GTD – Getting Things Done

Posted on | January 17, 2008 | 1 Comment

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As mentioned before, I’ve been looking a bit at “GTD mentality” (GTD means “Getting Things Done”, basically it’s about ways to be more efficient) lately, and even though I was already effective and doing many of the actions I found recommended, I decided to try a few more. This basically means I’m currently trying out a few different online apps to help de-clutter my mind. Besides starting to note more in my calendar, I’m trying out Remember The Milk (RTM) and Vitalist as task management systems, while also easily integrating them in my Google Calendar to see deadlines for current tasks.

RTM is a system I see as focused on todo lists, more than a complete task management. I enjoy being able to tag each task without having to define the tag before, the integration with other tools (GMail, Google Calendar) is good and simple, which is also the case when adding tasks to the predefined categories. That is, the addition of tasks is simple, but I find it a bit lacking when wanting to specify more about a task I added – when moving my mouse over the list I find that I’m suddenly on another task, instead of simply highlighting the latest task and let me edit date and tags, write notes, share the task, specify a url etc – in other words, the basics. A big plus for RTM is that it’s a free service. I’ve used RTM for work tasks, where most projects have a similar theme, meaning it’s easy to simply keep them in the work tasks and separate by using tags.

Vitalist let’s you specify your own projects and sub-project, ticklers, tasks for “some day”, add new tasks by Jott (speech to text service, seems only to be working in US though) besides giving the possibility to show your tasks in your online calendar, although with the downside of not being able to edit or add tasks through the calendar (at least not as far as I’ve seen, using Google Calendar). As a side note, I’ve been using Vitalist for my home tasks, having multiple projects which are not similar – here I can differ between various projects and contexts, besides the handy multi-level project interface.

The verdict between those two system is relatively equal, leading me to give 3/5 as a rating for each of the services. I will probably try one or two others soon, such as Toodledo, Ta-da List or Todoist, although I’m taking the Todoist warning seriously: “High usage of Todoist may result in an organized life“. All the five mentioned systems seem to have good integration with other online app’s which help you getting things done, such as online calendars, email and other, and in true “Web 2.0” spirit, of course most have an API if you want to do something in your own way, for example by mashing them all up together with the calendar of your choice, an email system (or a few) and of course put it all together with a good context interpreter (”if you are going to do this, maybe you should remember to do that other thing first”) – we all know from ProgrammableWeb’s 600 API:s that the possibilities are vast, and few categories are missing…

While on the subject of being productive and efficient, three of my favorite blogs often have articles on the subject, with lifehack.org’s “50 Simple Ways To Stay Productive“, Zen Habits “10 steps to becoming an email ninja” and Lifehacker’s “Newsreader showdown” as examples from this and last week. I find reading articles from those three blogs a nice start of the day, and would recommend subscribing to anyone.

Category: GTD, Internet, Life

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One Response to “GTD – Getting Things Done”

GTD - Getting Things Done | Online Services
January 17th, 2008 @ 21:07 pm

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