Getting Things Done

So this book, "Getting Things Done", has been around for a few years. It's a businessy get-control-of-your-time kind of book, which of course I have not read.

Del.icio.us-ing around recently, however, I found a site called 43folders, written by a musician, writer, geek, productivity nerd who loves Moleskine notebooks and the Macintosh as much, nay, more, than I do. And he writes vividly about his work in implementing & adapting the methods outlined in "Getting Things Done", starting here.

There's a deeply appealing notion here: that if you don't have a trusted system for writing down and externalizing life-junk -- "open loops", unfinished tasks, demands, projects, guilt trips -- then that junk floats in your head and doesn't let you rest. He calls it "stuff", these floating stressors, these bumblebees.

I have stuff.

The GTD approach says to bind your stuff -- write *everything* down, not in general terms, like "shop for Xmas presents" but in terms of what, specifically, needs to be done next. And then you have to actually use and revisit the system you use. You have to trust it.

Since it's a system, there are system-builders, cultists. For me, though, GTD dovetails nicely with some things I was already starting to do. I'll outline my method here, briefly.

I have two text files, one for work and one for home. Each one is just a list of headings. The headings are things like "People", "Conferences", "Development", and "Maintenance". Under each heading, there is stuff. And I look at this list, a lot. The work file is always open, for example, while I'm at work.

I also reward myself for doing tasks. When I finish a task (and a lot of the tasks are small, like "send email to XXX requesting price list") I copy that line down to a "done" list at the bottom of the text file.

My basic puzzle: I needed multi-platform access to these files, Windows and Mac, often from different places. Can't assume any particular set of software on any machine.

My Solution: For a document format, use text files, rather than anything fancy or proprietary such as Omni Outliner files, wiki pages, etc. For a storage location, get some free WebDAV-able space. I use the free 100MB from spymac.net. On both Win and Mac, I can treat that web storage as a folder, like any other folder on my computer (but slower).

BUT: there are hangups with this method. Would the OS and the apps let me actually *edit* a file that is sitting on a WebDAV folder in this way?

On a PC, the answer is, only through MS Word. You must name the remote file .rtf or .doc, and if you double-click on it, Word will open it automatically. (There is no "Open With..." choice for remote WebDAV files -- there's just Word. Even if you remap so that .doc files open with something like Abiword, clicking a .doc file in the WebDAV folder still boots into Word.)

Sadly, if you suffix a file with .txt, you can't edit it at all thru WebDAV (unless I'm missing something). You'd have to make a local copy, and edit that. Now you have synchronization problem and overhead -- a bad scene.

On a Mac, the answer is simply yes, you can edit over WebDAV, but saving and opening are both slow.

My wish list:

I'd like to leave these files in .rtf, rather than .doc. But because of Tofu, I've realized how great columns are. I'd like to edit an .rtf file in columns. But Tofu doesn't let you edit -- it just lets you look. So for now, I'm using .doc files, with three columns. This means having Word open all the time, which I'm less than thrilled to do.

.rtf doesn't actually include column formatting information, and I don't want it to. I just like to edit this way, because it lets me put everything onscreen in one view. Currently, my lists are 20 or 24 column inches long. Without columns, I have to scroll up and down all the time. I know that on the PC I'm stuck with MS Word for the time being, but on the Mac, a Tofu-style editor would be a great tool -- *much* more useful than Tofu-the-viewer.