Before I started to use Vitalist as my GTD tool of choice a number of months ago, I looked at two other systems which didn’t quite fullfill my needs.  Of course, times have changed now, with Vitalist’s announcement to start charging I have had to go back to my notes and re-review systems I looked at before.

This whole charging for Vitalist thing continues to rumble on within various GTD blogs, numerous people saying how bad it is while others say give them a break as the people behind Vitalist have to make a living and we should not expect to get such a good service for free.  In a way that is indeed true, nothing can ever be free in life - but in another way it is totally wrong.  In today’s online world I do expect to get a lot for free.  It is how the online world is these days, look at free email, free web hosting, free social networking…. everything has been put in place that is free.   With that in mind it is silly then to say you should not expect something like Vitalist to be free, because if it is not free then there are 101 other services like it that are.  That is how these things work these days now, we all expect things like this to be free, and it is the industry that has made us think this way by offering us so much free.

So that’s enough moaning about Vitalist, probably the best online GTD around but now unfortunately a paid for service that in today’s world people do not expect to pay for.

Two systems then I went back to look at again.  Firstly there is Thinking Rock which I have found to be the one system that follows GTD strictly and everything is there.  It is a java application which means I am able (and indeed for around four months did use) to use both on my Windows XP platform and at home on my Mac.  But, being java it is slow and it is not quick and easy to add things to it.  One of the things I liked about all the online GTD systems is the ability to email tasks to your Inbox which means a quick and simple email means the task has gone out of your head and can be processed another time.  Without this, you have to fire up the app, wait for java to come to life, and then bring up dialogs to fill things out.  Not a great hassle, but if the idea of GTD is to get everything out of your head quickly and simple, I found the email system a lot simpler and quicker and more likely to use.  So, although I used and loved Thinking Rock, I stopped using it after a while.

The other system is Remember The Milk which isn’t a dedicated GTD system but is a very flexible todo list.  While it is not as close to GTD as Vitalist is, the website I think is much better, much easier and quicker to use (and the quickness and ease of all this being such an important thing), some very nice Web2.0 going on.   I must say, I don’t like the larger font and the more spacing out, lots of white space going on, all very Web2.0 which is nice and pretty, but not as handy as Vitalist when it comes to showing as much information.   Also, it doesn’t include tags and things in the main description of each todo item, something that Vitalist does and is nice to see  - but that’s not a huge huge problem.

There are many articles and blogs about how to use Remember The Milk with GTD, which I had a look at and I have sorted out my own same sort of simple system.   Tags are used for the contexts, starting with the ‘@’ character, for @computer, @phone, @thought.   Tags are also used (because you can have multiple tags) as projects and I start these with ‘p-’, so p-moleville for example is the project for anything to do with this website.   Now, some people set up their projects as different lists, but with both personal and work related items going in my GTD system, thats a lot of projects and so a lot of tabs at the top of my Remember the Milk screen.  So instead I have used the ‘p-’ tags instead and for projects that I use a lot I have made custom searches on their tag and they appear as tabs.  I use tags too for items that I am waiting for others to do.  While these are housed within the Waiting list I find it hand to know who I am waiting for, so tags starting with ‘w-’ show this.  For example, w-phil tag means a task that I am waiting for Phil to get back to me on.

The lists that I have in my system include:

  • INBOX (new items added via website or email, worked through and emptied once a day)
  • Actions (an actionable item, which will be most things)
  • Reference (items for reference only such as birthdays and appointments)
  • Ticklers (items for the tickler file, reviewed during the Weekly Review)
  • Waiting (items that I am waiting for others to do, items here will be tagged with a ‘w-’ tag too)
  • Sent (default list that Remember The Milk gives but I do not use)
  • ACTION POINTS (a saved search.  During the weekly project meeting at work I will be given a number of action points to do and these will come up the next week in the regular project meeting.  It then is a good idea if I either complete these items within the week or I at least know what I’m doing with them so I can report back.  So any task that has come from an action point from this meeting I add the tag ‘ap’ and it appears in this tab.  I can then make sure that this tabbed list of items is looked at first.)
  • NTD (Next To Do.  GTD does not really use priorities for items, and possibly a good idea too as there are only so many high priority items you can have in one list!   So instead, for each project I add the tag ‘ntd’ to one and only one item per project.  I work through the projects in my Weekly Review which I can do quickly using the list of ‘p-’ tags.  This NTD list then gives a list of tasks that I should be working on next for each project.  It doesn’t tell me which one of them I should be doing first, that’s for me to decide at that moment, GTD suggests that different tasks may be more suitable to do first depending on the situation - which is true.

So, I have spent most of the day moving other my items from Vitalist to Remember The Milk, let’s see how I go with it.

Another system that I did quickly look at was a plugin for Firefox which works with Google Gmail and adds a GTD layer on top of it.  I did like this a lot, but unfortunately there is no real way to have timed items in the list, no way to include appointments etc…    People have written workarounds for this, but it all seemed a bit too clumsy at the moment for me.

[tags]vitalist, gtd, remember the milk, todo lists[/tags]