Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Why I am dubious about “GTD”

Well I just wasted 30 minutes trying to intuit my way around ThinkingRock which claims to be one of the most popular “GTD” (Getting Things Done) applications available.

It uses Java and NetBeans, so it ticks all the “worthiness” boxes.

After that half-hour, my opinion? Forgive the rant, but:

All I want is a fucking To-Do List, preferably hosted by Google so I can get at it anywhere. Pretty-looking enough, but not so pretty that it gets in the way. I don’t want to Collect My Thoughts Into Processes and thence Procedures and thence Projects. Or Contexts. Or something. I don’t want to colour them. I don’t want alerts. I don’t want to have to navigate a shedload of menus and pop-downs.

I don’t want noise.

If you watch Danny O’Brien’s superb LifeHacks Video[1] you’ll hear that most hackers tend to keep notes in flat files and there’s a reason for that, perhaps two: we already know how to think in a structured manner[2], and it’s simple. Works everywhere. I want that. Online. Prettier. I want is a ubiquitous mostly-textual graphical outliner tool with good quality drag-and-drop to rearrange their ordering.

Maybe I should go try using FreeMind again.

—
[1] also: http://quernstone.com/notcon04/NotCon-Danny_O’Brien-Life_Hacks-low.mov
[2] which is also why we hated Six Sigma Sun Shots

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Comments

7 responses to “Why I am dubious about “GTD””

  1. Katz

    I’d go for “Stickies” on OSX. That’s what I use on my laptop. You can also have a thread back and forth to yourself in gmail.

    Reply
  2. Dan Price

    Nice to-do lists are available both from http://www.tadalist.com/ and from http://www.rememberthemilk.com. RTM can even integrate with google calendar and google home page.

    Reply
  3. Dick Davies

    Agree with Dan – if you *really* ‘just want a to-do list’, then go for tadalist.

    I suspect you’d find rememberthemilk much more useful (it has priorities, due dates, tagging etc there when you need them). It has a very nice API too.

    Reply
  4. Dick Davies

    Oh, I forgot – it also has a full list of keyboard shortcuts, which save a lot of painful pointy-clicky nonsense.

    Reply
  5. Tom Meyer

    I would go with some of the other who recommended TaDa list. As well as looking at what else the http://www.37signals.com/ guys have to offer.

    Reply
  6. Neil

    Surely if it puts that much fluff and rubbish in the way of your app building it isn’t Getting Things Done at all….

    google -> wikipedia Ah I see, so “Getting Things Done” and “GTD” are registered trademarks!!! and are about “moving tasks out of the mind by recording them” – yuk! Well actually suits my poor memory and fascination with computers, but can’t stand this turning normal words and plain ideas into trademarks and commercial guff. Also I can’t help thinking about some of the sci-fi ideas where reliance on outside memory leads to various problems.

    Reply
  7. Jackie Danicki

    My friend Ben Casnocha has a method for keeping a to-read list that I think would work simply and beautifully for to-do lists. I’m sure you can connect the dots:

    “Tech trick: create a Gmail account for your book list, and email the address every time you hear about a good book. Now your inbox will be your reading list. When you’ve read a book, file it under “Done”. If you want, you can even reply to the message (to the same address) with notes about the book, and those will be in the same conversation thread, so now your Gmail account is your reading log too.”

    Reply

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