in less than a week. Turn, turn, turn.

Last time that the Palm bug bit me, I learned about SplashShopper, the heir apparent to my previously favorite PDA app, JShopper. Both Palm apps excel at tracking Have/Need items for a bunch of different stores, which you can customize to your heart’s content. This means, for example, “2% Milk??? can be associated with Safeway, Trader Joe’s, and Costco, as well as the bodega around the corner.  So you have a persistent, reusable, totally contextual shopping list for wherever you happen to be. Best use of the Palm ever, this shopping list tracking stuff. But, SplashShopper attracted me with two big additions.

Good evening everyone, I'm pretty new to GTD, switched to Mac about 8 months ago. I'm reading the book now and am interested to know if there's a site that has reviewed most of the GTD apps out there. There seem to be a good handful of apps (OmniFocus, iGTD, MidnightBeep) and I'm having a REAL hard time trying to decide which might be best for me. Right now I use Remember the Milk on my iPhone (very nice!), but I find that most GTD apps sync to iCal (events and tasks), therefore I can't see my tasks on the iPhone.

The following is a copy of my latest blog post on the new Ikea opening in Cincinnati. I hope that my words or the photoshop job (attached image) I did does not offend anyone, that's not my intention... just voicing my thoughts, and trying to make some sense of some crazy things.

During my normal work day, I do a lot of work in a web-based database application. And for the really repetitive data entry items, I have set up triggers to paste the "canned text" into different fields. But I have yet to figure out how I can paste into multiple fields at once with one trigger. Is this possible?

For example: Right now... I manually place my cursor in a field... hit Cmd+Opt+O to paste the first bit of text... hit the [Tab] key on my keyboard... hit Cmd+Opt+P to paste the next bit of text... hit the [Tab] key on my keyboard... hit Cmd+Opt+[ to paste the last bit of text.

I'm hoping that someone can help me. I've done some searching today for this and was surprised not to find very much information about what I'm looking for.

We all know that you can use Quicksilver to append to an existing text file (with the .txt suffix). However, I keep a set of lists—my non-systematic ‘stuff’—in a set of OmniOutliner documents. These documents are all stored in one folder. There seems to be no way to use Quicksilver to append a line to an arbitrary OmniOutliner document, as far as I can tell.

I've found this page which gives a script to use as a Quicksilver action. That script will append to a .oo3 document whose filename is hard-coded into the script. I would like to be able to define which document to append to from within the Quicksilver interface, in the third argument.