Online shared intelligence

The “GTD thing”

GTD (Short for David Allen’s book title Getting Things Done), is not only a book, it’s also a hugely adopted personal productivity methodology, a cult phenomenon, a tag in del.icio.us with 58,000+ entries, a favorite posting subject for bloggers (how original of me), and the subject of multiple software and online solutions, both open source and proprietary.

But GTD is also a naked emperor of sorts: chronicles of failed adoptions are pretty much as common (or more) as discussions of GTD itself. Typical postings about it go as follows:

1. Excitement about the discovery of either GTD itself, or even more common, a toolkit, software or smart implementation that promises to ease adoption (the “GTD thing”);
2. Review, description and analysis of the “GTD thing”, whatever it may be;
3. The sharing of a decision whereby the poster decides to start using it, with a comment of the type of “I promise, if I can stick with this for 3 weeks, I will write another post“
4. A series of follow-up posts by *readers* of the original post, but no post that fulfills the promise above… the original poster failed to adopt it;
5. Sometimes, successful adopters post their follow-up notes, highlighting that they in turn *were* able to stick to it. Somehow, those posts tend to sound somehow religious in tone, not in the spiritual sense but rather in the canonic sense: they all contain a very detailed canon which, if followed, will produce enlightenment.

I must confess, in three different occasions I shared the experience. Adopted it (as well as one of its variants), constructed my version of “the GTD thing”, and then dropped it. Each iteration left me wanting more, but also a little frustrated at myself (I have grown up in a culture that enshrines efficiency and condemns failed attempts at organization, blaming it on personal characteristics of laziness, procrastination or worse). But I am also stubborn, and I decided to keep trying. Having gotten much closer to success this time (several months using GTD), I would like to share the secret sauce: the experience only applies to me, but I hope it helps you…

Background

The principles of the methodology are quite simple, and I won’t go through them here; there is already a great place to go for GTD resources and , if you really want to dig GTD, the place to go is zenhabits (In the process, you will discover one of the best blogs in the web for all things that are really productive).

GTD is extraordinary in that it maximizes the user’s ability to (a) go with the flow –you don’t need to change WHAT you do as much as making minor changes to HOW you do it, (b) leverage serendipity –when things need to be recorded, whether a to-do or a project or a calendar event, it’s easy to do so and (c) utmost simplicity of process. Either do what needs to be done, record something that needs to, or review what comes next.

With such positive pedigree, why does GTD adoption typically fail? Armed with my personal experience, but also that of many friends who have tried it with varying levels of enthusiasm, plus an abundant corpus of web testimonials on the issue, I would venture two abstract principles:

How ubiquitous is your “GTD thing”?

For the zen of GTD to work, it has to replace two common personal habits:

• Replace the postponement of decision about emerging and existing commitments and tasks (”What do I do about this?”) with the process of logging them down, as they appear, and if possible categorizing them right there, at that moment;
• Make the retrospective habit of slowing down randomly to evaluate status (i.e., “Where am I, what next?”), usually performed under stress, with a regular, somehow meditative, but periodic review.

The rest is gravy, pretty much: if the two habits are replaced most of the benefit automatically accrues. The “GTD thing” of choice just needs to support the two routines, and minor behavior modifications create the rest.

That could be the reason that non-computer-bound people have high success rates when they use a “GTD thing” based on traditional index cards and a portable card wallet: they are always with you, and a pencil is very little extra equipment to carry.

There is, however, a serious drawback: index cards start to impose their own overhead as they multiply with the zillion events of a busy agenda, and they interface very poorly to daily computer-based routines. Typical case? Find something on the web, want to turn it into an actionable item. Have a contact in your contact manager of pain (I was going to say choice, really), and want to record a call to that person, with a reference to a note contained in the contact’s record, and perhaps having to make the call when you are away from the computer.

In my case, cards were already part of my arsenal of choice, but I had a hard time keeping them linked to the zillion computer-based and internet-based pieces of content in my life.

Computer-bound people need to bring GTD into their computer routine; and that means, of course, some sort of GTD software. Many of them are quite good. OmniGroup’s OmniFocus is, IMHO, a sure winner, having the big plus for me that it runs on the Mac (and the big minus of not doing Windows). Further, the ability to send yourself emails to register tasks and integration with other Mac apps and the OS comes close to making this particular “GTD thing” almost ubiquitous. The problem is… one day, traffic is bad, you decide to stop at Home Depot (sorry, I dislike Walmart’s Lowe’s even more), where is your GTD list for Home Depot? You are watching TV, and there is this short mention of a movie you want to add to your NetFlix, where is your GTD? You register it in a piece of paper? Mmmm… The moment that you start using paper ias well as software (ias input as well as output), your chances to fail at GTD start growing geometrically with time, because you create conditions for loss of synchronization. Things start to fall through that crack between the paper pad and the screen… The “GTD thing” of choice needs to be more ubiquitous than either of the solutions above.

How multi-modal is your “GTD thing”?

Remember the “retrospective review” I talked about above? That is an example of just one modality for using your “GTD thing”. There are more: inspection, planning, etc.
I have found that I am not alone at using the task management routine in multiple modalities. In some cases, it is “register and move on ASAP”. In others, it’s “let’s see many things, so that context makes itself evident”. Others, it’s close to meditative: look at this project while my mind wanders and ideas emerge. There is also a browse mode, and many others. That is the reason index cards excel: manipulating them is like manipulating ideas and events, stacking them, grouping them, etc. No computer version approaches that level of dexterity (except, may be, using Tinderbox — then again, Tinderbox has huge power as an XML-based mesh manager, but also its own set of drawbacks, amongst them a distractive abundance of possible operations, each one of them obscure)…

Those modalities take place in different settings, and have different requirements. Of course, nothing better than a large screen space with high resolution for context-related tasks (nothing kills context like having to choose which of many views is on top, hiding the others — that’s one of the reasons I am addicted to my Mac’s double 30″ displays). In-store list review is better done in a succinct, unobtrusive piece of paper (or screen), unless you want everybody else in the store looking over your shoulder. Your “GTD thing” has to support all of them optimally.

