What’s a GTD boy to do?
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
So I need a new GTD solution. Christmas came a day or two early, with the arrival of my shiny new 15” MacBook Pro (a refurb bargain that cost me only slightly more than the black MacBook I was looking at). This simplifies my life greatly (as well as looking very nice on my desk), as before I had a Mac Mini G4 at work, and an old first-gen Titanium Powerbook at home (where I probably do about a third of my work).
Now I can just carry the MBP back and forth and have all the files (and processing speed) I need, wherever I happen to be. But it creates a GTD problem for me (especially with this being the New Year, and I’m all keen on setting up good working practices for 2007).
Currently I do GTD using a Basecamp project. This was handy when I was working on 2 machines, but it’s a pretty clunky solution, so I don’t use it as much as I should. Now I’m back on the one machine, I could revert to Kinkless GTD which I’d tried on the Mini, but I only partly got on with that too.
There are some other GTD apps I could try - Midnight Inbox, Actiontastic for example, but I know that Omni are working on their OmniFocus product, so maybe I should wait for that.
The problem is that testing a new app or system for GTD isn’t like testing an ordinary app. The point is that you collect and process _everything_ that’s on your mind, so taking a new system for a spin requires a degree of commitment to input all the stuff and get a feel for the speed and clarity (or otherwise) of its workflow. This is hard if you think you’re going to be dating another app next week.
So, do I stick with my not very useful Basecamp hack, revert to kGTD (at least partly because the data should import nicely into OmniFocus (since kGTD is an OmniOutliner file on steroids), or jump on the Midnight Inbox solution because it looks so good?
Of course, time spent tweaking your GTD system is the hidden huge inefficiency that you get can fall prey to when embracing GTD in the first place, so maybe I should choose one option once and for all and have done with it. Some hope.