Before building your GTD system you need to make sure you have
a good idea of what you want it to be.
My personal experience hasn’t been to create my requirement list at
first, at least not a complete one, and I found out that the list increased by
itself as I start using my system and found new requirements. And, in the case of the NoteStudio plugins
that I have created here, several of my requirements were previously someone’s
else requirement initially, as people started sending me some suggestion of
features that I have eventually agree to implement.
Here is a list of my personal
requirements that helped me building my own GTD system and the plugins:
- Must be working fine on a Windows XP
Environment. But I have provided
support to Mac users in order to do my best to have them working on Mac
too!!
- Must be able to integrate/sync with my Palm device. This is very important as I am a very
long time Palm user and I like to have all my notes and to-do/calendar
shared between my PC and Palm.
This is what brought me to NoteStudio as it has real integration
between PC and Palm. The Wiki
style of NoteStudio allows me to do things the way I want them, and, since
it is extremely flexible, to organize my notes the way I want them.
- Must easily match what I have read in the David
Allen's book “Getting Things Done”…
Does @Action, @Errands, @PC means something to you? Me too. And for my system too…
- Must be able to store “Task” within project related
info. With NoteStudio, I can
create a page for each project I have, and store my “tasks” inside of that
page. This is where NoteStudio is
very interesting because every notes and journal information could be
store together. For instance,
outlook tasks are not attached to a project document, only attached
together by their categories. If
you have a project plan somewhere (probably in a word document), you will
not be able to attach your word document with your outlook task…
- Must be able to easily separate work related
information from home ones. The
plugins have been created in a way that I can separate reports generated
for home and office, and tools able to handle “only” office things or
“home” things if I want.
- I must be able to add new tasks/ideas very easily and
quickly. I have created for this
the AddGTDTask plugin and tool that provide me the possibility to add a
new task that came to my mind into a “IN” page. When a new thing to do come to my mind, I want to be able to
quickly note it to make sure I won’t forget it. Adding it to my “IN” page now will provide me the concept of
mind “clean as water”, and later I will process my “IN” page and move
the tasks properly. (See section Adding
tasks: An Introduction to the AddGTDTask plugin and tool)
- I must be able to update several tasks at the same
time. For this, the ManageGTDTask
will display all tasks from all project pages, and regroup them ordered by
either tag (@Action, @PC, @Errands) or by book name/tag. This plugin provide a GUI interface on
top of NoteStudio to easily Update/Delete and Archive any task. (See section Modifying tasks: An Introduction to the
ManageGTDTask plugin)
- I must be able to enter some date related tasks in
order to be reminded that something must be done by a specific date. My system is not intended to be used
for date/time specific task, such as a dentist appointment, but rather for
something more generic. For
instance, if for you the spring season start in April, you might want to
enter some task that must be done sometime in spring, and you could enter
a date such as 07/04/00 (for April 0th 2007), just to be
reminded. (“See [@Date] specific section for more details).
- I would like to have a complete report of all the
tasks I need to do from all projects, regrouped by tag. That means I want to know all the @PC
things from all projects that need to be done, all the @Errands one,
etc. This is the purpose of the
CreateGTDActionList plugin.
- For Palm reading, I found out it would be easier to
have smaller report containing single tag task entries only. This could be
generated using the “report_page_per_tag=1” configuration entry.
- Some reports titles must be customizable…. Actually,
I don’t need that as I could hard code titles in the source code, but
several users have requested a way they could customize their report in
their own language. Let's say, then, it is a user's requirement.
- For some projects, I know all the task that need to
be completed but I don’t want to enable all of them since they all need to
be accomplished serialized, i.e. one after the other one. The ManageGTDTask plugin provide a way
to support that possibility as it could auto enable the next task once one
is completed. (see the option
auto_enable_next_action=1).
Any of those requirements are
matching yours?