May Contain Nuts

I can’t say I’m an avid (or even staunch) supporter of the “Get Things Done” mantra that’s sweeping the corporate world and to some degree personal life across the country.  However, I do recognize the value in making lists of things to do that are small enough to keep you motivated but detailed enough to keep you organized.  Given that my entire job consists of a never-ending stream of projects with deadlines and due-dates, having a way to quickly and easily create and maintain lists of tasks for those projects is fairly important, and to that end, I’ve routinely tried to get a system together that works for me in that regard, with varying degrees of success.

I would like to take this moment to decry the state of Windows development when it comes to GTD software.  It’s just downright pathetic next to the myriad of options available for the Mac.  There are about half a billion (I may be exaggerating) different GTD-oriented apps on the Mac, ranging from free to about $80.  The stand-out winner for me thus far has been iGTD, due in large part to its flexible attitude towards “contexts” (which I rarely if ever use) and the degree to which it integrates with pretty much every other Mac application on the planet.  Need to keep a reference to an email handy for this task?  No problem, just drag it into iGTD when you’re viewing the task.  Want to have references to all the files changed by a specific feature addition?  No problem, just drop the files into the task from the Finder.  Have a website with the instructions for completing a certain tricky JS action?  Again, no problem, just drop the URL into iGTD from Safari!

Why is there not a single application on the Windows side of the fence that supports this kind of deep file-system and application-level integration?  Is it because the Windows shell isn’t flexible enough to support these kinds of drag/drop actions from Explorer?  Because Outlook is the single largest walled-garden application next to Windows itself?  Because IE is a pile of poop?  Because Windows’ drag/drop just isn’t robust enough to support cross-application tie-ins like that?  Seriously, why can’t Windows do all of these things?

Hell, I’d be happy to settle for a to-do list app that doesn’t make me want to vomit, let alone handle all the rest of these integration points.  Just give me something small, simple, and most importantly, free that I can use to create projects, put tasks in them, assign due dates to those tasks, and see an overview, by project, of the stuff I have to do today.  Why is this so god-damned hard?  Half of the GTD-oriented apps out there for Windows are Outlook plugins, and I don’t want to potentially break my copy of Outlook, lest the security nazi descend upon me like a ton of bricks.  The other half are either pay-only, or have such a crippled free version as to be totally worthless, or are the sort of open-source programmer-developed apps that have absolutely zero usability, or are apparently targeted at kindergarteners, judging from the insultingly overblown look of the UI.

Outlook 2007 has this thing called the Business Contact Manager that I’ve tried using on a couple of occasions, since it supports projects and tasks, and you can even link emails to specific tasks, but it’s tedious, bulky, slow, and just a general pain in the ass to use regularly.  I’d be totally gung-ho for this solution if they just made it easier to deal with by speeding it up, simplifying linking emails to tasks (or even creating tasks from emails), and took out some of the complicated cruft that I didn’t need (it’s oriented towards sales as far as I can tell [surprise...], which is decidedly not what I’m involved with).

I’m tempted to roll my own solution and run it off of my website at this rate.  It’ll have to be an off-the-job project, though, because I have enough else that I’m getting paid to do.  Though maybe I can pitch it to Brock as another service we can provide and/or sell outside of our core credit union demographic, and get paid to put this thing together for myself.  Yes, I’m devious.