Ben Kraal

A long time ago, I came across Getting Things Done, probably via 43Folders, and tried giving my life over to it’s annoyingly simple-yet-complex principles of self-management and organisation.

More recently, I’d promised Ricky to explain my GTD support system. I have been through many iterations in my implementation of the basic canonical methodology.

Iteration the First

Palm Desktop. Lovely software but too clunky for GTD. Soon surpassed by…

Iteration the Second

WikidPad + a user script to gather Next Actions and present them dynamically on a page. I still useWikidPad for it’s pure desktop wiki functionality but I gave it up for GTD in favour of…

Iteration the Third

d3, a hack/modification of TiddlyWiki that tries to get towards a Kinkless sort of implementation of the basic methodology. Running in a browser meant that the whole system was very portable and cross-platform. Ultimately I found it too slow, especially when I got to any sort of useful and meaningful number of projects and next actions. A 500k+ javascript file is not very wieldy.

Finding the sweet spot

Having gone through a number of tools, I had a list of essential things that a GTD-support-system would do:

• Is basically canonical with little or no extra stuff
  This is because everything outside of the canon is someone else’s 20%. (You all know about the 80/20 rule, right?) Everyone has their own ways of doing things. But I find as long as Ive got just the canonical stuff it’s easier to do my specific preferred 20%.
• Allows tight-coupling of next actions with projects
  This is neither here-nor-there canonically. Some people don’t find it necessary. I do.
• Knows about dates, allowing tickler-file-like behaviours and calendar-like behaviours
  Dates and calendars are tricky things. Every one of my previous iterations didn’t do the date-related stuff that I wanted.

Everything else was secondary. Thus I have arrived at…

Iteration the Fourth

ThinkingRock is software specifically written for doing GTD, unlike many of the other GTD implementations which are hacks or modifications to existing software. So far, it works for me.

It’s written in Java, meaning it’s completely cross-platform which is awesome as I rock a Mac at home and put up with a Windows box at work. It’s also well written in Java which is a double bonus. ThinkingRock is also open source and it has nice user and developer communities behind it. The stable release is currently 1.2.3 and there’s a Gamma release of 2.0 which by all accounts is also stable enough to use. There’s already a nice and long review on-line of 2.0 which does a better job than I will of explaining the features.

The workflow in TR is extremely close to the canonical GTD methodology. Capture, process, plan, crank widgets do next actions. Lovely.

There’s a lot of stuff that ThinkingRock won’t do for you. It won’t keep you disciplined about your email. It won’t file away your reference material and it doesn’t make coffee. All it does it help you keep track of projects and next actions. Saying “all it does” is damning with faint praise. If keeping track of NAs and projects was so simple there wouldn’t be so many people talking about it). In conversation with Ricky, t’other day, he said that strong email integration was pretty key for him. Being, at the moment, extremely self-directed in my work, email is at worst a distraction and at best a clunky twice-a-day notification system of stuff that is peripherally related to actual work. So, the lack of drag-and-drop email-to-next-action conversion that Ricky spoke about is not something that I miss.

There’s a lot of lovely things in TR. Actions can be sent back to the inbox for re-processing (which is lovely if you’re stalled on an action). Next-actions can be sorted by project, context, both or neither. You can tag actions for the future or as delegated to other people and then tag those for follow-up. The weekly review (a sticking point for me) is a joy to perform as everything is accessible and the work-flow is so “natural” (by which I mean “as The David describes it).

Most importantly, every other iteration of my support structure for GTD has annoyed me. ThinkingRock doesn’t annoy me. It’s great software. If you’re happy with your GTD-support system, don’t switch. But, if you’re not happy with what you’re using, I recommend ThinkingRock. (And if you’re not happy with your self-organisation, go and buy the book, read it and then get ThinkingRock — you’ll be glad you did).

ThinkingRock. Get into it.