Getting Things Done
If your like me at all you have so much on your plate that it can be difficult to keep it all in frame. Over the past few weeks I’ve been trying to get everything under control with my ToDo Lists and such. I have been using several applications and will be giving my notes on them soon.
- Things
- Anxiety
- Schoolhouse (re-purposed)
- GTDTiddlyWiki (cross platform)
As I have been examining my options (and not truly GTD) I have compiled my short list of preferred apps/methods.
Things is the first Application that I decided to try out, it is currently in Public Beta so not all of the features work at the time of this writing. With a good pack of features and collaboration options this will be a great tool for the individual or team. There is also nice documentation and tutorials easily reachable within the interface, this is helpful when you are trying to overcome a slight learning curve.
Anxiety Great app, Mail and iCal integration, lightweight footprint, and can work seamlessly with your Mac if you have 10.5.
Schoolhouse I view this as useful so far as Things, it’s designed with the student in mind but you could easily think of your projects as “classes” and take it from there. With this app you can do set up Tasks, jot yourself some Notes and even attach related files to the “class” like PDF’s, Word Docs & even layered artwork. It has a lot of potential and the developer is planning a new release soon.
GTDTiddlyWiki I have to say, I’m impressed with this method so far above all, extremely light footprint, it’s based on the Open Source TiddlyWiki aimed at the GTD purpose. I’ve been using this for a few days now and find it to be a top contender even stacked against a Desktop Application. I normally prefer an app to a web-based solution but for something that people used to jot onto paper or put in a simple .txt file, sometimes less is more.
With many options out there I’d be interested in hearing how you Get Things Done, and what it finally took for you to get the ball rolling.
February 16th, 2008 at 11:19 pm
Happy to report that GTDTiddlyWIki has won me over thus far, but like most of the solutions I had tried I would forget to open them after a few days sort of negating the purpose. My final method was to set it as a Homepage in a browser I rarely used, I chose Camino. But that wasn’t enough; I still needed to remember to launch Camino. Final outcome is that I set up a very annoying crontab to open Camino every 30 minutes; this ensures I don’t lose focus of getting things done. Below is my crontab entry for this task (Windows users I believe need to set up Scheduled Tasks).
0/30 * * * * open /Applications/Camino.app
You could just as easily open up any other application or site that suits your workflow habits a bit better.
March 22nd, 2008 at 10:11 pm
Just came across a post related, something else to check out. GTD Inbox it apparently a nice Firefox add-on that won’t really change your Firefox until you visit you GMail account online, a new dashboard for helping you GTD, this is helpful if you haven’t implemented GMail IMAP already (which I have). Worth checking into however, maybe it will still play nicely with IMAP.