david allen posts

The Squadcast 06 - eMail, Take back your life

by Grant Robertson Dec 17th 2007

We're back with another episode of The Squadcast. This time, it's all about email. We talk to productivity expert Matthew Cornell about the five D's. Also, we take a look at our five favorite email add-ons for keeping your house in order.

Download the show in 480p XviD (58MB)

Take the jump for the show notes.

Tags: david allen, DavidAllen, defer, delegate, delete, deposit, do, email, getting things done, GettingThingsDone, gtd, matthew cornell, MatthewCornell, squadcast, the five d's, TheFiveD's

Filed under: Business, Text, Utilities, Macintosh, Office, Productivity, Apple, Freeware, Beta

Taskpaper - dead simple task management

by Jason Clarke Aug 20th 2007

With the vast number of task management applications that are available, particularly for the Mac, you'd think that every possible feature has been done in a to-do list program. But maybe that's part of the problem. These programs are so feature-rich, that they end up getting in the way of actually getting things done, which is their purpose in the first place.

Jesse Grosjean thinks so, which is why his Hog Bay Software company has released a "work in progress" (notice the absence fo the word "beta"?) version of a new app called Taskpaper. The idea of Taskpaper is to boil down the job of task management to the most basic list making functionality, and make it work with plain text files. This makes it both dead simple to use, and totally flexible, since plain text can be used wherever and however you like.

Right at the top of the page, you'll see a quote from The David: "For the most part, the applications that are specifically designed for project organizing are way too complex, with too much horsepower to really be functional for 98 percent of what most people need to manage."

It seems Taskpaper might well be onto something here. If you're looking for something similar to Taskpaper, but web based, there's always Backpack by 37 Signals.

Tags: David Allen, DavidAllen, Getting Things Done, GettingThingsDone, GTD, Task Management, TaskManagement, To-do list, To-doList, Todos

Filed under: Business, Design, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Web services, Freeware

SimpleGTD - maybe too simple?

by Jason Clarke Jun 6th 2007

SimpleGTD is another in long list of online task management tools that attempt to adhere to David Allen's Getting Things Done system. On the surface, it's incredibly appealing; the makers of SimpleGTD have used Ruby on Rails to create a system that is stripped of the extraneous gunk that seems to litter other GTD tools, and instead present an incredibly bare-bones GTD environment. For those of you who prefer text files or paper lists, this may well appeal to you.

However the true value of using an application (be it a web application or a local one) to manage your tasks, particularly when following the principles of GTD, is the ability to see your tasks grouped by either context or by project. In other words, while you want one list to tell me what you can be working on right now based on the context you're in, you need another list showing you everything that needs to get done for a particular project.

SimpleGTD does not offer this project-based list, and it's a real shame. Without the ability to see this alternate view of your tasks, it's hard to recommend this tool for any serious GTDers. Otherwise, it's a very slick implementation.

SimpleGTD is free to use, but the makers suggest that regular users make a small $2 donation.

Tags: David Allen, DavidAllen, Getting Things Done, GettingThingsDone, online task management, OnlineTaskManagement, Simple GTD, SimpleGtd, Task Management, TaskManagement

Filed under: Macintosh, Office, Productivity, Apple, Freeware

iGTD - Getting Things Done on a Mac

by Jason Clarke May 7th 2007

It seems there's more Getting Things Done inspired software packages out there than there are Flash games littering the web. It's understandable; GTD has become the geek mantra for productivity, and finding the right tool to suit your GTD needs is like searching for the holy grail.

For Mac users, that holy grail may be iGTD. iGTD is a free Mac program that pulls from all of the GTD principles to provide a very concise platform for manging your projects and next actions. Links with Quicksilver and the ability to handle URLs that are drag-and-dropped onto it make using iGTD a seamless experience, and it even synchronizes your tasks out to iCal. In fact, the pairing of iCal and iGTD work very well together. iGTD functions as the management interface, where you manipulate your tasks and projects, and iCal can be your dashboard when you're actually trying to get things done.

If you're still searching about for the right GTD solution and you're a Mac user, give iGTD a try before you shell out big bucks for some other solution. It's free, so there's nothing to lose, right? Except maybe a couple days of messing around with all of your lists... but that's productive, right?

Tags: David Allen, DavidAllen, Getting Things Done, GettingThingsDone, GTD, iGTD

Filed under: Business, Developer, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Office, Productivity, Freeware

ThinkingRock - cross-platform GTD application

by Jason Clarke Mar 18th 2007

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.

Tags: David Allen, DavidAllen, Getting Things Done, GettingThingsDone, lists, Task Management, TaskManagement, Tasks, ThinkingRock, todo list, todo lists, TodoList, TodoLists

Filed under: Business, Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Office, Productivity, Web services, Commercial, Freeware

Getting Things Done with Nozbe

by Jason Clarke Feb 26th 2007

It seems like there is another Getting Things Done related task manager popping up online almost every week. The latest to surface is one called Nozbe, which reminds me in some ways of Tracks, although it takes a very different approach to the design and workflow.

Anyone that is familiar with the GTD methodology will be comfortable with the concepts used in Nozbe; you create Contexts, Projects, and Next Actions. A couple of the nicer features in Nozbe is the time field, which allows you to estimate the amount of time a given Next Action will take, and the pre-populated list of default contexts, complete with icons representing them.

Tags: David Allen, DavidAllen, Getting Things Done, GettingThingsDone, GTD, GTD Tracks, GtdTracks, Nozbe, productivity

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Web services, Freeware

Tada List, the GTD addict's to-do list

by Grant Robertson Aug 3rd 2006

I don't know about you, but I'm constantly walking around with too many things in my head. "Do this", "Read this book", "Buy flowers for wife", "start project Y" and so forth. It was really weighing me down, until I read a fantastic book that all the geek kids are talking about, "Getting Things Done" by David Allen. Allen's ideas for productivity are fantastic, but they all involved getting all of those little "open loops" of things to do out of your head and into some list system that you stick to.

The book is agnostic about what format your lists should live in, but I'm not. I'm a geek, and I spend all my time either in front of, or very near to, a computer. So what did I find to catch all my open loops? Tada Lists. Tada Lists is a clean, simple and very functional AJAX based to do list manager. It meshes well with the GTD system, or it can fit any other multi list system you follow.

Tada list is free, but the developers (those smart kids at 37signals) encourage users of Tada Lists to check out their for-pay web applications, Backpack and Basecamp.

Tags: 37signals, 43folders, David Allen, DavidAllen, getting things done, GettingThingsDone, GTD, productivity apps, ProductivityApps

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Productivity

List of GTD tools

by Victor Agreda, Jr. May 12th 2006

I'll admit I recently drank the GTD kool-aid, and I've been on the hunt for the elusive "perfect workflow" to accomodate my newfound system. While I'm starting with a mere pen and paper, ultimately I'm going to use plenty of good ol' technology to dump my brain in every day. To that end I found Jeff's list of GTD tools. It's not just software, but the paper (or analog, or meatspace) tools, plus some links to other productivity apps. The link to an old article on creating threads in Outlook is now subscription only, however. I'm still hoping Google creates that task list doohickey, which would really make Gmail, Calendar, the newly announced Notebook work together for an almost ideal online GTD system.

Tags: david allen, DavidAllen, gtd

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