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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

Jeff's picture

@Merlin: Yeah, I'm one of those...

@Merlin:

Yeah, I'm one of those Mac-at-home, Windows-at-work GTD-ers you mention. I've fiddled with systems like iCommit, tasktoy, Backpack, and others which I can access from either work or home. It would have worked great, but for two problems:

1) I like to keep my GTD information secure on my own computer. (Not that I'm paranoid... I just like making backups. Call me crazy.) 2) I like to plan projects and next actions quickly, which means I've got no time to click on buttons and select things from drop-downs. Plain text or nothin'!

Obviously, if I'm doing most of my planning in plain text, a Backpack or an iCommit account is just another bucket to sync with my text files. No good.

So I've settled on the uber-simple: editing my text files from work using an ssh connection. At work, I use puTTY to ssh into my Mac at home, fire up emacs, and away we go. If I need to check my tasks at the office, it's a simple "grep @office projects.txt" away. And any @home tasks I come up with at work can go straight into the text files on my Mac.

 
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