Getting Things Undone
blogDavid Allen’s Getting Things Done is fast becoming the Ur-text of the iGeneration. It has been analysed with greater fervour than most holy books and continues to stimulate questions and debates. Sites like 43folders.com and Lifehacker.com provide layers of commentary and exegesis that would leave St. Thomas Aquinas clockwatching.
The reason that it has been so succcessful is that it represents a paradigm shift in the way people process information about what they have to do. In the past it was easy to know what to do, becase there wasn’t all that much to do. Nowadays — with the internet! — there is so much stuff and information that unless you process it intelligently you’ll be overwhelmed by distractions.
Reading the book, thinking through the theory, one sees all of one’s accumulated psychic disorder illuminated. You can, for the first time in years, even envisage it being clear. It is a great experience that leaves one relishing the implementaton process. Allen himself lovingly details his use of the dymo macine, the inbox and the tickler files. Unfortunately, the people most enraptured by GTD have been geeks, whose only encounter with paper is when they go to the toilet. Geeks live on their computers. Work, rest, play, sex life: all of them take place on the computer. Geeks are assailed by distraction at every click, the reward centres of their brain falsely stimulated by silly emails and worthless rss feeds. There’s no point having an analogue implementation for a digital age and so, being geeks, they started writing their own programs.
What follows is a survey of the current crop of GTD programs, from the long established to the not yet written (e.g. iGTD, which is an entrant in My Dream App).
Past
Frictionless
This initially looked fantastic, with a screen to input next actions and another screen for doing. Unfortunately, everyone wanted these screens to be integrated and not on four separate windows. The developer pleaded ignorance, stopped updating his site and, as of March 18, the app died. Bizarrely, for a productivity book, GTD apps have a tendency to start off very well then suddenly stop development when things get difficult.
Take Completion. I read in a comment on Fraser Speirs’ livejournal that a chap called Pixelfreak has written a GTD app and was looking for Beta testers. The app was a very nice coca package which has the distinction of having a timer as part of its functionality. You could work out how long projects are going to take by typing in the number of minutes, which is an excellent idea. Unfortunately, it was very buggy as hell, frequently crashing or losing data. Whether it will ever be finished is a moot point (Pixelfreak stopped replying to my emails) but it has great potential.
GTD-php is pretty good, you can install it on your own computer if you have MAMP or LAMP or WAMP. You can edit the css to make it look as you want it to look and ir even has a screen for doing a weekly review. Unfotunately, the app involves too much clicking around to really be useful. It also lacks integration with, say, iCal. A better alternative is …
Despite requiring Locomotive (a Ruby on Rails server), this browser based GTD app is very nice indeed. The ajax isn’t distracting (which is the thing that makes MonkeyGTD and GTD TiddlyWiki unusable), the interface is simple and adaptable, and you can even subscribe to the todos with iCal or even set up an rss feed of all your tasks. It is not perfect (it is difficult to print off errands, which is surely a prequisited), but at present, it is my GTD app of choice and, although I’ve only been using it for four weeks, I don’t think I’m going to change any time soon. Especially not back to something like …
Entourage
GTD allows you to focus on the elemenatry particles of your current projects, it suggests that you break big projects up into meaningful sub-projects. With Microsoft’s Entourage the task of creating projects is so laborious that one end’s up leaving them as big projects. Recurring tasks, a neat idea, becomes horrible when they begin to stack up (as they eventually will). Psychic entropy is the thing that one aims to get reduce by using GTD, with Entourage entropy (that special Microsoftian entropy) stifles everything you do.
Voodoopad Lite
It was after using Entourage that I started to get deparate and used my Voodoopad as a GTD solution. I love Voodoopad, it is such a pleausre to have all my documetns and useful information linked in the way that I want to access, but as a gtd app it was uselss. Because you can’t split things into contexts, it isn’t dynamic and your todos just end up starting at you.
Present
The lack of a killer GTD app is, it seems, as pressing as ever. What else could explain the excitement with which Inbox was greeted?
InboxInbox was touted as being as beatiful as Delicious Monster – it isn’t. First thing it did was to try and scan my mail trash can. Brilliant. Then it started giving me a load tof Lorem Ipsum, without explainign what it was doing. Sure, it was beta, but it felt like a guest stomping muddy boots over a clean carpet. It purports to be a faithful Allenian implementation, but its focus seems to be on the actual process of GTDing rather than getting things done. It also, like Kinkless-OOP(which I haven’t used) costs money which, given the speed with which I have become dissatisfied with apps in the past, I am unwilling to pay.
Thinking Rock
It is notable that a lot of GTDers are mac users. I suspect that macs are more distracting, what with their seductive aesthetics and beautiful usability. Nevertheless, there are some PC and Linux GTDers for whom Thinking Rock, a java application, is built. I mean, it works on a mac, but a mac user would never tolerate the image you get when you open it up. It really is one the foulest pictures you ever did see, a blurry, horrible jpeg. The implementation of the method is interesting, but over-complex. It isn’t enough to have a mind like water, we want software that is like water too. (nb. They have have fixed that image know, thank god).
Future
The new kid in town is Actiontastic, like Completion it is a cocoa app with a simple interface. At the moment it doesn’t have a someday/maybe or waiting for functionality, but it is promising. Whether it will be bloated with features by users who have commented remains to be seen. For the problem with the GTD method is that we all have our own flavour, our own specific way of dumping all the psychic ram, processing it and then actioning it. A perfect app would be one designed especially for you (or be extremely customisble, in way that is easy to change).
OmnifocusNothing is known about this apart from that it involves Omni group, the guy who did Kinkless and Merlin Mann (a guru who, like most gurus, is a terrible advertisment for what he recommends). Expectations are high, which is kind of bad because in order to do GTD you have to trust your system and how can you trust your system if you’ve got half a mind on a new one that doesn’t even exist?
iGTDDespite taking an early lead in the My Dream App competiton, people seem to have quickly realised the impossibility of a GTD app that works for everyone. My advice to those making iGTD and Omnifocus is to let us have a go, to let us customize it, but keep to also keep it simple (if that isn’t a paradox). It is all very well have fifty thousand things you don’t use on photoshop, but everything on a GTD app has to be useful, otherwise it is a distraction.
CONCLUSION
The problem with GTD is that when you procrastinate or think sloppily, you instantly think that there must be something wrong with the organizational tool that you’ve implemented. When you first used the app you thought “Wow this is great, this allows me to think about stuff in a completely different way. I must implement it fully.” You take hours trying to get the system right rather than actually focussing on what you need to do. But once it becomes part of the furntiure you realise that it still suffers from the greatest obstacle to organization: yourself.
Nothing is ever quite right for the simple reason that pople use their GTD systems in different ways. The system has to be your system. So find one that is right for you, analyse yourself and your habits and don’t allow them to get in the way of achiveing your goals.