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iCommit: PHP app for doing GTD
Merlin Mann | Jun 27 2006
Getting Things Done [iCommit.eu]
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 pageLogged-in with a few test items.
Project view
New next actionNote "Effort" estimate.
23 Comments
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 Nick I've been there (and will...Submitted by Morgan (not verified) on June 27, 2006 - 6:45am.
Nick I've been there (and will be there again and again, I am sure on different decisions). What I find I need to do is time box my waffling and put down on paper (and usually tell someone who'll double check with me) that I will make a decision by X date or after X hours of review and then I give myself an outer limit to the timebox to make the decision seem less permanent. e.g. - I'm going to review GTD tools over the next two weeks in my spare time after that (July 14th at 5pm), I'll pick the most promising and then use it for 4 weeks and assess again on August 14th. I've been using Life Balance for a while for task management. I decided to do a review of my tool set (for data capture, brainstorming, task management, note taking and reference management) as I have just done a major move (different city, different work, etc) in the past month. My deadline was this week and I've decided on a couple of tools including kinklessGTD for task management (I'm on a mac most of the time). I am going to use this, without looking at other tools, for the next 6 weeks and then decide if it has been an improvement over Life Balance. It is important to note that time in one system is not "lost" if you make a change -- most of my GTD work has been in the content in the system. Cutting and pasting, even retyping, is some "work" but it can be part of a weekly review. As I am just doing it now, it is not as daunting as I thought it would be 3 months ago. :) It also gives me a chance to update my contexts, projects, etc more than I have in my semi-regular "weekly" reviews. My suggestion is pick a date for change, and jump on a solution and learn how you can work it! But keep yourself time limited to the test. You will learn a lot about how you work (probably more than about the tools). HTH Morgan » POSTED IN:
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