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 question before us today is: why are mobile phones chock full of functional goodness when cordless phones can’t or don’t do a lot of the things that a mobile phone does? My really old mobile phone has an easy to use addressbook, a multi-line screen and buttons that are easy to press. My cordless landline phone has a single line screen that is hard to read, big buttons that are difficult to press and a 10-position address book that only stores numbers. Also, a cordless landline phone only has to transmit to a base station that is inside your house while a mobile phone has to transmit to a base station that is 5 kilometers away! Yet, the mobile phone is smaller, has better buttons (well, mine does), has an easy-to-use address book, is light and slips into a pocket. Weird. Why do cordless phones mock us so?

Merlin hates his phone with a passion. So much so that he’s made a pod-cast about it.

At the top of Merlin’s hates about his (cordless, landline) phone:

• buttons that suck
• Bad UI for:
  • caller ID
  • address book entries
• form factor
• weighs as much as a toddler

Merlin, of course, uses his extreme hatred of his phone to segue into a life lesson. As he points out, most things in your life are temporarily not broken. So that you know what you hate about your object du jour Merlin’s advice is simple: make a list. If you’re on Mac, Merlin suggests Quicksilver (which is free). I would use wikidpad which isn’t at all the same thing as Quicksilver but it works for me.