One tool to “Get Things Done”
Last week we discussed “Getting Things Done” on Kill The Desktop. I’m in need of this kind of process for my work life. I’m as guilty as the next guy for using my Outlook inbox as a to-do list. It hasn’t really gotten me into trouble, but I do forget things and simply have a hard time understanding everything I need to do in one glance.
What makes this harder for me is that I’m a Mac user. I can’t run Office natively on my Mac and I’m OK with that. I use Mail.app and iCal right now and my plan has been to use them once my new job starts. But again, I’m not really doing anything different to make myself more productive.
I started to search around a bit to see what I could find and ran across Chandler. That project was written about in a book I recently read called “Dreaming In Code“. Highly recommended! I happily read through their site to see if Chandler could help me. Sure enough it’s platform independent and follows the GTD principles. The problem, as is well described in the book, is that Chandler still hasn’t hit 1.0. Not that I care much about a version number, but if you read the site it explains that one release may not have a data format compatible with the next. Bummer.
Anything out there I should check out?
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Hmm. It’s true that future versions of Chandler won’t use exactly the same repository format as the current version, but we’d like the upgrade process to be as smooth as possible.
Right now when Chandler users upgrade, they need to export their existing data and reload it into their upgraded version. At this point we’re committed to supporting old data exports, so you shouldn’t fear losing your data in an upgrade.
Hope that helps!
Dude, thanks for pointing out Chandler. Ive been thinking about the whole GTD ‘idea’ as well, and espc. now more than ever I need to do better at this. Ill really have to check this out…
@Jeffrey:
Thanks for the reply! I gave Chandler a download last night anyway and started to play around with it. I’ll continue to see how useful it can be for me. Not having exchange might be a deal breaker, but we’ll see. I’m not sure if the new gig has IMAP enabled or not.
I wish you guys the best on the way to 1.0. That book was seriously awesome and it’s nice to see you all are still moving forward with such a “grand vision” product.
@Jon:
Dude, it’s a cool app. I would _highly_ recommend checking out the book “Dreaming in Code” that talks about the development of the software from the start. It’s not exactly a glorious picture of the project but it’s real, and it shows the real nature of a software project as ambitious as Chandler. Great read.