International Mac Podcast

I have a confession to make… I’ve been fiddling.

Fiddling is not a principle of GTD. Not fiddling is in fact more of a principle than fiddling. You see, GTD is about a trusted system. A system that is ever changing is very hard to trust. I think I now trust this system, but I’d have to ask my subconscious about that.

The big change I’ve made is Things. If you’re not aware of it, it’s a great task management app for OS X and the iPhone. I had been using the beta, and stopped when I realized my tasks would be inaccessable when they went paid. I switched over to the free iGTD and was mostly satsified. I then looked at the release candidates, and was once again impressed. I have since moved back to Things, deluding myself into believing that it would have to be included in MacHeist, which recently started up again (without Things so far), or I would be able to fanagle myself a review copy. Failing all that, I suppose I could actually buy it, at $50, or $35 for a student license. My trial period ended at exactly the time I got my new MacBook Pro, so when I put my library in my DropBox and pointed both Thingses (or whatever the plural may be) at that to sync it, I got another 15 days to try it out.

Things has a nice entry mode, which basically pops up the normal task edit interface with a button telling Things where to file it. You can assign this to a keyboard shortcut, which I have set to command-return. Since I mapped my Caps Lock key to command in protest of it being too-often abused, I can just stick my pinkies out to either side whenever I’m typing.

I really like Things for its simplistic interface and powerful organization tools. New tasks, either created from the Inbox or from the nice Quick Entry HUD, go to the Inbox. Today is everything you want to work on today, both tasks and projects. Next is basically candidates for future Today items, and contains everything you could work on at the moment. At the top are lone tasks which haven’t been assigned to a project, and at the bottom the first three tasks in every project appear with a link to see all the tasks in that project without switching views. You can schedule tasks to be moved to Today on a certain date, or to turn red and give you a visual indicator in Next on a date. Scheduling supports recurring tasks, as well. Someday contains everything you want to do, well, someday. Projects is a master list of every project you have, from which you can reorder, complete, and inactivate them. You can also turn a task into a project by dragging it to this list. The Active Projects category contains all the projects you’re working on at the moment, and you can click each to see tasks in those projects. Areas of Responsibility are a new addition to task management, or at least to those I’ve seen. This contains everything you are responslibile for, and can have both tasks and projects assigned to them. They’re useful if you want to finally finish all the homework you have, or maybe you’re a web designer and want to see everything you could be doing that counts as “work.” Think of Areas as broader than projects, that cannot be completed. At the bottom of the pane is your Logbook, where completed tasks go. You can set a preference to have them travel there immediately, daily, weekly, or monthly. You can also use the Log Completed button to do it at any time. Then there’s the trash can where every deleted task goes. However, Things has a major, major limitation. You can’t nest projects or areas. The team is working on this, but in the meantime it can be simulated by using a specific tag structure. Hint to the team: you say Mac-to-Mac sync is your biggest priority, but all you have to do is add a button to move your Things library to, say, a DropBox, and maybe make it a package with a pretty icon like iPhoto’s library so users don’t go messing with your XML.

Things also supports tags, which are are a really powerful feature. They’re used in such a way that if you don’t want to have anything to do with them, they stay out of your way. If you want to use them, there’s a HUD panel you can use to organize them and create one-key keyboard shortcuts for them, ala iPhoto Keywords. to add them to a task, you can drag one onto the other (either direction works), or simply select the task and hit the keyboard shortcut. You can also click a selected task to open it for editing, and easily or edit the title, tags, notes, and due date. I find the notes feature especially powerful, because it automatically saves and if you write more than the three lines of space initially displayed the task grows with you, and it will gain a small note icon when it’s not expanded for editing. I use this now to write all my blog posts and emails, although I’ve gotten behind on those. As you can see from the picture, I use “—Pic Name—” to indicate a placeholder for my images, which I take with Skitch.

Of course, all this organization means nothing if you can’t do anything with it. This is where Things really shines. No, really, I know it’s already shining, but it’ll positively blind you when I’m done talking about the Tags bar. This bar, which appears at the top of any view which contains tasks with two different tags or due dates, allows you to narrow down your view of tasks.

Let’s see what these do, starting with the first item, the clock. This shows up whenever you have tasks with due dates, and when you click on it it shows you everything with a due date, in order of when it’s due. It easily lets me see how much I’ve been neglecting my blogging, and which posts I should complete first.

We then move on to the main portion, the tags. This lists all the tags present in some, but not all, of the tasks in view. Click on a tag, and it highlights in blue and you instantly see only tasks with that tag. If you command-click another tag, it highlights as well and you can see tasks with both tags. I would love to be able to option-click another tag and have it exclude tasks with that tag while highlighting in red, but at the moment that’s not supported. You may notice that some of my tags have an ellipsis (…) after them. That indicates that that tag has been assigned subtags, which will be revealed when you click on it, and you can then narrow down further. If you don’t narrow down, you see every task with either that tag or one if its subtags. Subtags can go as far down as you want, although for space’s sake you might want to limit it to three or four layers.

All these features make it incredibly easy to see what you have to do and when. The last piece of a task manager is completing tasks. In Things, you simply check the checkbox and tasks are greyed out. You can also cancel a task, and an X appears in the checkbox and the task is crossed out. As I said before, tasks go to the Logbook when they’re completed. You can then find them for future reference if you want, or focus on the next task at hand. After all, isn’t that what GTD is all about?

I think I’ll make a policy, about whenever I make a big GTD change I’ll have to blog about it. Expect my next fiddle report, about how I’ve “improved” my homework workflow, very soon. These are a great way to (a) get fodder for blog posts, or (b) discourage my fiddling, or else I’ll have to blog about it. I suggest trying it out, and a journal is as good a place as a blog if you don’t have one.