Catching Up Using GTD and Todo.txt

April 4, 2007

Last night I dusted off and started re-reading my copy of "Getting Things Done" (GTD). I'm a bit overwhelmed with projects and new ideas at the moment, so taking some time to optimize my scheduling algorithm seemed like wise thing to do.

A bit of Googling turned up a plethora of GTD-inspired applications, including several desktop applications (no thanks), a ton of web-based task managers (maybe!), and even a couple of Vim-based solutions plugins (neat!).

On a whim, I decided to check out Tracks, a Rails GTD application. Tracks was kind of a turd; the documentation is sparse, there seem to be a couple of weird bugs, and it didn't look so hot in my web browser (my guess is the stylesheet is pretty Mac-specific, although I didn't poke around too much to see what the problem was).

The attempted Tracks install wasn't a total bust, because I used it as an opportunity to upgrade my internal web/rails VServer. I've been using VServers at the house for quite a while now and I love them; there's even an entry my to-do list to write a VServer post which I haven't gotten to. Playing around with Tracks also gave me an opportunity to set up a Mongrel cluster, which, barring one minor hiccup, is as straightforward to configure as the documentation implies.

Next on my list was Todo.txt. Todo.txt certainly isn't for everyone; it's a shell script and a text file, and that's pretty much it. It's also exactly what I wanted; simple, unobtrusive, and future-proof. I set up the AIM bot too, so I've got a couple different interfaces for adding and viewing tasks. Google Calendar integration would be nice, although that's probably been done too and I just need to dig it up.

Anyway, back to reading and trying to re-shoehorn my brain into GTD and Todo.txt.