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43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

KGTD keeps getting better

Kinkless (Home)
Kinkless GTD 0.69 [Salt Water] (Download)

KGTD & QuicksilverYesterday afternoon at about 15:00 Pacific standard time, I realized that I officially had way too much going on. Too many scattered low-depth projects, countless "waiting ons," and a situation where seemingly infinite scintillas of work here and there were needed to keep two dozen plates spinning. It almost makes me understand what it's like for you people with jobs. Almost.

I'd already been meaning to have another look at the Omni Outliner-based Kinkless GTD, which -- after my heartfelt infatuation a month ago -- fell off my radar screen in a frenzy of air traffic that sent me into Extreme Tool-Reduction Mode™. Yesterday I realized the time was right and that KGTD would be perfect for this particular blizzard. Well, jeez Louise: I returned to find an already amazing project had actually gotten much better. I mean, damn, man.

The marquee feature for us Quicksilver flying monkeys is the addition of an Applescript for adding to a KGTD inbox from anywhere. I swear by these sorts of scripts (and currently use about 7 of them to generate Category-based Tasks in Entourage). Note that in the image above, you're seeing where I've created a Quicksilver trigger (F8) for the script plus its action via "KGTD Inbox > Process Text..." For what it's worth, this is a bit like putting your steroids on steroids.

The QS stuff alone is worth a look, because it frees you from the agony of the modal change, but I'm also intrigued by a bunch of other little finials in the latest editions:

  • sub-projects (e.g. "43F Board" tasks can live inside "43 Folders")
  • handy button for auto-adding a Context to all selected tasks (big timesaver over Clicky McRepeatselect)
  • ability to set start and end dates for tasks (as well as create recurring events)
  • iCal syncing
  • iPod syncing (although I haven't figured how to do that yet)

There's probably more I'm missing, but I'm here to tell you: my shit feels more together this morning than it has in weeks. My only caution is to avoid the (a/k/a "my") tendency to want to dump everything into KGTD. Nope. Don't do it. For example, in my case, the list of sites I need to backup lives in a text file just fine; the fact that I need to do the backups belongs in KGTD as a single task. The last thing you want in your to-do list is cruft, right?

Again, thanks to Ethan for what's clearly been some fast and high-quality iterations. This sort of industry with scripts and templates could be a model for aspiring developers. Instead of spending six months on a framework and an app and an API and blah blah blah, Ethan's taken an existing app and hammered its functionality to the edge of sanity. Nice work, mister.

(n.b.: make sure you're not using the latest beta of Omni Outliner with KGTD; for now it's not playing well with KGTD, so grab the older version. I'm keeping the oldie on my desktop for now, and it's working fine. You will definitely get AppleScript errors if you use the incompatible version. A fix is on the way, but watch your butt for now.)

Andy Stewart's picture

This looks lovely on screen. Do...

This looks lovely on screen.

Do the contexts print prettily onto 3x5 cards?

 
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