Getting things done

Since I was about 12 years old, I've had this notion that if I could just get organized, I'd be able to accomplish all these great things. This has never quite worked the way I planned it. I'm generally one of those guys who has stuff piled all over his desk, but at least I feel guilty about it.

I've been playing around with different systems for about a year and a half since I read David Allen's Getting Things Done. Being a geek, I resurrected the palm my wife gave me but I never really used and tried to use it as my list manager, but it never seemed quite right. I couldn't tie actions to projects among other things. I tried going beyond the default software and used a product called Life Balance. I liked it enough to pay for it after the trial, but stopped using it at some point. Tasks usually come in through my email and the effort to open LB, cut and paste, and also figure out just where in the hierarchy of my life this tasked belong became too much. I also didn't like the fact it was window-only when I was running linux at home and using palm graffiti to enter stuff at home didn't seem right. I've since moved to windows at home after using linux as my desktop for over 11 years, but that's another post -- the t6 software is largely to blame and I have a notion to replace it.

The experimentation continues... I tried Remember the Milk and like it very much. The best part of it was the natural integration with e-mail. You forward items to a special address and add some text with meta-data (due date, which list, etc.) in a very natural way (dates like "tomorrow" or "tuesday"). I'm not sure exactly why I abandoned it, but one of the problems was I couldn't figure out how to link projects in a natural way. I started to format the titles in such a way that projects would be grouped since it displays in alphabetical order.

Since then, I've been using a personal wiki (TiddlyWiki) but haven't quite made it work. I used the tagging, but it didn't seem to work as I'd hoped. Using plain text for project notes is nice, but there's lots of manual manipulation to work appts, etc. Using a new wiki page (tiddler) for each task is too cumbersome and a plain text editor isn't really a list manager.

I'll goof around with Remember the Milk some more since they've improved it (adding the long sought after tagging!). I have the feeling that the right system will seem obvious and simple once I've found it, but for some reason I also think I need to go through the "journey" of finding it before I'll be satisfied.