You are here: Home / Archives for iGTD

Keeping Personal Productivity Simple

May 13, 2008 By 3 Comments
Things

The hunt for an easy-to-use Mac-based “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system.

If you’ve ever been interested in improving your personal productivity, there’s no doubt you are likely to be familiar with such books as Getting Things Done (GTD) and 4-Hour Work Week. Both books are inspiring, but when it comes down to practical solutions, GTD has become the gold-standard. I highly recommend it if you’ve recently been caught drifting in a conversation because you forgot to do this, or forgot to email her that.

The Perfect GTD System

One of the cornerstones of the GTD personal productivity methodology is having a system that you completely trust. This eliminates the endless questioning of when and where did I put ____________. (For more on what makes a great system, check out this recent blog post on author David Allen‘s website.) Unfortunately, the hunt for the perfect GTD-based system isn’t an easy one. There are a lot of options available and there seems to be more coming on the market regularly.

My Specific Needs

Before I jump into the heart of this post, I should give you context for my particular needs. I’m using a Mac, Entourage for email, address book and calendaring and a Palm 755p for my mobile needs. Ideally, I would find a solution that would allow me to sync Entourage and my Palm seamlessly.

After searching for the perfect mac-entourage-palm solution for quite some time, let me save you the hassle; as of 5/13/08, that solution does not exist. While you could hack your way to some form of synchronization, it will not happen easily and without trial and error. This, at the core of GTD, is grounds for distrust. Thus, I needed something simple and trustworthy.

GTD Software Solutions

After narrowing down my options, I chose to test and review: iGTD/iGTD2, OmniFocus, Inbox and Things. The winner is … Things.

Here’s six reason’s why:

  • Simple to Use: The learning curve on this software is about 15-20 minutes. If it’s that easy to learn, imagine how easy it is to use on a regular basis
  • In Development: The current version of Things is 0.9.1.1 but the new 1.0 version is due out any day. With most anything, I like to be part of something that’s moving forward. Like many of the other apps mentioned, this software is living and breathing. Expect new changes and feature add-ons regularly. For you iPhone users, expect your own version in late-June.
  • Gorgeous Interface (see below): Let’s face it, we all like to look at pretty things. The Things interface is not only easy to use, but it’s fun to look at; which makes it more fun to interact with

  • Does NOT Synchronize: While this may be a drawback for some, it’s not for me. At this point, unless it can natively sync with Entourage, I’m not interested in trying to make it work. I’ve spent the past six-months trying to get things to sync through SyncServices and it’s a nightmare. Things inability to sync actually puts my mind at rest on the idea. Otherwise, I’d be tempted to keep that loop wide open in an effort to achieve the sync.
  • Brilliant Delegation: If you manage people and are regularly assigning tasks for future follow-up, Things has made delegation (@Waiting for) simple and easy to use by adding a “People” reference. This makes adding people to your project or task easy to do and easy to follow up on.
  • The Magic Tag Bar: They decided to leave context lists out and use a familiar tagging system instead. At first I didn’t know if I’d like this, but now, it’s brilliant. There are many levels and features to this system; too many to be described in this post, but is here. Overall, it’s much more intuitive.

My Full GTD System

In order to keep my system functional both at the office and while being mobile, the rest of my system is defined by the following:

  • Entourage – will track email, address book and calendaring
  • Things – will track projects, tasks and due dates
  • Palm – will track @Calls, @Errands, @Agenda’s, and @Lists (like books to read, movies to see…all things I generally discover outside of the office).
  • Missing Sync: will be used to backup my phone and synchronize it with Entourage

Which do you prefer?

Have you discovered the benefits and joy of utilizing your own GTD system? I’d love to hear about yours. Post your comments below.

Helpful Links

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,