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Self Organization with Kinkless GTD

management, software development

I’ve been a Getting Things Done (GTD) practitioner for more than two years now. For a simple overview it’s an organization system based around dumping every todo onto lists, organizing them into contexts and projects, and then reviewing on a regular basis to decide on the most logical think to work on right now.

Anyway my technical implementation has been with 37 Signals Backpack product for the past year or so and it’s worked fairly well. The pluses are:

  • It’s internet based so I can get to it from my work and home machines.
  • It’s good for capturing projects per page and adding related details.
  • You can organize contexts by using special characters for the first character. For example all of my GTD contexts start with @, all my work projects have a minus sign and all of my home projects start with a >.

The main issue with it is it isn’t really easy to handle next actions, and you can’t easily tie an action in a context to a project action without resorting to duplication with cut and paste, and it can’t be searched well.

I’ve finally gotten around to looking at a product I’ve known about for some time–Kinkless GTD. It’s a series of Applescripts to turn Omni Outliner into a GTD tool. I had avoided it before because I can’t use it at work, but I’m exploring it again because it appears to allow you to actually have next actions and tie actions in context lists back to projects.

Not very far in yet, but it looks promising. The intro screencast is very nice.

Ed Gibbs @ August 12, 2006

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3 Comments

  1. Luke Melia August 13, 2006 @ 6:48 pm

    Hey Ed, I’m curious if you’ve checked out Tr acks, and what you think of it. It’s an open source GTD web app and I’m a developer on the project.

    Cheers,
    Luke

  2. Ed Gibbs August 14, 2006 @ 4:31 am

    I knew about it, but I didn’t spend any time looking into it until just now. Not a bad attempt at capturing GTD, but the two things I noticed where that everything in a project is a next action. For me that ends up with some really long lists since I have a lot of projects with lots of actions. The other item that suprised me was that I had to add the actions off in the mini form to the right. I figured I could just click on the list somewhere and start adding items. There may even be easy ways to overcome these because my perusal was only 5 minutes.

    Overall it does look pretty handy, but for now I’m going to try out the Kinkless option based on current momentum.

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