Tag: gtd

Getting Epic Wins Done

At about the same time I was rereading Getting Things Done, I was reading Reality is Broken for the first time. The full title of Jane McGonigal’s book is Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World.

Make us better? Does that mean that games can encourage us to get things done? Yes it does: for example, McGonigal and her husband compete in the game Chore Wars, each an adventurer seeking to outdo the other in tasks such as “conjuring the clothes” (doing the laundry).

That raises the question: can Allen’s GTD system be “gamified”? This question has been asked and addressed before (for example, by this fellow WordPress blogger).

Next question: has someone already developed a GTD game? The nearest thing I and Google could find was Epic Win, an ioS app that provides a role-playing interface to the familiar to-do list. Here’s the avatar for my character, which has recently leveled up (but only to 2).

To address first the question that led me to Epic Win: it’s not a close fit with GTD. For example, EW expects actions/quests to be assigned a date, whereas Allen specifically recommends against the daily to-do list. It would be more GTD-ish for quests to have locations on the EW map, just as GTD actions can be assigned contexts.

That said, it would be unfair to judge EW as an implementation of GTD, since it doesn’t claim to be one. So how is it as a to-do list flavored with quests and other role-playing spices?

I’d say that the (RPG) spices are done better than the to-do nutrition. I don’t find the interface to be intuitive. Part of this is due to organization by date, rather than by context, priority, or some other criterion my choice. But there are other things I stumble against.

There is integration with Google Calendar. But as far as I can see, there is no integration with Google Tasks. More seriously, EW made some strange (with respect to time of day) changes to my calendar.

Epic Win feels like a work in progress. To be fair, there is progress, in the form of updates to the app. But, at $2.99, it feels expensive for an iPhone app. Maybe we’re spoiled in terms of app prices, and maybe I’m judging EW as I’m using it, on the iPad, rather than on its native iPhone.

So I’m still looking for an iPad app to gamify GTD. Any suggestions? Or any reactions to my remarks on Epic Win?

Getting Things Done, Again

Time to get more organized! I decided that a couple of weeks ago. This isn’t the first time I’ve made that decision. Neither is it the first time I’ve turned to David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Here’s how David contrasts his system with other systems.

The big difference between what I do and what others do is that I capture and and organize 100 percent of my “stuff” in and with objective tools at hand, not in my mind.

That quote captures the first of the half-dozen points that struck me as I reread the book. Another basic point is that GTD is a bottom-up, rather than a top-down, approach to personal productivity. Each of those first two points is from the first chapter.

The Workflow DiagramThe second chapter is the most important in the book, and makes each of the remaining points. In particular, it includes The Workflow Diagram (that link is point three). The workflow is the process for filtering stuff, identifying actions (i.e. things that can actually be done) and putting deferred actions in the appropriate place (Next Actions list or calendar.

A couple of explicit contrasts with some time management systems provide points four and five. Such systems recommend that actions be given priorities, and the that highest-priority actions be done first. In GTD, other criteria trump priority. One of these is time available: when do you have to do something else, and what can you fit in before then?

Allen recommends against the daily to-do list. The calendar is for things that have to be done at a particular time, or on a particular day. Other actions, however important, belong on a Next Actions list.

The sixth and final point concerns the weekly review: a look through Next Action lists, Project lists, etc. Like most of the points made in Allen’s first two chapters, this one is revisited later in the book: Friday afternoon is, for many people, a good time for the weekly review.

So those are the half-dozen things about GTD that struck me. If you have encountered GTD and wanted to make a similarly brief set of points about it, how would your list be different?

I’ll follow up soon with some thoughts on tools for GTD.

Putting Things Off

The web isn’t short of stuff about Getting Things Done (GTD). For a recent example, or a starting point, you could do worse by this post by Merlin Mann at 43 Folders.

But for many of us, GTD is a lot less relevant than PTO (Putting Things Off). That’s one of the reasons why I created a PTO site. I’m pleased to say that I got the URL iamdis.org.

Another reason, and perhaps a better reason, to set up the site is that I wanted to play around with Google Sites. That aspect of the site deserves its own post. But feel free to relax at this post, while Sandy Denny sings you some PTO-appropriate music.

Calendar, Lists, etc.

Any recommendations for web-based calendar, to-do lists, etc.?

I’ve been keeping my calendar at Scrybe since November 2006. Not much has been heard from the Scrybe folks since November 2007. I don’t feel confident that the next release will include the enhancements to the PaperSync feature that I’ve been requesting for over a year now.

I’m inclined to switch to Google Calendar. My wife has just started using GMail, and so it’s easy to share a family (kid’s appointments, etc.) calendar with her via Google.

That leaves open the question of to-do lists. I’m currently using Todoist. Or rather, I’m not. It just doesn’t feel as right as Backpack lists. But the Backpack calendar isn’t included in the free plan.

I’m tempted by Remember The Milk. It has a cool name and logo, integration with Google, free plan including calendar and to-do lists, clean look,… but so, I think, do several other options… but none of them have a cow in the logo… but is that really an important criterion?

I fear that I am more interested in researching organization tools than in being organized.