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12:00 am
[Link] | There was no way I could just use the hipster PDA, though I admire it deeply in principle. That meant that I had to find a way to store my GTD lists in some electronic form. This turns out to be less easy than one might think.
The geeks over at 43 folders have some good pages on getting started with toys. Still, I found too much on Windows and OSX, not enough open source.
My pre-GTD technique was just lists, and more lists. I had "yellow stickies" all over my desktop. When I finished tasks, I'd cut them and paste them into a "done" todo with a timestamp. But I wanted a little more.
GTD recommends that you keep the "right buckets" of places to put information:
- Projects & project plans
- Waiting (for someone else to do something - time/date)
- Next actions (for me to do ASAP, with priorities)
- Calendar (stuff that happens at a specific time, the "hard edges")
- Reference material
- Someday/maybe (hold for review, new project ideas)
- and Trash.
On top of these pieces, each item needs to be tagged with a "context" that describes the appropriate place/time/resource needed to do the task ("with computer," "online," "talking to boss," etc).
The calendar is easy, I'll just keep using http://www.kontact.org/korganizer. But the rest of it was hard. I came up with the following critiera for a good system:
- Ease of entry
- relevant fields
- sorting and filtering
- context tags
- portability (version control, multiple machines, on mobile device?)
- done marking & archiving
I considered staying with the yellow-stickies, which are great for ease of entry but suck at everything else. Then I tried a spreadsheet, but the macro programming was a PITA and the binary storage meant that version control systems can't integrate changes I might make simultaneously on different machines. The GTDTiddlyWiki is pretty cool, but it's a little slow, and entries involve too many steps. QToDo and other to-do specific task managers (such as korganizer's to-do) were both limited in what I could do, and slow to get entries in.
And, as is so often the case, emacs is the answer. I tried planner-mode, but that was too complicated. emacs' org-mode turned out to be exactly what I need. More on how I've tweaked it as we go along.
Current Mood: busy
Tags: emacs
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