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ThinkingRock - cross-platform GTD application

Thinking Rock
While many other task management applications have found ways to incorporate the ideas put forth by the Getting Things Done methodology that David Allen developed, it seems that very few have been built from the ground up as GTD applications. There are certainly a few web applications that can make that claim, but in terms of "offline" applications, the pickings are pretty slim.

One such application, however, is ThinkingRock. Written in Java, ThinkingRock boasts versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

In ThinkingRock, you work in specific modes that relate to the various levels of the GTD workflow. For example, rather than entering a task and setting the project it relates to and the context at that moment, you can simply use a collection view to do a brain dump of all of the tasks and ideas that are bouncing around in your mind.


Once you've captured all of your "open loops", you can move on to processing them. At this point, you are presented with each item that you created when collecting your thoughts, and an intuitive dialog leads you through the GTD processing work-flow. For example, the first decision you'll have to make is whether an item is actionable. If not, you either archive it, put it into a Someday/Maybe file, or trash it. If it is, then you get to decide whether the item is a simple task that stands on its own, or if it is really a project (multi-action task) that must be planned out, and have multiple actions associated with it.

While we love the collection and processing aspects of ThinkingRock, we're not quite as sold on the screens that you access when it's time to get down to work. They offer all sorts of filtering features, so that you can see your next actions by context, project, or any combination you can think of. This is all very functional, but it just feels a bit off to us. Hopefully it will become more comfortable over time.

Of course for the low, low price of free, there's not all that much to complain about. It was easy enough to move data from the Windows version to the Mac version, which is certainly a plus. As always, give us your best GTD thoughts in the comments!

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