Open season: GTD for Palm
My pal Jon develops applications for Palm devices. He’s kinda looking around for a project and, inspired by Cat’s Access app, I’m trying to convince him to make a GTD app for the Palm OS. I’m not a genius about software design though. I can barely use stuff. I know what I want, but I’d love to hear what you would want in such an application.
So, if you had the opportunity to design a GTD Palm application from the ground up, what would it look like? What kinds of features would you include? What would the application hook into…contacts, datebook, what else? What other apps (Palm or otherwise) would you prefer it play nice with?
From my point of view, simpler is better. I’d just want an app that was flexible enough to create unlimited context/project lists. I’d want a "master view" of next actions with options to filter by date, priority, etc, as well as a list-specific view of next actions. I’d want an overrideable option to sync with Outlook. It would have to play nicely with DateBk 5 and other similar apps (Agendus, etc…).
What else? Right now, everything is fair game. Drop your ideas into the comments…
Hey Bren: As long as you asked – a Palm app that could pick up both Project and Context tags from the GTD Outlook add-in would be a rockin’ thing!
David Allen seems to use just the most basic palm applications. Just the agenda and the todo-list and the memo application should do fine, in principle.
There are some things that could be just a little bit handier. Attaching todos to projects. Are projects in the ToDo list or in the memos? I’ve got them as a todo category. But, a bit of a link could be handy. There are some solutions, I remember a wiki-like linking mechanism. Anything smarter will probably mean you have to use something else than the standard ToDo application: not good.
I’d look more for background helpers. What I mean? Well, a little program that would list your todos that you haven’t touched in two weeks and that you might be procrastinating on.
Well, perhaps something *can* be done on the project-to-todo side. Write an app that takes the “project” items from the correct todo/memo category. When you create a new todo that relates to a project, create it from within that app. That application can then keep track of it and attach it to the project without messing up palm’s databases and default applications.
I hope you’ve gotten some ideas from this. Drop me a line if you want me to brainstorm a bit more.
Reinout
I really love the outliner approach. I use Shadow Plan for hierarchical lists that I can tag for sorting/selecting and also for it’s ability to link to Palm’s native To Do, Calendar and Memo apps. What’s missing is a way to efficiently create and link to larger text files (journals or extensive project notations) and to related/relevant content contained on the web – kind of a Wiki-like thing as referenced in the previous post. I’ve used Note Studio, Megawiki, etc. but thee require manual manipulation of project lists and other action items – I keep finding myself missing the efficiency of an outliner program and the linking to my To Do list, the functionality I require to efficiently work my plan.
- MB
Great stuff, thanks guys! Outlook add-in compatibility, and some wiki-ish linky action. Good.
I use ShadowPlan too and I dig it, though I think it’s linking stuff is weird. I’ve used Megawiki too, though that had a serious learning curve–kinda weird for a wiki.
I used Life Balance for a while, but its goofy interface got to me after a while, and its performance left a lot to be desired. Still, it has some things I like, such as locations for tasks. I never did get in the habit of using it on the palm – it ended up being strictly a desktop tool.
A simple outliner that would automatically put the next-thing-to-do for each major goal in the todo list would be great. As an item is completed, it would put the next item in, and so on. If there is no next item, perhaps it could prompt for one…
Matt (and Bren) great posts and thanks for the tip on shadow plan – this is what I’ve been looking for (now has a new OSX desktop app which makes it very nearly perfect for how I want to implement GTD. I’m still working through its features (about 4 hours into it) but I think the ideal app would do what SP does but would allow you to also link to your desktop calendar app. It would also be cool if the memos and notes were searchable through someting like quicksilver (i.e. one click and your @Inbox list is open and ready for adding items). I’ll probably come up with some other nits to pick as I get into it, but this is the best app I’ve found that has an OSX interface (which significantly limits options on this stuff.) Actually Entourage has been where I’ve been doing it so far and it is pretty robust program but my god is it slow and unwieldy. I can’t wait to get back to mail and Now Up to Date…
One of the key things about GTD is that every project should have a next action (even if that is “wait for Dude to show up” or whatever), and may include some other planning. These next actions are the ToDos, and some of the ToDos may be dated (although Allen warns against this wherever possible). If there were a projects interface that integrated with the standard ToDo and Calendar, and that signalled if a project needed a next action (the action had been completed, hadn’t had one in the first place, or had gone untouched for too long), that would be great. Nothing drags on me more than having to arduously hunt around to see if every project in the list has a next action in the ToDos.
I just wanted to mention that there is a program for the palm called Multitask that provides an additional Project index for to-dos. It is a great program, very powerful and easy to use. Problem is that it does not sync the project categories back to outlook. The developer (www.powermedia.com) is making version II right now, so I am sure they would appreciate feedback from you.
Any progress?
Sadly, no. Jon never quite got into GTD enough to make the app, I quit bugging him and then I moved on to a Blackberry. Bummer.