New Now Know How

I’ve been trying to follow David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology for a while now. It works, I like it, but I’m slack. I backslide every other day.

GTD relies on lists. Lists of projects, lists of atomic (monadic? ha!) subtasks (called next actions), lists of things you’re waiting on. The problem I’ve had, until recently was keeping those lists in some sort of order that made sense for me. What I wanted, and what I thought made sense, was to tie next actions to projects in some way that I could see all the next actions for a particular project but at the same time just see my whole list of next actions.

I’ve tried keeping the lists in Outlook and Palm’s surprisingly good Palm Desktop, both of which proved too clunky for me. It was too hard to add new projects and next actions and particularly too hard to tie the two together.

MarkTAW’s “Cascading Next Actions” was the next step, and an excellent paper-based solution, but still too clunky for what I wanted when maintained in a series of text files. A “projects” file and a series of files for each project quickly gets out of hand.

Enter wikidPad. WikidPad is sort of like a wiki and sort of like a basic text editor. It’s more like a wiki. It runs natively on Windows and is written in Python. It’s also open source.

WikidPad, out of the box, doesn’t do everything I wanted. As a wiki, It’s great for keeping lists and other information. But it only works top-down. That is, I can keep my projects list with sub-lists of projects but I can’t get a list of next actions out of it. That is, not without a little scripting.

WikidPad lets (nay, encourages) the user to hack it. A number of enterprising people have hacked wikidPad so that it does exactly what I want of it. Lists of projects; lists of next actions generated on the fly. Awesome. And all thanks to a few lines of python.

The promise of computing technology dissolving into behavior, invisibly permeating the natural world around us cannot be reached. Technology is, of course, that which by definition is separate from the natural; it is explicitly designed that way. Technology only becomes truly invisible when, like the myriad of pens sold in Japan’s department stores, it’s no longer seen as technology at all. Deliberately creating something ‘invisible’ is self-defeating. I can think of few recent technologies as visible to the public as RFID, no matter how physically ‘invisible’ it might be.

The point being, that you can’t design something to be invisible. It becomes invisible as people make it part of their lives, as it becomes part of the “fabric of society” or just something that people take for granted.

Design for appropriation is where it’s at. Being aware of the seams between things rather than making the seams invisble. Seams are useful. Edges make things clear. Inside. Outside. Here is the street. Here is the footpath.

I just finished Freakonomics. Good but ultimately unsatisfying, like half a cup of coffee with no cake.

I thought The Tipping Point, which is sort of in the same style (that style being the non-fiction best-seller), was better. More coffee. And cake, too.

Occaisionally these emails come around the uni email lists:

We will be running a workshop exploring how to use Word efficiently with long documents. The workshop will look at the various functions you might want to us when writing a thesis, mainly related to formatting the document to avoid having a document that seems to have its own life.

I love LaTeX.