GSD!http://norman.walsh.name/2010/01/25/gsd1332010-01-25T10:13:26-05:00NormanWalsh2010Norman WalshOur engineering department has a project management philosophy
they describe as GSD. I aspire to GSD.For me, the part of GSDGetting Shi␈␈␈Stuff Done!
that I most often have difficulty with is keeping
track of what needs doing. My todo (or want-todo) list is absurdly
long. If I feel like castigating myself, I can always find a few
things on my list that should have been done by
now. It's not that I don't work hard or get a lot done, it's that I
don't always prioritize perfectly and sometimes things slip through the
cracks.I've been trying to get better at this. Having an online
calendar sync'd with my phone keeps me from accidentally missing
meetings and phone calls, so it seems to follow that some sort of
online system should be able to help me with my todo list.My requirements are pretty simple: I want something that's easy to
use and I want something that syncs with my mobile device. An online tool
is almost, but not quite, as good as something that I can use offline on my
PDA.I don't subscribe to any particular Getting Things
Done methodology. Maybe I'll get there someday, but that's
not my immediate goal.I played with Remember The Milk
on-and-off last year. It seemed to work pretty well for simple lists,
but I wasn't using it consistently because, I think, it wasn't quite
powerful enough.This month, I took a few different systems for a test drive:
2Do,
Toodledo,
Things,
and
OmniFocus.
Unfortunately, 2Do is only an iPhone app. It appears that there
are plans for the next version to support syncing with Toodledo, but
that doesn't exist today. Toodledo is a web-based app and is quite
nice, probably plenty sufficient for my needs. On the desktop front,
both Things and
OmniFocus are probably plenty sufficient as well.
(There are no doubt other similar applications, those are just the
ones I happened to try. I didn't attempt an exhaustive survey, I've
GStD!)And the winner is: OmniFocus, by a narrow margin. I like the
project/context duality that OmniFocus uses (ToodleDo has contexts too,
if you turn them on). Mostly it boiled down to the UI: I liked the “feel”
of OmniFocus best.This is an app I plan to force myself to use, so
I figured I'd best pick one that felt good. It's also the most expensive,
by a pretty wide margin, but c'est la vie.Will this really work for me? Time will tell. But so far, so
good. And I'm already learning to use it in ways I hadn't planned:
maintaining shopping lists and travel check lists. Those aren't the
sorts of things for which I would have actively sought out software
(sometimes a pencil and a piece of paper really is enough), but it's
encouraging to me that I have other reasons to be paying attention to
my GSD tool.