GTD Tools, Hierarchy and Order
In an effort to improve my personal task management and prioritisation I’ve fallen into the GTD (Getting Things Done) tools trap. Several tools have been evaluated, wasting more time than they have saved. Worse, none of them have been satisfactory (for me).
Before going any further I should say that I’ve only been evaluating web-based GTD tools. I work from multiple locations and use Windows, Linux and MacOS. There are some nice desktop tools available, but cross-platform support and synchronisation are still an issue.
The two key issues I have with the current crop of web-based GTD tools are related to representing projects and ease of use.
Projects
In GTD terms a “project” is anything that requires two or more actions to complete it. Therefore, a project can range from tiny (write scope document) to huge (create disaster recovery site).
When using a GTD tool I find that the Project page is where I do my planning. However, this is difficult to do if the tool limits you to one, two, or even three levels of hierarchy, and sorts your projects in alphabetical order.
From my point of view, a list of projects is actually a tree structure (an outline). Actions are the leaf nodes on that tree. Each project has dependencies that can be partly represented by:
- Hierarchy. The root of the tree might be “earn a living”, with the next level down being a list of clients. Each project can contain multiple sub-projects.
- Order. “Purchase servers” comes before “install servers”.
Tags don’t work for me as a means of linking actions to projects. I have too many projects to remember a tag for each one, and tags weren’t intended to represent hierarchy or order.
Ease of Use
A good task management tool stays out of the way, and shows me only what I need to see.
The key issues I had with the GTD applications that I tested were:
- Action lists display all actions, instead of just the next actions for each project. Like projects, actions have order relative to other actions within the same parent project, and I don’t want to see actions that are not ready for my attention.
- Overly complex user interfaces. Hide the complexity, but make it available when I need it. Provide power user tools like keyboard shortcuts. I need to be able to use the tool without losing focus on my real work.
I don’t want to have to remember more than about seven tags, or embed hierarchy in tag names or project names so I can find things or put them in the necessary order. I do want feedback that helps me understand where I’m at.
There are some promising tools out there, but at the moment my favourite tool would be a cross between Todoist (outline view) and Remember the Milk (keyboard shortcuts, tags, and complexity that generally stays in the background). Strangely, neither of those two application are usable from within the organisation where I spend most of my work time (some sort of proxy issue). I got enthusiastic about Vitialist until I hit the limit of three levels of hierarchy, then my usage imploded and I haven’t been back.
The feeling I get is that the design of most of these tools has been constrained by limitations of the relational database model. Perhaps it’s time to consider another storage format. Anyone know a good format for storing hierarchical data structures, which is easily transformed into different views? :-)
Update, 2007-09-17: Subscribing to the new Todoist Premium fixed the proxy issue by tunnelling through SSL. To get a Todoist Premium account sign up for a free account and then go to Preferences.