JulianSchrader.de

GTD: How I manage my Things, errr… To-Dos

I wrote about how each one of us can track the time they’re spending on their projects and how to improve the particular skill of e-mailing. So we already discussed how to analyse our productivity and enhanced the efficiency of handling our e-mails.

But a productive system which actually lets you get your work done needs another basic tool: You need to keep track of what you need to do and of the things you already accomplished. And you need to get this stuff out of your head or it’ll keep you busy and hinder you from getting your things done.

I’ve worked with a variety of To-Do-List applications such as Actiontastic, Ghost Action, iGTD and Inbox before, but none of them could actually satisfy my needs. They were either ugly, didn’t sync with other apps or devices like mobile phones or made the user stick to certain principles without giving them the freedom to develop their own way of managing to-dos.

Things

A couple of months ago I found the app I was waiting for: Things.

CulturedCode, a german software company, have done a great job so far. Things has a very nice user interface which makes working with the program intuitive—everything works just the way you’d expect it, which makes it an irreplaceable tool. I use it every single day and though it is not released yet (you can use the pre-1.0 versions for free) it works great.

Besides the uncluttered and well-arranged interface (check it out!), Things syncs selected categories and iCal calendars in both ways. I chose to sync my Office calendar with Things’ Due and Today items. This feature in turn makes Today.app invaluable: It is a little application which sits in the lower right corner of my screen and displays today’s appointments from iCal—and aforementioned tasks, any changes are directly transferred to Things.

And then there’s a version of Things for the iPhone or iPod touch. Like it’s big brother it has a very nice and convenient user interface—and it syncs with the desktop version each time the mobile device is connected to the same wireless network (WLAN) as the Mac running Things.

The currently available version doesn’t sync yet—I’m honored to take part in CulturedCode’s beta program. The new release, including synchronization, is still waiting for approval by Apple and will be available on the AppStore soon.

It’s there when I need it

One of the killer features of combining these two applications—Things on the Mac and Things on my iPhone—is of course the possibility of ubiquitous use.

Amongst the most important factors when dealing with to-dos is to get things out of your head when you’re dealing with something else. Right away. So it’s nothing but great for me to have Things at hand—right there on my iPhone.

Check it out!

I strongly recommend to try Things. Watch the screencast (this was recorded at a pretty early stage of development, so it cannot replace actually trying Things on your own) and get Things for your iPhone or iPod touch.

What do you think about Things? Do you use other software (such as OmniFocus, which is also available for the Mac and on the AppStore)? Leave a comment below and let me know!

Do you know the principles behind the GTD concept? I recommend reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity for further information.