michaelmistretta.com

It’s not about Getting Things Done, it’s about how well you manage your time.

It’s not about how many projects you can do, it’s about how many you do well.

It’s not about finishing the race, it’s about how well you run it.

The underlying problem with GTD is that it implies that the goal is to one day finish everything on your todo list. To finish all the projects and tasks and simply finish. On the contrary, you will never finish. There will always be another something after the current something. It doesn’t end—and that’s not a particularly bad thing. A sucessful person isn’t defined by someone with all their tasks complete, but by someone who can balance everything they do, and do it with excellence.

Taking your eyes off the finish line and onto your performance today is what GTD is all about.

Kyle Baxter has written an excellent review of Cultured Code’s Things:

A productivity application is only as useful as how much users actually use it. A to-do application is utterly useless if users do not use it all of the time — if a user spreads their tasks out across a to-do application and, say, a notebook, they have two places they must reference when working on that project, which wastes time. Ultimately, then, they are likely to stop using the application altogether because it creates little value for them.

Part of the reason I refrained from using a task management system was because most applications required you to take a university course in GTD before actually being able to use them. I don’t want to spend more time maintaining my todo list than actually getting things done from that list.

After reaching the same conclusion as Kyle—that my memory would not suffice as a task management system—I forced myself to develop a GTD workflow. I decided to test both OmniFocus and Things—two of the popular new task management apps for the Mac and iPhone/iPod Touch.

OmniFocus sat stagnant in my Dock for two weeks. I dreaded having to open it up and set up my projects and contexts, so I never actually took the time to do it. It just seemed to require too much of an overhead—too much that I needed to know.

Things, on the other hand, I was able to open up and start working with right away. I started by simply writing down all the things I had to do today. As I continued to use the app, I developed a project and folder hierarchy, and refined my tagging system.

Really, there were only a couple requirements for my ideal GTD app:

• The ability to quickly jot down all the tasks that came to mind.
• Tools to help organize, sort, and filter my tasks.
• Helping me not only to organize, but also to focus on what I have to get done today¹.
• An elegant and simple interface, that looks and behaves like a Mac app.

Things has done all these things right. It doesn’t get in the way, but instead puts the focus on my tasks, and allows me to work like my mind thinks. It still needs some polish, which I’m sure will come with it’s 1.0 release, but already, Cultured Code has accomplished an amazing feat.

They’ve brought the power of productivity to the rest of us.