Justin Cline

For the past few months (hmm, check that.. past year) I’ve been on a quest to be more productive.

If you haven’t heard about David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), I strongly suggest you take a look. I love then idea of clearing ‘stuff’ out of your brain and accessing it only when you really need to. After learning about the system, I’ve been on a mission to get it to work for me.

The ABSOLUTE must for me to succeed in some process, is its ease of use. If I have to put more than a minimum amount of effort into something past the initial set up, it won’t happen, it just won’t. Either I have too much going on. or am just too ADD, but I lose interest in things quickly. There’s a reason I “outsource” the cleaning of my house, and cannot pay a bill if I have to write a check or can’t do it online…

So, I got excited about GTD and have been searching for some tool to help me with this. Now, I may love to draw, but I can’t be bothered to carry around a moleskin… so electronic was the way to go. I found iGTD which is a great little desktop app, but I’m not always on my main computer… so, something accessible from elsewhere? Web based app, check. (Plus… it crashed on me a lot… like, like a lot —   again, if it’s not easy I’m not going to follow through.)

So, I researched the web based apps. Now, I’m rather spoiled as far as web-based apps go these days (darn you 37signals guys!) so I dumped a few right off the bat. I actually read a post about using Backpack for GTD, but it’s not really designed for it, and not for what I’d be doing with it… so that didn’t last long. One of the ones that caught my attention was Remember the Milk. Aside for the catchy name, It’s also a very nice application! Great layout, some nice AJAX? I’m sold!

Well, not quite… maybe I wrote it off to early, or was tired of trying to make this whole kooky thing happen… either way I got busy with work again and let it fall by the wayside. Until I stumbled upon excellent blog post about Advanced GTD and Remember the Milk. Wow, this was it… I signed up for the pro account that day (so I could access it on the trusty iPhone) and ran with it.

I’m still getting into the habit of processing EVERYTHING into my ‘inbox’ so I can become über efficient, but what I’ve gotten down so far has been great! Accessible from multiple sources, easy and pretty - just the way I like them! (My GTD apps of course… ya sickos!)

And so sums up my rant… it’s obviously working, because I had time to write about it. Here’s to Getting Things Done, cheers!

UPDATE: Yep, it just got cooler… I just found this post about RTM and Quicksilver!