HMAUS Signal

Getting Things Done, David Allen’s book, has inspired a lot of new websites, and, modifications to existing websites. There are many examples of these sites, from RememberTheMilk, to Nozbe, to GTDAgenda. The theme of these is “getting things done” by building “to do” lists to keep track of what it is you HAVE to do.

It all reminds me of when I worked at a Fortune 500 company a few years back and the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” by Stephen Covey came out. There were classes, books, training, etc., to go along with it. And yes, both of them boiled down to getting smart about (prioritizing) your action items (to-do lists).

Looking at GTDAgenda, there are some cosmetic difference between it and say RememberTheMilk. RTM is very simple to use; add a to-do in seconds. That simplicity is also one of the reasons it’s so popular, including on its iPhone app. However, that simplicity is also its downfall for those wanting more. For example RTM doesn’t handle to-do’s within projects that are related to goals — well, it kind of can, but not in a simple manner (using tagging).

If you’ve worked at a large company or organization, you realize the importance of goal planning. Goals are major ideas with separate projects underneath them, and then specific to-dos. As Brian Tracy has said, “Goals in writing are dreams with deadlines.” A work example might be: Goal: Increase Sales by 2010 by 15%. Project #1: Advertising budget to specific product increase by 5% this year. To Do #1: Build new marketing slogan for product by next week. A personal example might be: Goal: Find a new job by December 2009. Project #1: Revise career path by July. To Do #1: Update my Linkedin Profile next week.

GTDAgenda allows for all of those Goals, Projects, and To-Do’s just as Microsoft Project might. You can take your goals and actually break them down into to-dos, scheduling and planning everything along the way. For people who really want to work on project planning, this level of detail is very important and GTDAgenda does a good job. Adding any of those items is pretty straightforward. It seems like you can really customize each entry.

However, some of the problems I found with the site is, that while it is very flexible in what it can allow, that flexiblity can be too much for just causal users — those who love RTM’s speed. The site also seems to concentrate more on the technical rather than on design — in other words, it can do a lot on the site, but it’s not as slick and fancy as RTM for example, or allow drop-and-drag editing that other sites might. Some major drawbacks for me are that while the site is very good as a stand-alone, it doesn’t allow interactions with other means of importing and exporting that I would want. So while there is an iPhone app for RTM, there isn’t something similar for GTDAgenda. It does allow users to subscribe to an iCal feed, but that’s only minimally helpful if you haven’t set firm dates on all your entries. Even print views on most pages is minimal — not including dates on tasks for example. There is a mobile version of the site available, with a trimmed down set of options.

So, while GTDAgenda might be a good solution for those wishing for more than RememberTheMilk, its lack of meaningful input/output to other applications (via APIs), may make it only a limited solution, especially if group collaboration is important to you.

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