I’ve known about David Allen’s Getting Things Done for some time now but I hadn’t really looked into it. On tuesday I decided to take action and purchase the abridged audiobook from iTMS. This was partly driven by seeing GTD mentioned around the blogosphere but also because I’d just come off a week of not feeling productive because I was very unfocused. I was making changes all over the codebase of Anzan and I knew this wasn’t a good approach. The GTD audiobook resonated with me and I could see how such a system would work for me. I could also see there would be some challenges in determining things like contexts. Rather than spend too much time worrying about any problems I plunged into the collection phase which really turned out to be more of a mind sweep for me since I don’t deal with paper much. The resultant list of projects/actions is quite large which served to further convince me that I did need to get this stuff out of my head and into a workable GTD system.
I decided to use Kinkless GTD because it seems to be fairly mature given what it is and Omni are working on OmniFocus. I already had a license for OmniOutliner (2 actually because one was included with my MacBook Pro) so I upgraded to Pro and got started populating my Projects and Actions from my mind sweep list. So far Kinkless seems to be working well but I can definitely see that creating the appropriate set of contexts will take some time. To that end I’m considering using Fast User Switching to simulate a work environment vs. a home environment for my computer use. If anyone has tried this please leave a comment with your experience.
October 9, 2006 at 1:22 pm |
Stephan,
I ‘ve been designing a set of applescripts for the past two years to help me comprehensively integrate all of my files and programs into David Allen’s GTD workflow. I just released it to the public under the name “Ready-Set-Do!” and would like to get feedback from anyone willing to give it a run. Since you have developed for Mac OS X I would be especially interested in your feedback. Since you know the Mac well you may also understand better than most what the value is to my approach to implementing GTD on the mac — not getting your workflow too dependent upon, or locked into a particular program that may or may not have long-term software support. These applescripts make it possible to integrate one’s entire set of files with the GTD workflow regardless of what program they were created in (or even future programs they could be created in). And for newbies to GTD two of the scripts — Do Weekly Review and Do Daily Review audibly coach a person through all of the elements of David Allen’s suggestions for these reviews using the speech features of Mac OS.
At any rate, here’s the backstory with links to try the scripts in case you’re interested:
http://homepage.mac.com/toddvasquez/Ready-Set-Do!/RSD%20Backstory.html
Would appreciate any feedback you might have if you decide to give them a run.
Todd