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iCommit: PHP app for doing GTD

Getting Things Done [iCommit.eu]

iCommit Home View

Rainer Bernhardt has put together a nifty little PHP app for doing GTD via a web interface. It lets you wrangle projects, next actions, calendar items, ad hoc lists, and all the other tactical building blocks of GTD all via your (non-IE) browser. The interface is pretty good and typical workflow is quite easy to navigate through. It has nice touches like attachments, per-item effort estimates, printable views, plus Rainer says he may soon offer email integration which would "eliminate use of a separate e-mail app" for workflow-related planning. Wow.

Although I haven't spent a great deal of time with it, I'm very intrigued by the baked-in "weekly review" functionality, which walks you through most of what you need to look over each week from one interface. Since review gets short shrift from the many folks (like me) who use GTD primarily for task management, I think an addition like this is a terrific idea.

iCommit is, like so many of my favorite apps these days, a non-commercial, one-man operation, so there are a few rough edges, no documentation (yet! coming soon, says Rainer), and it is very much "first come, first served" in terms of seats he can handle on his personal server setup (I hope we don't cream Rainer's productivity boxen with this). But iCommit is worth a look if you've been craving a cross-platform, low-paper implementation of Getting Things Done.

Screengrabs below the cut -- I feel like Michael Arrington!

Home page

Logged-in with a few test items.

iCommit Home View

Project view

iCommit Project View

New next action

Note "Effort" estimate.

iCommit New Next Action View

Chris's picture

The problem with using tools...

The problem with using tools like iCommit or Backpack for GTD is the fact that they are remote. If I am, say, sitting on a plane or in a coffee shop with no WiFi, I cannot access by to-do lists. This is a big problem, which caused me to abandon Backpack as a productivity solution. For someone who spends as much time online as I do, I did not think it would be an issue, but it was. I really like tracks because it lets you have the whole browser-based experience, but on a local webserver.

 
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