Monday, April 25, 2011

GTD + Todo.txt

So, I recently read Getting Things Done, and while I'm not sure all of it's points apply to me as a programmer*, I really liked the idea of capturing "open loops". You need to find all those little niggling things that you should be doing and capture them in a place you know where to look, so you can start thinking about what you should be doing, and just do it.

This led me to looking for personal organization solid. I wanted something that would be sync-able across anywhere I use the internet, fast and efficient to edit, and preferably compatible with common formats in case I need to upgrade to a different program in the future.

A few of the alternatives I considered were a plain TODO text-file, or Vim versions of Emacs Org-mode. After a little search however, I found Todo.txt, and I'm really happy with it. Todo.txt uses a plain text-file as it's central database, so it's about as compatible as you could hope for. It however also presents a filesystem like interface that allows efficient adding, listing, and completion, and will be instantly familiar to any Linux user. With the file-system interface, there is almost no friction to creating a new item, which is important for this system to work for me.

Using Dropbox or normal line-based version control, Todo.txt can sync easily across multiple machines. They also provide a paid-for Android app that uses Dropbox, and is easily worth the $1.99 for the convenience. All in all, I think this is a really great and elegant solution.

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