GTD: Ongoing Efforts
“Ongoing Efforts” is a bit of an overstatement, unfortunately. Currently, I’m fighting to keep hope (in the form of using GTD to impose form & sanity on my daily work) alive.
Over at The Cranking Widgets Blog, a recent entry in The Mind of GTD series has really done a good job of describing where I’m at right about now. Deliberate, Focused Review is a great description of the fact that doing GTD is actually hard work. It’s hard work largely because it involves retraining the brain to do things in a different (and hopefully more productive & less stressful) way.
I’m struggling with that retraining effort. “Reflexive capture” is a valuable & important concept. To be able to reflexively & simply get information captured into the trusted system is good. But, at times, it can be all to easy to get the info into the system and still be stressed out about having to eventually, you know, do stuff.
Stuff needs to be reviewed. It needs to be honestly & ruthlessly evaluated. Then, it needs to be done. A quote from the Cranking Widgets entry, sums it up quite nicely:
“That’s what this GTD stuff is all about, really. Looking at inputs and making decisions. So, as much as you dreaded this moment, embrace it as an opportunity to improve. And you know what? You’ll feel much better once you’ve put that little nuisance in its proper place.”
Unfortunately, right now I’m struggling to make the jump away from organizing (which is necessary) as an end/task in & of itself, and to begin using the organization as a tool by which I can best accomplish the actual tasks that face (and, being honest, plague) me.
Well, that’s enough blogcrastination for now…
-ghp
Remember The… GTD
Well, after yet another frenzy of self-doubt-driven evaluating GTD apps, I think I may have very well settled on a solution. And this time, I mean it! 
I tried Backpack. I tried Tasks. I tried Stikkit. I tried gtd-php (again). I tried Gubb. I tried Nozbe (again). I checked back in on Vitalist. I made myself quite angsty & pretty much crazy.
But I learned quite a bit about what I want my “implementation” to do, and how I want it to do it.
Quite significantly, I found that I like the flexibility of using lists, particularly when those lists can be “tagged” — tagging is good. Following the basic GTD framework of contexts, projects, and actions, I fully believe, is a good thing. That framework allows, especially when combined with a good calendaring app, good hard edges to be defined & maintained.
I was, however, finding it difficult to get comfortable with an app that afforded me the flexibility I need to bend the system to fit my brain. While I’m fully aware of the need to make my brain adapt to necessary changes in process (’cause if I didn’t need to do that, then I wouldn’t be in a spot where I feel the need to do the whole GTD thing, right?), I found that I was rebelling against change just for change’s sake, if you know what I mean. I don’t expect to be fully comfortable right away, but neither do I think it reasonable to endure too much discomfort just so I can point to it and say, “It must be good, because it’s so tough to do!”.
And I think that I found that happy medium — Remember The Milk…
RTM is a list manager, but one that is on the ‘roids. It has an amazing array of capabilities, a vibrant community (important for support), and what seems to be very solid management/development. It also has a great word-of-mouth rep. I resisted it at first, to be honest, because it was “just” a list manager, rather than a “real” GTD app. That was unfortunate. I think that it can be the “real” GTD app for me. Mayhaps not for everyone, but most importantly, the right one for me. RTM allows me to use lists as my GTD “projects”, and then use its extensive tagging capabilities to most flexibly implement the notion of “contexts” in a way that makes sense to me. RTM also has a full & robust integration with gCal. Once I got the hang of the keyboard shortcuts, action/task entry & manipulation became a snap, and actually makes the most intuitive sense for me, allowing me to manage my lists & actions more quickly & efficiently than I did with the other apps that I tried.
But, the deal-clincher for me was how RTM really shines in handling repeating/recurring actions. Many of the GTD-specific apps are very rigid in how they deal with recurring tasks - e.g., if you do it on the 4th of every month, cool, but if you have to do your task on the 2nd Thursday of every month, well, not cool. RTM was the only app that I found that let me easily schedule recurring tasks in the way that I needed to schedule it. I didn’t know that this was so important to me going into my investigative frenzy, but it sure became obvious real quick. And it made RTM pretty tough for me to ignore.
About the only thing that I find lacking in RTM, that a few other apps do quite nicely, is that it doesn’t allow items to be reordered in a nice, AJAXy, drag & drop way. Compared to all the other positives that RTM brings to the table, however, lack of Web2.0 eye-candy isn’t a deal-breaker.
I’m sure that I’ll always be on the lookout for a “better” app, that will be “new & improved” and allow me to GTD better. That just seems to be the nature of the beast (both the beast that is me, as well as the beast that is GTD apps). For example, Stikkit just might have won out, if only it could have done the recurring task thing better — it is an app that is undeniably cool, and it certainly has a certain cachet-type-of-buzz about it in the GTD/43Folders community. It’s just not quite well-developed enough. Yet.
