My GTD System
Posted in mine on November 25th, 2008 by ben – Be the first to commentMy previous post covers any background that can fill in the gaps if you’re unfamiliar with Getting Things Done. This post establishes the baseline of where I’m at for GTD tech.
My current system is MonkeyGTD on a thumb drive. MonkeyGTD is a micro-wiki, running standalone in a browser without any infrastructure than the browser that opens it. Being able to move it between my work PC and home Mac is a huge win. (From a web developer’s pespective, it’s an amazing bit of code.)
As a GTD system, it has all the core features: projects, next actions, ticklers, contexts, waiting on, someday/maybe, etc. Some of the features that have been extra valuable:
- Tickler scheduling – both single instance ticklers on a specific date and ticklers that repeat. You can set weekly ticklers, and when you’ve done them, it’s 1 click to push it out to the next week and it falls off your view.
- Realms – besides the traditional context, all the items are associated to a realm, enabling you to have the same file function for Work and Home tasks. You can turn on and off display of each realm, hiding the Home tasks during your working hours and vice versa, without having to maintain 2 systems.
- View “waiting on” by person
- List projects without a Next Action
There are weaknesses, intrinsic to its nature as a file-based wiki:
- It gets lost among all other windows on my desktop. It ends up being a tab among many in firefox, so it’s not always instantly reachable when I want to put something on the list
- No integration with email. When I want to work on Inbox Zero, I need to make next actions for those longer tasks associated with a message I’ve moved to a folder. I end up with lots of items in my list that are “respond to X in folder Y”
