I am on the hunt for the perfect GTD system (who isn't ;-)). I have been looking thru the GTD bundle and I think I have a few questions. My interpretation of the GTD bundle is that each file is a project in the GTD sense. and lines in these files begin with the appropriate word to make up the action to be performed. One of the pieces or the logic that I am not seeing is location. Once you get into GTD it is just not work.. It becomes your world. ;-)
This bundles along with the Blogging bundle have me digging into TM more and more and saving me time.
Keep up the good work. I look forward to your changes.
-Ron
P.S. A couple of feature requests: - Possible editor to edit the labels actions. - integration with either the unix cal program or iCal - re-occurring tasks
On Jun 9, 2006, at 3:19 PM, Mike Mellor wrote:
Dan -
Please see inline comments...
On 6/9/06, Daniel Käsmayr daniel@kaesmayr.net wrote: Mike,
First, on contexts, I thought that "TODO", "CALL", etc. were contexts (in my mind, I use TODO for a physical action or something that doesn't fall into another context). Maybe I'm missing something here. And maybe I need to explain how I use the GTD bundle betetr. I created a GTD project in TextMate where I add a *.gtd file for each project, e.g. "stuff to do around the house," "paint the living room," etc. Then I add tasks, using the TODO, CALL, etc. contexts. Finally, to use what I've done in context, I do a "view GTD tasks" (control-shift-T) to group my tasks by
context.
Well, it always depends. For me contexts are such things like "@lab", "@home", "@online" - where I can have TODOs, EMAILs or phone calls, as I don't really like to mix my private life and my work(s), it does make much more sense to actually split by location based contexts. I am not sure if it would be necessary to have these contexts be changeable as easily as FMP does (which creates new txt files for new contexts, beware spelling errors). I do like your approach to projects, this is somewhat similar to what I am doing, but I haven't really found a way I am really happy with (yet). What I have in my project.txt files is much more than just a list of nextactions, but also my motivation, the expected outcomes, brainstomring and notes as well as those nextactions and dones (a.k.a. as "Log"). And in this sense the FMP does not work as I would need it to scan all my project files and then compile the context based nextaction files. However your approach to list everything is also too much for me. I would need something in between, such as some way to actually create .txt files that are context sensitive, but do collect all my project's stuff. And I would love to have "done" states transferred back to the project.txt files as well, just to the corresponding logfile section. And I also don't want to have all future nextactions there, just some form of subset for the "really" next actions… (together with some form of metadata from its project, maybe also with some form of time stamp when it was created or when it is due…). In some way this may be too complex to be done, but maybe not. I will take a look ;)
What I have done in the past, and couled easily do here, is make "work call" and "work email" contexts. I haven't done so yet because I only use TM at home (I wish I could use it at work!). To a lesser exent, you can already see the locations in the rollup view. Maybe I should add this to the GTD sort function?
I wrote to Nick Fagerlund (FMP creator) and he has given me permission to include FMP in the GTD bundle. I think that FMP is a great tool, but it works the opposite of how I think. I like to "think in projects, execute in context" where FMP is designed to take a text file with more-or-less random categories and split it out into separate lists.
Yeah, FMP tends to enforce context over anything else. When you integrate it into the bundle, are you going to make it "versatile" via TM Environment variables? I have it running here now, but with hard coded paths as this was the easiest at the moment and I had no clue yet if I actually could use FMP. (which I know now does not nearly help as I thought it would.) FMP, I believe, almost requires you to use Quicksilver for task creation (…it was created for this purpose, i think?).
I think that FMP is a great "inbox" for thoughts. As such, I think I can make it work as part of this GTD system.
Let's see where additions to the bundle will take us and keep the discussion alive. At least I will probably learn enough about programming as well as gtd by just reflecting more and writing about it ;) And, as we all know, things will get done in the meantime… ahh, the gtd geekness has this affinity for the meta-level, where not "getting things done" but "getting getting things done" becomes the issue… lol.
Daniel
Well, I've tried building my "dream" GTD system in Rails, python, bash, Excel, CoreData, Keynote, and probably a couple of others that I don't remember. I used to write calculator programs as a way to learn a language, not it seems like I create GTD systems to learn!
Mike
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