As things progress

March 12, 2007 · Filed Under general

Well, for a Monday, things didn’t go too badly, at least on the implementing-GTD front.

I was able to get some more projects & tasks entered into Vitalist, as well as updating & closing some, and doing so helped clarify that I might not have made too bad a choice in going with Vitalist. At the very least, I’ll keep using it until such a time as I have learned enough about what I need to be able to make a more informed choice about what might be better.

I evaluated quite a few GTD apps, albeit from a relatively uninformed position, over the past two weeks of oft-manic investigation. One of the deal-breaker type of features for me was/is the ability to easily deal with single tasks (i.e., tasks that don’t really belong to a full-blown project). While Vitalist doesn’t allow this (I had to create a dummy project), it did enough other stuff well, that I’m able to overlook this one, rather significant IMO, flaw. Also important was the ability to easily (re)order actions within contexts and/or projects. This is a place where Vitalist shines, as it allows easy AJAXy dragging & dropping of actions. Tracks, for example, was really hurt IMO by it’s inability to facilitate reordering.

Some of the other apps included Nozbe (frankly done in by it’s pricing structure & limitations), php-gtd (which might still end up being used, despite it’s inability to sort actions), MonkeyGTD (but the 2.1alpha is confusing to me for some reason, and I’m not sure I completely trust the single-file nature of how it stores everything; even saying that, if I could’ve gotten either the Bidix uploadPlugin or the MiniTiddlyServer to work properly — my fault, not theirs — I might’ve ended up using mGTD…). The various Tracks hosting sites were also interesting, but they suffered from both the blemishes of Tracks, and the fact that if I’m going to use Tracks, I’d want to host it myself.

I’ve got to note at this point, that The Ultimate GTD Index was an invaluable source of information for finding the various & sundry GTD apps out there. There is also a nice survey of GTD apps available over at ATPM’s Next Actions.

In the end, though, I’m pretty happy with Vitalist. About the only thing that’s really vexing me at the moment is that I can’t get a good handle on how to use it’s repeating action function. The action that I set to repeat weekly either sits as an overdue item, or as a completed item, because recurring/repeating items need to have a due-date. As I haven’t yet found a Vitalist forum, I guess I’ll have to submit a question to their support group.

-ghp

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Tags: gtd, productivity