Anyway, that’s the current status of my implementation. I think things are reasonably steady at this point, with the following components:
- Hipster PDA w/a Fisher Space Pen - for walking around, analog-required, data dumps
- Remember The Milk - for anywhere online access to, and management of, tasks & projects
- Google Calendar - for managing the “hard-edges” of where I need to be & when
- GMail - for all that needs to be managed via email
- GroupWise - a work-related necessity, at least until GMail implements IMAP (as my work doesn’t allow POP3 access)
I feel pretty good about my decision to use RTM, better than I did about my initial decision to use Vitalist, or either of my interim dalliances with gtd-php or Backpack (which was/is undeniably cool, but just not right for me). Quite often, I’ll know deep down that a choice (even if I’m telling myself & others that it’s final) isn’t really, you know, that final. That’s what I felt after choosing Vitalist — I hoped, but I still wondered. I’m not feeling that now, with RTM.
So, I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice. Ooonga lagoonga.
-ghp
GTD implementation angst
It’s not so much that I have angst about actually using the GTD methodology. No, that’s actually pretty solid in my head as being a proverbial “good thing.” Rather, I’m experiencing a bit of angst wrt to the software that I will use to make my implementation useful & functional. So, in order to try and work through some of that angst, I’m going to write this post as a way of hopefully collecting & focusing my thoughts, along with soliciting some input from any GTD-using folks that happen by to read this.
Angsty Issue #1: Hosted or Local?
By “hosted,” I simply mean using an externally hosted service like Vitalist, Backpack, etc, and by “local” I mean both solutions that I host myself (e.g., gtd-php or Tracks) as well as those that don’t require hosting of any sort (e.g., EasyTask, MonkeyGTD, d3, etc…). The gear-head in me wants very much to avoid hosted solutions, in favor of local solutions. Control is a part of the equation, as are cost & online/offline access factors.
I like the idea of hosting it myself, both for the aforementioned control, as well as for value/cost issues related to the fact that I’m already paying for hosting, so why not leverage that sunk cost? Even so, there’s something quite appealing to an offline solution, where I don’t need to worry about not being online to input & review my “stuff”. But, there’s something that worries me about the data security of something that’s, say, flash drive based (like MonkeyGTD) & portable — I could easily destroy the single file and/or lose the flash drive. To get a hosted solution in place, there’s almost certainly going to be extra cost involved, at least if I want to limit the usage restrictions that most hosted plans have. Hosted plans also have a limitation in terms of functionality and/or feature sets. Though, to be fair, that’s pretty much true of any of the GTD apps/solutions out there…
Angsty Issue #2: Level of GTD Canonicity?
Simply put, how much do I want to be tied to (real or perceived) canonical constructs of David Allen’s GTD (as laid out in his book)? I’ve been struggling with implementing the theoretically appealing notion of ‘context’. ‘Projects’ and ‘Actions’ make more intuitive sense to me, although I certainly understand the proposed benefit of using harder-edged spacial ‘contexts.’ I’m just not sure that I need to slavishly force myself into their use at this point. I’m leaning towards letting myself learn a potentially hard lesson, by using the system as makes most intuitive sense to me right now, and then changing later on should the writing on the wall become so clear as to be unavoidable.
Angsty Issue #3: What features are deal-killers?
Fortunately, I’ve learned a few things over the past few weeks of (slowly) getting started with GTD. One feature that’s very important, just because of how my brain works, is the ability to easily reorder tasks. Vitalist & Backpack have this, and the others I’ve looked at don’t. For me, this is more important than the canonical GTD practice of only worrying about your ‘Next Action’. Another feature that’s important is the ability to have repeating/recurring actions. EasyTask & gtd-php do this nicely, while Vitalist’s implementation seems buggy at the moment (either that or I’m just stupid…), and Backpack doesn’t seem to have this working yet. I also think I’d like to have calendar integration, which only Backpack seems to offer part & parcel with the rest of the GTD functionality.
So, I’m left with a mixed bag. And a brain that’s churning big time to try an make sense of it. After spending the last week or so in Vitalist, I’m now wondering if it is still the right/best tool for me. I have an instance of gtd-php installed & running, and there’s a lot to like about that app, although I’m feeling some hesitancy about it (it just doesn’t *feel* quite right, for whatever reason). I think that I might give Backpack a more serious try, as it has some very interesting features that well could make up for the fact that it’s not a GTD app, per se.
-ghp
As things progress
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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