My secret sauce

In my case (remember, the fact that it works for me has no say on whether it will for you), the secret sauce has two main ingredients:

* monkeyGTD - An open source, one-file, self-enclosed, single page (but multiple-view) GTD program and data file that runs on practically every browser and every computer (yes, descriptions can be correct and yet do little justice to what they describe);

* The Nokia N810 Internet Tablet - A convergent hand-held portable computer that pushes the computer concept as close as possible to a phone as it possible (without loosing its character as full-blown computer), and pushes Linux (actually, Maemo) as close as possible to the ideal usability point.

Each one of these components is in itself a brilliant piece of engineering and usability:

• monkeyGTD brilliantly addresses one of the key problems of paper-based lists, namely that they are absolutely dumb. You put all the intelligence, all the alertness about time, all the manipulation required for review and any other modality. monkeyGTD does so by consisting of a single-file web page that has the GTD intelligence built in as part of the page (I was never a fan of JavaScript, but monkeyGTD made me much more tolerant of it): all modalities are well supported, and most common operations common in GTD and its variants are supported as well. If you have access to the file containing your GTD lists and contexts, you have access to the program, because it is inside the same file. This concept is much more brilliant than it looks at first sight, but it rarely given full credit until you try it yourself.
• It may sound like “killing mosquitoes with a cannon”, but the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet only adds two capabilities that are critical to your “GTD thing”: you can now carry and use your GTD “brain” (both data and intelligence) anywhere with you, 24-hours a day (showers not recommended). More important yet, because the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet is also an unobtrusive USB and Blue-tooth and wireless device, when you sit at the computer, you have access to that same brain, all its data, and all its intelligence, from any computer you may use.

Together with all the other computers I may use, both mine and somebody else’s, My Nokia N810 Internet Tablet and my monkeyGTD file create a wonderful “GTD thing”, one that has managed to stick to my routine (and viceversa). All the convergent features of the tablet come to good use as my GTD thing, and I have come to firmly believe that the almost $500 I have spent on the device would be justified by just using it with Monkey GTD:

• The tablet is always connected to anything I am using, from phone to Mac to Windows to Linux. Right now it’s sitting on the desk, but its monkeyGTD file is open on my Mac’s screen, next to the window I am typing this on;
• It is with me whether I am looking at a movie, having lunch, in the bathroom, bus, train, car, etc. Totally ubiquitous;
• If I am in a situation where I can’t type, I have my recorder always open: touch screen and talk is all that is needed, the “Check recordings” task is already there for when I do my review;
• I save the file to my web server at least once a day, just in case I lose the tablet or run out of battery (a very rare event);
• Whatever list, for whatever context, as well as whatever alerts I record, whatever emails I receive, whatever browser bookmarks I refer to, are always with me, and I can not only access them and act on them: I can also type short notes much less obtrusively than in my phone;
• The screen is large enough to comfortably show me my “dashboard” at any moment, as well as to look at a whole project in context, or at a whole context.

Looking at the notes above, it looks like the magic is in the tablet, not the monkeyGTD. But not really: of course, the tablet makes a great list manager, so you could do Zen to Done without the need for monkeyGTD, as all other benefits would still accrue. But why would you? monkeyGTD is quite intelligent, and the GTD routine is built into its navigation. Opening a monkeyGTD ona browser is much more context-rich than opening lists on a text editor.

But there is another reason why, IMHO, monkeyGTD is an absolutely critical component of getting GTD done. I can only explain it succinctly assuming you have come to depend on wikis as much as I do; if you don’t, you may find this explanation quite foreign. Wikis are an extraordinary productivity tool, as are blogs, because they favor the unobtrusive representation of those traces of our intelligence that we call knowledge, which in turn sits on lots of content (book paragraphs you may be writing, thought explorations, records of conversations, podcasts, pictures, videos, and more). When you search in a wiki, the results of the search frequently have that odd deja-vu-kind-of-feeling, as if you knew that your brain, would have come to the same answer if only you had time to spare. The problem is, they also require their own set of gestures and processes, and they usually sit only in a server somewhere in the sky. Did I mention that monkeyGTD is also a wiki? You can write as much as you want into gtdMonkey (no, you can’t store Wikipedia in a single page, but would you?). You can create a few files using monkey or the original tiddlyWiki, and then cross-link them, and still have an organic GTD thing that encompasses all of them. There is such a synergy between the two ingredients of my secret sauce, that I can guarantee you that, f you try the sauce, you will believe it’s a single, organically produced, indivisible single ingredient.

So, is this the GTD Nirvana?

I don’t know, never been there. It’s certainly not perfect, because integration between the tablet and my externally-imposed desktop productivity client at work (MS Office) is very poor, almost non-existent. Also, monkeyGTD is not supported by a large community of developers, but pretty much is the work of love of a single brilliant developer on top of another brilliant piece of software (and love), tiddlyWiki. It moves slowly forward in terms of features (then again, if it had too many more it would not be as cool).

But I would have to be unfair to find fault in the combination. This thing works and exceeds expectations: you will not only get GTD done, you will find that you have opened doors that were not available before, such as an infinitely expandable context of webs, an integration beyond belief between online and off-line info-spaces. Give it a try, let me know how it goes…

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 2:11 pm and is filed under desktop tools, nokia N810. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.