The GTD workflow Pt. II

I have previously touched on my affinity for David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity books and the GTD system as a whole. While I latched onto the concepts fairly quickly, the same concepts have been discussed at great length over the past few years online, one frustration shared by many a GTD disciple is committing yourself to a work-flow that actually works for you. I’ve tried hacked up solutions involving Evolution, Thunderbird/Lightning combo, GTD-GMail,  various personal wikis/notebooks such as GTD TiddlyWiki,  and MonkeyGTD, all awesome in their own rights but not quite right for me at least for GTD.

Most recently I have been spending a lot of time with Todo.Txt and WXRemind, since like a couple of other solutions all of list management is done by editing text files either directly via a text editor or on  command line and the user is left with their data in the most portable, mod-able, easy to access format. However after a couple of days, much like the solutions mentioned above I grew tired of the limitations of the script or program and lacked the interest to really get down and learn what amounts to a dedicated scripting language simply to interact with my to-do list and other similar files. Another issue is that personal information management software such as Outlook, Evolution, and even Thunderbird/Lightning are pretty heavy on the resources and too dependent upon an internet connection causing much of the work that goes into setting up these systems to be for naught. It should be stated that what works for one person, doesn’t always work out for others, which is why I cannot criticize any of the scripts or applications I mentioned above.

So after reviewing what I actually need, a set of to-do lists for projects and contexts to preform them, a closely linked calendar with reminder system and access to both of these elements regardless of access to the internet.

Conky, and Terminal w/ todo.txt in action

After a couple of days tinkering with all of the above as well as Org-Mode for Emacs (way too involved btw) I have settled on a system utilizing the following components:

Google Calendar/Mozilla Lightning Extension

Allows for sharing with the girlfriend, multi-pc access as it’s web based and it’s rss feed and api allow for tight intetgration into the rest of my system. The private iCal feed brings the data into the Lightning calendar extension for Thunderbird.

Thunderbird/GMail via Google Apps for Domains

When I’m actually doing my weekly review or adding my weekly work schedule I need access to email and a calendar, having them both in one app which syncs the data for offline access is absolutely key to my personal system.

Conky

Conky is one of those simple apps that keeps gaining more functionality everyday. I show the next 5 days schedule just be low my todo list right on my desktop so that it’s literally in my face, making my agenda and next actions hard to ignore. This is all possible thanks to Kaivalagi’s (freakin awesome) Python Scripts. I use them to query my Google Calendar, cat my todo.txt, system stats, and display whats playing in Exaile.

ToDo.txt

This little command line app allows me to jot down my thoughts and tasks about as quickly as I can think them. It also allows me to edit my list or lists from command line or using any text editor.

At the end of this process I’ve learned alot about some really great Open Source applications but most importantly I’ve analyzed what tools fit my lifestyle, work and thought process best. The Getting Things Done system of productivity and organization is one which only has as much value as you allow it too and is directly affected by your choice of implementation and the ease of which you can access your information. If your system is too complicated you will only find your self more frustrated and less likely to keep it up.