08.28.07
haxing teh megahutz
I lied; I still haven’t had any time to get into Luminous Arc, and I likely won’t until tomorrow night, at which point I’ll be either ignoring it further or playing Wild ARMs 5. Yeah. Anyway, today’s another GTD spiel; this time about a software tool I re-discovered just recently.
I first got into the whole “Getting Things Done” and productivity kick after getting linked to ThinkingRock way back in March. At that point, the program had entered a bit of a stalled stretch as a new version was being prepared; of course, after I remembered why I quit using iGTD in the first place (crappy reports and very little capabilities beyond what was there– seriously, about the only thing iGTD has going for it is the Quicksilver bits) I decided to give the pseudo-beta version of TR 2.0 a shot. So far, I am quite impressed.
ThinkingRock is designed with the book-canon GTD workflow in mind; it has you collect your thoughts, then process them, and then you can see your next actions at a glance. The 2.0 version adds “criteria” onto the action descriptors such as “Time”, “Priority”, and “Energy”. (David Allen, author of GTD, uses that last one as a measure of the amount of effort needed to accomplish the action; I repurposed it into tasks which are “foreground”, meaning they require most of my attention, like writing a chapter, or “background”, which means they are mostly automated but still require an occasional check-in, like laundry.) I’d like the option to add more criteria, but for now it’s still good (with sufficient tweaking, which actually is what GTD is about).
While I didn’t ever use it previously, ThinkingRock also has a much nicer printing setup than iGTD. TR generates PDF report files which can then be viewed in Preview or printed. These reports look snazzier and even have support for the new-to-me-yet-extremely-nifty PocketMod page layout. It’s far and away an improvement over iGTD’s crude “print out a snapshot of the ‘actions’ pane without regard for page width or visibility”.
It was with some amount of satisfaction that I was able to get my massive mental to-do list trimmed down from “a lot” to, currently, eight items that are easily manageable. Two of those I can take care of tonight; beyond that, I have a plan. I can’t attribute this sudden burst of foresight to ThinkingRock or to iGTD, or even to GTD itself; it was simply a matter of taking what I already knew and just sitting down and doing it. I knew most of the GTD stuff, I knew that I needed to just sit back and prioritize; but I just let it pile up and pile up until I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. That, of course, changes now.
Anyway, like I said, tonight I’m kind of busy, so we’ll probably have Bailout tomorrow. If I’m smart, I’ll be able to clear the decks tomorrow night so I can sit down and enjoy Luminous Arc from the beginning (I was thinking of just continuing the game I started, what, two weeks ago?, but that would be a Bad Thing). Catch you folks later.